The Classical Doctrine of Indian Medicine: Its Origins and its Greek Parallels c7.s2.68

c7.s2.68

If the Vedic *yákṣma* is not, like the *drug*, a cause of disease, it has at least some relationship, like the *drug*, with sin or bad disposition (*infra*, p. 80). It even seems that one must consider it as the physical evil produced by a sort of *drug*. Actually the word *druh* is used in expressions characterising the disposition of the man who contracts *yákṣma* because of an act of impiety towards Mitra and Varuṇa: “the man who, O Mitra and Varuṇa, the impure (*abhidruh*) man, who does not press for you the waters (the juice of the soma), the artful (*akṣnayādruh*) himself deposits the *yákṣma* in his heart . . .”¹ Accordingly, one may observe that the *yákṣma* is exercised conjointly with the *druh* in the *Atharvaveda* (II, 10, 6). The root *druh*, in the classical language, signifies “to cause harm, being hostile”, but in the Vedic, this hostility consists of all that twists the normal order, the *ṛta*; it is the heresy, the impiety, indeed it is the error or the falsehood. The Vedic *druhs* are originally related to the Avestan *drugs*, which are the antagonists of the *asas*, the Avestan counterpart of the *ṛta*. The sense of the Avestan *drug* is justly “falsehood” or “disorder”.²