Hindu Medicine c8.32

c8.32

There is a hymn in Atharva-Veda (XI, 4)⁵ which is addressed by the devotee as a prayer to his own life-breath to make sure of its continued beneficent presence within himself. It is concerned with the main task of ancient Hindu medical wisdom or “āyurveda,” the prolongation of life (āyus). In this respect it belongs to the medical section of the Veda of magic, though its principal content is a comprehensive description of the functions and potency of life-breath in both macrocosm and microcosm. In literary form, it belongs to the “descriptive eulogies” (arthasūkta) among the hymns and incantations; technically, it is used either with an amulet of rice and barley in a rite for averting evil (mahā-śānti), called “immortality” (amṛta), or in a propitiatory ritual for appeasing the malignant planet Saturn, and on other similar occasions. Its most impressive use occurs during the ceremony of initiation, at the crucial moment in the life-career of a Hindu of one of the three upper castes: when the Brahmin teacher takes the boy pupil out of the custody of his parents, he invests him with the sacred thread and, through the magic power of Brahman vested in him, addresses himself to the accomplishment of the spiritual rebirth of the adept, the transfusion into this new receptacle of the power of sacred wisdom. At this moment, the teacher lays his hand on the navel, the life-center, of the youth and utters the stanzas, which originally were conceived as a solitary incantation which the initiate was to address to his own life-breath: