The Yogi Physician: The Conscious Self and the Yoga of Karmic Observation in Early Ayurvedic Medicine

Abstract

Abstract This article develops historical links between early Ayurveda and yoga in light of the claim that a physician can enter the inner self (antarātman) of a patient “in the manner of a yogi.” Ayurveda’s idiomatically yoga-based analysis of the inner self is detailed, illustrating a concern with the karma, consciousness, perceptual habits, and mental clarity of patients. Diagnosing these most subtle aspects of a patient is shown to require the development of the penetrative power of “true awareness,” which physicians get by yogic means. It is argued that the ideal physician is a yogi who evidences the existence of a yogic paradigm of karmic observation. Textual parallels indicate that this paradigm was held in common among Ayurvedic and Buddhist social circles especially. Yoga, it is argued, afforded the perceptual “physics” for a karmic cosmos, while its methods of perceptual mastery afforded the expansive vision required to observe it properly.