The Classical Doctrine of Indian Medicine: Its Origins and its Greek Parallels c7.s2.131

c7.s2.131

The close relationship, thus affirmed with insistence, of the wind with the normal cosmic Order betokens, from the Veda itself, the rôle of the motor and of the regulator of the Heavenly bodies which will be later on ascribed to the wind by the astronomy of classical India. (*Sūryasiddhānta*, II, 3 & XII, 73). But other features show that the life of the body also was conceived in relation with the wind. In the Veda, the concept of reciprocal relations between the Universe and the body is quite clearly shown. On dying, the human being must dissolve himself in nature: ‘that the eye go to the Sun, the soul to the Wind, to the Sky and to the Earth according to the Order. Go to the Waters, if there it is advantageous for you, establish yourself in the Plants as your body’.¹ The eye, i.e., the flash, the fire of the eye, and the soul, the warm breath of the living one, which alone are named here as the elements of the human being had certainly been conceived as of the same nature as the fire and the wind of the universe as they are referred back to them. The sky, the waters and the plants, inhabited by the fire, could also receive them. As regards the earth, it is undoubtedly the residue of the solid organism which the division according to the natural Order ascribed to her. One may also see in this passage, as it has already been pointed out by Anna Moreshwar Kunte² a type of the announcement of the concept, later become classical, of the organism as formed of five elements (*pañca-bhautika*), if at least it is admitted that here the sky is a prefiguration of space (*ākāśa*) recognised in the classical doctrine. On the other hand, the world is sometimes represented in the image of a big human body (*puruṣa) standing, whose head is the sky, the navel the atmosphere and the feet the earth (RV., X, 90, 14). Among other cosmic elements, the Sun is born of His eye and the Wind of His breath.¹ According to the *Bṛhadāraṇyaka-upaniṣad* (beginning) it is the body of the horse which is placed limb by limb in comparison with the universe not so much because the world is conceived as the figure of the cosmic Horse but because the horse of the sacrifice must represent the world in miniature. It is the wind again which is the breath of this horse. In the *Atharvaveda* it is said that Tvaṣṭṛ and Vāyu have brought the breath (*ātman*) to a bull (*ṛṣabha*) which is an animal of the sacrifice and at the same time a symbolically celestial bull (IX, 4, 10). Lastly, the *Atharvaveda* affirms, in terms which could not have been more decisive, the identity of the *prāṇa* and of the wind (vāyu), “the breath (it is said) is Mātariśvan: it is the wind which is called the breath; it is on the breath that all that was and all that is, all is based”.¹ It is true that this hymn, at the same time, identifies the breath with many other forces of nature, but it is to make of it the motor of the universal activity and the entire piece is an amplified counterpart of the hymn X, 168 of the *Rgveda* where the mind is placed above all.²