Vanaspati: Plants and Plant-Life as in Indian Treatises and Traditions c2.4

c2.4

In the Introduction I have tried to suggest what reply can reasonably be given to the enquiry whether there was at all anything like a Science of Botany in India. It has been suggested that there are not only reference to such individual Sciences as the *Krishitantra*, *Vrikshāyurveda* and *Bheshajavidyā* but clear quotations from such individual authors as *Kāśyapa*, *Parāśara* and *Sāraswata*. And yet I have not gone so far as to maintain that there was any single ancient Indian treatise coinciding with any of the modern treatises of Botany. I have been concerned to emphasise the fact that the ideas of plants and plant-life in India are traced to a stage when Botanical discipline had not obtained an independent position, for much of the knowledge which might be relegated to the Science of Botany appears to have been either subservient to Philosophy, or to the Science of Medicine, or to the Science of Agriculture.