Jonny's first interview

Myself, my roommate and the team of interviewers from Ayur Info

I had the unexpected pleasure back in January of being interviewed by a group of four students at the Ayurveda College here in Kathmandu. We sat down for a couple hours in my flat, sang some Nepali folk and pop songs and some American songs (my roommate found a crowd-pleaser in the Red Hot Chili Peppers canon), and eventually got around to talking about Ayurveda here and in America. Then we went up on the roof and ate a delicious lunch of dal-bhat Alden had prepared while I was blabbing.
A few weeks later they sent me the transcript they had put together. I was . . . a little dumbfounded. Although the students had tape-recorded everything and taken notes, they evidently had a very different idea of quotation than I did, not to say journalistic integrity. I recognized a few phrases that sounded like I might have uttered them, but mostly my “answers” were in Indian English. No one reading the interview would think I was a native speaker, let alone an American. And in some cases the words put in my mouth were actually contrary to the spirit of what I’d tried to express. And my name was spelled wrong. And and . . . but luckily the students, ever thoughtful and friendly and certainly well-meaning, gave me an opportunity to edit the interview via email. I turned to this task immediately and with the vigor of the misrepresented. I present here the edited interview, which I hope will bear some resemblance to what eventually appears in the Ayurvedic students’ newsletter Ayur Info. If anyone's interested in the 'original' version, I'd be happy to share that as well. (There's about 20% overlap between the two.)

Jonathan (Jon) H. Edwards (25) is a Fulbright Research Scholar in Nepal staying from September ‘08 to July ‘09. He is investing his time to study Ayurveda.

He grew up in New York City and Vermont and has visited Italy, France, India, and Thailand.

He speaks and writes Nepali well, sings Nepalese songs playing Madal, Tabala, and Guitar. And he is currently learning Newari too.

He did his bachelors at Swarthmore College in Pennsylvania (USA).
Last year he completed the Ayurvedic Studies Program-I at the Ayurvedic Institute in New Mexico. The Institute is headed by Dr. Vasant Lad, a renowned Vaidya and teacher.

In January, Ayur-Info (AI) team visited his residence in Kathmandu and made the conversation. The theme is presented hereupon.

AI: Sir, first of all we would like to know how you were attracted to Ayurveda.
Jon: During my bachelors, I went to Kalimpong (India) on a study abroad program through Pitzer College and stayed with a local family. That is where I learned Nepali. During the program I got to hear a lecture on Ayurveda that sparked my interest. After returning to the States my interest grew and eventually I realized I could make Ayurveda the focus of a trip to Nepal. In the meantime I completed ASP-I (Ayurvedic Studies Program-I) in New Mexico, in the States.

AI: What is the status of Ayurveda in the USA?
Jon: Not too many people know about Ayurveda in the States. But due to various factors in recent times, there are many people who are getting familiar with it and are really interested in it. People's interest is growing day by day. In some ways, the position of Ayurveda in America is similar to that of Chinese medicine a few decades ago before it was recognized officially. In ten years time, the number of people loving Ayurveda will definitely be encouraging.
Right now there is a small but growing number of Ayurveda practioners serving as lifestyle consultants in the States. As such we can use diet and lifestyle therapies and some herbs but it is completely taboo to talk about diagnosis and treatment since Ayurveda is not recognized as a legitimate system of medicine in the US. But things are changing. Some states like California have passed legislation that allows Ayurvedic practitioners to operate freely, even if not as actual doctors as is possible here. For the most part people in the US practice Ayurveda after obtaining certification in Naturopathy, Yoga Therapy, Massage Therapy, Conventional Medicine, etc. They slip Ayurveda in through the back door, so to speak.
Nowadays demand for Yoga, Ayurveda and Panchakarma is on the rise. The number of students is growing, too. There were people from all walks of life when I was doing ASP (even a few students from India, ironically!). It just shows the wide-ranging appeal of Ayurveda.

AI:What is the role of Ayurveda in people's life?
Jon: We can't have a ruined environment and healthy people, healthy communities and a healthy world at the same time. It’s all connected. Ayurveda is eco-friendly; it can contribute a lot to sustainable health development. But the classical idea of local potent herbs is being replaced by patent drugs. It may be due to the fact that people look for drugs easier to use and attractive to look. But modern the production of pharmaceuticals and even “ayurvedic” patent medicine products has an environmental cost. We would do well to remember the classical idea that the people of a particular place are best cured by the herbs of that place. Ayurveda can help us live in greater harmony with the world around us. After all, it is a fundamental principle of Ayurveda that we are nothing but reflections of the world (or vice versa).

