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Chapter 17
Medical Sciences in Jaina Canons
Religion is a way of life involving a code of conduct leading to the best of physical and spiritual happiness of individual and society. It leads to increase in pleasure and reduce the pains. Sthānānga1 mentions ten types of pleasures involving attainments and controls. They include health and longevity at the top. These are experienced by reducing ten types of pains2 due to food, shelter, clothes and diseases of physical, mental, natural, supernatural and accidental nature. It seems the Jaina preceptors did have the idea of proper health as the basis for attaining the four objectives (religion, riches, desires and salvation) in the world. They had in mind that sound mind develops only in sound body. That is why, all the monks were formerly required to learn the science of vital airs or living and attainment of healthy and lustrous body was taken as one of their characteristics.
The Jainas have developed a science of life or Prāṇāvāya (Prāṇāyu) with the description of quatrained eightfold system3. This formed the earliest canon on medical science adopted by Jainas. Though this is not extant now, its contents have been described in other canons. This now forms only one section (12th) of pre-canonical texts under 12th primary canon the Dṛṣṭivāda or canon of apologies and worldly-cumsuper-worldly learnings, though this canon is also now extant. However, the studies of this or other canons was limited to the monks only wherein they were not required to practice it publicly to free them from attendant botherations. The times changed and this science became the science for general people and earned the name of skilled learning. That is why, the ash-thread-therapists (bhutikarma ), physicans and physio
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