568
A. Brennan / Stud. Hist. Phil. Biol. & Biomed. Sci. 33 (2002) 567–581
1. Introduction
Some environmental philosophers have wondered if, in Holmes Rolston
’
s phrase,the
‘
east can help the west to value nature
’
(Rolston, 1987). Others, expressing them-selves in the idiom of the resource economists, have asked whether Hindu and other
‘
Asian traditions
’
of thought may be
‘
defended as a valuable conceptual resourcefor a positive and direct environmental ethic
’
(Callicott, 1994, p. 48). In reply to hisown question, J. Baird Callicott claims that the main trends of Hindu thought havebeen
‘
ambiguous about the value of nature
’
(ibid., p. 53) or perhaps even
‘
anti-environmental
’
(ibid., p. 48), conclusions which the present paper rejects. I arguethat there is a plausible case to be made that Hindu medicine, as represented by thetradition of
Ayurveda
, incorporates an understanding of health and disease which iscompatible with Western ecological thought. This tradition is not represented at alleither in Callicott
’
s survey of the world
’
s environmental thought (Callicott, 1994)or in the earlier Callicott and Ames collection that is devoted to considering
‘
therole of nature in Asian thought
’
(Callicott & Ames, 1989). If Hindu medicine iscapable of an
‘
ecological
’
interpretation, then why has this important fact been neg-lected in these widely read studies of Asian thought? I begin the paper by proposinga tentative answer to this question.
2. Incomplete histories
Any talk about the use of one conceptual scheme or framework of ideas, drawnfrom a speci
fi
c cultural context, as a resource, raises the questions that have beenwell put by G. J. Larson. In his contribution to the Callicott and Ames volume,Larson writes:Ideas and concepts come to be construed as
‘
things
’
or
‘
entities
’
that can bedisembedded from their appropriate frameworks and then processed and made to
fi
t into our own framework. Such a method for comparative philosophy is, inmy view, one-dimensional, overly selective, forced, anachronistic, sociologicallyunsophisticated and, perhaps worst of all, unpersuasive. (Callicott & Ames, 1989,p. 270)Larson also points out the imperialist resonances of the idea of extracting
‘
concep-tual resources
’
from one culture and then processing, manufacturing and mass-pro-ducing these in a form suitable for global marketing, congratulating ourselves that
‘
what we are doing will subsequently bene
fi
t not only Asia, but all people every-where. This, of course, is exactly the rationale the British used in India during theRaj
’
(ibid.). These are strong warnings. Apart from the colonial overtones of the
‘
resource
’
metaphor, Larson
’
s words caution against the extraction of ideas and frag-ments of worldviews from a larger cultural framework. To understand a particularcultural movement within a society at a given time, we may need to understand
—
among many other things
—
social structures, religious beliefs, superstitions, philo-
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