The Classical Doctrine of Indian Medicine: Its Origins and its Greek Parallels c7.s2.172

c7.s2.172

Vayu because I pursue (or chase) the two creations, that of Spənta Mainyu and that of Aŋra Mainyu” (43), but this is for explaining by means of an etymology which is only a play on words, the name of Vayu by Vayemi, “I pursue”. Similarly the following addition is made, “I attain (apayemi) the two creations”, (43) “I conquer (vanāmi) the two creations” and “I operate well (vohu vərəzyami), for the creature, Ahura Mazda and the Aməsa Spənta” (44). Here there is no precise idea of any cosmic role ascribed to the wind; there are only the explanations of the qualificatives apayata, ‘who attains’, vanô-vīspa, ‘who conquers everything’ and vohuvarsta ‘benefactor’.¹ Vayu or Vāta has become a sovereign entity and is no longer a force of nature. It is true that in certain passages of the Avesta the wind is only a metereological phenomenon, but this itself removes it away from the central concept of the wind in the Veda. The Vayu-Vāta of the Avesta do not come in the middle of the material phenomenon and the god, the Vedic Vāyu-Vāta is thus less divine and more of a natural force. The soul of the world, it is the god because of the fulness of its rôle. Being breath, it is a material force and in the unitary explanation which the ṛṣis try to give of the world and of the body, he is ready to be conceived as the great cosmo-physiological principle of movement. The form in which he has reached us in the Avesta, does not show that a concept of the wind, simultaneously as a cosmic soul and as a vital breath is as clearly attested as in the Veda. One, therefore, tends to conclude from the comparison of the Avestan and Vedic data on the wind, that a general concept of its eminent rôle in the universe and its high rank among the powerful entities which co-operate for the maintenance of the Cosmic Good Order is Indo-Iranian, but it is by means of a more recent and exclusively Indian evolution that the wind has been conceived in the Veda as the common motor of the cosmic and individual lives.