The Mahabharata and the Sa,,,,Hitas of Caraka and Susruta

,,., BRILL Asian Medicine 3 (2007) 85-102 www.brill.nl/asme Narrativity and Empiricism in Classical Indian Accounts of Birth and Death: The Mahabharata and the sa,,,,hitas of Caraka and Susruta Frederick M. Smith Abstract This paper will address the relationship between the Mahabharata's representation of the physical processes of birth and death and similar material found in the classical ayurvedic texts of Caraka and Susruta, which are roughly contemporaneous with the Sanskrit epic (second century BCE second century CE). My primary source in the Mahabharata (MBh) is the Anugita, the second, and lesser known, dialogue between Kr~1,1a and Arjuna. This 'subsidiary Gita is situated in the fourteenth book (parvan) of the epic, the Afvamedhika parvan, which ostensibly deals with the horse sacrifice (afvamedha) performed by the victorious king Yudhi~rhira after the conclusion of the great war. The relevant chapters of the Anugita (MBh 14.17-18) contain fascinating and practically unknown material on the physical processes of birth and death, on embryology, and on physical dissolution. I will explicate this material, and then compare it with selected passages from the Caraka-Sarrihita and the Sufruta-Sarrihita. I shall then ask why, given considerable evi dence for intertextuality between the MBh and the ayurvedic compendia, the classical medical texts did not include this interesting material and why the Mahabharata did. In exploring this question, I must inquire into the scientific, or at least empirical, principles utilised in the medical texts that would force their authors to exclude the MBh material they probably knew well, in order to frame a particular kind of discourse. Keywords Ayurveda, Susruta-Sar1,1hita, Caraka-Sar1,1hita, Mahabharata, Anugita, birch, death Introduction In pursuit of an early connection, or at least a resonance, between Ayurveda and yoga, I would like to present here a comparison of descriptions of birth and death found in the Mahabharata on the one hand, and the Caraka- and the Sufruta-Sarrzhitas on the other. These texts all probably achieved definitive conclusions around the second century CE. At that time, Ayurveda was much more developed in what we would, two millennia later, recognise as yoga. Although we can hardly expect the phenomena of medicine and yoga in India © Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2007 DOI: IO. I 163/157.H2107X207227 Downloaded from Brill.com09/30/2021 01:25:34AM via free access 86 F. M. Smith I Asian Medicine 3 (2007) 85-102 to have intersected at that date in the same ways that they did a thousand or two thousand years later, we can still seek their connections by exploring the idioms of yoga in use at the time in both medical literature and parallel texts that spoke of medicine before the development of Patafijali's Yogasutras and of Tantra and the integration of tantric medicine into Ayurveda. The most likely texts in which to seek these connections are the Upani~ads and the Mahabharata (MBh), especially the latter, with its encyclopaedic scope and certain familiar ity with medical systems then present in India. What we should seek in the ayurvedic texts are notions of liberation that reflect the practice of yoga, and in the MBh medical knowledge that similarly embeds a definitive knowledge or application of yogic practice. However, since thick description of yogic practices was not part of the epistemological agenda of these texts, or was so elliptical that we would be treading on thin ice to trust any interpretation of them as valid sources of yoga, then we must establish our topic through other means, namely through seeking in ostensibly independent textualities a pas sive knowledge of parallel systems that might embed such practices. This, then, is what we shall undertake here. We shall look at a few topically related passages in the MBh and in the early Ayurveda sarrzhitds and see what might be reflected in them of yoga. More safely, however, we can say at the outset that the knowledge of yoga practice will not emerge from this study; rather, the application of certain ideas that comprised some of the important building blocks of yoga will be paramount. These include knowledge of the application of different kinds of pra,:ia (vital air/breath), the doctrine of a wit ness (that was elaborated in later Yoga and Vedanta), and a sense that the experience of moksa was highly desirable in the successful completion of life. It will not further our arguments to discuss the absolute dating of these texts; many have done this before and I have little of substance to offer on this topic. 