One of the most amazing nonagenarian ayurveda vaidyas (traditional healers) I’ve had the privilege of knowing once told me something that I could never forget.
In a moment of visible anguish, he turned to me and said, “My medicines are working more slowly these days because the food you eat is no longer food. The milk you drink is not milk. If you had eaten better food, I would have cured you faster.”
It was a powerful penny drop moment that viscerally showcased the interplay between food and health systems.
Traditional medicine treatment rests on three pillars: Ahara (food), Vihara (behavioral regulation), and Aushadi (medicine). Medicine is one leg of the tripod. When food quality collapses, the tripod loses a leg.
When the herbs themselves are degraded — essential oils stripped from pepper before it reaches the market, soils so depleted the plant cannot biosynthesize what it once did — the tripod loses a second leg.
The medicine carries the full burden of what was designed to be a shared load. The framework quietly fails.
In Part I, Dr. A.V. Balasubramanian — co-founder of CIKS, trained biophysicist, student of the Krishnamacharya lineage — traced the philosophical foundations of Vrikshayurveda (Ancient Indian Plant Science) and its central institutional problem: What do we do when the texts survive, but the practitioner chain that once translated them into farm practice doesn’t?
Part II moves from the philosophical to the operational.
We explored the immediate low-hanging opportunities for entrepreneurs. We grappled with the infrastructural gap that comes in the way of better adoption of traditional sciences. We mapped where modern technologies could complement traditional systems.
Although I hate takeaways, here is an edited transcript of the conversation for those who want to go into the greyness and nuance we explored. Always remember. The Map is not the Territory.
Venky: I want to start with a fundamental question about the relationship between Ayurveda and Vrikshayurveda. We understand that some of the underlying principles are common to both humans and plants. But I also want to explore where the similarities end and the divergences begin.
Dr.AVB: At a very fundamental level, the basic principles of worldview are shared in terms of the composition of matter and how we understand biological change. The Panchamahabhuta siddhant, the idea that all matter is composed of five Mahabhutas (Akasha Ether, Vayu Air, Agni Fire, Jala Water and Prithvi Earth) and Tridosha, that all prakriti (Nature) is constituted by a balance of Vata (The Energy of Movement), Pitta (The Energy of Transformation), and Kapha (The Energy of Stability) is shared by all life forms, be it humans or animals or plants.
However, when it comes to practical applications, the situation is very different.
The practical goal in Ayurveda is to help someone in good health maintain it, irrespective of changes in the environment and help them come out of it and restore proper balance, if a person is struck with disease or disorder. For that work, apart from the basic texts, you have an enormous amount of principles spelled out in commentaries and a living body of practitioners.
Nobody can read a text like Charaka Samhita and simply get into practice. There is a whole lot that links the text to the actual prayogam (usage).
There is no institutionally trained body of scholars well-versed in Vrikshayurveda. There are hundreds of scholars across India deeply knowledgeable in Charaka Samhita, Sushruta Samhita, Agastya Gunapadam, Siddha and Unani texts. They have read commentaries, written commentaries, translated many of those into practice. We are not able to find any such body of scholars in Vrikshayurveda.
Venky: Is Ministry of Ayush1 also not able to do this?
Dr. AVB: Ayush didn't even consider it part of their mandate. They woke up later and said they have to do something about it. At the fundamental conceptual level, in the case of a human you can say that among the building blocks there are seven dhatus — Rasa (Plasma/Lymph), Rakta (Blood), Mamsa (Muscle), Majja (Bone Marrow & Nervous Tissue), Meda (Fat/Adipose), Asthi (Bones and Cartilage), Shukra (Reproductive Tissue)
Nobody has clearly spelled this out in Vrikshayurveda.
We know we cannot map those exact seven dhatus into plants. There are some things approximately corresponding, but nothing with a clear one-to-one. So that makes it quite a challenge to translate certain principles in Vrikshayurveda texts into actual prayogam (usage)
It is strange that somebody like me — not really a practitioner of Ayurveda — got interested and strayed into this. Sometimes I create a particular yukti, a strategy, for treating some plant disease. I voice it to a Bradman class Ayurvedic scholar, a real Acharya and ask what do they think. They would be very interested and say that logically, the chain of reasoning you set out is flawless. But you have to test it out in practice. We have no basis to say whether it is right or not till you put it to actual practice.
