The Classical Doctrine of Indian Medicine: Its Origins and its Greek Parallels c7.s2.95

c7.s2.95

In the Avesta, the waters which cure and purify (Yasna, LXIV, 1-5), are not only the source of health but also and chiefly as in the Veda, one of the primordial elements of the universe and of the living bodies. A part of Yasna, XXXVIII is devoted to them. They are invoked here under the names given them by Ahura Mazda, such as azi, mātar, aganya, daragudāyaṅh. These names are variously explained. Neryosengh, in his Sanskrit translation of the Yasna, explains azi in relation to water, in the form of phlegm (kapha)¹, mātar ‘mother’ in relation to the waters which are in the semen of the man and the woman at the time of the sexual union²; the aganya will be the ‘bloods’³ and lastly the daragudāyaṅho, whose name he translates by durbalakapālakāḥ, ‘cups of the weak’⁴, would be waters which are inside the matrix⁴, they being, therefore, those with which the embryo is saturated (hence the designation of ‘cups of the weak’). In the same text other designations follow where Neryosengh sees the waters of the plants and of the grains, those which are ‘in the body’ of the Earth and lastly ‘the milks’.⁵ This interpretation, if it were correct, would peremptorily prove that in ancient Iran there used to be some speculation on the physiological rôle of the waters, just as has been the case with the Indian doctors. But Neryosengh, the Parsi priest, could have been suspected of interpreting the passage too much in the Indian way and to have himself introduced therein, without any right, the traits which remind us of the ideas of the Āyurveda. However, Neryosengh did not translate the Avestan text directly and according to his personal conjectures, he rendered the Pehlavi version in Sanskrit, which had already explained the various denominations of the waters as the designations of different liquids, organic and others. The Pehlavi translation can, in its turn, be suspected of having, by virtue of the cosmological and physiological ideas prevalent under the Sassanians which could have been subjected to Indian influences, lent to the Avestan text a significance which it did not have in view. In fact, the Pehlavi version and Neryosengh differ a little in detail, which leads one to think that they did not follow a tradition which had been rigorously fixed from the time of the origin of the text, and lastly in the names of the waters in our passage, Nyberg sees only the epithets of the waters, respectively invoked as full-grown cows, as cows who are calving and as cows with milk, which give the nourishment of drigu, that is to say, undoubtedly of the ‘poor’ in the scheme of sacred things.¹