The Classical Doctrine of Indian Medicine: Its Origins and its Greek Parallels c7.s2.112

c7.s2.112

In the Avesta, besides the fact that *Atar* presents the general traits which relate him to Agni and go back, in all probability, to the Indo-Iranian period, some of his special forms appear to be related to the special forms of Agni. *Yasna* (XII, II) successively invokes the fires, *bərəzisavah*, *vohufrayāna*, *urvāzista*, *vāzista* and *spənista*. Neryosengh translates the first name as *udagrajyotiṣ*, “eminent light”, and explains that this is the ever-luminous fire found near Ahura Mazda, but the Pehlavi version renders it as ‘of great utility’. The fire *vohufrayāna* literally ‘who aims the good’, is according to Neryosengh who agrees with the tradition, the ‘excellent friend’, one who finding itself permanently in the body, eats and drinks. The fire *urvāzista* becomes *vanaspatiṣṭha* in Sanskrit meaning ‘one who lives in the trees’, ‘one who always drinks but never masticates’. ² The fourth is the fire in the form of lightning (*vidyudrūpa*) which neither drinks nor eats and the last one is the fire found in milk (*payaṣṭha*). The existence of the fire in plants, specially in wood, from where it is drawn out by friction, is a notion quite common in the Veda. But it is chiefly the fire *vohufrayāna* whose rôle of the element of body presiding at nutrition is important for observation as that aids us to reconstitute the physiological ideas of the Indo-Iranians, because it corresponds exactly, by means of this rôle, to an aspect of the Vedic fire, *Vaiśvānara*. Perhaps one could say that the functions ascribed by the Iranian Sassanian tradition to this fire do not really go back to the epoch when the Avestan text was conceived and we have seen that the similar function