A Boeing 747 rises off the runway at London’s Gatwick Airport. Gazing down at the rapidly diminishing carpet of cool green meadows, I feel my eyes mist over. It has been an exhilarating English summer, spent among beloved friends.
By contrast, walking through the hallway of New Delhi’s Indira Gandhi International Airport is like swimming through a custard of melted sun. The heat threatens to liquefy my eyeballs inside their sockets. Every nerve in my skull is dissolving. But, ah, it is so good to be back home.
In the airport lounge, my mother wraps her soft arms around me, and I can smell mustard oil and curry leaves in her hair. Curry and rice — yum! My stomach rumbles happily in anticipation of the wonderful lunch awaiting me at my mother’s home.
Each time I think back to that lunch, my heart fills with gratitude. Of course it was delicious, warm, welcoming. But what made it unforgettable was that it changed my life.
We had just sat down to lunch when the doorbell rang. An elderly man stood at the door, wearing a cotton kurta-pajama and an affable smile. My father introduced him as Vaidya Divakar Sharma, our new neighbor. Vaidya Sharma had stopped by to give my mother an herbal formulation for her cough, but at our insistence he stayed for lunch.
I was, of course, familiar with the word vaidya. It comes from the Sanskrit word vid, or “knowledge,” and means “one who knows.” I knew that Ayurvedic physicians were called vaidyas, but I had never met one before.
Over lunch, the vaidya remarked I looked more than exhausted from my journey; I looked unwell. “You look like you need some hydration therapy” were his exact words. “Really,” I smiled politely, helping myself to another ladleful of curry.
By evening, I was decidedly ill: fever, shivering, abdominal cramps, and a horrible burning sensation in my urine. I rushed to the nearest hospital, and they diagnosed me with acute urinary tract infection.
The doctor advised me to stay off coffee and spices, and to start a seven-day course of Norfloxacin. And, yes, “Drink lots of water,” he said.
Water. Hydration. The vaidya’s words floated back into my consciousness. How had he known?
The next morning, I downed my first dose of antibiotic and phoned Vaidya Sharma for a formal appointment.
Sitting in his verandah-turned-clinic, the vaidya wore starched snow-white clothes reminiscent of the Ganges-bathing, mantra-chanting sadhus of the Himalayan foothills. His wife, pleasant and petite, brought me a tall glass of cool rose-water sherbet.
I opened my mouth to tell the vaidya about my condition, but his hand waved me into silence. Sitting close to me, he placed three delicate fingers on my wrist, supporting it with the ball of his thumb. Then he leaned back and closed his eyes. It was as if, in that one silent minute, he was drawing on his lifetime of training to hear the inside story of my body.
When Vaidya Divakar Sharma opened his eyes, he asked me an unexpected question: “Have you had persistent throat problems?” I nodded, stunned. He was right, but how could holding my wrist tell him about my throat? And weren’t we supposed to be addressing a totally different region anyway?
As his fingers pressed slightly harder, his questions began to come more rapidly: “Do you tend to clench your teeth?” “Do you often miss lunch?” Then, most curiously — and accurately — “Do you have a tendency to suppress your real feelings most of the time?” I remember thinking what a Sherlock Holmes–like situation this was; here was a man I had barely met, piecing together fragments of my personality from clues I had no idea I was giving out.
Vaidya Sharma caught the questions as they darted from my eyes. Holmes would have chided Watson for his lack of perception. The vaidya only smiled. “It’s really quite simple. The human pulse is intimately communicative, and we vaidyas are trained to pick up its signals, both superficial and deep. Ah, the things your pulse can tell me — and even your face, your skin, your eyes! Some day, I shall sit and talk to you about it all.”
He then asked me to pull out a piece of paper and a pen. “Write down your prescription,” he said.
I opened my mouth to ask how I could write my own prescription, but decided against voicing the question. After all, nothing in this session was going quite conventionally.
The prescription Vaidya Sharma dictated to me read as follows:
• Give yourself a warm sesame-oil full-body massage before your daily bath.
• Drink a cup of warm water every half hour.
• Make generous use of coarsely pounded coriander seeds in cooking.
• Eat a spoonful of rose-petal preserve at noon.
• Practice twenty minutes of quiet reflection every morning and evening.
