ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on food, which is an ideal entry point to examine how systems of medicine theorize the relation between body and mind because food is related to both of them. While any system of medicine may accept the importance of food, the problem lies in how exactly it postulates the relation between food, body and mind. In the Indian medical tradition, the question of the relation between body and mind will probably not be asked in a direct and dichotomous manner. Medical traditions in the Indian subcontinent are many; they include regional variants of a master template and autonomous, local and specialized forms of medical practice. The food-body relation mediated by work is to be understood in the context of their common existence in ecology. The chapter highlights how a non-dualist episteme conceptualizes body and mind and what kind of social organization of medical knowledge non-dualist episteme would give rise to.
