The Classical Doctrine of Indian Medicine: Its Origins and its Greek Parallels c6.17.3

c6.17.3

It is, in any case, probable that some king of Kāśī had, in antiquity, acquired a reputation in medicine and that the legends, now preserved, might have been the result of the efforts to reconstitute from the Indian point of view, the life and the genealogy of that prince who was accepted as a divine incarnation. If one were to view things from this angle, it will have, at least, to be accepted that extremely ancient mythical personages such as Divodāsa and Bharadvāja have, in various ways, been introduced into these legends. We have already seen that these two last-mentioned ones, sometimes seem to mingle into one. In the Harivaṃśa, a distinction is made between the two, as one of the two is the master of Dhanvantari and the other his great-grandson. But even here at least the notion of a relationship between Dhanvantari and Bharadvāja is present and this relationship goes back at least to the Śāṅkhāyana-gṛhyasūtra (ii, 14) which unites the two names of Bharadvāja and Dhanvantari, just as the Ṛg-veda had made a rapprochement between those of Bharadvāja and Divodāsa. Therefore, it does not go as far away from the tradition as one would have thought at first view, keeping in view the tradition adopted by the Caraka-saṃhitā.