1

Fundamental Principles of Ayurveda

Ayurveda is the science that describes what is appropriate or inappropriate, what brings happiness or sorrow, and what is beneficial or harmful for life; it is the measure of life itself.
Charaka Samhita

This book covers Ayurvedic treatment for preconception up to about age 40. But before you delve into the upcoming chapters to look up specific pathologies you want to learn how to treat, it is best to understand some fundamental principles that will be applied to each health problem. Reading this chapter will make it easy for you to plug in these concepts as you learn about the treatments.

WHAT IS AYURVEDA?

In Sanskrit, the term veda means “knowledge.” In this case, it refers to the most eternally pure, unchanging, and sound knowledge.

Ayu means “life.” In this case, it refers to everything that gives life, including the flow of prana in your body. Ayu is a combination of the physical body, the senses, the soul, and the light of the soul, working together to keep you alive while also keeping prana flowing in a continuous and coordinated fashion.

Ayurveda, thus, can be defined as “knowledge of life,” meaning what is good for your life and what is bad for your life, and its practice requires knowledge of disease, etiological factors, diagnosis, treatment protocols, pacification of imbalances, and purification techniques. Ayurveda is concerned not just with herbs and diet but with anything and everything that interacts with your life, which either enhances or disturbs the flow of prana.

Ayurvedic Philosophy

Ayurveda is designed for keeping the healthy person healthy but also focuses on helping people who are unhealthy. Modern medicine’s aim is generally to treat a sick person once they have been diagnosed with a disease. Which means that not much attempt is made to identify and treat the earliest stages of a disease process so that you don’t get the disease. Instead, you are allowed to go down the long prickly path to ill health, while the medical system superficially patches up symptoms along the way, until you develop full-blown disease. Then the system jumps in and gives treatment, which again consists of patching up the symptoms of that disease.

One thing that I love about Ayurveda is the principle that before a practitioner writes any prescription, they must first see what has gone wrong for each particular patient and correct that, so that the treatment—the herbs, dietary changes, and so on—will work. Sounds like common sense, right?

But all too often I see that modern medicine relies on one-size-fits-all treatment. People diagnosed with an autoimmune disease, for example, such as multiple sclerosis (MS), are immediately prescribed medication to shut down the immune system. No questions are asked to see what has happened in each person’s life to allow their immune system to go out of control in the first place.

But if we take the time to look deeper, we find that there are numerous causes for MS, and they are different in each person.

MS arises from a breakdown of the protective myelin sheath that covers nerve fibers. One person with MS might have consumed excessive amounts of aspartame, an artificial sweetener, over the years, which burned holes in their myelin sheath. Another person might have picked up a parasite that is eating holes in the myelin sheath, while someone else may have followed a low-fat diet for years, depriving their nerve cells and myelin sheath of much-needed cholesterol and causing the sheath to shrivel up and die. Another person may have absorbed too much mercury, which is infamous for burning the myelin sheath and causing MS. In all these cases, and many others, these hot toxins, which have the capability of burning the myelin sheath, also upset the normal functioning of the immune system, allowing it to misfire and attack this delicate sheath in the first place. So in addition to pulling these hot and burning toxins and infections off the sheath, we also need to recalibrate the immune system so it stops launching these attacks (in the many ways mentioned throughout this book).

In the first case, we need to clean and heal the myelin sheath. In the second case, we need to administer herbs to kill the parasite and then give the herbs to heal the nerve tissue and the myelin sheath. In the third patient, we need to introduce good forms of cholesterol and nourish the nerve tissue back to health. And in the fourth case, we need to chelate out the mercury and then give herbs to heal the nerve tissue and the myelin sheath (both of which were burned by the mercury).

This is why the knowledge of Ayurveda is invaluable. Every day people call me to ask me what herb(s) I use to treat this or that particular disease. But it doesn’t work that way! Giving herbs to help resolve the disease is the step we’ll take last. First we have to spend some time figuring out what has gone wrong for the patient, now or in the past, in order to write up a treatment protocol. We don’t just give out herbs according to the symptoms.

Again, it sounds logical, but I can assure you, it is seldom done. We don’t want to make that same mistake in Ayurveda, for example by reflexively giving shilajit or ashwagandha to a thyroid patient without identifying all the reasons why their thyroid is weak in the first place, addressing all those reasons (sometimes it’s twenty reasons!), and then giving the herb(s) for strengthening the thyroid.

How Does Ayurveda Define Health?

According to the ancient Ayurvedic texts, in a person who is healthy:

All doshas are in balance. (Doshas, you’ll recall, are the manifestations of prana in the body; we’ll discuss them later in this chapter.)

