Apr 8, 2020
Have our ancestors have “seen” Corona like viruses before?
If Novel Cornona 2019 is an evolution, could it not be that our human race has seen similar virus threats in the past 5000 years of human existence? If our ancestors have dealt with “vishanu” (poisonous elements) that have wiped out “Janpads” (territory?), surely, they would have written about this in our ancient texts. What do our texts tell us that we may have forgotten or overlooked as we moved to western education and science in the last 200 years in India?
To explore these thoughts, we organised a zoom based discussion with 3 of the leading Sanskrit scholars from the Mithila region, a region famed for its scholarship of Shashtras, Vedic knowledge, Sanskrit texts for thousands of years (and in many sense paying a price for its over dependence on this knowledge as the new world knowledge left it far behind in economic development and modernity). We also chose the Mithila scholars as we had access to a Facebook community of about 130,000 mithila-origin people who would be naturally interested in this topic (MaithiliMachaan group on facebook — https://www.facebook.com/groups/maithilimachaan/).
What ensued was a fascinating discussion with citations from Rig-veda, Yajur-veda, Atharvaveda, Panini, Sushruta Samhita, Kautilya’s Arthashastra, Charak Samhita and Puranas!!. Our scholars made these important points:
i. Our ancestors have “seen” such viruses before. Viruses are born with creation and are a natural evolution. Viruses which have “felled men as strong as horses”.
ii. Such viruses have caused great damage and killed many people (entire Janpads were wiped out)
iii. Such “adrishya” (unseen) elements can spread via air, water, touch, food
iv. Our texts mention both medicinal, devotional and life habits that may prevent / protect from future occurrences
v. Our focus in past 200 years on the religious / spiritual content of our texts has reduced the value of the scientific wisdom in these texts and their practical use. Devoid of this credibility for practical modern life, we have lost trust in their wisdom and treat it only as “Godly” material.
Some suggested actions by our scholars based on knowledge in our texts:
1. Pray to Rudra. He is the first doctor / healer of the world (drank all the poison that was killing the world). Pray to Durga / Shakti — harini of mahamaari.
2. Stay clean — was hands before every meal/ after going out (WHO recommendation). Avoid touch (sparsh dosh) — think of this as social distancing
3. Stay tolerant — Sanyam — Lockdown is a form of social Sanyam
4. Drugs based on KalpaSthana
Check out the hour long video at — https://youtu.be/bK00JJqFhAc
(This is in Maithili, my mother tongue. A summary will be published in English / Hindi soon. Stay tuned).
