The Classical Doctrine of Indian Medicine: Its Origins and its Greek Parallels c6.112

c6.112

In that case one would be tempted to suppose that historically it has been so and that the two big medical *saṃhitās* have been revised by one and the same author, who has been given two different names by the traditions of the two schools. But this conclusion is too hazardous. It is quite possible that the grammarian Patañjali, the doctor Caraka and the Buddhist savant Nāgārjuna have existed independently and that the stories which identify them or which make them identical, have come into being secondarily. In effect these names are attested much before we have proof of the existence of these legends. The origins of these can be linked with the name of Nāgārjuna or with ideas which have given him this name. In India it is a common usage to demolish the claims of others, not by denying them, but by appropriating them. Senart has shown that the serpent has often played the same role in the Buddhist and Vaiṣṇava stories.¹ Nāgārjuna is said to have seized the doctrines of the Mahāyāna from the Nagas, who had been keeping them hidden in the depths of the Pātāla and Viṣṇu is said to have brought out from the same depths the Vedas, which had been stolen by the Asuras or by the Nagas.² It was natural that a Buddhist savant and a Brahmanic savant or a group of Brahmanic savants, both parties having relation with the serpents, made a pair. If once the revision of the *Suśruta-saṃhitā* had been attributed to Nāgārjuna, if it were really the work of a savant of that name, it was necessary that the reviser of the *Caraka-saṃhitā* also became the incarnation of the mythical Nāga, as his school would not have liked to have been left behind. It does not follow in the least therefrom that the two personages must have been the same historic personage. From this we can only conclude that the stories told about the classical redaction of the two *saṃhitās* have a common source;