How Old Is Ayurveda - #3009

Oh, you’re right. Ayurveda’s history is a pretty fascinating, yet complex, thing to unravel! Trying to pinpoint the exact age of Ayurveda is a bit tricky because its roots indeed stem back to those mysterious foggy beginnings of oral traditions. It’s often said Ayurveda has been around for, like, 5000 years. This timeline generally links to the Vedic period (around when the Rig Veda was written), though Ayurveda as a formal system probably emerged a bit later, maybe closer to some of the last Vedic texts.

Charaka Samhita and Sushruta Samhita are indeed key to understanding Ayurveda’s foundational knowledge. They were weren’t written at the exact same time. Charaka Samhita, focusing largely on internal medicine and detailed descriptions of doshas among other things, is estimated to have been composed around 300-200 BCE, I think, but keep in mind these texts likely evolved over time with many contributors. Sushruta Samhita, which is more surgical and innovative in its approaches documented possibly a century later.

Determining exactly how old Ayurveda is, well that’s a wild ride involving analysis of oral histories, literary references, and examining archaeological evidence. As Ayurveda spread and brushed against other cultures, sure it was influenced here and there—added some spices to the curry, so to speak, but its core ideas stayed surprisingly intact.

Through time, principles have definitely been iterated upon and tuned to fit new understandings, but fundamentally the concepts like balancing doshas, maintaining agni, stuck around. When it mingled with other cultures, some of it’s practical ideas like yoga and herbology sometimes got exaggerated or adapted differently.

How Ayurveda managed to stay relevant? The oral transmission followed by strong scholarly work, like codification in writing, played a huge role. It had to adapt and resonate with different age’s philosophies and discoveries, which helped it survive. Knowing how much of the ancient wisdom we practice today is a mix — some unchanged, some evolved. Digging through Ayurveda’s timeline is as much a practice in history as it is in medicine, understanding how it’s interwoven with culture, philosophy and perhaps, humanity’s intrinsic search for well-being.