Ashtanga Hridayam - Heart of Eight Limbs

Friday, December 22, 2006

Introduction

शुक्लाम्बरधरम् विष्णुम् शशिवर्णम् चतुर्भुजम्।
प्रसन्नवदनम् ध्यायेद् सर्व विघ्नोपशान्तये॥

The literal translation of Ashtanga Hridayam (aShTA~Nga hR^idayam) is "heart of eight limbs". Here eight limbs refers to Ayurveda as it contains the following eight branches:

  1. Kaya (internal medicine)
  2. Bala (pediatrics)
  3. Graha (mental disease)
  4. Urdvanga (facial organs)
  5. Salya (surgery)
  6. Dhamshtra (toxicology)
  7. Jara (geriatrics)
  8. Vrisha (virilification)

AH was written by Vag Bhatta and is considered to be one of the three well-known treatises on Ayurveda (Brihat-Trayi). The other two are Charaka Samhita and Susruta Samhita. AH is an abridged version of several Ayurvedic texts which existed before the author's time.

AH consists of 120 chapters, divided into 6 sections. The sections are arranged in a different order than the Ayurvedic branches. The sections (or also called as sthanas) are as follows:

  1. Sutra - Fundamentals, Health, Prevention, Lifestyle, Diseases
  2. Sarira - Anatomy, Physiology, Physiognomy
  3. Nidana - Monitoring, Diagnostics
  4. Chikitsa - Therapautics
  5. Kalpa Siddhi - Pharmacy
  6. Uttara - covers the other branches from #2 to #8 of Ayurveda

The coverage given to Internal Medicine (Kaya Chikitsa) is quite obvious as the first 5 sections mainly deal with it and the last section deals with rest of the 7 branches of the Ayurveda.

This blog is to capture my notes from the English translation of Sri. K.R. Srikantha Murthy. It uses ITRANS format 5.3 for Sanskrit words.