The Classical Doctrine of Indian Medicine: Its Origins and its Greek Parallels c9.7

c9.7

correspondence between stana, “bosom”, and pārśvaka, “side”; now the Atharva says: káti stánau vyadadhuh (st. 4), “How many (gods) have disposed (his) two breasts” and Hoernle feels obliged to understand that this refers to “the sides of the two breasts”. He coldly supplies the word “side” in the translation.¹ One case of this type should have sufficed to warn him that the Vedic hymn did not have bones in view. He has not hesitated from changing the naturally attributable sense of certain terms of the hymn to find them a pendant in the medical list. For example, he puts skandha of the hymn (st. 4) as an equivalent of the word grīvā, “neck” of Caraka, which he translates as “neck-bones”, but skandha in classical Sanskrit signifies “shoulder”; this word appears for the first time in the Ṛgveda (I, 32-5) in the form of skandhas having the ramifications (of the trunk of a tree). In our hymn it is in plural number; one may, therefore, think that it denotes the “ramifications (of the human trunk)”, shoulders, neck etc; nothing allows us to suppose it as an equivalent of the word grīvā of Caraka, specially when grīvā is employed precisely in that first part of the stanza, where the other figures.² Hoernle also places the words lalāṭa and kakāṭikā with regard to the compound of Caraka, *nāsikā-gaṇḍa-kūṭa-lalāṭa*, denoting together the bones of the nose, the cheek-bones and the arcs of the eyebrows. He imagines that *kakāṭikā* represents the bones of the nose and the cheek-bones conceived as an unique bone. But *kakāṭikā* is most naturally explained as a doublet or *kṛkāṭikā*¹ denoting "neck" and the stanza where it occurs can be translated: "Which is the god (among the gods) who, the first, has climbed the sky after having constructed his brain, his front, his neck, his cranium, that which is constructed on the jaws of man."² We cannot, therefore, confidently make use of the identifications proposed by Hoernle although they have been accepted (Vedic Index, see word *Śarīra*, in part.; Dasgupta, *Ind. Phil.*, Vol. II, pp. 284 ff). On another side, the explanations of the Vedic commentators such as Sāyaṇa and Mahīdhara do not always deserve to be accepted. The enormous distance separating, in time, these commentators from the texts interpreted by them, creates the fear that they have not known the real meaning of