I hesitated, then asked, “And the medicines?” He smiled. “My dear girl, your pulse tells me you are blessed with very strong immunity. I feel certain that my prescription will heal your infection quite easily. But to make sure you don’t encounter these minor illnesses, use the medicines that are sitting on your spice rack, and those that are waiting inside your heart.”
The good vaidya’s words kindled in me a keen curiosity about Ayurveda. How I wished he would take the day off and talk to me about his methods, but his next patient was already at the door. I decided that my next-best source of information on this system of healing would be a good book. So off I went to the nearest public library, and fished out all the books on alternative healing that I could find.
I soon noticed a pattern: in most books, Ayurveda was sandwiched between aromatherapy and Chinese herbalism and defined as “a 5,000-year-old healing system from India that believes all human beings are combinations of three doshas — vata, pitta, and kapha — whose harmonious functioning is the key to good health.” The dosha charts looked like this:
VATA: thin build, dry skin, rough nails, restless movements, volatile nature
PITTA: strong pulse, hot urine, reddish skin, loud voice, exaggerated emotions
KAPHA: strong build, soft skin, thick and greasy hair, slow digestion, relaxed nature
My meeting with Vaidya Sharma had led me to expect something different — something simpler. These unfamiliar terms jarred. Anyway, I attempted a What’s-Your-Dosha quiz from one of the books. Yes, I was prone to rashes but, no, I didn’t love hot weather. Yes, I was generally calm but, no, I didn’t suffer frequent coughs and colds. So what did that make me? A jumbled mix of vata, pitta, and kapha. And armed with this extremely helpful information about myself, what was I supposed to do? I was clueless. It was time to see Vaidya Sharma again.
He heard me out, then shook his head. “Ah, yes, the doshas. It is true that you could call them the keystone of Ayurvedic healing. But unfortunately, in these impatient times, learning about the doshas has become a shortcut to understanding Ayurveda. I find that people quickly identify themselves as certain dosha types, then start treating their problems according to fixed dosha-balancing charts. But that is as unfair as watching the first few scenes of a film to write a complete review. Ayurveda is much more than the doshas, just as psychology is much more than Freud. That is why I don’t introduce people to the doshas right away; I urge them to live their lives the Ayurveda way.”
And what, I queried, was the Ayurveda way? “Learning how intimately your body and mind are connected, knowing what will make them work in harmony, and doing what you can to create that harmony. That is all there is to it.”
With those words, Vaidya Sharma invited me to dip my toes into the Ayurvedic ocean. For the next fourteen years, I plumbed its fascinating depths. Today, I emerge — refreshed, rejuvenated, and ready to share with you the golden nuggets I found.
1. How old is Ayurveda? No one really knows, but perhaps it is the oldest system of healing in the world. The Rig-Veda, India’s oldest philosophical text, describes Ayurvedic theory in great detail in its verses; it was written somewhere between 4500 and 1600 B.C.
2. Ayurvedic theory in its entirety was recorded as an upveda (subtext) of the Yajur-Veda, one of the four ancient philosophical texts (Rig-Veda, Sama-Veda, Atharva-Veda, and Yajur-Veda) of India. It was authored sometime between 3000 and 2000 B.C. In keeping with the vedic tradition, the Ayurvedic text is written in verse form and is not the original work of any one person. Instead, it is the codification of health traditions passed down orally over the centuries.
3. How did Ayurveda originate? As ill-health grew in the ancient world, the sages of that time became concerned. To seek a deep understanding of human health and well-being, they held a convocation. Their chief, Sage Bharadwaj, sought the answers while the rest of the group sat deep in meditation. Together, the synergy of these great minds created a sublime moment of revelation that Sage Bharadwaj recognized as the very essence of Ayurveda. This is the story of Ayurveda as recorded in the ancient vedic texts.
4. Legend apart, it is Sage Charaka who is widely credited as being Ayurveda’s founding father. He is said to have been the world’s first physician to describe multiple sclerosis, Alzheimer’s disease, myasthenia gravis, Parkinson’s disease, and many other well-known conditions.
5. Sage Susruta, said to be the world’s first surgeon, is credited as being one of Ayurveda’s principal healers along with Charaka. He described the month-by-month development of the fetus in the womb. His knowledge was corroborated many centuries later by modern science using state-of-the-art diagnostic instruments. For instance, Susruta says, “During the third month of pregnancy, all the sense organs and all the limbs emerge simultaneously. When the sense organs manifest and the latent mind activates, there is a throbbing sensation in the heart.” Modern science now knows this is true.