The Classical Doctrine of Indian Medicine: Its Origins and its Greek Parallels c10.69

c10.69

One should therefore not be surpised in having to suppose, at an ancient date, a pneumatic concept of life, carrying the notion that breaths are found in the entire body and command the actions of the same. This is not attributing extremely advanced ideas to the Vedic times. The air coming out of the lungs during expiration is not the only breath of the body, it appertains to the upper part of the front part of the body, which contains others in the abdomen. The pains and the involuntary movements of the entrails are felt as being in evident relationship with the flatuosities which are independent of respiration. Many centuries were not needed, nor as Ewing believed, mystic speculations as intermediaries were necessary so that, knowing and naming inspiration and expiration, one should have noticed the existence of other breaths in the body. And from the time the breath in general had been, since an early date, assimilated with the wind, which latter had from the time of Indo-Iranian pre-history been conceived as the principle of activity, it was easy to conceive a system of pneumatic cosmo-physiology or to feel its existence. If the Vedic Saṃhitās do not themselves offer us a systematic explanation, which they need not have offered, they at least give us, in an already constituted form, the technical vocabulary which was, later on, to accompany the pneumatic theory in its period of full development. Under these conditions, when the intelligibility of Vedic formulae postulates the existence of at least a start of this pneumatic theory during the period of their composition, it is perfectly normal to accept the same.