CHENNAI: “Indians have taken to yoga only after the West endorsed the ancient Indian physical, mental and spiritual discipline as an effective one. Let us adopt Siddha medicine before the foreigners, again, give us what is our own,” said Dr Dipti S Tripathi, director of the National Mission for Manuscripts. She was speaking at the inaugural of a three-day national seminar on Siddha manuscripts and their relevance in education, industry and research, organised by the Government Museum and the National Mission for Manuscripts, New Delhi.Calling Siddha a proven system of harmonising the physical and spiritual aspects of human beings, Dr Tripathi reiterated that a system of medicine without side-effects had been developed comprehensively by our forefathers. “Unless it is ratified by the West, no ancient knowledge has been acceptable to the Indian psyche,’’ she commented, even as she said there was a need to rediscover and harvest the wisdom of our forefathers to apply them with relevance today.TN Ramanathan, commissioner of Indian Medicine and Homeopathy, explained that the Siddha system of medicine was said to have originated from Lord Shiva, who taught his consort Parvathi. She, in turn, briefed her son Lord Muruga about it, who is later said to have blessed Sage Agasthiar with this knowledge. This school of medicine is at least over 5,000 years old, and a lot of knowledge has been inscribed in palm leaves. In order to spread the knowledge of Siddha, efforts were on to decode the language that the palm leaf inscriptions are in and present them in English. “Commonly, Siddha medicine lessons are taught only in Tamil, and reach only those pockets of the world where Tamilians live,” he observed.In his address, SS Jawahar, commissioner of Museums, noted that several palm manuscripts on the Siddha system existed today, including a whopping 72,000 bundles of palm leaves at the Tamil Nadu Government Oriental Manuscripts Library in the city.
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