Pranam
Long life in Ayurvedam
No one knows exactly when civilization developed in India;
all dating is arbitrary until the time of Gautama Buddha (563-483
BC). The earliest culture about which we have any useful data is
that of the Harappa, the Indus Valley civilization, which arose
around 3,000 BC and lasted for perhaps 1,500 years. Successors to
Neolithic settlements of 5,000 years previously, the Harappans
built large cities, such as Mohenjo-daro, and traded with foreign
lands via Lothal, their seaport. Their cities had wide, paved
roads, aqueducts, public baths, and extensive drainage systems.
With such attention to sanitation, they almost surely also possessed a
system of medicine, though no firm evidence yet exists to support this
conjecture except for the discovery in Harappan remains of
substances such as deer antler and bitumen, which are used in
classical Ayurveda.
The Harappan civilization seems to have collapsed between 2,000 and
1,500BC. Natural disasters may have been to blame, or the
Harappan downfall may have been caused by any factor but brought with
them the Vedas, their ancient books of wisdom and sacrificial ritual. The
Vedas took on their current form at some point during the second millennium
BC, though this version, which has been carefully preserved by India’s
priests, the Brahmins, is derived from much earlier versions,
which are now lost. From the youngest of the Vedas, the
Atharva-Veda, developed Ayurveda, probably with the help of residual
Harappan knowledge. At the turn of first millennium BC the treatise now
known as the Charaka Samhita, the first and still most important of all
Ayurvedic texts, appeared. Although Ayurveda’s most famous surgical
text, the Sushruta Samhita, was also compiled around this time, the
development of surgery being spurred by the need to treat injuries
sustained in warfare, the version that has come down to us dates from much
later.
Indian culture entered its Golden Age during this period
and learning flourished. By the sixth century BC a ‘university’
had been established at Takshashila (Taxila), near what is now
Rawalpindi in Pakistan. This institution apparently had no true campus
but was rather a concentration of scholars and their disciples, who lived
near one another to facilitate debate and the exchange of ideas. One of
Takshashila’s products was Jivaka, the royal physician of King Bimbisara of
Magadha (now part of the state of Bihar), who was appointed by the King to
personally supervise the health of Gautama Buddha and his followers.
Ayurvedic medicine was already extensively developed by the time of the
Buddha, a result, at least partly, of politics. Because the health of the
king was equivalent to the health of the state, the services of a royal
physician were essential to the state’s political stability. The physician
had to protect his royal patron from poisoning, cure him of wounds
accidental and military, and ensure the regal fertility, the queen’s safe
pregnancy and delivery, and the royal progeny’s healthy development. He
allowed his monks almost all the therapeutic measures advised in
classicalAyurveda, including surgery (except for fistula, the operation for
which is often unsuccessful and which is better treated by other
means).Jivaka was so famous that at one point most of the
citizens of Magadha joined the Buddhist community solely to be able to
avail themselves of his treatment; the Buddha consequently prohibited
anyone who was ill from being accepted into the fold. Many are
the stories of Jivaka’s amazing cures, and his studentship at
Takshashila was apparently no less amazing.
In 326 BC Alexander the Great invaded northern India.
Though it is likely that Indian medical knowledge had already
found its way to Greece before then, this was the first documented
exposure of the two cultures to one another. Alexander was
sufficiently impressed by Ayurvedic practitioners that he
ordered all cases of poisoning to be treated by them alone. He carried some
of these doctors away in his retinue on his departure. In the third
century BC Ashoka, the emperor of most of northern India, became
a convert to Buddhism. Motivated by compassion for all sentient
beings, as Buddha taught, Ashoka built charitable hospitals, including
specialized surgical, obstetric and mental facilities, for both
humans and animals throughout his realm. Numerous rock-cut edicts around
India attest to this, and to the embassies and Buddhist missionaries he
sent to many neighbouring countries. These emissaries carried Indian
science with them, which is probably how Ayurveda reached Sri Lanka. The
Ayurveda now existing in Sri Lanka is almost identical to that in India
except that it has been adapted to the requirements of the island and
reflects basic Buddhist philosophies, as it might still in India had
Buddhism not been exterminated there almost a thousand years ago.
Medical missionary activity continued long after Ashoka, as
documented by the Bower Manuscript, written in the fourth century AD and
found in Central Asia, where the missionaries had carried it. It contains
recipes for various medicines and a long panegyric on garlic. In the later
empires of the Guptas and the Mauryas, state-employed and private
practitioners seem to have coexisted, and village physicians were
maintained by the government through gifts of land and payment of
salary. The state also planted medicinal herb gardens, established
hospitals and maternity homes, and punished quacks who tried to practice
medicine without imperial permission. During this period of
intellectual flowering three more famous Ayurvedic texts appeared.
