[Buddha-l] The state of buddha-l: a brief report

[Richard Hayes]

On Aug 15, 2009, at 8:21 PM, Dan Lusthaus wrote:

> BTW, how esoteric to be concerned about some obscure plant named  
> Papaver
> somniferum L., right? Anyone know what it is

Yes. Sorry I didn't mention what its English name is, because I  
thought it would be obvious from its Latin name. The genus name  
Papaver is, I think, the basis of the English word "poppy," and the  
species name "somniferum" means sleep-inducing, which is a  
characteristic of the narcotics derived from opium, such as morphine  
and diacetylmorphine (popularly know by the brand-name Heroin). People  
such as Dominik Wujastyk and Ken Zysk have devoted a great deal of  
time to studying pharmacology in India, which is extremely tricky  
because of the difficulty of attaining certainty (niścaya) about the  
current names for plants mentioned in early Indian medical literature.  
(Just look at the history of the debate over what on earth soma was.)

Zysk, who was my colleague for several years at University of Toronto  
and is now in the Institute for Cross-Cultural and Regional Studies at  
Københavns universitet, was trained in Indian history by A.L.Basham of  
the Wonder That Was India fame. Basham encouraged Zysk to study the  
history of Indian medicine. Zysk can talk about Indian medicine and  
pharmacology for hours. If you ever meet him, prepare to be  
fascinated. People interested in Buddhism may be interested in his  
thesis that monastic Buddhism played a significant role in the spread  
of medical knowledge in India. One of his observations is that  
Buddhists, who meditated on decomposing corpses, inadvertently learned  
a lot about human anatomy, which knowledge played an important role in  
the development of various surgical interventions. If you ever grow  
tired of the discussions about health-care in modern America, take a  
look at Zysk's book <title>Asceticism And Healing In Ancient India:  
medicine In The Buddhist Monastery.</title>

A pleasant memory I have of Zysk was when we were having a long  
conversation about ancient India, he suddenly stopped at said "Damn  
it, Richard, do you realize how lucky we are to be able to spend our  
lives learning what we love to learn about and to get paid for it?"  
Yes, I did realize it, and yet I still catch myself at least once a  
day marveling at this particular piece of good fortune. (Some might  
call it karma, I suppose.)

Richard