In the US, people go to buy things in stores, and they are confused, overwhelmed with choice. What to eat? People hardly know what food is anymore. Advertisements in the mass media give all sorts of perverted ideas, so we have an epidemic of diet-related disease in the West. Ayurveda can help people remember what is good ad natural. It's time-tested medicine, and it provides a lot of common sense: not just herbal remedies but preventative care through seasonal diet and such. But people in the West tend to want a quick-fix or magic pill, and worse, they want to consume an exciting new product. For some, Ayurveda is just that: something new and exotic to try, then forget about. I want to see Ayurveda adapted locally and assimilated into the broader culture in the States, because we need it so badly.


AI: What is the status of Ayurveda in Nepal?
Jon: It's a tricky question; actually . . .I don't know if I’m qualified to answer that! You might know better as you study in official Ayurveda College.

I do know that here in Nepal, cultural practices with regard to diet and lifestyle are well-informed by Ayurveda. (Though some people do not follow it seriously) people mostly know what to eat and what not to eat, for example. I mean that a lot of Ayurveda is actually embedded in the culture here in Southasia.

You have a long-rooted tradition. But in many modern settings such as Naradevi hospital they take a less traditional approach. They say “integrated,” but they seem to use mostly biomedical language in diagnosis. The overall clinical model there is very Western. Ayurvedic examination and treatment are minimized—they take blood pressure but not pulse (nadi pariksha). There is certainly a postcolonial dynamic at work, with people aspiring to the legitimacy that they associate with Western medicine.

One problem with allopathy is it focuses on disease without looking at the big picture, the overall aspects of body mind and spirit. You know there is no good definition of health in modern bio-medical science. I'm worried that people look too much to the West to validate such time-tested medicine.

AI: What do you think about integration?
Jon: Integration is exciting, but Ayurveda may be in some danger of being swallowed up by the biomedical/allopathic approach. Even the Ayurvedic drugs are justified in (Western) scientific terms: they say that this herb is Ayurvedic 'antibiotic’ or that one an ‘immunomodulator’ instead of talking rasa/virya/vipak/prabhav. So it’s a fine line between changing with the times and staying true to tradition. I for one am not convinced that modern science should be the ultimate judge when it comes to health. I tend to trust tradition; traditions have survived for so long for good reason.


Some dream about a single, global medical system. I prefer to think in terms of what’s appropriate for a given place, you know, keep it local. But there’s this tide of globalization, the dominance of big multinational companies on the supply of drugs to the whole world. You have to be suspicious whenever there is a lot of money involved . . .
Still, integration in a positive way is necessary. We can’t keep knowledge segregated, it’s not possible. For example, while treating an acute case like bike accident/emergency case, we have to use the modern biomedical parameters immediately. Biomedicine is undeniably excellent for traumatic injuries. And for long-termtreatment (like those of chronic conditions- as sometimes Ayurveda scholars mention) and for health maintenance we can use Ayurvedic parameters. I mean to say that there should be equal dialogue. It should not be like one medical system (like Allopathy) dominating the other systems of medicine.

AI: What do you think about the efficacy of Ayurveda ?
Jon: It's one of the reasons why I got into Ayurveda—because it works. I had some lingering digestive problems and I visited many doctors for the cure. But they said I had no problem, I was OK. I searched in net and went through some Ayurveda books. I met Ayurveda physicians. Ayurveda explains the idea of agni (the digestive fire) which many westerners do not have a concept of. Ayurveda helps to build some common sense like - proper food in proper time and in appropriate amount. In American culture, such things are not practiced well. (Now my digestion is better)
Although it is more than this, Ayurveda can serve as a self-help book. If you study it you can manage many things yourself. People think Ayurveda works slowly. Yeah! it works slowly and balances all ingredients of body unlike Allopathy, which may manage one thing at the cost of another- you take from one hand and lose from another. There is a growing dissatisfaction with the allopathic approach in the West, a growing demand for approaches like that of Ayurveda which work deeply and for longer period of time.

for clarification we'd like ask you, here you mean to say- 'Some may argue one system to be scientific and another to be unscientific and useless. This is due to lack of proper understanding.' Is it so? I consider Ayurveda scientific, in the sense that it is based on observation and experimentation. But of course the worldview that Ayurveda comes out of is broader than the merely physical. The reason that many modern scientists are skeptical of holistic systems like Ayurveda is that the current trend in science is to be reductionistic, to look at one little element and ignore the big picture. The Ayurvedic tradition contains the wisdom not to try and isolate. There are always too many variables; when it comes to life and living creatures, everything is a variable! So clinical studies have trouble capturing the beauty and consistency of Ayurveda.

