The Western cultural conceptualization of “nature” as set apart from the human person arguably finds its closest ancient Indian analog in two Classical-era-defining works: Īśvarakṛṣṇa’s Sāṃkhyakārikā and Patañjali’s Yogaśāstra (both dated to ca. 3rd-4th centuries CE). These works developed the then-novel position that the puruṣa, the conscious person, was categorically and metaphysically different (niḥsāmānya) from prakṛti, “nature,” the physical and phenomenal world that is “produced” by virtue of its intermingling with consciousness. The concept of God (Īśvara) was similarly treated as distinct from nature; Patañjali, for instance, defines God as a special kind of puruṣa, a pure consciousness forever distinct and never subject, as with the human puruṣa, to any level of intermingling with nature. According to these works, coming to a recognition of this difference between the person and nature marks the ultimate human achievement and the perfection of all possible knowledge. Consequently, nature was framed as existing solely for the human, ready to be observed, exploited, and, ultimately, abandoned.
However, prior to these works, the pre-Classical era traditions of India overwhelmingly thought otherwise: Persons and nature were then conceived as intimately related entities that, though conventionally recognized as different, are really one and the same thing. Whether conceptualized as prakṛti or loka, nature’s relation to the person was rather one of identity (sāmānya) than of difference; knowing and acting in accord with that identity was the highest goal. The divine was similarly difficult to distinguish from nature in pre-Classical traditions: Gods manifested in multiple ways, human and natural, supernormal and mundane.
This paper draws from the Caraka Saṃhitā, an early work of Ayurvedic medicine with diverse religious and philosophical influences that offers a paradigmatic formulation of pre-Classical era thinking about personhood, nature, and the divine. Ayurveda, I argue, proposes a broadly accepted vision of the relationship between humanity, nature, and the divine that resists conceptualizations of “nature” as fundamentally set apart from humanity. Through an analysis of Ayurveda’s “person-based world,” I argue that a key aim of early Ayurvedic medicine was to rectify presumptions and practices that treat nature and the divine as “other” than the human. Building on scholarship that illustrates the fluidity of Indic approaches to the categories of “person” and “self,” I also show how Ayurveda understands the conditions of nature and humanity—their health or illness—as direct expressions of divinity.
To this end, the paper will show how Ayurveda posits a cosmological anthropology rooted in the metaphysics of sāṃkhya-yoga, according to which the human person is understood to be continually constituted by seasonally shifting and environmentally determined flows of five basic elements (ether, wind, fire, water, and earth). These flows are worked out especially according to a person’s habits of eating and perception. Such habits impact both the physical and psychological dimensions of the person, affording conditions of balance and health or imbalance and disease, physical and mental. Simultaneously, Ayurveda deploys the cultural logics of possession (bhūtavidyā) to explain howthe mental life of a person is further impacted by the presence or absence of divine or demonic entities, who produce various moods, ethical dispositions, and habits of body, speech, and mind. Likewise, Ayurveda understands the seasonal conditions of nature, with which the person continuously interacts, to be determined by, and expressions of, the relative presence of the divine. Healthy persons and environments are indications of harmonious, identity-recognizing habits that contribute to the maintenance of divine presence in nature and in humanity. Diseased persons and environments, by contrast, are indicative of disharmonious relations and the absence of the divine (or the presence of demonic influence) in nature and among human beings. So conceived, a person cannot be viewed as fundamentally set apart from either nature or the divine; persons are instead worlds, phenomenally spatialized loci where the character of nature and the activities of the divine are simultaneously constituted and expressed.
This paper will argue that the practical import of this approach to nature, personhood, and divinity is best understood in current times by placing it in relation to recent legal attempts to establish the personhood of nonhuman, natural entities like rivers and mountains. Such attempts have predominately relied on three sources of argumentation: Traditional accounts of nature’s cultural and/or religious significance, environmentally conscious arguments for the interconnectivity of ecological systems and their role in sustaining human life, and the legal doctrines of parens patriae (which establishes governments as ‘parents’ to the members of a nation) and in loco parentis (which establishes entities or organizations that may act in place of parents). This paper will take recent court decisions surrounding the proposed personhood of the Ganges and Yamuna rivers (and their surrounding ecologies and glacial sources) as emblematic of such legal efforts to establish environmental personhood, and argue that Ayurveda’s person-based understanding of nature bolsters the court’s arguments by developing conceptual approaches to both nature and divinity that erase their potential distance from the human. By framing their intimate interrelation as a matter of health and happiness versus illness and suffering, Ayurveda reframes legal and environmental concerns as matters of public health and as fundamental determinants of the viability of law-based societies. As a totalistic program for understanding interconnections that sustain living systems, Ayurveda compels us to think beyond the anthropocentric logics of “othering” and exploitation, and to embrace philosophical, legal, and ethical frameworks that extend personhood to nonhuman entities.
This paper draws from the Carakasaṃhitā, an early work of Ayurvedic medicine, to explore a vision of the relationship between humanity, nature, and the divine that resists conceptualizations of “nature” as fundamentally set apart from humanity. Through an analysis of Ayurveda’s “person-based world,” I argue that a key aim of early Ayurvedic medicine was to rectify presumptions and practices that treat nature and the divine as “other” than the human. Building on scholarship that illustrates the fluidity of Indic approaches to the categories of “person” and “self,” I also show how Ayurveda understands the conditions of nature and humanity—their health or illness—as direct expressions of divinity. As a totalistic program for understanding interconnections that sustain living systems, Ayurveda compels us to think beyond the anthropocentric logics of “othering” and exploitation, and to embrace philosophical, legal, religious, and ethical frameworks that extend personhood to nonhuman entities.