Thread by @kikumbhar

A while back I saw a v good article on healthcare in India mention that Ayurveda goes back to "more than 5000 years." Like so many origin stories around the world, those of Ayurveda have also acquired many mythical elements (like the above) over the centuries. Hence this PSA...

When it comes to Indian history, we tragically lack what's called "critical thinking skills" (or in common parlance, "logic and common sense"). In the late 1800s and early 1900s, Sanskritist Ramakrishna Bhandarkar urged us to work on such mental skills: thewire.in/history/grand-…

Keeping that in mind, let me intro u to an awesome 2005 article by historian Projit Mukharji. He explains well why claims over ancientness became more imp than any other characteristics (like therapeutic efficacy) for Ayurvedic publicists in the 1800s.
academia.edu/761638/Bengali…

Like most popularly believed & propagated claims on Indian history, those abou Ayurveda's exaggerated ancientness come mainly from d writings of British colonial officials & Orientalists. Their early-1800s ideas were expanded in the mid-1800s by Indian proponents & practitioners

However, modern, more rigorous scholarship gives us a better idea about how and when Ayurveda arose. Historian Dominik Wujastyk writes: "The system of Ayurveda probably arose in a recognizable form at about the time of the Buddha."
books.google.com/books/about/Th…

In other words, "5000 years old" is a needlessly drawn-out time frame for Ayurveda. 5000 years back, in 3000 BCE, even the Indus Valley Civilization had not reached its "mature" phase, and the Vedas were centuries away from being conceived.

So how old are the samhitas? Serious historians agree that the earliest versions of the Charakasamhita were composed in about the 3rd or 2nd centuries BCE, and the earliest versions of the Sushrutasamhita followed it, around a similar timeframe.

Wujastyk: "Today, there survive Sanskrit manuscripts from [400s CE] onwards which contain what has survived of the written record of this medical system. We do not have the original works." What survive are mostly versions which were re-worked in the early first millenium CE.

Thus, it would be safe to say that Ayurveda is in the ballpark of 2,500 years old.

About the commonly cited claim that Ayurveda originated from the Vedas, and the fact that the samhitas begin by paying homage to such claims, philosopher Debiprasad Chatotpadhyaya wrote: "The fact that ayurvedic texts claim to 'derive from' the Vedas...

"...is not evidence for medical history, but rather evidence of a bid by [those] authors for social acceptance & religious sanction." Wujastyk says that people have taken "at face value the Ayurvedic texts' own strenuous assertions that they are derived from the Vedic tradition."

If not from the Vedas, where do the samhitas come from? That's perhaps one of the best-kept secrets of our history, especially as it does not sit well - as almost every fact and truth about India's past and cultures - with the myth-laden versions of history we grew up hearing.

Historian Kenneth Zysk wrote a stunning account of the origins of Ayurveda in 1991, where he showed how the fundamental Ayurvedic ideas originated from the healing work of ascetics who lived in the second half of the last millenium BCE. (Free ebook: google.com/books/edition/…)

Long story short, as Vedic society stabilized & hierarchies in it became rigid, healers/physicians began to be relegated to the “lower” strata. Zysk dates this to the later Vedic period (900–500 BCE). This denigration had its origins in Vedic casteist ideas of purity & impurity.

The healers then dissociated from the Vedic mainstream. They “roamed the countryside, earned their livelihood by administering cures, increased their knowledge by keen observation and exchanging medical data with other healers [Adivasis] whom they encountered along the way.”

Such sects of wanderers were numerous, but it was among the Buddhists that this medical knowledge began to get properly organized. Wujastyk says: "The detailed parallels between the medical passages in the Pali Tripitaka and the Sanskrit Ayurveda treatises are inescapable."

Chattopadhyaya also had indicated similar origins for Ayurveda in his fascinating study 1970s book "Science and Society in Ancient India." I have tried to summarize all these scholarly works here: kikumbhar.medium.com/zysk-chattopad…

In other words, classical Ayurveda has its origins in a wide variety of individuals and groups who were denigrated in and dissociated from mainstream Vedic society, became wandering groups of healers, and then consolidated their accumulated knowledge in several ways including,...

... most importantly, the Buddhist textual canon. It is from this consolidated knowledge and rational medical ways of thinking that the remarkable Sanskrit texts of Charakasamhita and Sushrutasamhita derived most of their content.

So much for the dating and origins of Ayurveda. It is a dynamic, highly sophisticated Buddhist tradition in its origins, which arose in the subcontinent's northern regions, was later Sanskritized, and then became a pan-South Asian (pan-Indian) entity.

The story of how Ayurveda was then practised on the ground (which obviously was v different from what was written in the texts), how practice differed from region to region, and how it changed and developed over the centuries, is fascinating too. Perhaps stuff for another thread.