Rasayana Nighantu

From the Preface: Ayurveda has been in existence since the dawn of mankind. Atreya defined Ayurveda as the knowledge of life dealing with wholesome and unwholesome, happy as well as unhappy, qualitative and quantitative aspects of life. Life span is related to a balanced union of the body, mind and soul. The individual is an epitomized form of universe and is made up of nine basic substances — panchamahabhutas (i.e the five primordial elements that include ether, air, fire, water and earth), Atma (soul), Manas (mind), Kala (time), and Disha (direction).

Bharadwaja passed the knowledge of Ayurveda to Atreya, who in turn passed it on to his disciples, Agnivesha, Bhela etc. who wrote treatises on Ayurveda (knowledge/wisdom of life). This was the first integration of spiritualism with material and medical sciences. Sushruta, who belonged to Dhanwantari surgical school wrote a treatise on diseases requiring surgical intervention. Agnivesha tantra which mainly dealt subject of general medicine was redacted by Charaka and has become popular as Charaka samhitha. When some of the sections of the text were lost, Dridhabala (5 AD) rewritten those portions. He has introduced for the first time Namarupa Vigjnana (nomenclature and descriptive sciences) of medicinal plants in Kalpasthana which was unusual type of description in Samhitha literature. Basing on this observation, it can be concluded that Dhridhabala was the first and foremost lexicon writer (Nighantukara). During medieval India, Ayurvedic scholars have evinced keen interest in compilation of Nighantus and Yogasamgraha granthas. Initially the nighantus were written by enumerating synonyms only. e.g Ashtanga nighantu, Paryayaratnamala. Later nighantus namely, Dhanwantari, Sodhala, Kaiyadeva, Madanapala, Rajanighantu added pharmacological and therapeutic profiles of drugs and enlarged Ayurvedic materia medica by including certain new drugs.