According to Charak’s delightful story, the ancient wise men of India one day assembled at the foot of the Himalayas with the purpose of ridding men of disease. They decided to send one Bharadwaj to heaven to learn medicine from the god Indra. According to another account by Susruta, one Dhanwantari, the house physician in heaven, learned the science from Indra and took birth in this world with the sole object of imparting his knowledge to eight chosen men of good will. According to other scriptures, when Narayan came to Earth as Visnu Incarnate, He taught knowledge of Ayurved to one Anantadeb. In the Purans we get the Dhanwantari story in a slightly different form. Here angels and demons combinedly churned the seas to get the ambrosia of immortality. Then Dhanwantari came out of the sea and taught Ayurved to men of the Earth. From these accounts we can understand that Ayurved even in olden times was regarded as ancient and superior. Men have a natural tendency to believe in the divine origin of what is old and good. The Greeks thought their medicine came from Apollo; the Egyptians, theirs from Thyoth; the Hindus, Ayurved from Indra and Narayan.

Whatever the origin of Ayurved, human or divine, what we see is that it has come down to us through seers. Lord Buddha, under whose influence King which Asoke accomplished so many marvels-among which was certainly the preservation of Ayurved-was born in 567 B. C. Long before the time of Buddha however, Ayurved experiments had gone on under various seers in India. The science was further developed in different ages by Drirabal, Nagarjun, Bagvat, Madabkor, Chakrapani, etc. After Buddha and Asoke there was considerable growth. Charak and Susruta had hardly ever used minerals as medicines, but in the Tantric Age mercury and other minerals were used plentifully by Somdeb, Gobinda, Nagarjun, etc. Nagarjun is sometimes called the Lavoisier of Tantric Times. Bhab Misra in the sixteenth century wrote about syphilis, a new foreign importation. After the sixteenth century Ayurved continued, but in 1835 a college of Allopathy was started in Calcutta. Up to that time Allopathy had not made such great progress in this country. We did not, and sometimes we do not even now, like to give a glance in the direction of Allopathy, but it is doubtful if Ayurved could have gone ahead as it has, without the help of allopathic chemistry.