The Classical Doctrine of Indian Medicine: Its Origins and its Greek Parallels c11.8

c11.8

Indian medicine has, therefore, drawn on the Veda even for the principal elements of its general doctrines. Thereby Āyurveda is the legitimate heir to the Veda, but it has developed to a large extent the patrimony thus received. It has coordinated and systematised ancient ideas and it has constituted an immense treasure of observations and experience, both concerning the diseases and the means of curing them. When we come across it for the first time in classical texts, it seems to us as if there is a chasm between the knowledge accumulated by it and the scanty medical notions which can be found in the ancient Vedic texts. The intermediary works, those where we could have seen the gradual constitution of the vast edifice which, all of a sudden, appears before us in an already achieved form, have not reached us. It is, therefore, all the more precious to measure the considerable depth of the Vedic soil to which go the basic roots of Āyurveda. It is also because of the necessity of a continuity between Vedic speculations and the classical doctrines of Āyurveda that we can affirm with certainty the existence of an intermediary tradition.