Pedagogy, philology, and procedural medical knowledge

ABSTRACT

This article probes the history of education and current pedagogical practices among Malayali physician-teachers, vaidya-gurus, of Ayurveda in central Kerala. Considering the sources vaidya-gurus cite as the bases of their teaching styles, especially a three-part method known as mukhāmukhaṃ (‘face-to-face’ instruction), I discuss the place, production, and practice of texts in the didactic arrangement of the ayurvedic gurukula, ‘teacher’s residence’. Unlike subject-specific textbook learning at ayurvedic colleges, where students attend lectures and take exams in subjects like anatomy, physiology, pharmacology, and so forth, mukhāmukhaṃ education entails a rigorous philological investigation of the Sanskrit medical classics and allied regional sources that, under the guidance and modelling of a vaidya-guru, empowers students to do things with the texts in their own clinical engagements with patients. During mukhāmukhaṃ training, the ayurvedic gurukula becomes a discursive space wherein formal rules concerning the interpretation and transmission of technical healing knowledge in texts are, by design, upended with improvisational inquiry and exploration, inter- and intra-textual referencing, and an ongoing production of new texts to meet the healthcare needs of patients.

KEYWORDS:

• gurukula
• Ayurveda
• history of education
• Kerala
• philology

Acknowledgments

In 2016 several colleagues at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin offered helpful comments and feedback on the research in this article. Two anonymous reviewers provided encouraging comments and constructive suggestions that helped me clarify and strengthen my arguments and analyses. But thanks are due most of all to Minakshi Menon for inviting me to present this research in Berlin and for her conversation and encouragement as I revised the original presentation into this article.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. All transliterated terms are from Sanskrit unless clearly noted or marked by the post-abbreviation – Mal. – to indicate that the term is Malayalam.

2. Early references, for example, occur in the Mahābhārata 1.3.81 and 12.184.8.

3. Gurus and ācāryas are not the only teachers common in Indian literature and history. Another related title that often appears in India’s classical literatures, a kind of scholar or expert, who in certain situations may also function as a teacher is the paṇḍita. Historically this title is applied to someone considered learned in any number of subjects, usually a member of the Brahmin class, who also has knowledge of Sanskrit, the Vedas, and Indian philosophy or religion. The way this term has evolved in everyday English usage, however, might point to a difference between the paṇḍita and the guru or ācārya. The English word pundit (or pandit), as we often hear in North America in the phrase ‘political pundit,’ describes someone who is versed in multiple areas about which he or she can, and is often called to, pontificate publicly, but perhaps is not qualified to teach. In its most pejorative usage, calling someone a pundit in American parlance amounts to calling that person a dilettante.

4. Scharfe, Education in Ancient India, 120 n33.

5. Bode and Shankar (‘Ayurvedic college education’) recently conducted several informative interviews with recent ayurvedic college graduates in south India about the extent to which vaidyas today engage the literary bases of the ayurvedic tradition.

6. Pollock, “Future Philology?” 934.

7. All personal names and the name of the gurukula where I conducted most of my fieldwork have been pseudonymized.

8. Yamashita and Manohar, “Memoirs of Vaidyas,” 45–46.

9. Pollock, “Future Philology?” 934.

10. Cox, Modes of Philology, 5 (italics in original).

11. Ibid., 8.

12. Central Council of India Medicine, “Syllabus of Ayurvedacharya,” 4.

13. See, for example, Carakasaṃhitā Siddhisthāna 12.41–45; Suśrutasaṃhitā Uttarasthāna 65; and Aṣṭāṅgahṛdaya Uttarasthāna 50. There is considerable overlap between the tantrayuktis in these medical works and in the oldest Sanskrit work that presents them, Kauṭilya’s Arthaśāstra, which enumerates 32 rhetorical modes of interpretation. An author from Kerala, Nīlameghabhiṣajā, composed an authoritative work in Sanskrit on the tantrayukti doctrine in Ayurveda, Tantrayuktivicāra (ninth century CE), which names 36 tantrayuktis, basically following the Carakasaṃhitā. Apart from expositions of the tantrayuktis in Sanskrit literature, which also occur in the Purāṇas, they are found in Tamil and Pali texts as well.

