The Classical Doctrine of Indian Medicine: Its Origins and its Greek Parallels c8.4

c8.4

The existence of the Vedic literature is supposed by all other known literatures of India. Buddhism and Jainism, founded in the VIth century B. C., refer, in their ancient traditions, to the Brahmins and to their religion. It is certain that before their time, the essential part of the Brahmanic literature had been constituted and this had taken place a long time ago. Two concordant facts prove it. Firstly the language of these Brahmanic texts is not the language which had been in use during the centuries preceding the Christian era; it is much more archaic. Towards the end of IVth century B. C., at the time of the Expedition of Alexander and of the Seleucid Embassies to Central India, the current language was no longer the ancient Indian, the Sanskrit, it was already a form of middle-Indian; the forms of geographical names or of the names of men reproduced by the Greek sources, clearly establish this point. Moreover, in the totality of the Brahmanic literature, there are several successive strata of different ages as is shown by the evolution of terms or of the habitudes of style. Now this is the second fact which establishes the antiquity of the Brahmanic literature—the geographical horizon of the texts belonging to the oldest stratum is in the West of India whereas that of the linguistically more recent stratum, progressively extends itself towards the East. The authors of the oldest book, the Rgveda, belong to a circle of conquerors, the Aryas, fighting the indigenous people. The texts belonging to latter epochs thus lay out the stages of the conquest going from the West to the East, the conquest, which in the times of the Buddha and of Mahāvīra, had not only attained the East, but had also permeated the entire population for centuries, because the Sanskrit language, brought in at the time of the conquest and still used in the Brahmanic texts (which refer to it) had already transformed itself into middle-Indian.