The Classical Doctrine of Indian Medicine: Its Origins and its Greek Parallels c8.5

c8.5

Efforts have been made to have an idea of the time which must have passed between the successive literary strata, in which the Vedic and the Brahmanical texts can be chronologically spread out. These are of the Rgveda, of the other Vedas, of the Brāhmaṇas, of the liturgical commentaries, of the Āraṇyakas, “books of the forest” for the use of sages who have retired into the jungle, of the Upaniṣads, speculative texts generally attached to the Brāhmaṇas and the Āraṇyakas, and lastly the Sūtras, manuals of ritual and religious legality, associated with other technical manuals on grammar, prosody and astronomy which together form the group of Vedāṅga or parts of the Veda. Long ago Max Müller had proposed to calculate in roughly two hundred years the duration of each of the earlier periods corresponding to the first stratum, the last one having taken a longer time and having been possibly elaborated (in part), even a long time after the beginning of Buddhism. Certain savants have thought that this period of two hundred years was too short, others as too long and Max Müller himself said that his choice was altogether arbitrary.¹ He put it forward not as probable, but simply as being reasonably adopted for fixing the ideas while waiting for better things. His calculations showed that the collection of the Ṛgveda was constituted sometime between 1200 and 1000 B. C.