The Classical Doctrine of Indian Medicine: Its Origins and its Greek Parallels c7.s2.44

c7.s2.44

Often enough his fatal rôle has not been correctly recognised. In order to identify Tritá completely with the Avestan Thrita, Haug has covered this rôle by means of tendentious translations.³ He has understood the passage, which we have just quoted as signifying that Tritá extinguished diseases in the human beings just as the gods had extinguished it in him, but mṛj can not denote “extinguish” and Bloomfield has quite justly recognised in Tritá the “scapegoat” of the gods.⁴ Haug has equally claimed that in the Ṛg-veda (VIII. 47, 13) disease was sent to him for being “pacified” and he has added that reference is made in the Avesta to this circumstance “by the surname Sāma, which signifies pacifier”. But this assertion is false because there is no question of pacifying in the Ṛg-veda (VIII. 47, 13) which says: “That which openly, that which secretly, O gods, is badly done, on Trita Āptya, all that place far from us; your help be benign, your help is good help”.⁵ This passage, when compared with the preceding one, provides good evidence that Tṛtá or Tritá is the divine scapegoat but the men on whom he tries, in his turn, to discharge a disease, request the gods to take it back and send it back to him with their own affliction, so that this personage, though indirectly and in return, is also the scapegoat of human beings. There is thus quite a distance between this rôle and that of a cure-giver and it is surprising that Pischel has tried to make Tritá a doctor.¹