The Classical Doctrine of Indian Medicine: Its Origins and its Greek Parallels c6.119

c6.119

*Essential Doctrines of the Ayurvedic texts:*—The large saṃhitās are didactic texts in prose and verse of varied metres. The prose passages generally contain mnemonic verses which summarise them. The chapters entirely in verse are specially those that contain the enumeration of symptoms or therapeutic prescriptions. They are, therefore, the ones which it is most useful to know by heart for practising, whereas the passages in prose generally deal with the theoretical principles. The choice of prose or verse seems, therefore, to have been dictated chiefly by a pedagogic desire. Their alternation is not the sign of the intervention of several authors in the composition of the *saṃhitās*. The prose-parts, chiefly in the *Caraka-saṃhitā*, remind one of the theoretical accounts of the *Brāhmaṇas* and the *Upaniṣads*. In a certain number of cases they have the same dialogue-form as in these later texts, but the language has the characteristic of being more recent.