AI: Do you think more Ayurveda scholars are required for the better health of the people and community?
Jon: Sure, more is merrier. But educating the general population is as important as creating more specialists.

AI: What can be done for public awareness?
Jon: If every student at the Ayurveda campus teaches their friends and family some of the principles of Ayurveda, that is a good start. And this magazine plays a role too. For me it’s about bringing the concepts to life on a daily basis. Everybody already knows some Ayurveda, since they know some things that are useful for life (the sutra defining Ayurved says, hita hitam sukham dukham, ayus tasya hita hitam . . . ): like maybe they chew cardamom for flatulence and indigestion or drink ginger tea for a cold. Now if they can just extend their understanding to why these things work . . .

AI: How are you doing here in Nepal, how is your study going here?
Jon: (Despite few problems like electricity, pollution, transportations, he did not like to mention them, as it was already well understood. Let us hope that in coming days there will be no electricity cut, pollution, traffic jam and so on. Jon has never experienced power cut in the USA)
Nepal is treating me very well. I don't have one way of study. I'm using various methods and techniques. I have studied with the people of different fields. I have been going to meet traditional Vaidyas in Banepa, the guys who are still preparing Ayurvedic medicines in the old way. They are also involved in Rasa Shastra-- alchemy. In western culture, Mercury is considered as a poison and in Ayurveda it is used in some medicines called Rasaushadhi, so some westerners are afraid of it. I have had to pleasure to meet with Dr. Kashi Raj Sharma Subedi - who is a reknowened Ayurveda scholar here and a real embodiment of Ayurveda. I have visited many people and places. Sometimes I work and study with friends like Puspa Raj Poudel and you.
Overall, I try to find a balance between studying Ayurveda itself (like you all are doing at TU) and researching the forms that Ayurveda is taking in modern Nepal.

AI: Anything that you like to say at the last?
Would you like to send any further message to the readers?
Jon: Sure. I’d like to say, remember how broad Ayurveda is. It’s about what is useful for life, what is healthy in a broad sense for people, for society, for the world. Today so much ill health can be traced back to food: processed, refined, nutrient-deficient food. Too much food, not enough food. That’s a big enough problem to occupy the most ambitious student of Ayurveda (or public health or nutrition). I owe a shout-out to my roommate Alden Towler, a fellow Fulbright scholar, who is studying the relation between modern diet and disease (especially diabetes) in Kathmandu. I consider his work to be Ayurvedic as well.
To the students at the Ayurveda College--keep up your studies but don’t lose sight of the big picture. Find time to do the things you love, that’s the only way you can keep up your own health and happiness. There’s no point in being a doctor if you are sick and stressed-out. When you lose your inspiration, remember the richness of the tradition you are studying, the distilled wisdom of hundreds of generations of Vaidyas. You are a vehicle for that living tradition. And for that you have my deepest respect.

AI: Thank you very much for your kind cooperation and invaluable time!
Jon: You’re welcome, It's a great honour to me. Thanks to you as well.

(Prepared by Aseem Baidya, Cyrus Neupane, Shiva Ram Khatiwada and Shree Ram Phuyal)
{Our heartiest thanks to Mr. Alden Towler for his unforgettable cooperation, help and hospitality}

We humans, animals cursed with metacognition, are in constant need of stories, without whose ordering power existence is a senseless (if occasionally sublime) series of events. These stories are of all kinds. Some are handed down to us as myth, but also as what we call history; even the great god Science consists of the gluten of fact stretched and leavened by the yeasty air of interpretation: like bread, knowledge is mostly useful fiction. In the areas of our lives where the great library of culture fails to supply stories, we’re left to construct our own. This is no mean feat, though, since the stories by which we order our lives had better be believable. Our job is to tell a story so good we convince ourselves it’s true.
Part of the work of growing up in modernity is finding the words in which to tell your own story. (In postmodernity, prose, being linear, may fail altogether; so then you have to write your own poem?) Young people are frequently forced to assess how well the stories we tell fit us: whether they bind and constrain, straightjacket-like; comfort and thwart ambition like a bathrobe; stoke the ego like a tailored suit. Often they’re second-hand stories (though all stories are second-hand in one sense), or patchworks scrapped together from TV and Hollywood, and fit like you’d expect someone else’s clothes to. Who hasn’t in all earnestness tried on layers that look ridiculous in retrospect? Dressing oneself in a story that fits is no easy task, especially with pop culture bombarding us with ready-made articles, one-size-fits-all pieces of glimmering one-dimensional pulp that can’t serve our individual purposes for long. How many people, wearing a plastic tiara or superhero jockstrap, talk in snippets of Hollywood drama for want of something that fits any better?

