The Classical Doctrine of Indian Medicine: Its Origins and its Greek Parallels c6.26

c6.26

The majority of the hymns of the fifth maṇḍala of the Ṛg-veda is attributed to Atri and to the Ātreyas, each of whom has a personal name in addition to his surname. Among these personal names, that of Punarvasu, the Ātreya of the Caraka-saṃhitā is not found, but one comes across those of Vasūyu, Vasuśruta and Śrutavid which make the reader think of Punarvasu and Suśruta at the same time. Śrutavid signifies “one who knows what he has heard”; this is, therefore, a name quite near to that of Suśruta. Vasūyu can denote, “desirous of riches”. For Vasuśruta, Monier Williams has proposed the probable rendering of “a person renowned for wealth”, a sense which can be brought near to that of the epithet vasuśravas. Punarvasu is simply the name of the constellation of Gemini⁴ and the names of the constellations normally form the personal names with the sense of "born under such and such a constellation" (Pāṇini, IV, 3, 34). In any case, the frequent use of giving a name to the descendants of Atri, where *Vasu* enters as an element, goes back at least to the period when the traditional list of the descendants of Atri, who were authors of the Vedic hymns, was fixed. Moreover, *Vasu* can denote "good" and *Vasuśruta* "one who has listened to good things", that is to say, "learned in good things"; in this case *Suśruta* can be a variant of the same. The doctor *Suśruta*, pupil of Divodāsa could be, in this case, definitely another name of Punarvasu Ātreya, pupil of Bharadvāja. The traditions of the *Suśruta-saṃhitā* and the *Caraka-saṃhitā* agreed here although this accord was not apparent at first view and both of them had probably borrowed from a single source the names of the legendary masters of the medical science. To put it differently, they probably constituted a unique tradition, but with two different series of proper names. Otherwise, one has to attribute to chance all the resemblances and equivalences observed between the names furnished on the two sides. One can ask as to why, if the two traditions are in fact only one, they should present themselves under different forms, but this is something quite natural in India.