The Classical Doctrine of Indian Medicine: Its Origins and its Greek Parallels c6.116

c6.116

As regards the connection of the legend of Caraka with that of the grammarian Patañjali, this forms part of an ensemble of concordances between the legends of the transmission of grammar and that of the transmission of medical science. We have already seen that a tradition attributes the teaching of grammar to Indra. Pāṇini (VII, 2, 63) quotes the opinion of a Bharadvāja who could have been a real personage and whose name only signifies "descendant of Bharadvāja". But chiefly Kātyāyana, the predecessor of Patañjali-Caraka, is sometimes, as the exegetist of Pāṇini, called Punarvasu¹, just as in the medical traditions the teacher of Caraka passes for having been Punarvasu. The late character of the attribution of this name to Kātyāyana indicates that probably this is only a secondary adaptation of the story of the doctors to that of the grammarians, but this attribution gives an example of the way in which the Indians have readapted the history of their sciences.² This is then another sign that the stories of the origins and of the transmission of the Āyurveda are not at all altered history but are the ideal reconstitutions of a history that had been lost or neglected and the names given to the authors of the big medical saṃhitās are not, undoubtedly, those which they really had, unless they had precisely selected these names or had received them as surnames. The medical saṃhitās cannot therefore be dated surely according to the possible epochs of their supposed authors. It is only their intrinsic composition, the state of their language and their place in relation to the texts of known date which allow the assigning to approximate period for their composition.