The legacy of Caraka is an ambitious “retelling” of the Caraka-saṃhitā, the earliest extant Sanskrit medical manual dating from the early to mid-second century CE. M S Valiathan, a western-trained cardiologist, provides us with a reorganized version of the text in which he has rearranged and condensed the material found in all eight sthānas (“sections”) of the Sanskrit original. He has organized the material according to theme. In his introduction, Valiathan properly highlights the philosophical and religious eclecticism of the Caraka-saṃhitā, emphasizing its non-dogmatic nature. The text's author, Caraka, most likely a physician at the court of Devaputra Kaniṣka, a second-century king of the Kushan empire, was, as Valiathan writes, not a “passive borrower of ideas, and in this case whatever was borrowed, underwent a transformation in his mint” (p. ii). Though generally a very useful book, the introduction is marred by moralizing fabulations (pp. xv–xvi). Valiathan also strains to establish a continuity of tradition from the much older Atharva-veda, which delineates a medicine that is largely based on the deployment of mantras and the bestowing of amulets, up through Caraka's text. He writes of Atharvan “echoes” in the Caraka-saṃhitā, but “echoes” by nature are interpretively suggestive. Valiathan also states that the Atharva-veda “anticipates” the tridoṣa (or “trihumoral”) system of Caraka, but does not provide us with any textual evidence or “proof” to enforce this point of view. But that said, Valiathan includes in his introduction a most useful discussion of diseases, and by systematically plotting the recurrence of the names of disorders in Caraka's text, he attempts to reconstruct the “epidemiologic scene … in Caraka's period through the mist of twenty centuries” (p. xlvi). Fever, of course, wins. The book is strewn with many observations—some of them quite insightful—that speculate on major āyurvedic theories (particularly on tridoṣa and vega, or “urge”) and how they may be thought about in terms of western medical science. As long as we remain solidly in the realm of analogy and do not wander into the problematic realm of correspondence, such speculations are useful, and can serve to deepen a reader's understanding of how these theories “work” in a physiological sense. Valiathan's section on rasas (“tastes”) is particularly good, and the tables that he provides are of great value (e.g. Table 16.1, pp. 107–8, which lists food incompatibilities). He has also chosen to condense the more unwieldy and elaborate portions of the Caraka-saṃhitā, but he never does so without alerting readers to the fact. His “digests” are made with great care—Valiathan never sacrifices the underlying logics and principles prevailing in these portions; in fact, they shine through a bit more clearly than in the original text precisely because of his condensations. The words of modern science and medicine do creep in now and then—“ova”, for instance—and translators as well as the new redactors of Caraka such as Valiathan would do well to avoid making such equations whenever possible (but this is admittedly hard to avoid). Valiathan's decision to provide digests for the lengthier chapters works especially well in his treatments of the Kalpa and Siddhi-sthānas (the sections on “pharmacology” and “cures” respectively), where literally hundreds of formulas for emetics and purgatives are listed. The legacy of Caraka will prove useful as a reference book, and I can imagine assigning sections of it for use in general introductory courses on South Asian cultures and civilizations as well as in more specialized courses on medical anthropology and the history of medicine. Valiathan concludes his book with a list of botanical terms and an excellent glossary. Reading the entire book will help to attune the reader's own intuitions and expectations about how the systems of āyurveda work.
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Aug 1, 2012
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