14. Cox, Modes of Philology, 7 and fn. 8.

15. Ibid., 3.

16. ‘Or l’écriture [prémoderne] ne produit pas de variants, elle est variance’ (Cerquiglini, Eloge de la variante, 111).

17. Richardson, “The Consolation of Philology,” 9.

18. In recent years, Bhaskaran’s students have begun to collate his lessons, though very few have appeared in print; Biju has produced scholarship on Ayurveda, but his gurukula lessons on the Sanskrit classics have not yet been collected, edited, and published.

19. See note 10 above.

20. See M. P. Sridharan’s extensive comments on the disconnect propagated between ayurvedic theory and practice in ayurvedic colleges in the 1970s in his preface to Muthuswami’s edition of Nīlameghabhiṣajā’s Tantrayuktivicāra.

21. Tolkien, “Philology: General Works,” 36–37. Pollock might have been riffing on Tolkien’s sentiment when he asserted that philology ‘is and always has been a global knowledge practice, as global as textualized language itself’ (Pollock, “Future Philology?” 934).

22. Cox, Modes of Philology, 11.

23. Daston and Most, “History of Science,” 368.

24. Namboodiri, “Ashtavaidya Tradition,” 140–144; Variyār, Āyurvedacaritraṃ, 488. The Malayalam term aṣṭavaidyan is derived from Sanskrit aṣṭāṅgavaidya, ‘physician of the eight divisions.’ The eight divisions of Ayurveda are: kāyacitkitsā (internal medicine); bālacikitsā or kaumārabhṛtya (paediatrics and OBGYN); bhūtavidyā or grahacikitsā (treatment of mental diseases caused by demons and malevolent spirits); śālākya or ūrdhvāṅga (treatment of diseases of the head and neck regions); śalya (surgery); agadatantra, viṣacikitsā or daṃṣṭrā (detoxification); jarā or rasāyana (rejuvenation therapy); and vājīkaraṇa or vṛṣacikitsā (potency therapy).

25. Yamashita and Manohar, “Memoirs of Vaidyas,” 143.

26. Vāriyar, Āyurvedacaritraṃ, 491.

27. The more common transliteration, without diacritics and using just the first two initials, is ‘P. S. Varier.’ Raghava Varier 2002, 15–17.

28. Viṣacikitsā in Kerala historically had two divisions: viṣavidyā (mantra-based poison treatment) and viṣavaidyaṃ (pharmaco-based poison treatment). Over time, both traditions merged, and a new discipline evolved in the fourteenth or fiftheen century. This was the so-called golden era of viṣacikitsā, and the Manipravalam text, Jyōtsnikā, was the first literary work descibing that new discipline. It has two parts: an auṣadha khaṇḍa and a mantra khaṇḍa, corresponding to the tradition’s pharmaco-base and mantra-base, respectively.

29. The word maṇipravāḷaṃ is a dual-language compound meaning ‘pearls and coral,’ from Tamil maṇi (pearl) and Sanskrit pravāla (coral). Rich Freeman has shown that the fourteenth century Manipravalam text, Līlātilakam reverses the naming convention ‘where the more valued pearls were traditionally understood to be the Sanskrit and the coral to be the elements of some vernacular speech or other literary language interspersed with it,’ in this case Tamil (“Rubies and Coral,” 58). The Līlātilakam’s author further re-signified the Sanskrit-vernacular relationship by claiming that maṇi does not refer to white pearls but rather to red rubies. The meaning of maṇipravāḷaṃ thus becomes ‘rubies and coral’, which Freeman reads as the Līlātilakam’s aesthetic metaphor of a linguistic necklace consisting of a ‘harmonious blend of the same red hues’ instead of ‘red and white variegation’ (Ibid, 58). Today many Malayalis refer to Manipravalam as ‘Old Malayalam’, and some scholars have suggested that the language is an admixture of Sanskrit and Malayalam (or rather, Keralabhasha), not Tamil (e.g., Menon, A Primer of Malayalam, 9). Freeman has written about two streams of premodern literary cultures in Kerala – Manipravalam and Pattu – the latter being a mix of Sanskrit and Keralabhasha. In addition to explaining the differences between the two literatures, he argued that for some Malayalis Pattu has been an important linguistic marker of Kerala identity, distinct from the larger Tamil cultural sphere that is commonly seen as Kerala’s literary parent (“Genre and Society,” 448-450).