Venky: Let us say 150 years ago, somebody in Varanasi or from South India, wakes up and says, “I want to start my journey to become a Vrikshayurveda Acharya”. Could you speculate on what that journey would have been — in the colonial times, or prior to British rule, whichever you feel comfortable with? Sometime back, if there is somebody with a genuine interest — I recently met this gentleman who is calling Vrikshayurveda Agro Ayurveda, Ravi Singh Choudary, who is just attempting to learn this and go deeper — how could he become an Acharya today?
Dr. AVB: I don’t think Vrikshayurveda had a parampara (tradition) of that kind. Almost any Ayurvedic text that tells you how the text came down to you will mention a Guru Parampara — he taught it to Indra, Indra taught it to so-and-so, and through a lineage it came down to you. A similar thing you find in yoga texts like Hatha Yoga Pradipika. The Vrikshayurveda texts we have encountered do not specify a similar Guru Parampara.
So 150 years ago, if somebody woke up, it is very unlikely he would say he wants to become a Vrikshayurveda Acharya, as the term itself would not be there in his mind. That does not mean the expertise doesn’t exist.
But unlike Jyotisha — where there would be court scholars, folk practitioners, people who do Kuri Solrathu, various levels from whom you could learn, and then specializations like Nadi Jyotisha, Grantha Jyotisha, Fala Jyotisha and the calculation aspects of Siddhanta — Vrikshayurveda never had that kind of a parampara (tradition). It is not quite clear to me if it ever did.
Having said this, I must also say that Vrikshayurveda is extremely vast. Even though it has been a 30–35 year journey and we have explored various things, there are lots of byways which are fascinating that we did not pursue.
We preferred to stick to pathways with practical utility. Can it help crack the problem of certain pests that are proving very difficult by chemical methods, can it help improve the quality and quantity of harvest of certain crops? There are enormous other questions in Vrikshayurveda that I have parked. For example, Vrikshayurveda has some fascinating things about forecasting weather — short-term, medium-term, long-term. mind-boggling things. I have parked that, maybe even for a future janma (rebirth)
Venky: Few years ago, one of my favourite Ayurveda Acharyas, whom I consulted for my family, once said in a moment of anguish: my medicines today are working slowly because the kind of food you eat has become rotten. The kind of milk you drink is not milk. If you had eaten better food, my medicine would have cured you much faster. It is a statement I remembered for a very long time. It is also a fundamental question especially with the kind of climate change we are seeing — we are seeing a lot of nutrient collapse in plant life.
Are you seeing any sort of shift in the way some of these medicines are prepared? When you talk about barks and bringing in these plant materials — is that also affecting the performance of these formulations over time?
Dr. AVB: I will communicate two things.
One, at the the larger level, why there is such an obsession about food alongside medicine. In the framework of Ayurveda, at a physical level, if you are in harmony and good balance, you are in good health. Anything that triggers an imbalance is what disease is. To restore this balance, there are three pillars: ahara, vihara, and aushadi — food, behavioral changes, and medicine.
If I have a certain Kapha aggravation, my vaidya would tell me: you should be off curds completely, or at least at night; avoid refrigerated and reheated foods. That is the chunk of advice about food. Regarding behavior, he might say: absolutely no sleep in the daytime, that will just aggravate your Kapha; do bathe in cold water. Then the third aspect is medicine. Medicine is really one third of the armory. So when your vaidya says in anguish — with this kind of food, what can I do?
You are like a two-legged man, limping on one leg.
Second, on the quality of herbs, I have a famous Siddha vaidya friend in Chennai who told me: If you look at the properties of spices spelled out in Siddha texts, like Pepper and Turmeric, those properties are so fantastic that if you are regularly having them along with a regular South Indian diet, it should boost your health. But the quality of herbs in the market is very poor. A lot of people who put pepper out in the market have extracted certain essential oils from it first before it gets to the market. He was investing time, energy, and money to create his own plantations to harvest herbs. I asked why, given he was already running an Ayurveda college and Siddha college. He said: unless I invest in the quality of drugs, they are simply not working.