Ashtanga Sangraha (probably seventh century) and
AshtangaHrdaya (about a century later) are both ascribed to one
Vagbhata, though they were almost certainly written by two different
people. These two texts are condensations of the works of Charaka and
Sushruta, with some new diseases and therapies added. The eighth century
also saw the appearance of the Madhava Nidana, a treatise on diagnostics.
All forms of learning, set up true universities to teach Buddhism, Vedic
lore and more secular subjects such as history, geography, Sanskrit
literature, poetry, drama, grammar and phonetics, law, philosophy,
astrology, astronomy, mathematics, commerce and even the art of
war, as well as medicine. The most famous of these universities
was that of Nalanda, also in Bihar, which was established during the fourth
century Ad and flourished until about the twelfth century. Students came
from all over the world to study at these universities. The best
accounts we have of Nalanda are those of two Chinese travellers who
visited India as students in the seventh century. We learn from them that
only 20per cent of all applicants could pass the entrance examinations,
that instruction was free to all, that senior students acted as teaching
assistants and that teaching went on day and night. Some graduates elected
to stay on as research scholars at Nalanda, whose campus covered half a
square mile, housing as many as 10,000pupils and 1,500 teachers at a
time, with numerous cooks and support staff. ‘Nalanda brothers’
even had the same kind of old-boy network that old Etonians or
alumni of Harvard enjoy today. The Golden Age ended when waves of Muslim
invaders inundated north-ern India between the tenth and twelfth centuries.
The Muslims slaughtered the monks wholesale as infidels,
destroyed the universities and burned the libraries. Those who
could escape fled to Nepal and to Tibet, where Ayurveda had
first penetrated in the eighth century AD. Some Ayurvedic texts
are thus preserved today only in Tibetan translation. In spite of
these catastrophes and of the import into India by the Muslim
conquerors of their own medicine, Unani tibia, Ayurveda survived.
Unani (the word means ‘Greek”) was created by Arabic physicians
by combining Greek medicine with Ayurveda, which they learned from texts
translated into Persian in the early years of the modern era when the
Sassanian dynasty controlled part of northern India.
Unani medicine is thus closely related to Ayurveda and,
while India’s Muslim rulers tended to support Unani, Ayurveda also
prospered. In the thirteenth or fourteenth century a new treatise
on medicine, the Sharngadhara Samhita, appeared, introducing new
syndromes and treatments.
During the sixteenth century Akbar, the greatest Mogul emperor
and a remarkably enlightened ruler, personally ordered the
compilation of all Indian medical knowledge, a project that was
directed by his finance minister, Raja Todar Mal. For centuries Europe
had coveted Indian spices, which were used to preserve meat and
to mask the taste and odour of putrefied meat. During the
sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, with the opening of secure trade
routes to the East to ensure a steady flow of spices, a European
fascination for things Indian developed.
An Indian massage therapist named Sake Deen Mohammed, known as the
‘Brighton Shampooing Surgeon’ (the Hindi word for massage, champana,
metamorphosed into the English word ‘shampoo’), became the toast
of that resort town in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries
with his ‘Indinavir Bath and Art of Shampooing’. Lords and ladies
flocked to him for both treatment and preventive care, and odes were
written to his expertise. The Europeans brought to India syphilis,
which was first described in Ayurveda in Bhavaprakasha, a
sixteenth-century text, under the name of ‘the foreigners’ disease’
in honour of the Portuguese, who imported it. They also imported
their own intellectual bigotry, which gradually superseded their
fascination. Sir Praphulla Chandra Ray in his History of Hindu
Chemistry cites an essay by a Briton in which the author endeavoured to
prove that the entire Sanskrit literature as well as the Sanskrit language
itself was a ‘forgery made by the crafty Brahmans on the model of Greek
after Alexander’s conquest’. This deni-gration of traditional wisdom
reached its zenith in 1835, when Lord Macaulay settled the
controversy over whether the government should support indigenous
or Western learning by ordering that European knowledge should be
exclusively encouraged in all areas governed by the East India Company.
Before 1835 Western physicians and their Indian counterparts
exchanged knowledge; thereafter only Western medicine was recognized as
legitimate, and the Eastern systems were actively discouraged. Since
living traditions are lost when experts die without being able to
reach others, vast quantities of indigenous expertise evaporated
during the next several decades.
