The Classical Doctrine of Indian Medicine: Its Origins and its Greek Parallels c7.s2.195

c7.s2.195

of the cosmic animals are not found from the most ancient Rgvedic hymns (the myth of the Puruṣa is found only in the Xth maṇḍala). Very old ideas can be found in relatively late texts. The concept of the world as a body is frequent among the people of inferior culture, it can therefore perfectly have been a part of the Indo-Iranian ideas. Moreover, the relative age of the hymns is sometimes appreciated without any serious criterion, by reason of sentiment. The older Vedic scholars have introduced in science the prejudice that hymns containing theosophical, philosophical and other speculations were necessarily more recent than those whose contents are more purely naturalistic. To their mind, all that concerned speculation was not sufficiently "primitive" to be able to belong the base itself of the Veda. But one can no longer accept such ideas if it is thought that much before the first Vedic hymn was composed (and this hymn itself supposes a degree of civilisation which admits the usage of speculations) various peoples not far removed from the Vedic Aryans, those of Mesopotamia, had both, speculations and various sciences.