Choose an application

• Reference Manager
• EndNote
• RefWorks (Direct export to RefWorks)

A free open access ebook is available upon publication. Learn more at www.luminosoa.org.The Practice of Texts examines the uses of the Sanskrit medical classics in two educational institutions of India’s classical life science, Ayurveda: the college and the gurukula. In this interdisciplinary study, Anthony Cerulli probes late- and postcolonial reforms in ayurvedic education, the development of the ayurvedic college, and the impacts of the college curriculum on ways that ayurvedic physicians understand and use the Sanskrit classics in their professional work today. His fieldwork in south India illuminates the nature of philology and ritual in the ayurvedic gurukula and showcases how knowledge is exchanged among students, teachers, and patients. The result, Cerulli shows, is that the Sanskrit classics are presented and applied differently in the college and gurukula, producing a variety of relationships with these texts among practitioners. By interrogating the politics surrounding the place of the Sanskrit classics in ayurvedic curricula, this book reveals a spectrum of views about the history and tradition of Ayurveda in modern India.

Medicine, Ayurvedic --- Religion. --- HISTORY / Asia / India & South Asia. --- Study and teaching --- History. --- Religion, Primitive --- Atheism --- Irreligion --- Religions --- Theology --- Ayurveda --- Ayurvedic medicine --- Ayurvedism --- Hindu medicine --- Medicine, Hindu --- Medicine, Oriental

Choose an application

• Reference Manager
• EndNote
• RefWorks (Direct export to RefWorks)

Medical Texts and Manuscripts in Indian Cultural History presents a collection of the latest research on Ayurveda by an international group of leading historians of medicine and Indian culture. The book begins with papers by C. Pecchia and P.A. Maas that reveal some of their discoveries resulting from their work on a critical edition of the Vimanasthana of the Carakasamhita. K. Preisendanz presents a study of the early phases of formal Indian philosophy in the Carakasamhita, arising out of the same project. D. Wujastyk reports on the recent discovery of a Nepalese manuscript of the Susrutasamhita that pushes back our physical evidence for the text by almost a thousand years. A. Cerulli discusses the interplay of medicine, government, and religion in an 18th-century Sanskrit allegorical play. K. G. Zysk discusses the Siddha tradition of medicine and alchemy in Tamil Nadu, and his co-authored chapter with T. Yamashita reports on their progress in editing and translating an early commentary on the Carakasamhita. M.Sankaranarayana discusses the relationship of clinical practice and Ayurveda theory in modern Kerala, and P. Ram Manohar explores the combinatorics of Indian pharmacology in an innovative 13th-century Keralan ayurvedic text. The meticulous studies in this book advance the boundaries of the modern knowledge of Ayurveda. At the same time, they demonstrate a range of original mythologies for deepening our understanding of this scholarly, traditional medicine of South Asia, while also directly speaking to the unique problems presented by the modern reception of Sanskrit medical works after centuries of manuscript transmission.

Medicine, Ayurvedic --- Medicine