The Echo of Ashta Bindu

Every time another scientist or physician writes about man’s new discoveries of medical science, I stop to wonder why Sanskrit-knowing Ayurvedic physicians remain quiet. 

Do they not live on this planet? Why do they remain unwilling to reveal to the world that evidence validating these ‘new’ discoveries were written 2000+ years earlier by Caraka or Sushruta using metaphors of nature, and keen observation of jungle animals, patients, and livestock?  
Are they not confident with what they are reading? Do they not understand or perhaps not believe the science they practice? Are they busy in meditation, self-preparation, and personal change? Do they not trust their prowess of English? Are they just wounded and mute from not getting into MD/MBBS medical school? 
 

I am still perplexed at the journalistic silence of the talented, articulate teachers who are BAMS physicians.
 

In the past two years, a dozen books have been released in English about the new discoveries of the immune system, “a global adventure spanning 60 years,” writes one. Some focus on cancer; some ponder our immune system’s attack of our own DNA; others scrutinize the basic science underlying our capacity to sense what is self and what is non-self.   

All are met with praise in the leading magazines, both in the west, and also in the anglo-worshipping periodicals that the urban Indian cultures are now embracing.  The Times of India, Mint, and The Hindu will adopt articles in their health, science and medicine sections announcing these breakthroughs about T-cells, cancer receptors, HIV proteins, or gut bacteria cytokines. On a nearby page,  someone near the word jumble, sudoku, and horoscopes, they will profile a sleek, stylized yogini telling us of ancient health remedies, claiming India’s keystone in the pursuit of health. 
 

Scientists, or at least the shareholders investing in them, understand the need for skillful unraveling of their highly technical language of science and medicine into common English. They have invented ‘medical writers,’ separate from teachers and educators.  But somehow, no one on this side of the forest has understood the need for investing in and training skillful Sanskrit-speaking, ayurvedic physician-cum-medical writers.  If more could be fostered, there is a world of twines of knowledge waiting to be unraveled. 
 

The immune system is beautifully categorized and detailed in Ayurvedic texts, encoded in a language that understood the most powerful essence of our selves, Ojas, and the relationship between immune cells and the brain, which has celebratedly been discovered by scientists recently.  Without microscopes, the ancients used macroscopes. Without electricity, they used sunlight and fire.  They observed keenly and watched Nature reveal its laws to them, through plants and planets, stars and shells, animals and insects. They watched Nature’s patterns again and again, of transformation, of movement, and of stability. They named these forces, never needing an apple to fall on their head, or jumping naked out of a bathtub of displaced water. 
 

After our food has been fully digested, subjected through all the tests of fire and heat transfer energy that the body can muster, the essence that remains goes to feed a subset of the protective shield we call apara Ojas. In addition, at the time of birth, somewhere near our heart zone, called the hrdaya, are the ashta bindu (ashta=eight, bindu=dot, drop) eight drops of essence, called para Ojas, that define who we are and are essential for life.  They circulate through ten canals near the hrdaya and move throughout the body. These eight drops define us, says Caraka, an eerie pre-echo of the same immunology concept espoused today as immunological tolerance, developed by Arab-British scientist and skin-grafter, Peter Medawar. 
 

But, Ojas is not simply a bunch of drops and fluid circulating through our body. It is also an energy field that defines us as separate from the world around us.  It keeps things from invading, even when they live in, or on, us – like our gut bacteria or skin flora.  Ojas also influences the physical blueprint given to us by our parents, through a subtle potential field known by prana-tejas-ojas, guiding our body’s ability to develop stability and structure through tissues and organs.  
 

In addition, says Charaka in his 30th of 120 chapters of his tome, in the essence of the embryo is Ojas. It was there when the embryo first formed, and it is present as reproductive tissue and in the blood, when the plasma forms. At the time of formation of each new organ, ojas is present in its own form. It is present in all stages, and yet it is separate. This poetic language is easily interpreted by every physician as DNA-triggered molecules, perhaps MHC antigen development on the bilayer of a cell membrane. It includes the philosophical, materialistic, and physiologic concept of knowing self vs. non-self. In other chapters relating to specific diseases, he outlines how they deplete the Ojas, and which herbs, foods, and activities will replenish Ojas. 
 

My physician colleagues ask: well, what do you use and how can I replicate that? If it is irreproducible, it is bad science.  But we are learning now that science actually realizes it is bad science to give the same medicine to everyone. They are now ‘inventing’ individualized medicine, personalized medicine, and ‘the concept of the uniqueness of the individual.’ Nature’s reality in giving us compatibility genes and epigenomic uniqueness are their ‘new’ discoveries. 
 

When will ayurvedic physicians, who know Sanskrit and Samhitas far better than I, speak out to these ‘new discoverers’ who take the Nobel Prize each year and dominate the country’s reservoir of research funds? When will they show the world that there are elegant clues to immunology, wrapped as twine, which require both a Sanskrit scholar and a molecular biologist to unravel?
 

When I was 14, I had found a tunnel where I could go in my mind and see undescribable light. I thought it was uncharted territory, my brain’s unique ability. There, I had pondered the space between the electron and the nucleus of an atom and ‘discovered’ the concept of Space and subatomic space-time zones. My high school mind felt so betrayed when I discovered that post-modern physicists, which I had decidedly not learned from my teacher, had already described subatomic particles and bosons.  ... Perhaps this is why western scientists dare not delve into the Sanskrit texts: nothing would be theirs.