Bearing the Gods in Mind: Psychogenic Climate Change in Early Ayurveda

Within the study of Hindu traditions and their responses to climate change, studies that deal with historical texts have typically focused on literary and śāstric sources. The field of Ayurveda, with its empirically driven insights, practical medical concerns, and ethical commitments to sustaining all life, has been so far neglected. This paper examines an Ayurvedic response to climate change attributed to Ātreya Punarvasu in the pre-Classical period Caraka Saṃhitā. Building on scholarship that demonstrates the fundamental interrelation of humans and environments in Ayurvedic theory, this paper argues that Ayurveda forwards an anthropogenic, or more precisely, psychogenic theory of climate change.  

Ayurveda is an understudied resource for understanding trends of thought within the history Hindu traditions. The precise value of studying Ayurveda in this light is evident in its etiology of health and disease. Ayurveda is a uniquely cosmopolitan discipline in the history of Indian traditions. It crafts its medical outlook from a studious, observationally tested engagement with the many established and still-developing traditions of pre-Classical India. The creative synthesis it develops, despite its primary focus on medical concerns, is arguably broadly representative of then-current trends within India. Consequently, Ayurveda has to potential to grant unique insights into how pre-Classical India, broadly, may have thought about and responded to climatological concerns.  

To this end, this paper will examine the third chapter of the Caraka’s Vimānasthāna. There, Ātreya Punarvasu weaves together medicalized theories of karma, yoga, dharma, the yuga system, and the psychology of divinity to argue that faults of human awareness are the root cause of climate change. Faulty awareness (prajñāparādha), he argues, skews perceptions and inspires selfish habits that ignore the interdependency of human and nonhuman worlds. It inspires a politics of exploitation that erodes dharma and causes the gods to abandon the Earth. This causes the climate to deteriorate, which in turn leads to environmental degradation and, eventually, widespread disease among human populations. 

To explain these causal links, I will analyze the etiology and symptomatology of faulty awareness. The etiology of faulty awareness points to Ayurveda’s uniquely medical approach to karma and yoga. Karma here indicates actions that lead toward future states, positive or negative, which are in turn categorized according to the various diets of human beings. Ayurveda understands the concept of “diets” in terms of the yoga of the senses, and it assesses the quality of a diet according to its “balance” and “appropriateness” to the seasons and the elemental-cum-perceptible qualities of the environment in which a patient lives. Balanced diets contribute to future states of health; imbalanced diets contribute to the propagation of disease (and future births).  

The status of a patient in Ayurveda can be diagnosed in several fashions, but one of the most important indicators is the quality of a patient’s mind. Ayurveda relies on the idioms of Sāṃkhya philosophy to describe minds as pure (śuddha/sattva), turbid (rajas), or opaque (tamas). When pure, awareness is undistorted and faultless. Actions arising therefrom conform to reality, they are supportive of health, and they honor the network of interrelations—human, natural, divine—upon which life depends. By contrast, when turbid or opaque, awareness is faulty and distorted, inspiring actions that are likewise faulty in aim and execution, generating a friction between the person, their environment, and the divine that degrades health. 

Ayurveda treats dharma as a cosmic, ethical extension of its approach to karma and yoga. The impact of faulty awareness, according to the Caraka, fosters habits among the people that are driven by selfish impulses and negative mental and emotional states like greed, envy, vanity, fear, and hatred, all of which Ayurveda calls “mental deformations” (mano-vikāra). Because mental deformations tend to disrupt a person’s actions, producing unbalanced “yoga diets,” they exert a fundamentally unsupportive (and thus, adharmic) influence upon the broad ecology of human and nonhuman interrelations. According to Ātreya, the impact of adharmic action breeds social divisions and wars, opens human populations to the attack of demons, and causes the gods—whose primary duties include the regulation of seasonal change and climate—to abandon their stations.  

The mental and emotional states of rulers are especially significant, according to Ātreya, because they set the tone and pattern for the habits of the populace at-large. As a result, for both the general populace and rulers especially, Ayurveda prescribes developing habits rooted in the practice of sensory restraint that rectifies human dietary action. Through such restraint, supportive (and thus dharmic) habits are cultivated; the impulses of greed and the like are quelled; and the interrelationality of humans, their environments, and the divine is recognized and honored.  

On this last point, I will show that Ayurveda recasts the relationship between humanity and the gods in primarily psychological (rather than ritual) terms. The Caraka develops a typology of minds and psychological traits that are either divine or demonic, which overlaps precisely with the symptomatologies of clear or faulty awareness, as well as with the Ayurvedic classification of behaviors as dharmic or adharmic. The presence of the gods and the continuation of their regulating activity is evident first and foremost, according to Ayurveda, in the quality of the minds of human beings. 

This paper further demonstrates that Ayurveda’s approach to climate crises was broadly shared in pre-Classical India. Literary sources like the Mahābhārata, and political texts like the Arthaśāstra of Kauṭilya and the edicts of Aśoka all exhibit clear echoes of Ayurveda’s claims. Particular attention will be paid to analyses of the decline of the yugas in the Mahābhārata, the role of sensory restraint in Kauṭilya’s political theory, and Aśoka’s claims regarding the potential to restore the presence of the gods and return humanity to a glorious age in his earliest edicts. These sources illustrate the currency of Ayurvedic thought, and their chronology affords insights into the nature of the shift in Indic traditions away from the paradigms of ritualism and toward the paradigms of contemplation and mental cultivation that were popularized by Buddhism, the still-emerging schools of Sāṃkhya and Yoga, and the politics of Aśoka.