30. The title Jyōtsnikā drives from Sanskrit jyotsnā (‘moonlight’), symbolizing cool healing nectar (i.e., the opposite of poison). Thus, the Jyōtsnikā is titled to convey the idea that its discourse at once discusses healing antidotes to snake venom and is itself an anti-venom knowledge collection. It is not the oldest work on poison treatment in India. Michael Slouber has written about several Sanskrit texts authored in Kerala and elsewhere in India that are far older, including the early medieval Gāruḍa Tantras that influenced much of the later viṣacikitsā literature (see, e.g., Early Tantric Medicine).

31. Jyōtsnikā, Pāraṃparyādhikāra 11.

32. Basu, “Review of The Beautiful Tree,” 140; Scharfe, Education in Ancient India, 128–129.

33. Di Bona, One Teacher, One School, 54-56; see also Basu, “Review of The Beautiful Tree”.

34. Basu, Essays in the History of Indian Education, 31.

35. Scharfe, Education in Ancient India, 77–78.

36. Brahmins have not been the only purveyors of medical care and education in Kerala’s history. For example, the Ezhavas, an historically low caste community, are well-known medical practitioners (Jeffrey, The Decline of Nair Dominance, 128, 188, 191) and ritual healers generally. Though the historical relationship of the so-called Ezhava medicine to what we call Ayurveda today is sometimes contested, of particular note in this conversation is the late-seventeenth century Ezhava, Itty Achudan, who is widely remembered for his influence and potential contribution to the major botanical project of Dutch Malabar governor, Hendrik van Rheede, the Hortus Malabaricus (written in Latin over 30 years and published in 12 volumes from 1678–1693).

37. Although there is some variation in usage among Malayalis from the northern part of the state and those south of Kozhikode, in general they use the term illaṃ to denote a person’s house, whereas the term mana is used by non-Nambūtiris to denote the house of a Nambūtiri Brahmin family. In addition to being the traditional house of Nambūtiris, the name of a mana also reveals the patrilineal ancestry through which the house and associated property have been handed down. It is also standard for the term mana to appear on postal addresses today in Kerala.

38. Menon, Social and Cultural History, 280–321.

39. Wujastyk, The Root of Ayurveda, 193.

40. Mookerji, Ancient Indian Education, 347–348.

41. Yamashita and Manohar, “Memoirs of Vaidyas,” 49; see also 51.

42. Langford, Fluent Bodies, 97–116.

43. Raina, “Guru-Shishya Relationship,” 174.

44. Carakasaṃhitā Sūtrasthāna, 30.16–19 (NB: Atridevajī Gupta’s edition of the Carakasaṃhitā provides an alternate breakdown of the verses translated here, with all the information contained in two verses, 30.16–17): tatrāyurvedavidastantrasthānādhyāyapraśnānāṃ pṛthaktvena vākyaśo vākyārthaśo ‘rthāvayavaśaśca pravaktāro mantavyāḥ / atrāha kathaṃ tantrādīni vākyaśo vākyārthaśo ‘rthāvayavaścoktāni bhavantīti //16// atrocyate tantramārṣaṃ kārtsnyena yathāmnāyamucyamānaṃ vākyaśo bhavatyuktam //17// buddhyā samyagan-upraviśyārthatattvaṃ vāgbhirvyāsasamāsapratijñāhetūdāharaṇopanayanigamanayuktābhis trividhaśiṣyabud-dhigamyābhirucyamānām vākyārthaśo bhavatyuktam //18// tantraniyatānāmarthadurgāṇāṃ punar vibhāvanair uktam arthāvayavaśo bhvatyuktam //19//.

45. Mookerji, Ancient Indian Education, 197–198.

46. That is, licenced vaidyas who have finished their 5.5-year Ayurvedic College educations, which includes a one-year residency, and received a Bachelor’s of Ayurvedic Medicine and Surgery degree (BAMS).

47. Bode and Shankar, “Ayurvedic college education,” passim.

48. Barthes, The Rustle of Language, 57–68.