The Classical Doctrine of Indian Medicine: Its Origins and its Greek Parallels c5.11

c5.11

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.