Kashyapa

Kashyapa

 

The sage Kashyapa is the inspiration for the famous but currently incompletely preserved work "Kashyapa-samhita". Little is known about the sage Kashyapa. He is the son of the sage Marichi and is one of the exceptional beings who arehave manifested both ina superhuman form, as beings of light, and as a sage, incarnate in aa body in the physical world.

In the famous work Mahabharata there are some references to a great Brahmin sage named Kashyapa Dhanvantari, who was a great expert in the science of toxicology and who is said to havemet the God-Snake, Takshaka, master of the hidden powers of Nature (prakriti).

Sage Kashyapa is famous in Ayurveda for his concern in the field of child healing (kaumarabhritya) and in revealing the mysteries of the fundamental energy of life (ayus). In his earthly incarnation as a sage, Kashyapa is identified by historians in the 6th century B.C.E., in the preBuddhist. He then passed on his teachings to his disciple Jivaka, which the latter wrote down in the form of the Ayurvedic work Kashyapa-samhita.

Kashyapa work-samhita is now found inan incomplete form, but even so it reveals a great wisdom, a perfect specialization of the millenary science of life (Ayurveda) to the particularity of the treatment of pediatric diseases, both in the practical aspects and in the theoretical and principial ones.

This work is comparable to the two exceptional works of Ayurveda namely Charaka-samhita and Sushruta-samhita. Incidentally, the sage Kashyapa is quoted in Charaka-samhita as one of the sages who participated in the secret initiation into the knowledge of the six fundamental principles of esoteric knowledge in Ayurveda (shad-padartha-vijnana).

Sage Kashyapa is credited with revealing the secret process of purifying the waters by invoking Varuna, the Divine Protector of Waters, an initiatory process that was also used to refresh vegetation by sprinkling it with pure water that had been previously charged by subtly invoking Varuna.

It was the sage Kashyapa who revealed to Jivaka, his disciple, and then through him to the people, essential truths about the birth of the human being in this physical world and how the body of the human being is structured according to the subtle needs of the individual soul that comes into that incarnation. The sage Kashyapa points out that in the period before birth, in the nine months, and in the period of life immediately after birth, the human being receives a great supply of vital energy, which has an essential structuring role.

Being initiated also into the esoteric knowledge of the sphere of force of the Great Cosmic Power of Divine Order and Harmony (Matangi vidya), the sage Kashyapa was able to give people, at that time, some extremely valuable revelations about how to organize living matter in the body of the human being according to the fundamental Law of Divine Necessity.

The initiatory teaching of the sage Kashyapa helps us to understand an essential truth, namely, that the main source of the shortcomings of the human being in childhood lies mainly in the various disorders of kapha, whose general function is precisely structuring.

For a clearer exposition of the science of child care and healing, the sage Kashyapa also offers some esoteric teachings on astrology, which are contained in Kashyapa-time. In this context, the sage mentions the worship of the de-the sixth monthly day (shashti), which is responsible for the well-being of children's lives and draws attention to the structuring importance of the 6th housea monthly; "House of 6-of the moon gives the being an orientation towards the past, from which it draws the essentials for structuring a new configuration of its consciousness. The new body is the expression of the current needs of the individual soul. This body is formed ina full connection with the progress made by the consciousness of the individual being in its evolutionary journey so far. The past is a cumulative dimension. The past is an important collection of information structured according to the quality of life experiences. Therefore, any quality acquired as a result of a merit becomes later a real ordering criterion for the body that the being will have as a vehicle in the physical world. Both the groupings and the hierarchies of the various aspects of consciousness are made according to qualitative criteria."

Through his exceptional example, sage Kashyapa teaches us that the level of organisation of the human physical body is amazing and that it can reach extraordinary complexity.

The descriptions of the sage Kashyapa show us how admirable is the order and organization that Nature has achieved in the various stages of life. The bodily order of a living being grows sensitively, especially during the development of the new-born, and then continues through childhood and youth to maturity, primarily on account of the vitalizing energy received from the sun. This bodily order is then maintained by certain vital mechanisms with recursive and self-regulating functioning (karman), so that in every part of the body normal functioning is manifested, thus ensuring the optimal maintenance of life.