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from that which contributed to Ayurvedic medical thought. An intellectual
sympathy seemingly was shared by both the wandering ascetics on a
spiritual quest and the roving physicians whose professional curiosity led
them to encounters with different sorts of people from whom they could
obtain useful medical knowledge.
Finding rapport with the communities of heterodox ascetics and
renunciants who were not inclined to censure their philosophies,
practices and associations, the healers, like the knowledge-seeking
ascetics, wandered the countryside performing cures and acquiring ever
new remedies, treatments and medical information. They eventually
became practically undistinguishable from the mendicants with whom
they were in close contact. A vast storehouse of medical knowledge soon
developed among these wandering physicians who, like the ascetics, were
unhindered by Brahmanic strictures and taboos. With the help of ideas
from the intellectual ascetics, the physicians began to conceive a radically
new epistemology with which to codify and systematize this body of
efficacious medical data.
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Fitting into the Buddha's key teaching of the middle way between
world indulgence and self-denial, medicine became part of Buddhism by
providing the means to maintain a healthy bodily state characterized by
an equilibrium both within the body and between the body and its
surroundings. Portions of the repository of medical lore were codified in
the early monastic rules, thereby giving rise to a Buddhist monastic
medical tradition. The early Buddhist community of monks or sangha
was where wandering intellectuals would gather and exchange
information which often included medical knowledge. As the sangha
established more permanent dwellings and fixed abodes for ascetics, the
intellectual life turned more scholarly, and a formal systematization of
information and instruction ensued. The symbiotic relationship between
Buddhism and medicine in the large conglomerate monasteries (vih膩ras)