Ayurveda (the science of life) is a holistic, ancient, time tested and traditional system of medicine that is indigenous to, and widely practiced in India.
The word Ayurveda is a Sanskrit term meaning ‘science of life’. Ayu means ‘life’ or ‘daily living’ and the word veda means ‘knowing’. Ayurveda was first recorded in the Vedas – the ancient texts of the Himalayan sages and the world’s oldest existent piece of literature.
The Ayurvedic healing system has been practiced in daily life in India for more then 5000 years. All Ayurveda literature is based on the Samkhya philosophy of creation. (The root of the term Samkhya: Sat means ‘true’ and khya, means ‘to know’.) The Vedas, made up of the Rig, Yajur, Sama and Atharva Vedas on which the ancient scriptural knowledge is founded, have been handed down to us generation by generation over several thousand years by oral tradition, before finally being recorded in written form. It was not until approximately 500 B.C. that the sage Adi Sankara culled the end portion of Vedas (called Vedanta) which reveals the knowledge that the self and the Supreme Being are one. Sankara recorded this knowledge on palm leaves. Rig veda, the foundation pillar and oldest of the vedas, contains many references to Ayurvedic principles, although Ayurveda itself was primarily developed from the Atherva Veda, the most recent of the Vedas. The mainstay of the Ayurvedic knowledge that we have today is found in two treatises, Charak Samhita and Sushrut Samhita, each of which first appeared at the time of the first millennium B.C.
The main objective of Ayurveda is to impart healthy longevity and to relieve human suffering. This is achieved through appropriate regimes of Ahara, Vihara, and Ausadhis and systemic Samshodhana (detoxification) of the body.
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