Asceticism and Healing in Ancient India: Medicine in the Buddhist Monastery by Kenneth G.ZyskReview by: Francis ZimmermannJournal of the American Oriental Society, Vol. 113, No. 2 (Apr. - Jun., 1993), pp. 321-323Published by: American Oriental SocietyStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/603067 .

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Reviews of Books 321

Observations on the Term bying ba (Depression) in the Lam rim chen mo": in effect, a disquisition upon "calming" medita- tion in Yogdcar& tradition, and its presentation by Tsong-kha- pa, with further references to Chinese translations by Hsuan Tsang. David Jackson, in "Several Works of Unusual Prove- nance Ascribed to Sa skya Pandita," continues bibliographical work upon the great scholar's oeuvre. Sakya Pandita is also the subject of Josef Kolmag, "Spiritual and Life Wisdom of a Tibetan Lama," a biographic sketch and brief discussion of the famous volume of aphorisms. Jampa L. Panglung, "Die ti- betische Version des Siebengestirn-Siitras," with edition and translation.

Earlier History and Pre-History. Guntram Hazod, "Die 'Herkunft' und die 'Ankunft' des tibetischen Konigs: Zu den Momenten einer Ideologie der Souveranitat in der Legende von 'O lde spu rgyal." E. K. Dargyay, in "Sangha and State in Imperial Tibet," shows how the early kings laid the foundation for the later system of reciprocal influence and support. Cris- tina Anna Scherrer-Schaub, "Reciprocit6 du don: Une relecture de PT 999," includes edited text and translation of a brief Tun Huang manuscript also bearing on church-state relations. Hel- mut Eimer, "Eine friuhe Quelle zur literarischen Tradition uber die 'Debatte von bSam yas"' compares some previously known, and some new materials on the eighth-century Chinese- Indian debate in central Tibet. Helga Uebach, "dByar-mo-thani and Gofi-bu ma-ru: Tibetan Historiographical Tradition on the Treaty of 821/823": an unavoidably inconclusive study of the location of Chinese-Tibetan border pillars of the 9th century.

Later History. Agata Bareja compares the chapter on Tibetan history of the Mongolian eiqula keregligc'i teguis udq- a-tu sastir with the Shes bya rab tu gsal ba by 'Phags pa bla ma. Luciano Petech, "sTon-tshul: The Rise of Sa-skya Para- mountcy in Khams": a mysterious local chieftain is appointed governor by Qubilai upon the recommendation of 'Phags pa bla ma. Herbert Franke, "Qubilai Khans Militarbefehlshaber in Osttibet: Bemerkungen zur Biographie von Yeh-hsien-nai": another minor figure, who was Uigur. Walther Heissig, "Zu einigen mongolischen historischen Sagen des Kukunoor- Gebietes."

D. Seyfort Ruegg, in "mchod yon, yon mchod and mchod gnas/yon gnas: On the Historiography and Semantics of a Ti- betan Religio-social and Religio-political Concept," thoroughly explores the Tibetan bla ma in his role of officiant/chaplainl preceptor to an external ruler, who exercises in turn the function of donor; the misleading characterization "patron-priest rela- tionship" is corrected.

Leonard W. J. van der Kuijp, "On the Life and Political Ca- reer of Ta'i-si-tu Byang-chub rgyal-mtshan," is a major study of an important political figure of the fourteenth century; ap- pended is a tentative genealogy of the lHa-gzigs rlangs clan. Experimentally perhaps, length of footnotes is not only ex- traordinary, running to several times the length of the text; but in addition, footnotes are appended to one another in 3 levels.

This format probably does not reflect real difficulties in orga- nizing the material, but it would need wall-poster pages to be successful. To clear up a point of confusion: it matters whether this figure was a monk or not (pp. 287-89). The term rab-byung does indicate that he became a monk at the age of 8-but only a novice, dge-tshul; he apparently was fully or- dained, bsnyen-rdzogs, as a dge-slong later in life, in connec- tion with ecclesiastical advancement.

Elena de Rossi Filibeck, in "A Chronological Note on the dGa' ldan khri pa," summarizes biographies covering A.D.

