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Ayurveda Isn’t What It Used to Be Views of an Indian Surgeon. Part 4

Ancient Ayurvedists postulated that each bhuta in ingested foods and drugs augmented matching bhutas in bodily structures. They maintained that each part of one’s body is best nourished by substances whose qualities are similar to those of the part – for example, flesh by flesh, blood by blood, bones by cartilage, semen by semen, and fetuses by eggs. If a substance considered theoretically ideal nourishment for a particular body part was unavailable or unsuitable (for example, because of individual aversion), less similar substances were prescribed as substitutes — for example, milk and ghee to increase semen. Diminution of urine supposedly called for the consumption of sugar-cane juice, a particular type of wine, and gruel.

Such thinking may seem whimsical, preposterous or foolish to many moderns, but it was perfectly rational in antiquity, when peoples lacked information other than that gleaned through the unassisted senses and without controlled experiments. For example, it was obvious to ancient peoples that fire — combustion — can affect matter exceedingly. Thus, ancient Indians gathered that “digestive fire” (agni) inside the human body was responsible for the transformation of ingested materials into body constituents. The Caraka Samhita states: “Just as fire below transforms rice grains and water in the pot into cooked food, so the fire within the stomach transforms the food consumed into the organic sap (rasa) and excretory matter (mala).”

As for the notion that herbal dietary supplements are innocuous, I quote the Caraka Samhita: “Like poison, like a weapon, like fire, like lightning, the drug whose nature is not understood remains a source of unknown terror. When understood, however, it proves as beneficial as nectar.”

Ayurveda Sourcebooks
Historians of Indian medicine consider the period 600 B.C.E. to 200 C.E. Ayurveda’s creative era. The oldest and most authoritative sourcebooks of Ayurveda are the Caraka Samhita and the Susruta Samhita. (The Sanskrit word “samhita” means compilation.) Most of the medical practices the Caraka Samhita recommends are nonsurgical, whereas most of the medical practices the Susruta Samhita recommends are surgical. It is generally held that what would become the Caraka Samhita races to the sixth century B.C.E., and that, approximately in the first century C.E., a king’s physician named Caraka edited it. A man called “Susrutha” is generally credited with composing the Susruta Samhita about a century afterward.

The only extant version of the Caraka Samhita (that of Dhrdhbala of the sixth or ninth century C.E.) is enormous. Its bulk is roughly three times that of the extant medical literature of ancient Greece — the Hippocratic corpus.

Mystical Additions to Ancient Indian Medicine
In “About Ayurveda: The First World Medicine,” Swami Sada Shiva Tirtha, D.Sc., the founder of the Ayurveda Holistic Center, says of ancient Ayurveda:

What is fascinating how this knowledge of the uses of foods, herbs, aromas, colors, gems, yoga, surgery, mantras and lifestyle was obtained. The surgeons of the time were the same seers or sages, who saw health as an important part of spiritual life.

But what the Susruta Samhita recommends concerning the acquisition of surgical skill is much more complex. For example, it states:

The art of venesection [i.e., phlebotomy] should be taught on the vein of a dead animal, or with the help of a lotus stem.
The art of scraping should be instructed on a piece of skin in which the hair has been allowed to remain.

Although both the Caraka Samhita and the Susruta Samhita describe Ayurveda’s source as divine, Ayurveda was originally naturalistic (not supernatural and not mystical), at least rudimentarily — and therefore a potentially scientific discipline. As such, it has long been dead. There have been no substantial changes in the field of classical Ayurveda since the finalization of the Caraka Samhita.

Ayurvedic colleges in India teach the classic samhitas with almost no attempt to criticize the early Ayurvedic literature. Although these schools provide some instruction in such subjects as anatomy, physiology and pathology, they do not do so in a manner integrative with Ayurveda.

Nevertheless, for better or worse, India’s newer generation of Ayurvedic practitioners, particularly its urban constituent, diagnoses patients in modern medical terms. Many such practitioners have learned how to interpret reports of biomedical tests (for example, MRI reports) and order these tests for their patients.

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