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The Ayurveda is seen to have started its career quite early in Indian history. We know very little about the state of medical knowledge in the Indus Valley culture, reaching upto five thousand years ago, except perhaps the fact that these people with their bathing tanks and well built drainage systems, had a keen sense for public hygiene. But then coming to the Atharva-Veda, which is mixed up with superstitions and magic, we find, especially in the Kausika-sutra belonging to it, clear references to diseases and their cures, and also to the 'eight parts' (aştanga) of the Ayurveda, as recognized by the later tradition. At the time of the Buddha (i. e, in the 6th century B. C.) we are left in no doubt that a well-recognized system of medical knowledge had come into existence. The halflegendary figure of Jivaka, the great medical genius of Taxila, who is glorified in the Śibi-Jātaka, emerges as the first surgeon-physician of India, to whom not only marvellous surgical operations, but also some medicinal formulae have been attributed. The Mahāvagga of the Pali-Vinaya mentions purgatives and medicines for fever, constipation etc. as household remedies. The oldest complete medical works on Ayurveda, however, are known to be those of Suśruta and Caraka (of the early Christian era), who produce different geneaologies. of their predecessors starting right from the God Brahmā, and they have come down to us more as textbooks for students rather than as independent original treatises, so that one can surmise that actual theories were first mooted at a much earlier date.
Prof. J. Filliozat in his "Classical Doctrine of Indian Medicine" has discussed extensively and penetratingly the relationship between the Vedas and the Ayurveda as well as the one between the Greek medicine and the Ayurveda, and has arrived at important conclusions regarding their comparative chronology. With special reliance upon the evidence of Megasthenes, who had lived for a long time as ambassador at the court of Candragupta Maurya in India, he proceeds to observe that "Indian mediçine during the seven or eight centuries preceding the Christian era had nevar ceased to be actively cultivated and directed towards the definitive constitution of its doctrines." He then concludes that "classical Indian medicine, which is found in a fully (3)
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