On Problem Of Contribution Of Ascetics And Buddhist Monks To Development Of Indian Medicine

SR No.: 269653
Original Sutra Author: N/A
Author: A Wezler
Publisher: A Wezler
Total Pages: 11
Language: English
Classification: Article
File Size: 822 KB

Page 1

Review Article
On the Problem of the Contribution of Ascetics and Buddhist Monks to the Development of Indian Medicine
ALBRECHT WEZLER
The purpose of this study is, according to the author's own state. ment ("Conclusion'. p. 117). 'the investigation of Indian medicine in the
crucial but neglected period from about 800 to 100% (i e. from the time . of the 'compilation of the Rgveda in its final form (p.14) up to the
period of the classical treatises of Caraka, Bhela, and Sufruta' (p.3). and these dates are 'B.C.E', the aim of the study being to obtain a more comprehensive and more plausible picture of ancient Indian medical history ... Hence this book is clearly a continuation, and a logical one at that, of Zysk's doctoral dissertation;' and it is logical that the main results of the vissertation are summarised at the outset (pp.11ff.). What Zysk is looking for, and claims to have discovered, is the missing link, so to say, between what he time and again calls the 'magico-religious' Vedic medicine and the empirico-rational ( yuktivyaparnya) medicine in the earliest works of Ayurveda literature, or, in his own words, the transition from Vedic medicine, anchored in a magico-religious Ideology, to munera, dominated by an empiricorational epistemology' (p. 117); this transition is conceived of as 'a paradigm shift', though not exactly in the sense of Kuhn's theory 'From the early Vedic period, medicine and healers were excluded from the core of the orthodox brahmanic social and religious hierarchy', that is to say, from the group of Brahmins who were the vehicle of the "trylvidyd-culture", 'and found acceptance among heterodox traditions of
A Review of: Kenneth G. Zysk, Asceticism and Healing in Ancient India. Medicine in the Buddhist Monastery. Oxford University Press: New York/Oxford 1991, 200 rp. £ 30.00 or US-$ 35.00. ISBN 0-19.505956-5. (Indian edition: Rs 160.00. ISBN 0-19-562966-3.)
Politically correct American for 'BC since the Common Era' is in the West of course the Christian one.
? Religious Healing in the Irda, with Transition. Innrarians from the garda and the Atharvaveds and Rendering from the r iding Rimvai lent (ansactions of the American Philosophical Society 755) Philadelphia 1985