A collaborative project between Indian and Bhutanese scholars has successfully used Artificial Intelligence to transcribe and translate a rare 8th-century Sanskrit manuscript found in the library of a remote monastery in the Paro Valley. The text, titled Visha-Vigyan, is a comprehensive treatise on ancient Indian toxicology, detailing various plant-based antidotes and chemical processes for neutralizing organic poisons.
The AI model, trained on thousands of Sharada and Grantha script variants, identified sections describing bio-chemical refining techniques that were previously unknown to historians of science. This discovery underscores the sophisticated level of chemical knowledge in ancient India and its preservation in the trans-Himalayan Buddhist tradition.