Ayurveda (Sanskrit language and literature)

Medicine, India, in the New Dictionary of the History of Ideas

by Dominik Wujastyk

2005 Wujastyk, Dominik. "Medicine: India." New Dictionary of the History of Ideas. 2005. Encyclopedia.com. (March 7, 2012). http://www.encyclopedia.com/doc/1G2-3424300466.html

On the Position of Classical Āyurveda in South Asian Intellectual History According to Global Ayurveda and Modern Research

by Philipp A. Maas

pre-print version of the article published in Horizons: Seoul Journal of Humanities 2,1 (2011), p. 1-14.

Exponents of Global Ayurveda have managed to develop Āyurveda, an ancient native medical system of South Asia, into a... more Exponents of Global Ayurveda have managed to develop Āyurveda, an ancient native medical system of South Asia, into a renowned supplement to Western biomedicine. This commercial and promotional success has been bolstered by a number of characteristic assertions concerning the history of pre-modern Āyurveda. New Age Ayurveda, for example, maintains that Āyurveda is more than five thousand years old, that it is the origin of Greek humoral medicine, and that it is intrinsically connected with the Hindu spiritual tradition of yoga. From an academic perspective, these claims are easily refutable, since they contradict well-known results of modern indological research. Drawing upon these, the present paper sketches the South Asian intellectual history from its beginnings to the classical period, determines the intellectual milieu from which classical Āyurveda originated, describes some of its fundamental medical theories, and reconsiders their historical relationship to ancient Greek humoral medicine.

Medizinethik in den klassischen Sanskritwerken der altindischen Medizin

by Dagmar Wujastyk

This is the German summary of my PhD dissertation "Medical ethics in the Sanskrit medical classics". The (revised) English version of my dissertation is due to be published with OUP NY in 2012.

Traditional Indian Systems of Healing and Medicine: Ayurveda

by Dagmar Wujastyk

This is a pre-publication version of the article ''Healing and
Medicine in Ayurveda and South Asia." In: Jones, Lindsay (ed.),
Encyclopedia of Religion, 2nd Ed., MacMillan, New York,
2005: 3852-3858.

Contrasting Examples of Ayurvedic Creativity Around 1700

by Dominik Wujastyk

2009. In the book Mathematics and Medicine in Sanskrit, ed. Dominik Wujastyk (Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass, 2009).

"Indian Medicine:" an online bibliographical guide

by Dominik Wujastyk

2011: This is part of the Oxford Bibliographies Online project. You may not be able to access the full document if you or your institution does not subscribe to Oxford's service. The downloadable PDF here does not have all the features of the online version at Oxfordbibliographiesonline.com, where the content is enriched with various features.

See http://tinyurl.com/7zmqqt2 for a direct link to this bibliography, in its online version.

Towards a Critical Edition of the Carakasaṃhitā Vimānasthāna — First Results

by Philipp A. Maas

An unauthorized deprecated version appeared in: Indian Journal of History of Science 44 (2009), pp. 163-185. Download corrected version.

The present paper highlights first results of a series of research projects that aim, among other things, at a... more The present paper highlights first results of a series of research projects that aim, among other things, at a critical edition of the Carakasaṃhitā Vimānasthāna on the basis of more than fifty paper manuscripts from the northern part of South Asia. In taking a special focus on the application of the so-called “stemmatical method” to this large textual tradition, the paper illustrates how a well established hypothesis concerning the textual history of the Carakasaṃhitā is frequently useful — and in some cases even indispensable — in order to judge the genealogical relationship of different versions of the same text. The fundamental importance of stemmatics for the editorial process may not, however, distract from the simple fact that in dealing with large and ancient traditions of Sanskrit texts the application of this method does not automatically result in the reconstruction of a historically correct textual version.

The Concepts of the Human Body and Disease in Classical Yoga and Āyurveda

by Philipp A. Maas

Wiener Zeitschrift für die Kunde Südasiens 51 (2007/2008), p. 125–162.

On what became of the Carakasaṃhitā after Dṛḍhabala’s revision

by Philipp A. Maas

eJournal of Indian Medicine Vol 3, No 1 (2010), 1-22

This paper is part of a series of articles by the present author dealing with the textual transmission of the oldest... more This paper is part of a series of articles by the present author dealing with the textual transmission of the oldest classical Āyurveda work in Sanskrit, the Carakasaṃhitā (CS). It starts with an analysis of the CS’ two well-known references to its own textual history occurring in Cikitsāsthāna 30.289-290 and Siddhisthāna 12.36c-12.40b. These references provide information on the attitude of Dṛḍhabala, the alleged final redactor of the work, towards the textual tradition of classical Āyurveda. They also tell us that Dṛḍhabala composed seventeen chapters of the Cikitsāsthāna as well as the complete Kalpa- and Siddhisthāna in order to finish the incomplete work. Since the CS Cikitsāsthāna is known from early printed editions to exist in two different versions, this information is, however, not sufficient to clarify Dṛḍhabala’s role in the formation of the work. Two questions remain to be answered: (1.) Which chapters of the Cikitsāsthāna belong to the oldest stock of the work? (2.) Which of the two conflicting sequence of chapters in the Cikitsāsthāna is the original one? Both questions were recently discussed by Meulenbeld in vol. 1A of his monumental work “A History of Indian Medical Literature”. The present paper reviews Meulenbeld’s discussion and reaches the conclusion that question no. (1.) can be answered almost with certainty, where as question no. (2.) cannot be answered at all on the basis of the historical sources which were at Meulenbeld’s disposal. Additional evidence is then sought from applying a stemmatical hypothesis, which was recently developed by research into the transmission of the CS Vimānasthāna, to the transmission of the CS Cikitsāsthāna. It turns out that the stemma of the CS Vimānasthāna, at least in its broad outline, is also valid for the Cikitsāsthāna and possibly even for the whole CS. But even this new source of information does not solve the question of the original sequence of Cikitsāsthāna chapters, since the two conflicting sequences are characteristics of the two main branches of the transmission, which derived directly from the oldest reconstructable CS version, i.e. from the archetype. Accordingly, the CS Cikitsāsthāna and also other parts of the work must have been thoroughly revised at least once quite soon after Dṛḍhabala had executed his famous revision.