Revisiting the Charaka Samhita

In keeping with its policy of promoting India’s own knowledge systems, the Government of India has of late proposed integrating MBBS, the standard degree for physicians trained in modern medicine and surgery, with BAMS (Bachelor of Ayurvedic Medicine and Surgery) which is rooted in ancient Indian medical traditions.

MANAS DAS | New Delhi | July 30, 2025 9:01 am THE STATEMAN

In keeping with its policy of promoting India’s own knowledge systems, the Government of India has of late proposed integrating MBBS, the standard degree for physicians trained in modern medicine and surgery, with BAMS (Bachelor of Ayurvedic Medicine and Surgery) which is rooted in ancient Indian medical traditions. Although the idea is offered as a push towards ‘holistic’ medicine, anxieties prevail in many quarters regarding the implementation of such a scheme.

Many in the academic fraternity as well as common people feel that ayurveda, the ancient medical tradition of India, cannot match the allopathic branch of modern medicine and surgery, with respect to technological progress, advanced research and complexities of modern ailments. But why do modern physicians have reservations about ayurveda? According to some scholars, this branch of ancient medical science has not undergone timely revisions and what is taught at ayurvedic colleges is an incongruous mix of truths and untruths. Moreover, the discipline has remained intellectually stagnant because of a continued reliance on outdated texts and traditional beliefs. It is indeed a sad decline for a branch of knowledge that was part of the great glory of ancient India.

The 3000-5000-year-old traditional system of healthcare of the Indian sub-continent is truly India’s precious yet neglected treasure box. Dating back to the Vedic period, this ancient medical science is widely accepted as a holistic system with a philosophy that gives importance to the physical, mental, spiritual, social and environmental factors related to health and medicine. It accepts the panchabhuta-based (the five basic elements Prithvi, Jala, Agni, Vayu and Akasa that is, earth, water, fire, wind and space) nature of all natural objects, including the human body. Today ayurveda and other traditional systems of healthcare are steadily gaining ground across the world, given the prohibitive cost of modern allopathic treatment and its side-effects.

Unfortunately, in India, where ayurveda originated, there is a colossal indifference to this centuriesold medical treatment system. The apathy towards ayurveda in India started from the British period. All research came to a halt and allopathic medicine and treatment were given full patronage and preference. Even after independence, ayurveda in India, for decades, faced neglect, lack of respect and lack of funding that naturally impacted the quality of its practitioners and its medicines. Only recently, under the present dispensation at the Centre, the ancient wellness system is being given some importance through various missions, schemes and incentives that have resulted in renewed interest in ayurveda in India. As India and the world are gradually veering towards ayurveda in search of physical and mental wellbeing, we must remember the towering figure of Charaka, the founder of the ayurvedic system, and his monumental contribution.

People all over the world regard Hippocrates (460- 377 BC) as the father of medicine, but only a few are familiar with the contributions of Charaka who lived in the Indian subcontinent. Charaka is credited with editing one of the most ancient, authentic and popular medical treatises in the world, “Charaka Samhita”, which is one of the foundational texts of classical Indian medicine and ayurveda. Charaka’s treatise is broadly viewed as much as a guide on how to live as it is about how to get better. In the early 20th century, the tradition became professionalised, and now it is government policy with ayurveda and other old medical practices assigned a ministry of their own.

Charaka’s book has been translated in many international and national languages and in one example of its global popularity a “Charaka Club’ was established in New York in 1898 by a group of four doctors to perpetuate his memory. No exact timeline can be set regarding the birth of Charaka. There are many stories regarding his birth and life. In Vedic times, a branch of Krishna Yajurveda was known as Charaka. In one ayurvedic compendium, “Bhavaprakasha”, Charaka is described as a sage, born as the incarnation of ‘Shesha Naga’, the serpent king. As nothing conclusive has been found about Charaka’s personal life, the main source of biographical details remains Charaka Samhita or “Compendium of Charaka.” The text mentions Himalayan place names, plants and foods found in the hills, so we can be quite sure that he lived in north India.