1699 to 1830. This is the highest elected position in Tibet; Tibetan parents are wont to say, "any boy can grow up to be throne-holder of Galden."

Dan Martin translates "A Brief Political History of Tibet by Gu-ru Bkra-shis," with the argument that late historical works have their own importance. And finally, see Peter Schwieger, "Die Hindernisse auf dem Weg zum Staatsvertrag zwischen Purig und Ladakh 1752/53."

MARK TATZ

INSTITUTE OF BUDDHIST STUDIES

Asceticism and Healing in Ancient India: Medicine in the Buddhist Monastery. By KENNETH G. ZYSK. New York: Ox- FORD UNIVERSITY PRESS, 1991. Pp. 200. $35.

The early history of medicine in India is easily divided into three broad periods, each characterized by a specific body of literary remains: (1) the early Vedic period (ca. 1700-800 B.C.), which displays magic and religious practices of healing in the literary form of hymns and charms; (2) the crucial, but hitherto neglected, period from about 800 to 100 B.C., which is the subject of Zysk's new book, based on a philological exege- sis of the stories of medical treatments recorded in the monas- tic code (vinaya) of the Buddhist P5li canon and in the legend of Jivaka Komdrabhacca; and (3) the period from about 200 B.C. to 400 A.D., which is the time when the classical Sanskrit compendia of Ayurvedic medicine were compiled, namely, the Caraka-, Bhela-, and Sugruta Samhitds, which incorporate the existing healing tradition into Hinduism. A Sanskrit scholar who teaches at New York University, Zysk is already the au- thor of Religious Healing in the Veda (Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 1985), an important philological study of the Vedic healing tradition based on texts from the Rgveda (compiled in its final form not much before 800 B.C.) and from the Atharvaveda (a slightly later Sanskrit text). He now pro- ceeds to the next period, during which Buddhist texts bear witness to a fundamental shift in medical thought.

The basic idea propounded in this book runs counter to the conventional wisdom among Indian pandits and prominent

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322 Journal of the American Oriental Society 113.2 (1993)

indologists like Jean Filliozat. There is little continuity of the medical tradition from the Vedas to Ayurveda, Zysk argues; classical Ayurveda is the result "of a later Hinduization pro- cess" applied by the brahmin authors to "a fundamentally heterodox body of knowledge" (p. 4). During the centuries in- tervening between Vedic medicine and the absorption of Indian medicine into brahmanic orthodoxy, that is, in the crucial period from about 800 to 100 B.C., on which Zysk focuses in this book, "the medical paradigm dramatically shifted from a magico-religious to an empirico-rational approach to healing" (p. 26). Phrases like magico-religious and empirico-rational will sound somewhat antiquated to a number of readers, but let us be fair to the author, who simply wants to emphasize an un- deniable shift from medicine based on daiva (the divine) to medicine based on yukti (rational adjustments). Who was re- sponsible for this paradigmatic shift? In a brilliant book, which obviously had some impact on Zysk's problematics, the Indian philosopher Debiprasad Chattopadhyaya convincingly argued that physicians in classical India were systematically defamed by the Hindu priestly hierarchy, because medicine's fundamen- tal empiricism was threatening to the priestly ideology that em- phasized esoteric knowledge.' Zysk translates Chattopadhyaya's epistemological analysis into historical hypotheses, and he makes two historical observations that would substantiate his thesis about the heterodoxy of the medical tradition. First, medicine was never used by the Hindu sacrificial cults, and medical practice devolved upon professionals that existed out- side the mainstream of society. Physicians were itinerant, "rov- ing physicians" (caranavaidya), as one Sanskrit phrase suggests (p. 24), maybe organized into sects, and the Greek historian Megasthenes (fl. 300 B.C.) counts them among the Sramanas, wandering ascetics (p. 28). Secondly, medical knowledge may well have developed among the fraternities of ascetic wander-

ers, but it was among the Buddhists that it became "an integral part of religious doctrines and monastic discipline" (p. 38). Buddhist monasticism played a fundamental role in the trans- formation of medicine into a doctrinal body of knowledge. Therefore, it was already systematized, although it had re- mained heterodox, when it fell into the hands of the brahmin or- thodox compilers of the Caraka-, Bhela-, and Sugruta Samhitds, who appropriated heterodox medical doctrines by applying to them "a later Hindu veneer" (p. 84 et passim).

