The Realm Of Ayurved - II

 

 

 

 

 

THIS statement at an academic discourse is good enough to state in clear terms that Ayurved was not considered a sub-text of the Vedas -- UpVed -- without reason. Its early exponents approached the issue of human wellness with the mindset of scholarly inquiry into the intricate details of the human body and the ailments that could impair it, but also into the ways and means of tackling those. That search took them to every possible nook and corner of the country to know the medicinal herbs and led them to divide the landmass into segments as per the availability of medicinal plants and categories those segments according to the weather conditions in those places. The Charak Samhita makes it clear that the work Maharshi Charak did in this domain was very elaborate and very purposeful. Ayurved, thus, was a comprehensive science of wellness in which was included a massive pharmacological study in each and every part of the ancient Indian landmass that used to be several times bigger than the India of the present day. Such a work must have taken possibly centuries! Such a massive work spread all over the country must also have taken a huge manpower trained in medical botany as well as science of surveying and steeped in research methodology.

 

All the data that such a manpower collected and collated carefully and stored meticulously also must have taken literally hundreds of years. In those days, without any mode of quick movement, those teams must have moved across long distances to cover different geographical areas -- through sun and rain -- and made elaborate records of the medicinal plants and their utility in healthcare. What a research project must that have been! One of the most basic requirements of any science is that an inference is never reached about anything by studying small samples. For, when the object of the activity is human wellness, no risk could be taken while researching on medicinal plants and their utilitarian value in theoretical as well as practical terms. So, most logically and naturally, the researchers of those times must have worked on massive numbers of people afflicted by similar illnesses and subjected them to well-coordinated and well-calibrated dosage of herbal medicine before arriving at any definitive finding about the nature of illness and the treatment that could set it right. The Charak Samhita offers a full and elaborate evidence of all the detailed work that must have gone into the writing of the world’s oldest treatise on human wellness -- covering every possible illness known to human community of those times countless thousands of years ago.

 

Ayurved is, thus, a fully scientific domain whose details modern science refuses to recognise. That is very unfortunate. Very casually, almost thoughtlessly, practitioners of modern medicine -- Allopathy, in particular -- declares that taking ayurvedic medicine damages kidney and liver and pancreas ... and what not! -- even when they know nothing about Ayurved. What moral right can anybody have to criticise a science about which he or she knows nothing? This is not a cantankerous question. This is a serious issue that needs to be raised and discussed and answered in complete mindfulness. This issue requires a very deep and serious inquiry -- so that the hollowness of so-called scientific claims of people practising modern medicine gets established. The purpose here is not to decry modern medicine at all. The purpose here is to open the society’s mind to vast possibilities and potential of Ayurved as a complete science of human wellness. In the past 100 years in particular, much work has been done to cross-check the veracity of claims Ayurved makes in the cure of human illness.

 

A huge body of that work has been conducted with the help of modern research methodology. All that work has been put together in well-researched papers that have been published in various international scientific journals. All that body of evidence is available for anybody’s scrutiny. Why do not practitioners and promoters of modern medicine cross-check all that evidence -- instead of rousing rubble unnecessarily? These people must also study the Charak Samhita in original text in Sanskrit so that they would not face the loss of substance in translation. The sheer detail of the work done by researchers of those times would simply astonish them.