So the quality of herbs is one thing. And if you cannot regulate your food in the manner that was once possible, it badly affects how the medicine works. Even if someone comes and symptomatically improves with medicine, to put them in proper balance in terms of restoring the three doshas, you have to have activity at all three levels.
I will share one anecdote about vihara (behavioural regulation).
Several years back in Pune, there was a friend who came for a meeting where there was also a vaidya. This friend was an extremely intense person — the kind where if you sit near them, you feel they are radiating something. He had a horrible digestion problem. The vaidya felt his pulse and asked a strange question: Is there any long-standing habit that you gave up very abruptly? The man looked shocked and said yes. He had been a chain smoker for thirty years, but someone who can take an oath and live through it. Once, in a group of friends, somebody challenged him. He took a puff and said: This is the last puff.
I am not going to smoke anymore. A thirty-year-old habit changed abruptly. The vaidya told him he had made a mistake there. You may have the determination, but your body is acclimatized to certain habits. There is a stepwise way you should have gotten out of that habit. Because you did it abruptly, your body is not able to adjust. So this shows it is not just medicine, not just food — these habits are very important.
Venky: Today, a large part of farmers have inculcated certain habits, thanks to the influences of Western agronomy imposed through retailers and others. Seed treatment has become a very serious activity. Are there Vrikshayurveda practices that modern agronomy has rediscovered? I am just taking seed treatment as one example.
Dr. AVB: The classic example is neem. Around 1950/60s, neem as a biopesticide or bio-agent was hardly known in the West. There is a folk story that the India International Centre in Delhi has some magnificent neem trees. Somebody visiting saw that got curious and pursued it. Neem has been used in India since time immemorial for pest control, crop protection, and so many things. The West became conscious of its potential and began to investigate it. Over a period of time, they did what the West does best with herbs — they fractionated it and asked: which particular component seems to be giving the bioactivity in terms of pesticidal properties? They zeroed upon azadirachtin.
People started manufacturing CNFs — commercial neem formulations — with varying concentrations of azadirachtin. The West has done this repeatedly with so many herbs. Sarpagandha was a herb used traditionally in Ayurveda. Fractionation led to the alkaloid reserpine.
The neem story does not end there. 10-15 years ago, there was a paper that looked at the LD50 value of various commercial neem formulations.
You would expect that as the azadirachtin concentration goes higher, it becomes more potent, so the LD50 value decreases. What was found is that beyond a point, it does not decrease — it seems to increase. We picked up azadirachtin, went on concentrating that molecule, and beyond a particular point it loses its efficacy.
One possible answer — which I think should be checked out — is that the effect of neem oil when applied is not just because of a single molecule azadirachtin, but because of a synergistic effect of a family of molecules. As you concentrate azadirachtin more and more, you lose some of the other substances and lose a certain balance. This is precisely the kind of approach that an arka or an asava carries — a family of substances in relationship, at a formulation level that does not require corrosive solvents, high temperature, or high pressure. It is much more moderate-scale friendly. So it is within the reach of a lot of people.
Venky: Let’s take chilli thrips. It is a big challenge, especially for viruses, traditional agronomy has a bit of a hands-off approach. You have to keep the plant healthy, and if it is caught, you have to only clear it off. So does Vrikshayurveda offer an alternative in these kinds of contexts? I know all the questions are still coming from a very conventional viewpoint. What are the areas where modern agronomy has a hands-off approach, and are there areas where Vrikshayurveda says this is something we cannot treat? Like, even in modern health science, immunological conditions or inflammation conditions — there is still a lot of research and complexity evolving there. I am just trying to bring these two approaches in contrast.
Dr. AVB: In the philosophical framework of Ayurveda, if you look at health, disease, and curing, disease may have three possible approaches. Sadhya — you can cure it. Krichra sadhya — with difficulty you can cure it. Asadhya — you cannot cure it, you can only manage the symptoms to some extent. For certain patients, Ayurveda may take the view that within the framework of our Shastra, we have no cure. We will look at the comfort level of the patient, see if we can manage them in reasonable health. That recognition is itself part of the framework.
