The Classical Doctrine of Indian Medicine: Its Origins and its Greek Parallels c5: Introduction
The Classical Doctrine of Indian Medicine: Its Origins and its Greek Parallels c5
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Introduction
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THE HISTORY of Indian science is ordinarily not considered important either by the Indologist or by the historian of sciences. For the former, it is only of secondary importance as India has been great more because of her various schools of philosophy than because of her learning. For the latter, it is an aberration because it does not put itself on the continuous line of scientific evolution which starting from Greek science continues right into modern science. Both of them suspect her to be lacking in originality, to be based in a number of its branches on borrowings firstly from Greek science, then from the Arab world and even from that of China. But it is a fact that it has been studied, with prodigious activity in India, where it has given rise, not to one, but to many immense literatures and also throughout the Indianised parts of Asia and Insulindia.
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This fact alone should attract attention. In the absence of all other interest, Indian science, the element of the expansion of one of the greatest world cultures, does have evident historical importance. Its diffusion outside India is exactly parallel to that of Greek science outside the Hellenic world. Mentioning merely the chief facts, it may be observed that Indian science has been adopted in Tibet, in Central Asia, in certain Chinese and Japanese circles, in the entire Indo-China and in Indonesia. The Tibetans communicated it to the Mongols. And it is not only the empirical notions or the techniques of India which have thus spread among so many distant and diverse peoples; have equally spread among these peoples texts teaching the theories, which, like those of the Greeks, attempted to explain the Universe. The Tibetans, chiefly, have translated the Sanskrit texts with extreme care and with full understanding of the teachings. Their translations cannot be surpassed in precision aud faithfulness, because the Indians did not merely give them their learning and the practical knowledge of Sanskrit. They also gave them their precise analysis of this language, which is the means of understanding it better and is.
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the model for a clear comprehension of the resources of their own language. They also taught them their logic, the totality of their reflections on the criteria of truth and on the legitimacy of reasoning. Indian science has thus spread itself giving at the same time, both its methods and its results. Therefore it is not merely because of the extent of the geographical area wherein it spread itself, but more because of its learned mode of transmission, that it is comparable to Hellenic science. This parallelism ceases to be valid only during the recent epochs, when suddenly in Europe starts, among the inheritors of Hellenism, the modern scientific growth, because ancient Indian science has produced nothing comparable to the same. But this growth is definitely not the exclusive result of and the natural consequence of the scientific Greek tradition. Upto this exceptional growth, on the one hand Greek science and its derivatives in Christianity and Islam and on the other Indian science and its derivatives in the form of exported Brahmanism and Buddhism have, between themselves, shared the world. Outside these, only the Chinese science kept a domain for itself, extended in sooth, but without distant expansion and often mixed with Indian influence.
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Someone can, however, object that it is not legitimate to put in this manner Indian science on a par with Greek science and it may be preferable to compare the former with that of Islam. The prevalent opinion which feels that Indian science is lacking in originality, supposes that it has been derived from Greek science and as a consequence is a sister of Islamic science. In this case, even when regard is to be had to the great historical role of Indian science as also to its intrinsic value, the problem of its originality re-appears—the problem dominating all the ideas that must be had thereof.
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This problem has been very early resolved by the authors who had taken it up. In India, because of National pride, certain persons make it a principle to claim that in early antiquity the science of their country had gone much farther than that of the present occident. On the other hand, in the occident many claim that the spirit of scientific research could not arise but among them and that India could have had only that much in science, which she could have borrowed. In both cases, only certain examples, thought to be the characteristics, are offered as proofs; these examples are immediately generalised, with hypotheses supplementing the missing data, without making any effort for acquiring the latter. In truth, judgement is given on the basis of racial or rational prejudice rather than on that of a profound comparative study of the two great scientific traditions, on whose respective values pronouncements are made. It can be easily observed that those who settle this question with greater certainty are familiar only with the tradition in whose favour they give the decision and know the other only by means of fragmentary data or through studies they cannot appreciate. This is the least to be said in the most favourable case, because, clearly, we do not have to consider those who know neither of the two sciences, with which they deal.
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The greatest historians of science have not always been able to escape this inconvenience of unilateral knowledge when they had to compare the Greek and Indian data. A. Paul Tannery, so justly famous for his studies in the field of ancient Mathematics, has been himself an example of the same. It is known that the trigonometric sinus is not mentioned by the Greek Mathematicians and Astronomers, that it has been in use in India since the Gupta period, as the *Sūrya-siddhānta* of the fourth or the fifth century A.D. gives a table of sinus, that the Arab Astronomers who borrowed from India had known the sinus and that its usage came to the occident in the twelfth century A.D., when the astronomical work of Al-Battani was translated into Latin. From this, the conclusion should have been drawn that the sinus had been invented, not by the Greeks but by the Indians whose tradition on this point had been taken up by the Arabs for completing that of the Greeks. But, being sure that the Indians could not have invented anything in Mathematics and believing that this science had no place among them, Tannery has preferred to suppose, without any basis whatsoever, that the sinus could have been the response to a Greek idea, not adopted by Hipparchos, who had merely established a table of chords. The mere fact that Indians had known the sinus sufficed to persuade Tannery that the Greeks had known it and had then taught its concept to the Indians.¹
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¹ P. Tannery, *Recherche sur l'histoire de l'astronomie ancienne*, Paris, 1893, p. 66.