Just because I’m the storyteller here doesn’t make me immune to the need for narrative, and I’m as excited as the next twenty-something (a phrase I submit myself to voluntarily because at 25 it’s nice to feel I’m in the same boat as all my story-hungry peers, and there is a particular flavor (quiet urgency?) to the years before 30, as we search out our paths) when I stumble across good material for my own plot. I had such a moment recently, when I suddenly found myself playing the role of Ayurvedic doctor to a fifty-year-old Nepali woman. This was during a trip to the Terai a month ago (cf the Nepali Time entry below). My friend Pusparaj and I had stopped by the woman’s house to pay a social call, and over the inevitable irrefutable methamphetamine-like tea it came up that the woman suffers from pain in her right hand. My friend, who is in the middle of his five-and-a-half year Bachelor of Ayurvedic Medical Science program in Kathmandu, beckoned me over so I could examine her. I wasn’t totally comfortable, both because my own Ayurvedic training is very limited in scope and because there was a small crowd of her family members, neighbors, and interested birds watching. But with a little encouragement from Pusparaj I asked her a few questions, compared her hands, took her pulse. Ayurveda’s basic diagnostic strategies: darshana, sparshana, prashna (looking, touching, questioning). She was constipated, it turned out, suffered from lower back pain as well as the pain in the back of her hand, and her pulse and tongue showed the presence of aam (metabolic waste, generally from improper or incomplete digestion) in her system. Her appetite was poor. Her pain was worst in the morning. I found myself blurting out a diagnosis before my conscious mind had reached its conclusions, but Pusparaj nodded: ama-vata, or rheumatism. Treatment would have to involve first cleansing her system of the aam, and under the circumstances of a quick and informal chat about her health, that was all I could hope to undertake. I told the woman to take triphala, the famous Ayurvedic bowel-cleansing, digestion-regulating formula. I’ve given triphala (“three fruits”) many times in my capacity as an Ayurvedic lifestyle consultant in the States, but this was different: here the remedy I prescribed was not some funky, esoteric and exotic powder, but a traditional formula that the villagers knew of. The three ingredients—amalaki (Emblica officinalis), bibhitaki (Terminalia belerica) and haritaki (Terminalia chebula) all grew in the vicinity. The medicine would be fresh, it would be free, and it would be all the more potent for it.
The clarity with which Ayurveda explained (with its own narratives, in turn; much of Ayurveda’s power is in its metaphors) the woman’s condition and pointed to a simple treatment; the beauty of feeling that the remedy lay not only in physical but in cultural proximity—a small but successful union of nature and culture; the mounting roar of disease everywhere; my own struggle for good health in a broad sense; these factors align to illuminate the thread of my own tale.
My own tale: I’ve couched it before as based on a recognition of the fundamental unity between the health of people, society, and the planet; my work then must be somehow to serve as doctor, helping in some small ways to restore the health of the interconnected parts and of the whole. Medicine is anything that enhances health at all these levels, or at least one level without disrupting it elsewhere. Planting a tree can be medicine for the earth; that tree’s nutrient-rich fruit can be medicine for a sick person; even cutting that tree down for its fragrant heartwood can be compatible with medicine if you leave many such trees for every tree you take. Love is good medicine, since it is always more than the sum of its parts.

The premise of my plot, then, is to practice medicine as best I can, using my own peculiar skills and proclivities to do some good, try and avoid harm. (Sounds deceptively simple, I know. Stay tuned for complications.) As this story comes into focus I find myself believing it as though my writing were merely the tracing of letters already written. Don’t we all have to convince ourselves that what we find ourselves drawn to is what we are destined to do? Destiny, that grand narrative, (or as master storyteller Neil Gaiman has it) a dusty tome always being written. An endless book of stories, a story of an endless book of stories: basta. I surrender to that vision, knowing Borges would approve.