References to Chandrabhaga river suggest his Kashmiri origin. As per the Chinese translation of the Buddhist text “Samyukta Ratna Pithaka Sutra”, Charaka was, however, a physician to a Kushan king named Kanishka, whose mountainous realm, in the second century of the Common Era, stretched from Bactria to today’s Bihar. But it is uncertain whether the name Charaka refers to one man, or to the members of a school of thought perhaps even to a clan or community of practitioners. Indeed, Charaka Samhita encompasses multiple voices and a range of subjects, presenting alternative views of more than one physician. As a treatise, the Charaka Samhita is encyclopaedic, covering almost all aspects of life: epidemics, heredity, the reasons why we live as long as we live; how lives can be made longer or shorter; from earthly topics like visiting toilets to sublime ones such as the nature of wisdom and why the abrogation or violation of wisdom causes all diseases; how to build and supply and run a hospital, and many other topics such as what time one should get up in the morning, what one should eat, the kind of people one should associate with and how to live a virtuous life.

The book is written in Sanskrit and, like other texts from early Indian history, it was composed in a poetic style so that it could be chanted, memorized and passed down. While analyzing the treatise, one finds that Charaka’s model of the body and its functions were in many ways different from the one we would recognise today, and his concepts don’t translate easily into modern terminology. There is no circulating blood, for instance, and no beating heart. Ayurveda’s operating principles are based instead on a conception of the body’s basic ‘humours’: ‘vatta’, ‘pitta’, and ‘kapha’ (wind, bile and phlegm) and on the belief that if these elements are displaced from their proper bodily locations, illness follows.

Ayurveda, like other traditional medical systems such as unani and siddha, sees the human body as part of a vast natural, even cosmic, system of causality. But within that system individuals play an important role as moral actors shaping their own lives and trying to help sustain the universe. Disturbances of the humours and other afflictions are often caused by our own disregard of the basic principles of well-being what Charaka calls “violations of good judgement”. To stop external diseases Charaka suggests the following: “Give up violations of judgement; calm the senses; be mindful; be aware of time, place and yourself and adopt a good lifestyle.”

However, ideas about good conduct proposed in treatises like Charaka Samhita do not represent a uniquely ayurvedic point of view. Rather, they share a great deal with the general worldview conveyed in other Sanskrit Brahminical literature. But the Charaka Samhita diverges from that worldview in its more dialectic spirit. Charaka commends debate as the central method to advance knowledge about life and health. He sets out precise rules for “parleys of specialists”, and much of his treatise is in the form of questions and answers between a teacher and a disciple.

The increasingly popular psychosomatic constitution or “Prakriti” as a patient-specific treatment approach was first explained by Charaka. At the time of conception itself, this ‘prakriti’ or constitution gets determined and this is not changed. This consists of a series of physical, mental and behavioural traits. These determine whether a man belongs to ‘pitta prakriti’, ‘vatta prakriti’ or ‘kapha prakriti’. It is a physician’s job to determine this nature in every patient as it is essential for identifying the predisposition to diseases. Secondly, it is important to determine the course of the disease. In certain people, one disease has a rapid course while in others the disease lingers for weeks and months.

Most importantly, ‘prakriti’ determines response to treatment. The same treatment will not have identical effects on different situations and in different patients. Although the concept of ‘prakriti’ enables practitioners to identify treatments for their patients that are non-generic, it is not exactly customized. As one Charaka researcher, Dominik Wujastyk of Vienna University, feels: “…it’s quite a fine-grained diagnostic tool but it should not be confused with New Age ideas of treating the whole man and not just the symptoms.” Although composed in the ancient period, Charaka Samhita continued to be studied, and its ideas followed, by traditional practitioners right through the medieval period and into the nineteenth century. The emergence of ayurveda as a field of modern professional practice, however, dates back to the late nineteenth century when Indian scholars started to publish editions of Charaka Samhita.