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Reasoning in this way, we have only the Greek science left in the world and the great problem of knowing whether scientific spirit is the exclusive product of the Greek miracle, whether scientific invention has taken place only among the Greeks, is solved in advance. That is to say that it is not at all resolved because the expression of a prejudice is not a solution. Only a profound study of Indian science in parallel with the contemporary sciences, especially with corresponding Greek science, will enable us to recognise if it has some originality or not and in such a case, to measure the same, to truly judge the role of India in the history of science, to determine whether she has been only a propagator or also a creator.
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In his great series of works on science in Antiquity, interrupted too soon, the late Abel Rey, centring his research on the originality and the genius of Hellenic science, has objectively tried to give due share to foreign science which had surrounded the same.² The method, which for this purpose had appeared to him to be the surest, consisted in making a list of documents which introduce these sciences to us, in dating them to the best of ability and in comparing their dates with those of the corresponding Greek documents. This was a strict application of the historical and comparative method. When a foreign scientific work was surely anterior to the Greek texts containing analogous teaching, he made a comparative analysis of the tenor of teaching given on both sides. When, on the contrary, it was found to be posterior, he did not think it necessary to take note of the same. In this way he had come to the conclusion that, in the present state of our documentation,—in sooth extremely fragmentary in so far as the ancient sciences of Egypt and classical Orient are concerned—the Orient, before the Greeks had merely furnished a proto-science, chiefly of a practical nature and that it was only after the growth of Greek science that the later Oriental peoples had known a more developed science. But in certain cases, particularly while examining the data of Indian science, Abel Rey has much too exclusively considered the chronology of works, whereas the full application of the historical method would demand the determination of a chronology of ideas.
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² Collection *L' Evolution de l' Humanité* : I. *La science orientale avant les Grecs*, Paris, 1930; II. *La jeunesse de la science grecque*, 1933; III. *La maturité de la pensé scientifique en Gréce*, 1939; IV and V. *L' apogée de la science technique grecque*, 1946 and 1948.
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The special texts of Indian medicine, which have reached us, are didactic works of relatively late date. In the majority of cases, they are not the original compositions of initiators, they are only the manuals of schools, which have, at a certain moment, become traditional due to success and which, because of the same, have been preserved for us in preference to those which they, more or less, reproduce. The date of their editing has, therefore, only secondary importance; it is not valid for marking the epoch of the creation of doctrines contained therein. Therefore, in dating the totality of these doctrines in the epoch of these manuals, as has been done by Abel Rey, is to take an extreme risk. These doctrines are surely much more ancient. One may, however, believe that no other course was open to him. Certainly it would have been still much more risky to put them in an indeterminate antiquity and, most of all, to put all of them there *en bloc*, because the higher they go, with reference to their expression in these manuals, the more chance there is of their being mixed up, during various periods, with more recent notions.
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Fortunately, we do not find ourselves faced with the dilemma of either having to rejuvenate, against all evidence, the ancient doctrines or of having to make them old at random. The special classical manuals of Indians constitute only a part of the immense literature of ancient India. It is therefore, legitimate for us to see if we can find out, in more ancient literary strata, the appearance of doctrines, which they have systematised for teaching. In this way we have the chance to locate them nearer their origin and sometimes to find even the stages of their constitution.
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This is what we have tried to do for the medical doctrines. It is only after having put them in their place in the current of Indian thought, where they arose, and after having determined their antecedents that we could proceed to compare them with similar Greek doctrines. We will strive chiefly to seize their first manifestation or the formative elements in the oldest texts, so that we can go as far as possible in the historical past of ideas. We will be led to observe that a number of ideas, which had been believed to be borrowed by India from the Hellenic science, as long as they had been studied only in classical manuals more recent than the great Greek works, have, in fact, in India more ancient bases than these great works and that the two medical traditions, Indian and Greek, have had a parallel development. We will have, therefore, to envisage their eventual exchanges in the light of those historical conditions which have made them possible.
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The problem of the existence of these exchanges does not have an interest only for the history of ancient sciences; it constitutes a part of the more general history of relations between the Orient and Occident, too often discussed on the basis of *rapprochements* of general ideas which are much less characteristic than those of special doctrines.
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On the other hand, the study of special doctrines of sciences is called for, even outside the sphere of comparative researches, even inside each civilisation, because these doctrines are not limited to the savants. They are all known to all the thinkers, at least in their main lines. They determine a part of their ideas and often they constitute a fund of notions on which they agree with one another more easily than on all the problems of Metaphysics or of Religion. This fund is more closely common than any other and to all those belonging to the same culture. The historians of occidental thought are devoting themselves more and more to a consideration of the influence of scientific ideas on the Occidental philosophers. Here we must note, however, that in India speculation concerning nature and physiology has, in parallel, commanded many concepts of the thinkers and of men of all types. We have, therefore, while undertaking this study, to try to call attention at least to the interesting doctrines and which by their large diffusion, characterise, on certain points, Indianism in its entirety, while at the same time they are important for the history of sciences and of the ancient currents of thought, no matter how modest elements they may be in themselves.