I recently experienced this with an 86-year-old relative who fell into a coma. His close family decided to keep him at home so he could pass in peace, surrounded by the chanting of the Vishnu Sahasranama. He passed away a few days later. Sometime after, his treating doctor learned that my relative had premium health insurance. Visibly offended, the doctor told me he would have taken an 'aggressive approach.' When I asked what he meant, he suggested an exploratory operation. I was appalled. For an 86-year-old man whose family had accepted his time had come, what purpose would an exploratory surgery serve? The stark contrast between our family's acceptance and the doctor's reaction perfectly illustrates the gap between a system that recognizes asadhya and one that does not.
More than thirty years back, we had one of our early experiences at Theosophical Society campus in Chennai. It is a 300-plus acre plot. There was a grove of mango trees very badly affected. The guard and superintendent of that time was my high school classmate. He said: we don’t believe in using harsh chemicals — do you think you can do anything with the approach of Vrikshayurveda? So we went and took a look. Our diagnosis was that certain branches were very badly affected — they had to be cut off and burnt. Other branches were mildly affected.
The prescription for those was two things: make a mixture of neem and Pungam oil with soap solution and spray it, and fumigate it with fumes of Daruharitra and Vacha. This really arrested the further spread of the disease. The plants put forth new and fresh shoots and they got a yield that year — not a normal yield, a subdued yield, but the plants were revived.
This is possible because it was a tree, and you could distinguish affected from unaffected parts. If it is a smaller plant in a grove, about 10–20% of the plants may be very badly affected and may have to be sacrificed. You can only learn a lesson for the future — at the time of planting, pre-treat in this way.
Ayurveda also recognizes that disease goes through various stages: the purva rupa, the emerging phase when symptoms are not yet quite manifest; then symptoms are manifest, then strongly manifest, then full-blown. At what stage you catch it makes all the difference.
Venky: Was there a particular community that had ownership of this knowledge? In the Tamil context, the vellalar community had a big roles. Did they actively own it, or was the healer a separate community that took charge? How was that ownership structured?
Dr. AVB: Sometimes if you look at particular branches of knowledge or shastra that work with restricted materials — stone masonry, wood, jewelry — there is only a small specialized community who needs to work with it. Plants and agriculture involve a huge portion of the Indian population. They interact with plants because they cultivate food, harvest it, and use plants as medicine. So knowledge of a certain kind regarding agriculture and plants is very widely spread — it is not the prerogative of any particular community.
There have also been local specialists. Even today in many parts of India you would see: this family gives treatment for jaundice; there are traditional bone-setters, not college-trained, but a well-established tradition; there are visha chikitsa specialists. Ayurvedic texts will even say what stage of maturity of a particular plant you should harvest and cook it. There is a sloka which says: Vatakam komalam pathyam, kushmandam komalam visham. If you use brinjal when it is tender, it is beneficial; if you use it when very ripe, it is not wholesome. With white pumpkin, it is the other way — you should use it properly ripened. But you don’t have to read an Ayurvedic text to know that. Any person who knows how to cook would know this. That type of knowledge is very widely dispersed.
What is more specialized is eco-specific cultivation knowledge — people along coastal regions have preserved certain varieties of paddy tolerant of salinity; Basmati is cultivated at high altitudes in certain places. There is a lot of niche-specific knowledge dispersed among the people who live in those locations.
Venky: For a knowledge system to be alive, it must also create newer forms of knowledge. I was in Pune recently and met an Ayurveda vaidya, Dr. Yogesh Bendale, who has come up with newer rasayans treating various forms of cancer — he was talking about research on prostate cancer documented in a few journals.
Are there newer forms of formulation that can be created based on the principles of Vrikshayurveda that have not been spelled out in any text? Are you looking at creating newer formulations just based on the principles?
Dr. AVB: I can give various examples. Take Ayurvedic or Patyashastra texts — they talk about cuisine, properties of various preparations, kanji and various other preparations. Sometime back an Ayurvedic physician wrote an article called “Custard: An Ayurvedic Study.” Custard is not a classical preparation known in traditional kitchens. But the materials of which it is made and the process can be described and analyzed. More than thirty years back, a couple of us edited a monograph called “Ayurvedic Principles of Food and Nutrition” in two parts. I invited him to contribute this as a chapter.