1 Though differences remain among scholars regarding their dates, these disagreements do not place the texts many centuries apart. What I can say is that the section from the Mahabharata that I will discuss here, namely the Anugita (MBh 14.16-50), surely falls cowards the latter end of this period. There is incontestable evidence that important parts of the epic, including the Bhagavad-Gita, preceded it, although this of course does not necessarily indi cate that the ideas in the Anugita postdate the Bhagavad-Gita. Similarly, although there is evidence that the two Ayurveda sarrzhitds may also be dated closer to the second century CE, there can be little doubt that 1 See Fitzgerald 2003, who places the origin of the MBh in the early second century BCE, during the reign of Pu~yamitra. Hiltebeitel asserts that the entire epic was composed berween 'the mid-second century BC and year zero'. See Hiltebeitel 200 I, p. 18. Downloaded from Brill.com09/30/2021 01:25:34AM via free access F. M. Smith I Asian Medicine 3 (2007) 85-102 87 many of the ideas and features of these diverse texts were several centuries older, and that these texts were probably gathered from different regions and medical traditions in North India. In fact, I can state here, at the outset, that the evidence for this dating at the upper end of the period is weak, and all the weaker for the evidence I shall present. I shall, therefore, discuss the relative chronology of these texts at some length here. lntertextuality between the Mahabharata and the early medical sa,r,hitiis Considerable evidence exists for intertextuality between the MBh and the Caraka- and Sufruta-Sarrzhitds. Before entering into the main discussion of birth and death, I will draw on some of my earlier research to try to establish this intertextuality. In my recent book on deity and spirit possession in India, I related at length a substantial discussion of balagrahas or 'childsnatchers' (in Dominik Wujastyk's felicitous translation) embedded in the Vana-parvan of the MBh, (3.216-219).2 These balagrahas are nefarious female spirits that kill foetuses and young children. Similar passages may be found in early ayurvedic literature, notably in the Kafyapa-Sarrzhitd of the seventh century CE, and elsewhere across the spectrum of ayurvedic texts of later periods.3 Although the MBh account of these balagrahas is more closely linked with the mythic history of the deity Skanda (and his birth from the Pleiades [krttikfib]) than is found in the medical texts, the MBh took great pains to make sure that the balagrahas were as fully described as in any Ayurveda source. Indeed, it appears that the list and description of balagrahas was lifted from an ayurvedic account, then contextualised to serve its narrative purposes. If in fact it was lifted from such a text, then we must posit an earlier date to these ayurvedic sarrzhitds and note that the authors of the MBh saw it, even at that early date, as a legitimate source for medical knowledge. We must ask here, more than parenthetically, was it necessary that the MBh presents itself as a medical text, in addition to everything else? Did its self professed encyclopaedic nature accomplish the tasks it set out for itself? Prob ably it did not because, despite its ambitions, the later history of Ayurveda did not absorb all that the MBh included on physiology and medicine. In other ' Smith 2006, pp. 272/f. 3 For treatment of this, see Wujastyk 1998, pp. 212-30. For epidemiological explanations of these 'seizers', see White 2003, pp. 35ff. For example, he interprets Purana, 'Stinky', as the pus tulant sores of chicken pox, Sltaputana, 'Cool Stinky', as evocative of the later smallpox goddess Sltala, Sarama, the mother of dogs, as carriers of epilepsy, and the many avian seizers as carriers of contagious diseases. Downloaded from Brill.com09/30/2021 01:25:34AM via free access 88 F. M. Smith I Asian Medicine 3 (2007) 85-102 words, the ayurvedic texts did not gather material from the MBh as readily as the MBh absorbed material from the ayurvedic texts. The reason, as we shall discuss below, was likely because the MBh adhered to a 'scientific' paradigm that was at odds with the dominant paradigm operating in the medical texts. Let us ask, then, whether there was a conflict between the ayurvedic sarp.hitds and the MBh. This is definitely not apparent at first glance, and probably in the final analysis as well; the ayurvedic texts overall remained on task, within their envisioned boundaries, including rather broad parameters of empirical thought. There is much in these texts that the modern scientific mind would reject as unscientific, but many of the building blocks of the ayurvedic empir ical system were the same as those of the overarching epistemological system found in the MBh, namely the principles of Sarµkhya, which are enumerative and describe the unfolding of the material and perceptual world from the subtlest and most indistinguishable form of materiality called prakrti or pradhana, to structures of self-reflexivity and mentation, to the archetypal building blocks of material form, to the operation of the senses in their ability to grasp the objective world.

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