[Buddha-l] Medicine, Efficient Cause and Philosophy

[Dan Lusthaus]

Katherine,

> You might be interested in medical historian Harris
> Coulter's *Divided Legacy: A History of the Schism in
> Medical Thought* 3 Vols. (Berkeley, North Atlantic,
> 1988).

Since for a Buddhist the criterion of what makes something real is that it
have or be an efficient cause (with material cause sometimes accepted as a
subspecies of efficient cause), it doesn't sound like Coulter would be a
reliable guide. Medicine without efficient causes would be unreal.
Demonstrating efficient causality need not reductionistically be restricted
to "mechanisms."

One needn't know the chemical and biological processes at work when one
takes an aspirin to know that it helps with headaches, etc. That has been
empirically verified many times over (aspirin is basically a derivative of
willow bark). But one shouldn't be eager to take a pill for a headache just
because it looks like an aspirin. One of the reasons the Caraka-samhita puts
great stock in aapta (tradition), is the recognition that medical knowledge
accumulates over time by a great deal of trial and error.

Dan Lusthaus