The Classical Doctrine of Indian Medicine: Its Origins and its Greek Parallels c7.s2.130

c7.s2.130

¹ Max Müller, in his famous theory of the Vedic religion, has seen in this habit, the expression of a religious form intermediary between polytheism and monotheism, the henotheism or the kathenotheism (cf., for instance F. Max Müller, *Origine et developpement de la religion*... French translation by J. Darmesteter, Paris, 1879, pp. 236 & ff). But in believing that it implied, in the presence of each god, a forgetting of all the others, he has somewhat exaggerated its importance (cf., *Physical Religion*, London, 1891, p. 181). He has not taken sufficient note of several facts. First of all, the authors of hymns are numerous and are of different ages and each one could have had the divinity of his choice, or better still, each one could follow the fashion of his period and of his milieu; It is one of the characteristic traits of the sects of classical India that each tends to appropriate for his gods or for his heroes, the glory or the exploits of the gods or the heroes of the other sects (cf., the reciprocal borrowings of the Buddhist, Jaina and Hindu legends) and it will not be surprising that the Veda had already become Indian by the same tendency among its authors. Secondly, the simple desire of giving to each god the maximum of praise fatally led to all of them being praised in the same manner. Moreover, the fact of ascribing to several gods successively the first place does not necessarily imply a contradiction; one, for example, who is “without precedent” is not necessarily the only one who should be such a one, because the epithet can be applicable also to each of his counterparts. It is true that the formal contradictions are numerous, that a particular specific exploit is once ascribed to one mythical being and then to another, but these contradictions seem to have been deliberately looked for, in the texts where the paradox is set up as a normal literary procedure and they are logically compensated by the idea that in definitive the gods are a single being under different forms (*RV.*, I, 164, 46), at least beginning from the moment when this idea had come forth. The epithet of *āpūrvya* retains nevertheless, in the case of wind, a special value because the wind is the first among the gods to arrive at a sacrifice and this priority is already Indo-Iranian (cf., G. Dumézil, *Tarpeia*, 1947, pp. 49 & ff). It appears to be due to this reason that the wind has the attribute of velocity in the race.