Dear Harry,

regarding early Ayurveda (before Vāgbhaṭa) I can add the the following:

• Only the Suśrutasaṃhitā mentions Dhanvantari regularly but this is a secondary development. As this article shows, his role was augmented only from around the 9th century onward: https://www.academia.edu/56668282.
• According to the sources, mantras do play a minor role in early Ayurveda. For example, in the whole Suśrutasaṃhitā I could find only 17 passages directly referring to mantras, only 9 of them quote specific mantras.
• Addressed deities include Śiva/Rudra, Brahmā, Viṣṇu, the Aśvins, Agni, Varuṇa, Vāyu, Soma, etc., but not Dhanvantari.

Thus, mantras addressing Dhanvantari are very likely a later development or originate in other (maybe tantric) healing traditions.

For more details, you can take a look at this workshop paper on  Medication or Magic? Mantras in Early Āyurveda which I presented earlier this year at the mantra workshop in Vienna. At the moment, I am preparing a more comprehensive article on the same topic, but it is still work in progress.

Best wishes,
Vitus

Dear list members,

Firstly thank you to Dominik Haas who found a reference in a modern womans travel journal to India.  Other than that I was extremely surprised that I couldn't find any mantras in any written sources to Dhanvantari.  I searched GRETIL, the Muktabodha digital library, and the Kyoto Archive of Sanskrit Texts (Michio Yano and colleagues) . There were lots of references to dhanvantarI (dhanvantarir uvAca etc.)  but as far as I could see no mantras to him (of course its possible I missed them).

Any supposition about why these are so rare (non-existent?) in written sources but all over the internet.  In ayurveda is it other deities that are used in healing mantras?  Or even better if the ayurvedic experts could point me to any mantras to dhanvantari (or other deities) used in healing.

Thanks again,

Harry Spier

On Sat, Oct 22, 2022 at 4:36 PM Harry Spier <vasishtha.spier@gmail.com> wrote:

Dear list members,

I was asked to find gayatrī mantras to the god of healing Dhanvantari (but with a source). I'm able to find lots of mantras (including gayatrī mantras) on youtube and the internet but they don't give a source.

Ideally would be a gayatri mantra with a scriptural source (some ayurvedic text?) but acceptable would be some modern book collection of mantras etc. And even some shloka or non-gayatri mantra in a text asking for healing from Dhanvantari would also be acceptable.

Thanks,

Harry Spier

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