Based on Panchamahabhuta Siddhant and Tridosha Vichat, he analyzed what custard does in terms of Vata, Pitta, Kapha, and the dhatus — who it is helpful for, who it is contraindicated for. This entire analysis was performed based on Ayurvedic principles applied to something completely new.
Other formulations — kashaya, arka — you can use them with newer materials, and people are continuously doing it. One of the most interesting examples: Vinay Pereira recorded that more than 25–30 years back in the Karjat tribal area in Maharashtra, the tribals were using the seed of Acacia auriculiformis.
Introduced by the forest department, this non-native pea-pod is used to catch fish without killing them. Locals dam a gently flowing stream and add a paste made from the seeds, which temporarily stupefies the fish. They float to the surface for easy picking, and the rest revive once the stones are removed. What is truly fascinating is the rapid local adaptation: tribal communities independently discovered this use within just a few years of the seed arriving from Australia, where this technique is completely unknown.
There are instances of older substances being put to newer use, and newer substances being put to newer use also. There is a lot of creativity in the sense that the method that is there is being applied to so many classical substances and so many newer substances — it may even include synthetic substances; there are instances of that.
Venky: Today, on a countrywide scale, our cotton yields have plummeted drastically. We’ve lost the native varieties of cotton. Some of them are still being revived. If we were to come up with a research agenda based on what are the most pressing problems that have to be addressed in Indian agriculture, from the point of view of Vrikshayurveda, what would be the top three areas you would prioritize?
Dr. AVB: Strategically, I must say this: Vrikshayurveda is something people may still slot as exotic, some kid’s bright idea, we don’t know if it really works. It badly needs a few demonstrations where we can say, “Look, this can crack certain problems”.
Cotton is is cultivated in just about 5–6% of our total land. But it guzzles an enormous amount of pesticides and fungicides disproportionate to that. To build belief in Vrikshayurveda, we need to be challenged with problems to which we can actually offer solutions. There are certain high-value crops — plantation crops, spices, things with high market value — where Vrikshayurveda can make an intervention and show some success that may draw attention to it.
Seed health is very important. If you can concentrate quite a bit on seed health for key and important crops, that has an impact all the way to the harvest stage. It makes the plant more robust, less prone to disease attack, less prone to pests, gives it intrinsic vitality.
The second is soil fertility . Aristotle once said that soil is the stomach of the plant. There are many lines of thinking available in Vrikshayurveda, starting from how do you prepare the soil over a period of time and in medium and short terms how we can enrich the soil.
Third, Ayurveda has the idea of Rasayana, a rejuvenator that can help improve the quantity and quality of so many tissues in the body and really boost general health.
The Rasayana approach to plant crops is something that should be seriously examined. And in the case of Vrikshayurveda, unlike Ayurveda, we have the great advantage that the kinds of experiments you perform can be very varied — you are treating plants. The ethical considerations for constituting a trial group are correspondingly so much easier. We also have an entire hundred-plus years of an Ayurvedic industry dealing with plants and processes of preparation that we can build upon.
Venky: This is also a point I want to bring in — it is a bit of a double bind. Today, a lot of people are productizing live microbial solutions. I remember a very funny incident where I was at a stall for a biological product and they were selling this microbial solution. A farmer comes in and quietly asks: this is a microbial solution? Yes, yes. Then the farmer asks: if it is a microbial solution, it is live — how can it be bottled? It is a question that often trips up modern-day approaches, because today, whether we like it or not, farmers have become in some sense habituated to traditional solutions that promise very quick results and are easy to handle. It always seems like the effort is higher with alternatives. How do we lower that effort, while not compromising on the principles?
Dr. AVB: “I think that is a very fair point. A century ago, within a traditional rural lifestyle, it might not have been such a big challenge to say: prepare this over a period of days, dilute it, and spray it. It is much like Kalamkari painting, where the dye takes a full 30-day process to mature. But once it is finished, the result is fantastic. I have a beautiful Kalamkari painting in my living room that has been exposed to sunlight—sometimes diffuse, sometimes bright—for about fourteen years now, and it has not faded. The color deepens like wine maturing in secondary fermentation. It is a slow, deliberate process.