This caught the attention of Western scholars and resulted in an eruption of Charakamania in medical and Indological circles in the West during the 1890s. That interest filtered back to a Western-educated and increasingly nationalist Indian elite, which was searching for aspects of its own history and tradition by which to counter British dominance. Gandhiji, though not himself an advocate of ayurveda he favoured naturopathy saw the readoption of Indian medical principles as a way to recover autonomy, or swaraj. He condemned Western medicine and doctors for undermining our self-control: “Doctors have almost unhinged us…I have indigestion, I go to a doctor, he gives me medicine, I am cured. I overeat again, I take his pills again.

Had I not taken the pills in the first instance, I would have suffered the punishment deserved by me and I would not have overeaten again. The doctor intervened and helped me to indulge myself…” It is not an easy task to enumerate all the contributions of Charaka in one essay. But we can at least remember some of his stellar contributions. Apart from his first-hand explanation of the basic physiological and anatomical fundamentals and principles of human life, he was the first physician to explain the concepts of digestion, metabolism, immunity and reproduction. Causes, pathology and management of various diseases were described extensively in ‘Charaka Samhita”.

Charaka propounded the threefold mechanism of body-mind-spirit and advocated that human life is based on the tripod of ‘Sattva” (mind), ‘Atma’ (spirit) and ‘Sharira’(body). He is therefore considered the original contributor of the modern day psychosomatic phenomena and mindfulness. Charaka introduced the concept of examination of disease and the diseased (Roga and Rogi pariksha) and his five-fold diagnostic techniques (Nidana panchaka) are successfully practiced by ayurveda doctors even today. Charaka is also credited with getting rid of blind beliefs and superstitions regarding occurrence of diseases and their treatment. He promulgated the rational treatment approach (Yuktivyapashya Chikitsa) in the management of diseases. Medical science was classified into eight specialized branches by Charaka.

Charaka’s compendium provided valuable advice to mankind for increasing longevity of life. The first chapter of Samhita is “Dirghamjivitiyam Adhyaya” meaning “Quest for Longevity”. Popular methods of “Rasayana” (Rejuvenation therapies) and “Vyadhikamatva” (Immuno-boosting therapies) are gifted by Charaka to mankind. We also get seasonal dietary and behavioural regimen (“Ritucharya”). Properties and therapeutic actions of thousands of herbs and formulations are described; these are still being used by ayurvedic practitioners. Popular ayurvedic formulations like ‘Chyavanprasha’, ‘Chitrakadi vati’, ‘Kansa Haritaki’, ‘Sitopladi churna’ and ‘Pushyanug churna’ are the contributions of Charaka. The devastating pandemic that we faced not so long ago was also foreseen by Charaka.

He warned us about such a pandemic and explained its causes, effects and do’s and don’ts. His term for the pandemic was ‘janpadodhwansa’. Although Western medicine has superseded all other branches of medicine and eclipsed the study and practice of ayurveda in today’s India, the stress and ill-health created by increasing wealth, rapid urbanization and aggressive competition for jobs at all levels of the economy have, ironically, helped Charaka’s ayurveda flourish.

As medical care becomes more and more like an assembly line in fiscally strapped health systems around the world and as doctors, in general, read generic codes for predispositions instead of looking at the table, the idea of staying away from the medicalindustrial complex can be compelling. One of the reasons why people turn to ayurveda is that Charaka’s system of treatment appears to promise them more recognition as individuals. At the same time, it places on each of us a greater responsibility for our health, enjoining us to live as Charaka teaches: with a little more judgement.

(The writer, a Ph D in English from Calcutta University and a freelance contributor, teaches English at the Government-sponsored Sailendra Sircar Vidyalaya, Shyambazar, Kolkata.)

 —Subham—

Tags- Charaka Samhita, Statesman Article, Manas das