BENCHMARKING YAJNA CHIKITSA & GAVYA CHIKITSA

BENCHMARKING YAJNA CHIKITSA & GAVYA CHIKITSA - A PROJECT PROPOSAL

India is a nation of vast diversity with nearly seven lakh villages in
which more than two-thirds of our people live and work.  The
productivity, creativity and sustainability of the rural people are
vital elements in our national life.  Our traditional Yajna-based,
ritualistic health care technologies and decentralized production
methods have sustained the whole of Indian sub-continent through long
ages.

Our traditional Cow-centric village system with periodic Yajna
rituals, down the ages of history, has created models that fulfill all
basic needs of the human society such as food, shelter, clothing,
health care and community bonding.  All these five aspects are to be
met within the boundaries of the village, if it is to be made
self-sustaining using cost-effective traditional health care
technologies which are nature-friendly and with the main emphasis on
human skill, knowledge and awareness.

But in the recent past, wrong educational values started during the
colonial rule, imposition of imperfect and incomplete science &
technologies on our people have created deep-rooted maladies in our
rural society.  Our Yajna-based civilization was described as
inadequate and uncultivated, our moral and spiritual values were
branded as superstitious, our Cow-centric village economy was marked
as backward and our per-capita, labor intensive rural technologies
were described as uncompetitive.

Meanwhile an alien philosophy of life - economically unviable,
culturally incompatible and suppressive of our national pride was
imposed on us by the colonial rulers and their Indian successors.  Our
village artisans lost their markets.  The ruin that colonization
wrought to our society has corroded our entire value system.

Yet the light has never faded.  Swami Dayanand Saraswati, the founder
of Arya Samaj, tried to bring back our spiritual values and sought to
place the Yajna culture and Vedic vision in the center stage of our
national life.  Sri Ramakrishna Paramahamsa and Swami Vivekananda
completed the first phase of spiritual revolution. Later on the
patriotic leaders began building on the foundation laid down by these
spiritual pioneers.  The constructive programs of these national
leaders covering all aspects of our rural life brought to the notice
of the world and to our own people the hidden potentials of our
traditional wisdom.

In 1940s Dr Phundanlal Agnihotri, a western trained Imperial Medical
Officer at Jabalpur TB Sanitorium, wrote in a powerful language how
our traditional Cow-centric, Yajna based therapeutic and holistic
health care system is superior and sustainable in an era in which the
environment and national life are seriously threatened by global
warming, ozone depletion, imbalanced biodiversity, ever-growing
economic disparity etc. Let's analyze the relevance of Yajna-culture
and 'mother Cow' in bringing about the sustainability in holistic
health care, traditional agriculture and sustainable rural
reconstruction in the Indian sub-continent.

The Yajna-culture that was dependant on the mother Cow, as a symbol of
Indian values, has been a turnkey since times immemorial to build
ideal values in the society. The gavya products and the related daily
rituals using the gavyas like Agnihotra, Darshapournamaseshti,
Chaturmaseshti etc, (now collectively promoted under the banner
'Gavyagni') have been playing a pivotal role in upholding our
tradition and sustaining our health care system & the rural econimy
ever since.

In the last few decades young scientists and researchers of the Indian
sub-continent have done much work to unearth the forgotten linkages in
our wisdom-chain and especially on the Cow-centric Yajna-culture that
connects all things in the world, the real 'Web of Life'.  And the
main objective of this project proposal is to bring together all these
professionals onto one platform and design the future plan of action
through mutual consent for achieving our common goals of Gavya &
Yajna-based holistic health, non-violent agriculture, balanced social
transformation and sustainable rural reconstruction.  Further
direction to this project proposal is to be sought through building an
extant 'database' based on our traditional knowledge systems like
Govidya, Yoga, Ayurveda and our rich ancient Vedic lore.