This is an important book, which offers groundbreaking new vistas of the early history of medicine in India. I would like to make one or two critical remarks, keeping for the conclusion an appreciation of the true discovery which gives Zysk's new book its special value. The first part of the book provides a comprehensive picture of classical Indian medicine in its

1 D. Chattopadhyaya, Science and Society in Ancient India (Calcutta: Research India Publications, 1977).

socio-religious context over all the three periods defined above. The second part provides a systematic comparison of medical materials from the P5li Buddhist canon with the clas- sic Ayurvedic treatises of Caraka and Sugruta, "to identify more precisely the relationships between Buddhist monastic and Ayurvedic medicine and to obtain a fuller understanding of the common repository of heterodox ascetic medical knowl- edge that both exploited" (p. 7). The comparison bears upon names of drugs, names of diseases, and names of treatments, and it reveals the existence of an elaborate technical terminol- ogy in P5li that parallels the Ayurvedic terminology. Zysk con- vincingly argues that systematic and exhaustive comparisons between Buddhist therapeutics and corresponding treatments in the Ayurvedic compendia "point to a common source of medical lore" (pp. 84, 86). But he goes one step further, saying that they "reveal a general continuity of medical doctrines" (p. 84). I have reservations about the idea of a continuity of doc- trines from P5li to Sanskrit sources. The retrospective impres- sion of continuity is reinforced by Buddhaghosa's commentary, which is quoted extensively, but Buddhaghosa, who flourished in the fifth century A.D., submitted the Pdli stories he was com- menting upon to some degree of normalization a posteriori. Humoral pathology seems to be implied in the Buddhist case histories of diseases due to wind (vata, pp. 92-96), and Zysk has shown that humoral pathology and the concept of peccant humors (dosa) were present in the P5li Buddhist canon (pp. 30, 66, 85), although this is not a Buddhist doctrine in the strict sense of the word. The P5li authors bear witness to the exis- tence of humoralism in their time, but it does not follow on from their thought. Some of us have attempted to find origins of the tridosa theory in the Hindu cosmology itself, while other scholars have explored the connections of Ayurveda to Greek humoralism. I disagree with Zysk when he says that these attempts are unconvincing (p. 119). Briefly, the theory of the three dosas combines a humoral pair of opposites, bile and phlegm, with the concept of pneuma as a bodily fluid, wind. The dialectic of bile and phlegm develops one of the basic po- larities of Hindu cosmology, the world's agnisomiyatva, the Agni-Soma-ness of the world, into physiology. Historians of Hippocratic medicine like Jacques Jouanna2 have shown that the core of the humoral system is the pair of opposites bile and

phlegm; a close reading of the Ayurvedic texts would confirm this interpretation, according to which the humoral system in its core concepts, bile and phlegm, stems from cosmology. Pneumatism has been grafted onto the humoral theory at a later stage. While in India this grafting took the form of a third humor, wind, straightforwardly incorporated into the tridosa theory, in Hellenistic medicine it gave rise to various syncre-

2 J. Jouanna, Hippocrate: Pour une arche6ologie de l'e'cole de Cnide (Paris: Editions Belles Lettres, 1974).

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Reviews of Books 323

tisms, including Galenic medicine. We cannot pursue this dis- cussion here, but I would like to advocate a pluralistic approach to the history of Indian medicine, which would take into account the connections of Hinduism with Hellenic thought, along with Buddhist influences.