Even during these years of persecution, however, Ayurveda
generously contributed to modern medicine. During the nineteenth
century the Germans translated from Sushruta’s treatise details of an
operation for repair of damaged noses and ears. This operation, which now
appears in modern textbooks as the pedicle graft, led to the development of
plastic surgery as an independent specialty, and today Sushruta is
regarded by plastic surgeons around the world as the father of
their craft. Skin grafting and operations for cataract and bladder
stones were still being performed by Ayurvedic surgeons in India as late
as the eighteenth century. Many writers on Ayurvedic history decry the
evident decline of Ayurvedic surgery after the Classical Age, often blaming
the Buddhists and their doctrine of non-violence for discouraging
wilful injury to the body. It is more likely, though, as Debiprasad
Chattopadhyaya argues in Science and Society in AncientIndia, that it
was the ritual ‘impurity’ involved in surgery, the close physical
contact that a surgeon must have with blood and other bodily substances,
that discouraged its practice, since the Buddha himself did not
object to surgical intervention when it was necessary. With the assertion
of Indian nationalism at the dawn of this century, interest in Indian
art and science was reawakened and Ayurveda began a gradual
renaissance. Today it is one of the six medical systems in India that are
officially recognized by the government, the others being allopathy (also
known as mod-ern, cosmopolitan or biomedical medicine), homeopathy,
naturopathy, unani, Siddha (a variety of Ayurveda practiced by the Tamils
of southern India) and yoga therapy. The practitioners of these six systems
must compete for patients with each other and with a profusion of
practitioners of other medical skills, including itinerant tonic
sellers, pharmaceutical representatives, village curers, bone-setters,
mid-wives, exorcists, sorcerers, psychics, diviners, astrologers,
priests, grandmothers, wandering religious mendicants, and experts
in such maladies as snakebite, hepatitis, infertility and ‘sexual
weakness’.
Today’s developmental planners, who often seem to be Lord
Macaulay’s spiritual descendants, tend to think of traditional
systems like Ayurveda as archaic and dysfunctional, and so
non-progressive (all the while ignoring the clear evidence of
obsolescence and dysfunction in the practice of biomedicine).Believing, as
do many foreigners, that ‘traditionalism’ has kept India backward, they
would prefer for most ancient traditions, including the medical
ones, to disappear. Many practicing allopath’s agree, ostensibly because
traditional medicine is not ‘scientific’, but practically because
elimination of alternative medical systems would reduce their
competition. Social scientists have noted that allopaths derive their
social status less from their medical ability than from the culture of
modernity and ‘progress’ that they represent; when in distress,
most Indians seek out any practitioner of any system who can cure them.
Ayurveda is the upaveda, or accessory Veda, to the
Atharva-Veda. Though all four Vedas are collections of hymns
written by seers called rishis, the Atharva-Veda differs in subject matter
from the other three Vedas (the Rig-Veda, Yajur-Veda and Sama-Veda); here
are a few references to treatment in the other Vedas, like a charm in the
Rig-Veda for chasing consumptive disease from all parts of the body, and an
entire hymn in praise of medicinal herbs, invoking their healing
power and comparing the physician to a warrior. The god Rudra is invoked
in yet another hymn as the ablest of physicians, preparing medicine for all
with his beautiful hands. One of the most famous of the Vedic hymns, the
‘Rudra Adhyaya’ of theYajur-Veda, praises Rudra as the first physician, and
mentions many medicinal plants. *{A view of extracts from a book written by
a British }. KR IRS 281221*
On Tue, 28 Dec 2021 at 08:00, 'gopala krishnan' via iyer123 <
[email protected]> wrote:
> *CULTURAL QA 12-2021-28*
>
> *BEING A COMPILATION THERE MAY BE ERRORS*
>
> *Q1 How many oranges can you eat daily?*
>
> A1 Lucia Garcia Worked at Hospitals Fri
>
> Oranges are cold fruits. at the same time, oranges are also known as the "good
> fruit for curing diseases", which have the effects of promoting body
> fluids and quenching thirst, moistening the intestines and laxative,
> clearing heat and detoxification.
>
> If you are hot physique, in order to let the body achieve balance, you can
> eat 3 to 4 oranges a day.
>
> But for people with cold physique, eat up to two oranges a day.
>
> Oranges are rich in vitamin C. A medium-sized orange weighs about 150
> grams and contains 48 mg of vitamin C.
>
> The daily intake of vitamin C for adults is 60 to 90 mg, with an upper
> limit of 2,000 mg per day.
>
> Two oranges can meet the vitamin C requirement for a day. Taking more
> dietary vitamin C is also harmless to the body.
