The need to explore traditional medicines as the future for a pandemic-confused world

Sri Lanka, which holds thousands of years of ancient medical knowledge, is merely willing to be a buyer of solutions developed in other countries and not contemplating our own in a backdrop where 37 Lankan traditional physicians have handed over their COVID specified treatments to health authorities for clearance

By Surya Vishwa 

If 2020 was a year of challenges, then 2021 would be a year of hurdles. Challenges one must face and hurdles one surely must jump over; or stumble and be injured. 

How we reacted as a nation to last year’s COVID situation makes us question whether we indeed faced it putting to honourable use our medical heritage which was abused and battered by centuries of Colonialism.

In 2021 our hurdle is to prove to ourselves that we do not have the Thomas Macaulay virus. No this is not a typo. The Thomas Macaulay virus; developed and produced in Colonial held India and hell bent on attempting to inject to the people of that land, through an aggressive promotion of Western education, a sense of inferiority about indigenous education, beliefs and tradition.

This virus it could be argued has spread  so chronically for the past decades in  former colonies that it is now threatening to ensure that  COVID-19 has a happy and prosperous new year playing hide and seek with a set of vaccines the world is talking about but without any surety. 

The vaccine is the enigma – yes of course – it could be good – and of course it could be bad but Thomas Macaulay, the Lord of British contempt of all things native is the real virus – because for example countries such as Sri Lanka, which hold thousands of years of ancient medical knowledge, are merely willing to be buyers of solutions developed in other countries and not contemplating our own in a backdrop where 37 Lankan traditional physicians have handed over their COVID specified treatments to health authorities for clearance.  

Although Dhammika Bandara’s treatment has received official attention quite speedily, the other traditional physicians of Lanka are still waiting for a response. Almost all of them have records of COVID-19 patients or those exposed to COVID-19 recovering within three days of consuming these treatments which these patients have obtained exercising their fundamental right to choose a route to recovering from disease. 

Yet despite detailed references of patients who have been COVID-19 negative after maximum of three days of consuming these cures, these physicians are now running from pillar to post, without any formal assistance to test their medicines on patients as a systemised initiative. Some of these physicians are desperately trying to get bank loans to put up buildings to construct ‘production houses’ for their medicines after being told that permission cannot be given if this requirement is not fulfilled.

“While the authorities are so concerned about my medicines being contaminated, which I make in my kitchen just like other Wedamahattayas of yesteryear, I like to ask what the authorities are doing for all the chemicals getting into the bodies of unsuspecting people through the agriculture produced in this country and making them become victims of Non-Communicable Diseases (NCDs) which is what is triggering deaths in corona patients,” quipped Sampath Kalutharage, a traditional Ayurveda Shasthri physician who has qualified from the Malawena Beruwela Ayurveda College as well as trained under two veteran physicians and holding an ancestral lineage in medicine. 

He has cured 11 COVID-19 positive patients who have sought his medicines of their own volition and who have provided preventive cures free for an entire camp of 692 military personnel who came under quarantine in Kalutara without a single person contracting the disease. All written proof of these phenomena have been handed over by him to the relevant authorities and ministries. This is just one example the writer is aware of among many others, which runs into hundreds as per my understanding based on ongoing research into this. 

To see why this kind of information are not coming out in the limelight and why the skill of these physicians is not being used, our nation may have to subject ourselves to more complicated tests than PCR or antigen – to see if indeed we are contaminated with the bacteria that first originated in the lab of the mind of Thomas Macaulay and manufactured to perfection in the education system unleashed in the colonies, beginning first with India. 

For the uninformed; Macaulay was infamous for his opinion that “A single shelf of a good European library was worth the whole native literature of India and Arabia.” This Macaulian opinion appeared in the ‘Minute on Education’ published on 2 February 1835 in India which accompanied the Colonial ideology for funding Western education in the Indian subcontinent. 

Thereby we now can say that we have in Sri Lanka, the land of the pre-Ayurveda traditional healing knowledge of Deshiya Chikitsa (Sinhala Wedakama), a reality that would have been in stark contrast to our ancient past. If this COVID-19 pandemic occurred when we had no entities such as the World Health Organisation (WHO) or similar other international agencies and as individual countries had been totally responsible for handling our own health completely indigenous way… using our maximum commitment, what would our kings have done? 

It is a question subject to conjecture. Possibly someone like Robert Knox the stranded and imprisoned British sailor who had been in awe of Sri Lanka’s ancient medical system as mentioned in his book ‘An Historical Relation of the Island Ceylon’ would have had the answers, if he could rise from the grave and tell us.  

It could be argued that the world is globalised today and that one science, the Western science, dominates the sphere of life. But modern man, who claims to be better thinkers than our forefathers of yore, has failed to think out that the ancient knowledge and technology that Sri Lankans had (that enabled us to build the first hospital in the world in Mihinthale) and perform complicated surgery as the ancient surgical implements reveal, were sciences in their own right and that we cannot judge this knowledge by the lens of modern science.

