ABSTRACT
The earliest Indian medical notions of health and disease are intimately linked to cosmology, ecology and religion. Whereas the common Western perspective views religion primarily as the intimate relationship of human-kind with a separate cosmic divinity, the various Indian religious traditions, primarily evident in the early Vedic and subsequent Hindu religion, place the individual not apart from the cosmic divine but co-existent in an integrated relationship within a much greater whole. It is in this framework a general medical ontology, which conceptually defines health as wholeness and disease as separation, arises in the ancient Vedic tradition and subsequently within the later Ayurveda system. 1 The notion of coherence and integration is, thus, the foundation of healing that unifies at both the personal and planetary level. Contrarily, fragmentation and separation of the individual from the environment and from the cosmos are the basis upon which disease originates. It is within this healing ontology that Ayurveda’s medical tradition is framed.
