The Classical Doctrine of Indian Medicine: Its Origins and its Greek Parallels c8.44

c8.44

The *rta* is the regular order in general, being the moral rectitude, the ritual exactitude and the true law of the universe; in one word, it is the “Norm”. Varuna is the Lord and the guardian of this “Norm”. The concept of *rta* goes back to the Indo-Iranian period (see *supra*, p. 67); to the Vedic *rta* correspond exactly the Avestan *asa* and the Old-Persian *rta*. He has for basis the sentiment that all things are harmoniously regulated and are not left to chance in this universe. The fixity of the stellar figures, the periodical return of the mobile stars to similar positions, the evident verification of all the principal and regular phenomena of nature have, from a very early date, imposed this notion. Among the peoples inclined to explain the organism by the cosmos and the cosmos by the organism, this notion must have quickly extended itself from the sky to the earth, from the world to the living being. Although victim of innumerable accidents, the existence of this last one could not be conceived as being outside the orbit of the great cosmic law, as the same body was a little cosmos. If this is not, properly speaking, a scientific concept of natural law, it is at least an idea quite near the same. The scope of this idea is absolutely general because there is nothing which is not governed by *rta*, including the moral behaviour of man. Sometimes the Indian and the Iranian minds are blamed for having thus mixed up the physical and the moral but it should also be recognised that this very mind has also raised above them a sufficiently large concept for covering both of them.