Ayurvedic medicine--the medical science developed by the ancient Indo-Nepalese civilization of the Himalayas--should never be regarded as just an alternative treatment for disease. The word itself is best translated as "knowledge of life" or "Life Science," and its practice depends on an understanding of health and disease in relation to the universe.
Westerners are accustomed to considering the body as a mechanism whose parts have increasingly become the domain of medical specialists. It is thus difficult for Westerners to comprehend a holistic system in which the interpretation of energy, mind, and matter are seen as parts of an integrated whole affecting the physical body.
The sages of ancient India thought of human beings as manifestations of the cosmic powers that underline and govern the structure of the phenomenal world. Ayurvedic medicine divides everything into five elements, or mystic principles--earth, water, fire, air, and ether. Human beings, born from the interaction of these forces--forces not to be confused with their corresponding material elements--reveal their qualities within their constitutions and in interaction with their environment. Human beings are microcosmic images mirroring the macrocosm.
History and development
Also known as the "science of longevity," Ayurveda grew out of the Vedic traditions and thus is based upon the earliest Hindu sacred writings, which contain a great deal of medical knowledge. By the fifth century B.C., Vedic hymns praised the universal order proclaimed in the dharma, the classic Sanskrit rules for leading a harmonious life. Through ritual and self-discipline, human beings were expected to participate in this order, to uphold its balance, or to counteract its upheavals. Human behavior, to be appropriate, was to be tuned to the unending cycles of the heavenly orbs in the turning seasons that punctuate the rhythm of the universe. Man, by analogy, viewed himself as part of nature. He was a model whom nature's forces would mark, in his whole being, with either beneficence or wickedness.
The germ of this idea sprouted during prehistoric epochs, when the earliest Indo-European tribes entered the Indian subcontinent. They identified the solidity of the body with earth, the support; the body's liquids with water; corporeal heat with fire, particularly connected with digestion and the bile; and air with breath and the life principle that circulates in any organism and gives it movement. Ether, or space, permitted growth and change; it is a state where everything exists, dies, or is transformed--where all things made manifest in the material realm undergo perpetual transformation.
Tradition has it that a certain sage, Dhanvantari, was directly inspired by the divinity Brahma, the Creator, one of the Hindu trinity of gods (the other two are Vishnu, the Preserver, and Shiva, the Destroyer). When Buddhists adopted the basis of Ayurvedic medicine, they too claimed its divine origin from the heavenly spheres via the Buddha, who, for the Hindus, was another incarnation of Vishnu.
Diverse philosophical currents colored the evolution of Ayurveda. The Upanishads, a collection of Sanskrit texts dealing with broad philosophical problems and dated approximately 5000 to 1000 B.C., elaborated
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