Dear Roz -

Prompted by your thread, I ran the customary Google search for "Ayurvedic Medicine" [Anyone know why Google is running today - 12.12.06 - with a front page adapted from Edvard Munch's "The Scream"?] and came back, naturally enough, with a Wikipedia article at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ayurveda.

Two things immediately stood out for me in the first paragraph:

Ayurveda was practiced during the time of Buddha (around 520 BC) , and in this period the Ayurvedic practitioners were commonly using Mercuric-sulphur combination based medicines.[7] In this period Mercury, sulphur and other metals were used in conjunction with herbs to prepare the different medications.[citation needed] An important Ayurvedic practitioner of this period was Nagarjuna, a Buddhist herbologist, famous for inventing various new drugs for the treatment of ailments. [citation needed] Nagarjuna was accompanied by Surananda, Nagbodhi, Yashodhana, Nityanatha, Govinda, Anantdev, Vagbhatta etc. The knowledge of Ayurveda progressed a lot during this period; and is therefore termed as the Golden Period of Ayurveda.[citation needed]

The first was the role of mercuric-sulphur combination medicines and the second was the linking of the treatment to Nargarjuna, this amazing Buddhist philosopher of the Second Century C.E., to whom I already knew that more things had been given attribution than any one man could have possibly done on his own, to the point that it is widely believed that somewhere between 4 and 5 monks worked together, writing under that name. The funny thing is that not less than a month ago, I gave a short presentation to my meditation group on the on the teachings of Arya Nagarjuna. Very briefly:

In the Commentary on the Awakened Mind, Nagarjuna sets out two major dichotomies. The first is the “Two Truths” of nominal or conventional truth on the one hand, and “ultimate reality” on the other. Then, after explicating this dichotomy to the point of an identity, he identifies this identity with the “wisdom function” from which true compassion - and indeed the compassion of the bhodisatva - must necessarily flow.

Nagarjuna is credited with extending the doctrine of Dependent Origination – or pratitya-samutpada in the Pali – the fundamental Buddhist teaching that all phenomena arise in dependence on causes and conditions and lack inherent being. Early sources indicate that the Buddha became enlightened under the Bodhi Tree when he fully realized the profound truth of Dependent Origination, that all phenomena are conditioned and arise and cease in a determinate series.

. . . in his so-called Middle or Madhyamaka School, Nagarjuna gives a new perspective to Dependant Origination, whereby it becomes associated with the “emptiness” – by that he means only that anything that is empty is devoid of inherent essence – of the composite of the causes and conditions which we conventionally understand as being.

But Nagarjuna did not stop with the “emptiness” of conventional causes and conditions, but the emptiness of emptiness and indeed, the emptiness of the Four Noble Truths, which Nagarjuna explain can have no independent essence but must serve as the description of the relationship between other concepts, namely suffering, craving and aversion.

But he further argues in another of his primary texts, “The Fundamental Stanzas on the Middle Way,” that not only are concepts such as motion dependently driven - and there is a nice little discussion of what 2,000 years later would be called special relativity - but that emptiness too is empty, i.e., there is no absolute world beyond that which arises conventionally.

This someone doing heavy lifting by any standards of modern Western philosophy but he's funny too, referring to humans as "large bi-peds," and maybe anticipating Darwin for all I know. Clearly, he walked the Earth as a genus, but I hadn't heard of him until I attended the 3-day teaching of the Dalai Lama at the Pasadena Civic Auditorium in September.

In that talk, the Dalai Lama referred us to Chapter 24 of the “The Fundamental Stanzas on the Middle Way.” Two verses – 18 and 19 – stand out as central to that Chapter:

Whatever is dependently co-arisen, that is explained to be emptiness.
That, [i.e. emptiness] being a dependent designation, is itself the middle way. Something that is not dependently arisen, such a thing does not exist. Therefore a non-empty thing does not exist.

The import of 24:18 and the Middle School doctrine is that conventional existence and ultimate nonexistence and are the same thing. Hence the deep identity of the two truths. And this is because emptiness is none other than dependent-arising, and emptiness being dependently designated is therefore empty.

But Emptiness in this context is not nonexistence. The lack of inherent existence that is asserted is not the lack of a property possessed by some entities but not by others, or a property that an entity could be imagined to have, but rather the lack of an impossible attribute. Nagarjuna explicitly and repeatedly rejects nihilism, the doctrine that nothing exists, is knowable or can be communicated. From this perspective the world is quite real, so long as we realize that everything and anything arises only in relationship to everything else.

But put off by the mercuric-sulphur combination therapies, I clicked on another Wikipedia link to another article which approached the "Teachings of Ayurveda" in much greater detail, at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teachings_of_Ayurveda

I recommend the second Wikipedia article for anyone with a deeper interest in the theory of Ayurvedic Medicine. That said, I don't offer any pretense of really understanding the basic concepts. Dependant Designation was hard enough.

Mike