Ayurveda by Robert E. Svoboda

Author:Robert E. Svoboda [E. SVOBODA, ROBERT]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-14-019322-0
Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd.
Published: 2011-03-15T16:00:00+00:00

Pathology

Ama is the immediate cause of most human afflictions; exposure to disease-causing microbes results in disease only in those people whose internal conditions are ripe for colonization. Louis Pasteur and Claude Bernard argued for years over the primacy of infective agents versus internal conditions, and it was only on his deathbed that Pasteur finally admitted that Bernard was right, and that the milieu interieur is more important than exposure to a pathogen. This is especially true of diseases in which no ‘pathogen’ can be detected. Nine times out of ten, specific causes for high blood pressure cannot be determined because it arises as the sum (yukti) of complex interactions between environmental, social and psychological stresses, the individual's constitutional tendencies, the central nervous system, the endocrine glands and the circulatory system.

Ayurveda was not unaware of infectious disease. Sushruta recognized leprosy, fevers, consumption and conjunctivitis as being contagious, ‘caused by intimate contact’, such as sex, physical contact, contact with expired air, eating from the same dishes, sleeping in the same bed, and the common use of clothing, garlands, unguents and so on. In the tenth century AD Dalhana added smallpox to this list. Charaka mentions that some blood-borne parasites are round, legless and too minute to be visible to the naked eye, and certain Vedic passages also allude to micro-organisms. While some people argue that without modern equipment such tiny beings could never have been seen, others maintain that the five senses are not the only means of perception open to those who, like the seers who cognized Ayurveda, have adequately trained their consciousnesses.

Microbes were, however, never particularly important to Ayurvedic pathology, because the principle of yukti discourages any attempt to find single causes for effects. Ayurveda teaches that the growth of any system, be it a single organism, a village or an epidemic, is caused by the same mechanism. Sushruta compares this process to the fermentation of yeast, and Charaka describes it with an agricultural metaphor: season, field, seed and water. Good crops are produced when healthy seed is sown in the proper season in a well-tilled, well-irrigated field. A good human is produced when healthy parents with healthy seed unite during the proper portion of the woman's monthly season, when the womb-field is well irrigated by rasa and blood.

Likewise, when a viable seed (bacterium, virus, pathological emotion or selfish thought) is sown in an appropriate season in the field of a body or mind that has been thoroughly watered by ama, the result is a ‘disease-being’. ‘Season’ can refer to any of the time cycles that affect humans: daily, yearly, age-related, digestive, astrological or other. Diseases are especially produced at the junctions or ‘joints’ of the seasons, those periods when one season is not quite over and the next has not quite begun, and the environment is in a state of upheaval. This is especially striking in temperate climates during the period between winter and spring, when the weather vacillates for days or weeks, unsure of its proper direction. Puberty,

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.