>
> Although oranges are a bit sweet, oranges are a low-calorie fruit with low
> sugar content.
>
> A medium-sized orange contains only 70 calories and 15 grams of sugar. Eating
> oranges will not make you fat.
>
> It is worth mentioning that oranges have much higher vitamin C and vitamin
> P content than most fruits. These two vitamins can increase the elasticity
> and toughness of capillaries and reduce blood cholesterol levels.
>
> Therefore, regular consumption of oranges is very beneficial for people
> with high blood pressure, high blood lipids, arteriosclerosis and other
> cardiovascular and cerebrovascular problems.
>
> *Q2 What is Queen Elizabeth’s secret to a long and healthy
> life?*
>
> A2 Diana Donald Lives in Cambridge, Cambridgeshire, UK
> (1994–present)Thu
>
> Her mother lived until age 101, so in her DNA. Her father contracted
> cancer due to heavy cigarette smoking, but the Queen has never smoked and
> in fact the late Duke gave it up on his wedding day out of respect for his
> wife’s fear of smoking disease. She has always eaten moderately and never
> drunk alcohol excessively. She has also had the privilege of owning
> horses so has ridden every day when possible until the last couple of years.
> She walks a lot on her estates and is often seen out by members of the
> public. Added to that she has the very best medical care.
>
> *Q3 Is it wrong in the 21st century to expect my bride to
> change her last name to mine after the wedding?*
>
> A3 Bhuvana Rameshwar married for three decades Sun
>
> It is neither wrong nor right. Most girls, women add husband's name after
> theirs to avoid confusion in jobs. Their educational certificates remain
> the same with their maiden name, sometimes with father's name or family
> surname.
>
> I changed mine to bhuvana rameshwar from bhuvana krishnan, *however my
> dil maintains the father's name as her surname* but gives our son’s name
> as husband in all documents and ID cards like passport, aadhar, PAN .
>
> *In the passport, national ID Card changes have to be made in the
> husband's name column as a married person*. It is a must. Some just add
> on like Priyanka chopra Jonas. This gives them a new identity.
>
> *Q4 Why do clothes under a fan dry up faster than without a
> fan?*
>
> A4 Loring Chien, former Principal Engineer at Fortune 1000
> Company (2002-2016)Answered Jul 13, 2020
>
> Air can only hold so much moisture, and warm air more than cool air. If
> the air is still, the air next to the clothes will be saturated with
> moisture and cannot absorb more moisture. *Moving air will circulate air
> with less moisture and and it will absorb more moisture*. The fan is a
> perfect way to move large amounts of air.
>
> *2ND ANSWER- Seth Flannigan, Merchant (1997-present)Answered May 27, 2018*
>
> The flowing air speeds up the evaporation process. It's actually pushing
> the water off the clothes and turning it into vapor
>
> Try this experiment. *Next time you have to line dry clothes, dry them
> inside and put a fan underneath wherever you hang them*. You'll be amazed
> at how fast they dry, without damage.
>
> *Q5 Why is the British monarchy so important, while other world
> monarchies are nearly unknown to the general public?*
>
> A5 Mats Andersson Visited 24 European countries Dec 14
>
> *Because you're English-speaking. Here in Sweden, we know all about our
> own royals, whether we want to or not, and the Dutch swear by their own
> royal family*. The Japanese actually believe their royals are descended
> from the Sun Goddess, which makes the House of Windsor look like plebeian
> upstarts.
>
> *Q6 Which foreign language did you learn in school, and how
> well do you still know it today?*
>
> A6 Gopalkrishna Vishwanath Decreasing proficiency order:
> English/Hindi/Tamil/Kannada/
>
> Gujarati/Malayalam Fri
>
> *I learnt French in school from standard 8 to standard 11 during the years
> 1962 to 1966.We were not taught to speak at all.*
>
> Those days the TV and internet did not exist and so we could not get any
> exposure to French spoken by a native speaker.
>
> The teacher was a local Maharashtrian who himself did not to how to speak
> French.*He taught us basic French vocabulary, grammar and reading and
> writing simple sentences.*
>
> By memorising the text book I managed to pass my matriculation exam with
> 90% marks in French.
>
> It was ironical because I got more marks in French than I got for English
> in which I was much better.
>
> Ever since I left school I have had no exposure to this language, no
> opportunities to use it, and no need for it either in my career.
>
> I have now forgotten almost everything that I knew after a long gap of 55
> years.I now remember only a few words and popular standard phrases.