But we must recognize that lifestyles have fundamentally changed. A hundred years back, people hand-pounded millets; today, nobody does that. On the one hand, there has to be user-friendliness at the farm level today. On the other hand, we must also realize that the ‘easy access’ of modern technological solutions has only been made possible by enormous state investments in backbone systems and infrastructure.”
Today, if you move just 50 kilometers outside Chennai, a plastic pot is somehow more viable than a traditional mud pot. How can this be? For a mud pot, the raw materials, the skills, and the tradition are all locally available. For a plastic pot, the feedstock comes from a refinery that might be thousands of miles away. It only seems more viable because the government has invested tens of thousands of crores into the necessary infrastructure—transport networks, refineries, and roads. If you question this disparity, people often ask, 'Are you trying to stop all progress?' We are not trying to stop progress. But we must recognize that a specific development paradigm has made certain technologies artificially viable while making others enormously less so.
Instead of waiting for the day when the state finally reinvests heavily in Vrikshayurveda, we have to get started ourselves. We must take those initial baby steps to prove that this is a viable path for development. We already have the foundational strength and experience to take those steps right now."
Venky: There are a lot of modern entrepreneurs who are willing to experiment. Agriculture universities are increasingly becoming privately owned. Kaveri Seeds launched their own Kaveri University with an ex-VC coming from the government institutions. I think there is a lot of emphasis on what kind of private research can be done, which is slightly more market-focused but can easily be taken to market and tested.
What are some of the immediate low-hanging fruit that someone could try out, that could be of good help for somebody who wants to get started?
Dr. AVB: Storage forms of biopesticides are promising. Seed treatments are another major opportunity. The advantage is that many of these approaches are transferable across crops and ecological contexts. We have an enormous database of knowledge, both in the textual literature and in the people’s knowledge.
Seed health has a lot of potential. If you have seeds with good health and vitality, it can result in crops that are much more healthy, getting better yield, much less susceptible to pests and diseases. We have done preliminary work with fumigation and treatment of seeds. It has been very promising. We are exploring how these treatments can have a prolonged shelf life.
Rasayana approach of Ayurveda for plants and plant health has tremendous value. Some of these special substances — people have spoken of major rasayanas for sharpening intellect or buddhi, and there are other kinds of rasayana that may be helping in various other types of functions. You can challenge the idea of Rasayana with the problems you have to solve in Vrikshayurveda.
Some of this knowledge is already widespread in our people. It is dormant. I don’t think it has been destroyed or done away with. A lot of it is dormant and capable of springing up in an atmosphere where people are willing to look at it, willing to think about it, and you are not going to be ridiculed just because you are voicing or talking about it.
There is also an enormous amount of data lying around. The Honey Bee magazine published by Anil Gupta over the last 30 years has humongous amounts of data drawing on farmers’ experiences from various parts of India. There are a whole lot of prescriptions, descriptions, and texts of Vrikshayurveda.
Several years back, I made a feeble attempt — which I couldn’t complete — to set up what in those days we called an expert system to capture all this data. Today, with the type of tools we have with artificial intelligence and LLMs, there are lots of possibilities. Supposing somebody comes and asks about a yellow hairy caterpillar problem on rice, if I don’t have anything readily available for that specifically, as a human being I’d say, “Maybe I have something that is somewhat close in terms of its habitat, behavior, or appearance”. Or I have something for yellow hairy caterpillar, but for some other crop that bears some resemblance?. Today, an LLM can be programmed to do this kind of analogical reasoning.
There is also so much in Vrikshayurveda about weather predictions — short-term, medium-term, long-term — how to use plants, how to use insects, how to use meteorological phenomena. Recently there is a new term doing the rounds called ethno meteorology.
Benjamin Orlove and his colleagues from the University of Rochester were looking at some peculiar traditions in the Peruvian Andes. Every season, the elders take a look at the stars, make some calculations, and tell the farmers whether they can plant in the normal season or there has to be some change. He published a Nature paper showing that this is a folk method by which they are able to figure out whether it is going to be an El Niño year.