All agnis are in balance. Agni, “fire,” refers to the body’s capacity for transforming material into the component parts of the body, from the tissues to the cells. We have the metabolic fire of the stomach, the five flames of the liver, and the seven flames of the tissues. We also have the cellular agnis, which promote transformation at the cellular level.

All the waste products of sweat, urine, and stool are eliminated in a timely manner.

The mind is balanced.

And the ancient texts tell us, that person is healthy who is happy, with excellent coordination between the senses, the light of the soul, the mind, and consciousness.

Ayurveda thus defines health as balance and disease as imbalance. For a person with disease, the goal of treatment is to correct the imbalance by identifying and removing the underlying cause(s).

A Little Background on Ayurveda

Ayurveda is a 5,000-year-old tradition of holistic medicine from India. It is an eternal body of knowledge that was cognized by rishis, or seers, who imbued themselves in the eternal source of life, in Brahma consciousness, the highest state of awareness inherent in each and every one of us. It has been said that the ancient rishis brought this knowledge “down” to human awareness as a gift and that the mythical origins of Ayurveda were practiced in heaven before descending to earth.

This divine legacy was handed down from Brahma to Daksha Prajapati, known as Prajapati, a primordial progenitor entrusted with creation and order in the universe. He is considered the son of Brahma and the son-in-law of Shiva. It was then entrusted to the twin gods known as the Ashvin Kumaras. These were the divine twins, known as the physicians of the gods (Deva Vaidyas) and associated with health, rejuvenation, rescue, and transitions. They are often depicted riding a golden chariot that appears at dawn. The Ashvins were famous for miraculous healings, such as restoring sight to the blind, replacing lost limbs, rejuvenating the aged, and saving people from death or disaster. Because of this, they’re considered the earliest divine physicians, long before later medical gods such as Dhanvantari, the god of medicine and healing and the divine originator of Ayurveda. Symbolically the twins represent balance, duality (body and spirit, night and day, illness and healing), and harmony between opposites. While the Ashvins were considered emergency healers/rescuers, Dhanvantari was the physician, surgeon, and system builder, churning the ocean of milk and carrying a pot of amrita (the nectar of immortality) in addition to the Ayurvedic texts and healing herbs. Both formed the (probable) mythical foundations of Ayurveda.

The Ashvins are said to have had full access to the integral knowledge of Ayurveda, covering all of its eight branches, namely: Kaaya Chikitsa (internal medicine), Baala Chikitsa (pediatrics), Graha Chikitsa or Bhoot Vidya (psychiatry), Urdhyaanga Chikitsa (treatment of the eyes, nose, throat, head, and related diseases), Shalyaroga Chikitsa (surgery), Damstra Chikitsa or Agad Tantra (toxicology), Jara Chikitsa or Rasayana Chikitsa (geriatrics), and Vrishya Chikitsa or Vajikarana (aphrodisiac therapy). Several herbal formulations still in use today are attributed to these ancient Ayurvedic doctors.

Though Ayurveda’s origins are shrouded in mythical lore, it is important to note that the foundational ancient texts describe sophisticated medical treatments for tuberculosis, chronic diseases, bone and muscle diseases, heart disease, respiratory tract diseases accompanied by fever, parasites and worms, ascites, bipolar disorder, and vitiligo, to name a few. They also describe surgical operations (Atharvaveda 1.11.5). Their guidelines for the practice of obstetrics and pediatrics showed them to have an advanced understanding of these fields, including the use of full-fledged aphrodisiac concoctions!

The ancient texts also describe the powers of spiritual healing, which employed the more subtle forms of energetic healing, such as prayer, meditation, mantras, and yagyas, and the vibrational healing powers of natural elements from sources such as five elements: space (ether), air, fire (the sun), water, and earth.

Knowledge of Ayurveda is said to have progressed from pre-Vedic times all the way through the Vedic period, the Buddhist era, the Mogul period, British imperialism, and the post-independence era. Each time period left its own trace of wisdom, amending the body of knowledge while passing it forward, though not in terms of correcting the original texts, but instead adapting them to meet the changing needs of the times. For even though Ayurveda itself, the science of life, is unchangeable, pure, eternal knowledge, humanity undergoes change as human nature evolves. Our understanding of Ayurveda evolves as we work to address the new situations that arise through the millennia.

Charaka, one of the principal contributors to Ayurveda and author of the definitive textbook of Ayurveda, the Charaka Samhita, himself authorized such amendments, allowing future vaidyas, or doctors of Ayurveda (from the Sanskrit root veda, meaning “knowledge”) to add elements as needed to adapt the eternal texts to the current specific situations, though always under strict guidelines in order to protect the integrity of the original works.