>
> *Q7 If water is H2O and there are planets were they are covered
> with ice (water form), doesn't that mean there lies oxygen too?*
>
> A7 Steve Baker Blogger at LetsRunWithIt.com (2013–present)Dec
> 21
>
> Water is made of hydrogen and oxygen - so, yes - if there ice or liquid
> water - then there are oxygen atoms present - but that’s not necessarily
> breathable oxygen.
>
> Consider Mars, for example. It has a LOT of water - and it’s atmosphere is
> almost 100% carbon dioxide - which ALSO contains oxygen. *But if you
> tried to breathe the air there - you’d be unconscious in 20 seconds and
> dead in two minutes* - because there is no FREE oxygen…oxygen that’s not
> chemically bound to anything else.
>
> You can extract the oxygen from water (or from CO2 for that matter) - but
> the energy costs to do so are considerable.
>
> Here on earth, we have green plants and algae - which are like little
> solar power stations - converting water and CO2 into oxygen and
> high-energy sugar using sunlight to power that chemistry.
>
> If we didn’t have those plants and algae - then all of the oxygen in our
> air would gradually either be converted to CO2 or would also combine with
> iron in the soil to form rust - and so forth.
>
> Planets that have free oxygen just floating around and not reacted with
> something have to have some kind of active process - such as our green
> plants - continually renewing it.
>
> *Q8 What do you do when there is literally no one to talk to?*
>
> A8 Bhuvana Rameshwarmarried for three decades Thu
>
> *In such a situation I talk to myself. We are our best friends. We keep
> the talk to ourselves. We do not* spread it to others as gossip. We are
> our best advisors also.
>
> I go for my morning walks. Usually the roads are empty with only birds and
> some stray dogs. Unknowingly I have often found myself talking. With
> whom? To myself.. Sometimes they are about events that happened, some
> explanations or sometimes sentences in defence of any future confrontation.
> It is like a good rehearsal.
>
> Our thoughts can be processed better when we rewind, talk about it and
> analyse everything to ourselves, like a retrospection . Such talk is good
> as helps to think rationally, speak chosen words to the point and helps us
> to prepare for a bad situation, in future. We are also our best judges when
> alone.
>
> *Q9 What evolutionary purpose do slanted/smaller eyes serve?*
>
> A9 Claire Jordan Degree in biology and folklore; programmer,
> shop owner, secretary on newspaper Oct 24
>
> The eyes themselves are not smaller - it’s just that the opening between
> the eyelids is narrower when they are open but at rest. It protects the
> eyes against wind and glare in extreme weather conditions. East Asians
> developed this feature for protection as their ancestors migrated across
> steppes and snowfields, before humans had worked out how to make horn or
> parchment goggles that would do the same job.
>
> *Q10 Which planet is so light that can float on water?Can Saturn
> really float on water?*
>
> A10 Vinod Kumar Teaching S.St, GK, preparing NTSE aspirants
> (1999–present)Sat
>
> *Yes, if you could find a big enough body of water for it to float on*.
> Saturn is very large and is the second largest planet in the Solar System.
> However, it is made up mostly of gas and is less dense than water. Since
> it is lighter than water, it can float on water. None of the other
> planets in our Solar System can do this because they have a higher density
> than water. Saturn has the lowest density of all the planets, which means
> that it does not weigh as much for its size as the other planets do.
>
> *Q11 What is the point of an oxygen machine or giving someone pure
> oxygen?*
>
> A11 Steve Baker Blogger at LetsRunWithIt.com (2013–present)Dec 22
>
> Air is only 20% oxygen. With healthy lungs and normal respiration - that’s
> plenty.
>
> But suppose someone’s breathing is shallow - or blood flow is slow - or
> lungs are congested with fluid? Maybe a piece of a lung - or even an entire
> lung has been surgically removed due to cancer or something?
>
> In all of those cases - you can make the remaining respiratory function
> five times more effective by supplying the patient with pure oxygen.
>
> *Q12 How does metal stick on a magnet?*
>
> A12 Ritwik Sunny Former Customer Support Executive at Ashok
> Leyland1h
>
> A magnet is a piece of metal with the ability to attract other metals.
> These forces merge, and the object acts like a magnet. The north pole of
> one magnet attracts the south pole but repels the north pole of another
> magnet unlike poles attract and like poles repel. A metal is a magnet if
> it repels a known magnet.
>
> *All the above QA are from Quora website on 27-12- 2021. *
>
> *Compiled and posted by R. Gopala krishnan ,78, former AGM Telecom
> Trivandrum on 28-12-2021*
>
>
>
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