More than thirty years back, I visited the Karjat tribal area in Maharashtra. In a heavy rainfall season, some surrounding communities had planted and lost a lot of the rice crop. But the tribal community I spoke to said: our elders could foresee that this was going to be a heavy rainfall season, so we were prepared. I said: how could they foresee it? They said: no single indication is entirely decisive, but you have to look at a collection of indications. Every season before rain, you observe where the birds make their nests. Are the crows making their nest in the dense foliage close to the trunk, or in the thinner foliage farther away from the trunk? That is one indication. A set of indications like this, put together and synthesized with a yukti gives you an idea of what is going to happen.
Venky: I have heard this from other farmers too on where the nests are made. When owls are spotted in a farm, I’ve heard farmers correlate it with the level of soil fertility. There’s a UK-based company called Chirrup which has made small monitors that record biodiversity sounds, bird sounds in a particular farm. They make an estimate of the ecological health of the farm. A lot of modern approaches can be interlinked with some of these traditional approaches. And especially the meteorological aspect — a lot of algorithms can be built around these. Are there other plant indicators that people have tested?
Dr. AVB: There are examples from Gujarat. If a particular plant flowers in a particular season, that is a signal as to whether the onset of monsoon is going to be normal, or whether there is going to be a change.
When we look at all of this, we need to look at it with an open mind but also non-judgmentally. Though we belong to the same culture, much of our system of upbringing and education have alienated many of us from the way things are done in our own tradition.
Very often there is this idea that people were secretive, didn’t share things, a lot of knowledge decayed because people didn’t even teach it to their children. What we actually see is that one of the underlying factors in many people who hold traditional knowledge — in Vaithyam and so many other things — is that they have moral considerations about who they will and will not teach it to. Whether that person deserves it or not.
I know some people who say: I have this powerful medicine for jaundice. I am not going to teach it to my son. That fellow is commercially minded — he will only use it for making money. I once got into an interesting discussion and challenged this person: if you teach it to nobody, this knowledge will die with you. And I found the most astounding answer.
This idea that a human being is the sole repository and carrier of knowledge — that knowledge dies with him and is born with him — is the height of arrogance.
If a human being needs a piece of knowledge, the Great Spirit holds that knowledge, and it will come and descend upon them. It is a strong moral position. There can be no logical argument against it. It is the height of arrogance to say that I generate knowledge.
This is also manifest in a very interesting experience we had more than twenty-five years ago. As part of a study commissioned to look at how some traditional Ayurveda industries are working, some excellent MBA people analyzed one successful Ayurvedic company. They said that they are doing very well, quality of products is fine, but their product mix is wrong. If you look at your total income, about 50% of your preparation gives you 70% of your profits. You should cut out about twenty-five of these preparations and you will be much more profitable.
So this family looked at what they wanted eliminated. The products the MBA team wanted eliminated was a medicine called Karna Bindu, an ear drop; a tooth preparation; niche formulations for a small range of conditions — these are products where hardly one person in many would come to a vaidya with that complaint.
But the family said that we are not here just to make a profit. It is our dharma, responsibility to give a complete portfolio of medicines that a vaidya can use in practice. If I cut those preparations in the name of maximizing business, the vaidyas who are dependent on me are deprived of those products — and that is not right.
What would a modern corporate say? You have shareholders to answer to, maximize profit, do your 2% CSR. There is a deep moral consideration here. Traditional teaching is often not transactional — you pay me, I teach you. It is relational. You establish a relationship, assess whether the person is suitable, whether they are responsible, and then you teach.
We can create dharmic structures that respect where each one is coming from. There are entrepreneurs in the community I steward who are looking at these questions with respect and reverence. I am trying to see in what ways this can be taken forward. I come with that conviction because there are people who are actually looking at this and trying to create artha, rooted in dharma.
So, what do you think?
How happy are you with today’s edition? I would love to get your candid feedback. Your feedback will be anonymous. Two questions. 1 Minute. Thanks.🙏
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The Ministry of Ayush was formed on 9th November 2014 to revive the profound knowledge of ancient systems of medicine.
