The act of confession is often considered one of the highest reflections of human ethics and morality. But The scientists like Hugo Münsterberg debunked the narrative that confession is the gold standard indicator of truth. The scientific red flags further warned about untrue confessions which arise out of overpowering influences. In the background of the recent viral article " confession of an Ayurveda professor" by renowned Ayurveda scholar Dr. Kishore Patwardhan, it is important to retrospect the theme of the confession. The furious inquiry would be to know whether the confession of the Author is due to self-guilt or due to power influence?
The Art of Dissection
Every confession probably has to follow three major phases. In the first phase Right and Wrong is being segregated within the system based on a particular parameter. In the next phase, one becomes judgemental over own thoughts and activities based on the parameter. In the next phase, one identifies thoughts and activities to be wrong while comparing with parameters. That eventually leads to mental distress. Then to overcome the psychological distress and find a state of solace one starts to confess. In the act of confession by respected Ayurveda scholar Dr. Kishor Patwardhan, it's important to observe that he considered the legitimacy of biomedical methodology and its epistemology as the parameter for judgment. the paradigm of Ayurveda is majorly centered around evaluating the functional dynamics of the system rather than focusing on structural components with the reductionist approach of allopathy. Thus the futile effort of Dr. Kishore Patwardhan to find the exact origin of "sukhra " dhatu and dissecting bone marrow to look up "majja" dhathu would have enormously exhausted him. The Ayurveda text and fundamental premises of Ayurveda clearly identify property or quality of matter as the ultimate cognitive experience. Such schematic intersubjective cognitive experiences are the base of Ayurveda knowledge. It's because Ayurveda considers consciousness as the epicenter of experience. One of the most advancing philosophical concepts like panpsychism propounded by Philip Goff may strengthen the perspective of consciousness centric knowledge paradigm of Ayurveda. This may also pave the way to think about how physical sciences are excluding consciousness from its premises of knowledge and consequently their state of limitations in understanding subjective experience. Thus Dr. Kishore Patwardhan's judgemental of biomedical knowledge as ultimate legitimate in validating Ayurveda would have possibly led him to pranjaparadha.
From falsification theory to Against the method; The ever-evolving scientific methods
The article" confession of an Ayurveda professor" depicts the Author's blind belief in Karl popper's falsification theory in verifying scientific knowledge. The Author interprets lack of falsifiability as one of the major concern with Ayurveda fundamentals and conclude that Ayurveda requires to pass the litmus test of falsification to prove its scientificity. The pranjaparadha with the Author becomes more visible in this context as he neglects the significant change that happens with the perspective of scientific methods. The falsification theory is not the one-stop point in the history of science rather it travels In a non-linear pathway. Science offers diversified choices like falsification theory to a paradigm shift(Thomas Kuhn) and phenomenology of Michael Foucault to Against the methods of PaulFeyerabend to formulate a scientific knowledge based on its epistemology. The obsession with falsification theory as the ultimate tool to evaluate the Ayurveda paradigm thus becomes not only an act of injustice towards Ayurveda but also towards the scientific temper itself.
Don't Throw the Baby Out With the Bathwater
The Author's remarkable contribution towards evaluating the Ayurveda education system and developing an innovative learning system has always got immense relevance in the domain of Ayurveda. Some of his arguments regarding Outdated and repressive themes in Ayurveda texts has got relevance and need attention. It's always easy to take an approach to outrightly reject these contents, but only making those attempts can't solve the real social problem. Those attempts seems to be similar with some of the renowned universitie's thoughts like Removing the ceiling fan in dorms can solve the rising students suicide. The proper solutions must be evolve focusing on addressing the real and broader problems than knee jerk responses.Rather than simply escaping from contents,learner may need to have critical engagement with the content of the text to form its interpretation and critique.
The curriculum and learning system must be able to cultivate a strong sense of social critique among Ayurveda learners so that they can constructively transform society and science. The Ayurveda community alone can not be accused of much of its weakness and limitations. The Ayurveda system is being constantly repressed by colonial forces and global power relations. The insufficient budget allocation for Ayurveda, Lack of proper policy-administrative backup, Absence of a solid ecosystem for Research, Lack of intellectual investment, and constructive engagements of scientists-scholars from other disciplines with Ayurveda, etc are hardcore realities.
These sad state of current hard-core social reality can't be ignored by anyone. Apart from these, there are many sociological and Anthropological studies enumerating how traditional medicine knowledge and practice are being degraded due to colonialism and global imperialism. "The randomized controlled crime" an important paper written by vincas Adams observes in a case study how the traditional Tibetan medicine practitioners over some time started to experience guilt themselves due to the powerful influences of biomedical establishments with collaborative research. In collaborative research, The methodology, policy, and economical power imposition of biomedical establishment on Tibetan traditional practitioners made them think their knowledge and its practice are significantly inferior to the biomedical system. That eventually lead them to the state of confession. The confession of the Ayurveda professor has got very significant striking similarities to the guilt experience of Tibetan medicine practitioners. The case of the confession of an Ayurveda professor also opens up the scope to aware of the untrue confessions resultant from overpowering influence.
Dr Dinesh KS
Professor
VPSV Ayurveda college kottakkal
Dr. Skanthesh Lakshmanan
Research consultant & scientific chair
Arogyam UK CIC
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