The biggest medical conference of all time

Everything begins with a story, so here is a story about the origin of Ayurveda, also known as Science of Life.

Although it is commonly known and universally accepted that Ayurveda has been around for over 5000 years, there is an interesting story about how it was documented formally for the first time.

About 11,000 years ago in the region we now know as India, there lived a sage named Bharadwaj. Sage Bharadwaj was a prominent Vaidya (physician/healer) of his time. At the time, most sages served as teachers, managing their Ashrams where students lived and studied for years. One day, Sage Bharadwaj decided to formally organize all available medical knowledge for the benefit of his students and future generations. This was no small task, and he knew that he would need the help of his fellow colleagues, and so he called upon all the scientists of his time for assistance. Shortly thereafter, one of the biggest medical conferences, attended by over 80,000 veteran experts, was organized and conducted in the valley of the Himalayas.

The objective of this conference was to share widely the medical knowledge available at the time, and to encourage attending scholars to compile the information gleaned by different peoples of the region that had been passed down, mostly orally, down the generations. This body of knowledge that pertained largely to health and longevity is what we know as Ayurveda today, and it was regarded as an eternal science, one that existed since the beginning of time.  However, the participants were aware that there were no authentic and complete texts of Ayurveda available for study.  It was decided that the writing of texts would be the focus of the conference.

This conference was a milestone in the history of medicine. Compiling all medical knowledge was very difficult, because the scholars lived and worked across the Eastern Hemisphere.  Travel and communication was challenging.  Nevertheless, the participants of the conference were committed to the task at hand. They arrived from distant regions, and spent nearly three years working on the project.  They engaged in long and complex discussions, debated on various ideas, and formed committees to compile full texts about the different aspects of Ayurveda.

An interesting phenomenon occurred at the conference. Most of the participant sages and experts spent long periods in deep meditation, and they came to realize that the entire Universe was a vibrational wave function. This has been verified by modern quantum physics as well. The human body vibrates at a certain frequency. Each organ has its own unique vibrational frequency, as do all herbs, plants, roots, and their combinations. Specific herbs can have a healing effect on specific organs, or on certain parts of the body.

And thus it so happened that Charaka Samhita (treatise on internal medicine), Sushruta Samhita (encyclopedia of surgery), Kashyapa Samhita (elaboration on pediatrics), and many other seminal Ayurveda texts were written during this period.