The Classical Doctrine of Indian Medicine: Its Origins and its Greek Parallels c7.s2.186

c7.s2.186

Nevertheless, these speculations hold an important place and seem to have been linked with cosmological ideas, much nearer those of the Veda than it can be seen from the actual Avesta. We have seen that the wind and the breath had been assimilated in the Veda, that the breath was regarded as a wind animating the body and that, reciprocally, the wind was conceived as the breath of a Cosmic body. The actual Avesta contains nothing similar to it. It is true that the Vedic myths of the cosmic man, of the cosmic horse, of the cosmic bull must be originally related to the Avestan myths of the primordial bull (gəus) and of the first man, Gayo-marətan. But if one relies only on the Avestan data, then neither man nor bull possesses a body representing the world. It can be that they were originally a celestial man and a celestial bull as was conceived by Darmesteter, but they do not cover the universe. In the *Gāthā Ahunavaiti*, (in *Yasna*, XXIX) the soul of the bull is presented as the spirit of the herds. According to *Yast*, XIII, 87, Ahura Mazda has drawn the Aryan race from Gayo-Marətan. On the other hand, the Pehlavi tradition gives a cosmic significance to the myths of the primitive bull and the primitive man. According to the *Bundahisn*, both are killed by Aṅra Mainyu. From the various parts of the body of the bull are born all sorts of plants, his semen goes to the Moon, whose light purifies it and produces a couple of bovides and then couples of all the animals (Chap. X & XIV).¹ Similarly the semen of Gayo-marətan, gathered on his death, is purified by the light of the Sun and later gives birth to two plants which become the first human couple (XV). All this is presented as having been taken from the Avesta and the *Zādsparam* which takes it up with more details and indicates (IX, 1) that a correspondence of the plants with each limb of the bull is given in the *Dāmdāt nask*.² Here it is precisely the case of a *nask* lost from the Avesta, but the assertion can be accepted as the actual Avesta, instead of contradicting these myths, contains several details which corroborate them and most of all because several traits of these myths are Indo-Iranian. The Vedic texts compare with the semen of an animal, the rain which makes the plants grow and which assimilates itself to the celestial Soma, to the Soma whose relations with the Moon are not necessarily of a late origin as is admitted sometimes. In any case, the bull whose semen is in the sky and whose dead body giving birth to plants, represents all the earth and is a cosmic body; He is the world conceived in the image of an animal; He is sometimes conceived by the Vedic texts. This idea has all the chances of going back to the Indo-Iranian epoch.⁴