The lack of understanding of this has made humans today victims of their own ignorance and we have at a time Western science is struggling with the biggest global health challenge in decades, a traditional medical system which could have effortless answers, kept in the shades of oblivion. However in every household one finds the resorting to our everyday herbs such as pas panguwa and koththamalli.

The health officials who did the PCR tests down the road of this writer’s Colombo residence all admitted to be carrying out vapor healing with herbs such as Yaki Narang used traditionally in Deshiya Chikitsa and almost all of them were drinking roasted coriander instead of coffee (coffee introduced to us by the British increases heat in the body while roasted coriander which is just like coffee, does the opposite).

Former colonial countries such as Sri Lanka suffer from diverse complexes that prevent our emotional link with our traditional knowledge and the main reason is that our intellectuals, especially those educated in English (as well as those craving to be like them) and using English as the medium of communicating knowledge and information, are far removed from the philosophy as well as practical use of traditional knowledge. These individuals cannot be blamed for it. We as a nation have done nothing to promote or conserve this knowledge within our education system. We cannot blame the colonisers or the West for all our problems.

We have been purportedly ‘independent’ for seven decades and in this seven decades we have very effectively and apathetically killed off every ancient knowledge that we had. Paradoxically some of these knowledge thrive in the West. Knowledge such as Kem govithena which is part of our Kem karma, which has a very broad significance and primarily relating to healing, is now taught in foreign universities. 

The question we should ask ourselves is why we could not do this in this country. Why could we not recognise this 70 years ago after the British ended their uninvited occupation of this country? Why did we not take steps to resurrect our Sinhala Wedakama (Deshiya Chikitsa) which predates Ayurveda? 

Recently a Sri Lankan Ayurveda doctor who has a Phd in Rasa Wedakama (cures using metals such as gold, silver, mercury, copper) was narrating to this writer how when she enrolled at a leading Ayurveda university in India to study this traditional medicine discipline, a senior Indian professor responsible for this subject had inquired from her in all earnestness why she came to India to study it. When she had naïvely asked him why he is asking her that question, he had been even more aghast. “Why, you people are from the land of Ravana – the founder of Rasa medicine…so why you did you come here to learn from us…” were his words. 

Strangely most educated Sri Lankans spend quite a lot of energy proving that Ravana is a myth. Of course a mind cultivated on the mental science of Buddhism would be prompted to say that we do not know – history after all could be called a distant cousin of the shadow of myth which fact marries. But what was narrated in this article in terms of Ravana is merely to show how another country also sharing that historical or mythical or magical figure – (or whatever other way one would describe) linked it with the present.

Hence, we have to learn to salvage our ancient knowledge from the oceans of cynicism and not confine ourselves to the small boat of Western originated knowledge when we prepare ourselves to face the tide of a future that is surging in the storms of modern and over-developed misery we have created for  ourselves. 

Meanwhile we can see if we look out for this fact, (which has not caught the eye of the Western media), that less  modernised countries, which still have high forest cover are not hit hard by COVID-19 virus. Bhutan well known for the respect it gives both its traditional medicine and its forest cover has zero deaths from COVID-19 and Brunei, also a nature protected country valuing its traditions have recorded only three deaths. Clearly, if one carefully analyses, it could be said that it is in cities of countries which are over concretized and those of high ‘development’ and ‘modernity’ that one finds the highest prevalence of the COVID-19 pandemic. 

We now hear of a brain eating amoeba rapidly spreading through water in the US which poses deadlier threats to mankind and scientists have explained the direct cause as climate change.

Thereby at a time when synthetic medication seems to have no solutions except vaccines which have its own share of failures from the little we see emerging in the global media, the answer of the future is a pursuance of traditional knowledge for a simpler and nature rooted lifestyle that will prevent disease and protect the planet, both at the same time. 

Alongside this the interlinked parallel answer is in traditional medicine; not to ape Allopathy and become part of the current big pharma driven medical industry as we know it but the traditional medicine of the kind Sri Lanka was known for from historic times that is strongly interwoven to the earth and its offspring in a most authentic sense and which makes up the concept of Sinhala Wedakama (Deshiya Chikitsa) which although having certain commonalities and similarities with Ayurveda, can stand alone as a specialised way of healing. 

If the development of Deshiya Chikitsa was really strategised, with clarity of purpose and far thinking vision within the country since independence, it would not be an exaggeration to say that Sri Lanka would have by now re-asserted its medical superiority as enjoyed in the now distant past when we had rulers such as the medical king of Lanka, King Buddhadasa. 

As Sri Lankans it would do us good, while respecting the knowledge of all other lands, such as the ancient knowledge of people such as Native Americans, the original people of the land of America and read up on them, to be aware of, and put to use our own knowledge. To scoff at ancient people and their knowledge and doubt it is what the colonisers wanted us to do because it would merit a particular purpose which has nothing holistic in it. 

Thereby to recognise our traditional knowledge and our intangible cultural heritage and protect it in these times of pandemics should not be for the petty joy of being superior to some other nation or people, but for the purpose of helping humanity including ourselves in a misled and confused world. 

(Also see http://www.ft.lk/harmony_page/2021-wish-May-humanity-stop-abusing-Mother-Earth-and-her-children/10523-711014)