The Compendium of Bheḷa 1.17

Then, fourfold food reaches life in ten ways: / through body heat, sweat, faeces, urine, and likewise through the three beginning with vāta,

or through a woman's breast milk, semen, and blood. / Life in embodied beings becomes steady through these ten.

It strives for nectar-like maintenance by the three—vāta, pitta, and phlegm. / Indeed, from balance of diet comes health; in its imbalance, diseases are recorded.

One should know two physicians here for embodied beings: the knowledgeable and the ignorant. / Among them, the knowledgeable is the one versed in the aphorisms, discerning through the meaning of the aphorisms;

who knows the decoctions with five bases, the fourfold bases of food, / the four superior unctuous substances, and the disorders based on the four;

various powders and poultices, gruels recorded as eightfold, / the twelve wholesome foods, and the two remedies;

and the thirty poultice-bandages across the eight sections in their true nature. / The section on aphorisms and therapeutics are each said to have thirty chapters here;

eight chapters on pathology are spoken of, and likewise on determination; / eight on the human body, where limbs, major parts, and minor parts are described;

twelve successful treatments are declared, and likewise pharmaceutics and sense faculties. / This is declared as the one hundred and twenty chapters, in which are sixteen root-drugs,

nineteen fruit-drugs to be known, and three milky-exudate plants; / knowledge of lifespan from signs of death, treatments for curable and incurable conditions,

knowledge of disease from pathology, habitat and season from determination, / the aggregation of tissues, constitution, and compatibility of tissues from the human body,

and whatever else of this kind is heard in the medical treatise— / the physician who truly knows this is the knowledgeable one. But learn of the ignorant one:

he who gives gruel at mealtime, soup at broth-time, / meat at vegetable-broth-time, and astringents where evacuating therapies are required,

emesis where purgative therapy is due, and unctuous enema where non-unctuous enema is due, / or who does anything else reversely—he is called ignorant.

Therefore, desiring to perceive the truth, one should acquire knowledge through practice; / just as a lamp shines in darkness, there the treatise produces light. / Thus said the venerable Ātreya. / Thus ends the seventeenth chapter in Bheḷa. / / Eighteenth chapter. / Now we shall explain the chapter on guarding food; thus said the venerable Ātreya.