The most original aspect of Zysk's book is in the Pali liter- ary sources referring to actual cases and providing case histo- ries of sick monks and a case-by-case instruction for the care of the sick in the Buddhist monasteries. However, there are some medical realia about which the Pali texts are silent, al- though later reports from travelers to India confirm their exis- tence in Buddhist times. This is the case for the technique of observing decomposing corpses deposited in rivers, on which a few fascinating pages bring out fresh evidence that comple- ments the author's earlier publications (pp. 35-37). Zysk's ap- proach is content-wise, so to say; he provides a wealth of information on the practical aspects of medicine, he empha- sizes the absence of any theoretical speculation from the Pali medical texts. Seen from this angle, the section on medicines in the Mahdvagga, which functioned as a case-by-case guide for the treatment of common afflictions, seems to have pro- vided the model for later medical handbooks. This is the rea- son why Zysk compares it to the Bower Manuscript's Ndvanitaka, Nagarjuna's Yogagataka, and Ravigupta's Sid- dhasdra, suggesting that, to quote him (pp. 6, 72, 118), the codification of medical practice within the Buddhist monastic rules "probably provided" the literary model for later enchiri- dions of Ayurvedic medicine. I would like to question this as- sumption, because I think these later texts belong to a radically different literary genre. The contents cannot be isolated from style. Contrary to the Pali texts, the Sanskrit Ndivanitaka, Yo- ga~ataka and Siddhasdra are versified and composed, as we say, in the kirika style with a play on recurring padas; in con- tents as well as in style, they are closely connected with the Ayurvedic classical samhituis. Conversely, narrativity, that is, reference to actual cases, with the personal names of patients, and a narrative of the treatment, cannot be found anywhere else than in the Pali texts glossed by Zysk. Illness narratives are strikingly missing in the Ayurvedic literature.

This is what comes to me in this book as a most important rediscovery. Zysk has established that Indian physicians did cultivate a literary genre of medical texts in which medical instruction was embedded in a narrative. Narratives are a specific feature of the Pali medical texts mentioned here, and Zysk really has unearthed a missing link between the hymns and charms of the Vedic period and the treatises and hand- books of classical Ayurveda.

FRANCIS ZIMMERMANN

ECOLE DES HAUTES ETUDES EN SCIENCES SOCIALES, PARIS

Samnydsa Upanisads: Hindu Scriptures on Asceticism and Renunciation. Translated with introduction and notes by PATRICK OLIVELLE. New York: OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS,

1992. Pp. xv + 320. $17.95 (paper).

Olivelle's reputation as an interpreter of the Hindu ascetic tradition is well established and will be further enhanced by the present volume. It contains an accurate and readable translation of all the upanisads included in Schrader's critical edition (Adyar, 1912), which is still the definitive text for these works, but it also contains a lengthy, 112-page introduc- tion giving a comprehensive overview of the development and nature of renunciation in the Hindu tradition, the rituals asso- ciated with it, and the classification and customs of renounc- ers. The volume is avowedly addressed to the non-specialist but there is no trace of condescension in the way that the ma- terial is presented, and the Sanskritist will certainly find it valuable.

Apart from Schrader, Olivelle acknowledges a particular debt to J. F. Sprockhoff (especially his Samnydsa: Quellen- studien zur Askese in Hinduismus) and many of his notes to the translations simply refer to his work. While this saves space, it is perhaps not altogether helpful to a non-specialist, who may not have ready access to Sprockhoff's work or Olivelle's command of German. For the same reason, although borrowings from Vidyaranya's Paficada~i or the Yogavisistha are indicated in the translation, there is no discussion in the introduction of the implications for dating; some explanation of the relationship between the Maitreya Upanisad and the Maitrdyanziya Upanisad might also have been helpful (or at least a reference to van Buitenen's study). However, because he differs here from Sprockhoff, Olivelle develops the inter- esting point that, since the controversy over the sacred thread appears in all the older texts except the Laghu-Samnydsa, they cannot be earlier than the first few centuries of the common era. Also of interest is the final section of his introduction on courting dishonor and acting like animals-practices which were clearly more widespread than the Pa5upatas, with whom they are usually associated.

The translation is carefully done, capturing the sense well, while any difficulties of interpretation are discussed in the notes; for example, the first note of all justifies his translation of karma as rite or ritual action. Less happy, though, are 'goblin' for pi?- dca and 'element' for dhuitu in the sense of guna, while the use of 'swan' for hamsa is positively misconceived, particularly in a philosophical rather than a literary context. However, these are minor points to set against the general accuracy of the transla- tion. Its proof-reading is less accurate and a recurring irritation is the random addition or omission of a final s on 3rd person verbal forms and nominal plurals, while 'S'/"mine" as the first entry under I in the second index is grotesque. The second index is to the translations and is keyed to the page numbers of

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