I was going to add this as a comment to my last post, but then no one would see it. So here it is, my little footnote, writ large with its own heading. Which may as well be in Sanskrit. In that language's aggressively precise grammar, words are glommed onto each other to form compounds, like we sometimes do in English, btu moreso. Dravyagunavijnana, a modest example of this phenomenon, is composed of the words for substance (dravya), quality (guna), and knowledge (vijnana), and is essentially the term for traditional pharmacology. Could there be a more straightforward encapsulation of the herbalist's most basic line of study? Knowing the qualities of different substances. To think I forgot to mention this in my last post!
Dravyagunavijnana, or the art and science of the materia medica (to throw in scraps of another dead language here), is very much a foxy pursuit. I don't mean it's leggy and red-headed, but rather that it's un-hedgehoglike. According to this scheme of classification, which may or may not (anyone?) predate literary critic Isaiah Berlin and his Tolstoy study The Hedgehog and The Fox, hedgehog intelligence has one Big Idea, and everything fits into it. This is the territory of ideology, big-time. Of -isms. Fox intelligence is of an opposite sort; it sees every situation as different, and accrues lots of little insights instead of one big one. Berlin was arguing that the Tolstoy of War and Peace is at heart a fox, but one who wanted desperately to be a hedgehog. But back to dravya, their guna, and the vijnana thereof. It's foxy because every substance, be it an herb per se or a mineral, metal, or animal part, is its own entity. The more hedgehoggy eye of theory comes and sticks all these things in categories--derived from if not one then just a few Big Ideas--so that oyster shells and coral are both cooling (from an Ayurvedic perspective) and calcium-rich (from a Western one) substances. But in fact they are not the same, nor are red and white ginseng, nor aconite harvested on the summer solstice and aconite harvested at some other time of year. They each have their own qualities.
This is all a very convoluted way of saying that it's helpful for an aspiring herbalist to be interested in these qualities. To wonder what the spicy sweetness of American Spikenard root might signify, and how this sets it apart from the closely related but blander-tasting Wild Sarsaparilla. To be the sort of person who can entertain themself for hours in a tea shop, sampling and reading about different varieties of Camella sinensis. Some might say, "it's all just tea." But they'd be missing so much! The devil may be in the details, but so is the magic.
Dravyagunavijnana, or the art and science of the materia medica (to throw in scraps of another dead language here), is very much a foxy pursuit. I don't mean it's leggy and red-headed, but rather that it's un-hedgehoglike. According to this scheme of classification, which may or may not (anyone?) predate literary critic Isaiah Berlin and his Tolstoy study The Hedgehog and The Fox, hedgehog intelligence has one Big Idea, and everything fits into it. This is the territory of ideology, big-time. Of -isms. Fox intelligence is of an opposite sort; it sees every situation as different, and accrues lots of little insights instead of one big one. Berlin was arguing that the Tolstoy of War and Peace is at heart a fox, but one who wanted desperately to be a hedgehog. But back to dravya, their guna, and the vijnana thereof. It's foxy because every substance, be it an herb per se or a mineral, metal, or animal part, is its own entity. The more hedgehoggy eye of theory comes and sticks all these things in categories--derived from if not one then just a few Big Ideas--so that oyster shells and coral are both cooling (from an Ayurvedic perspective) and calcium-rich (from a Western one) substances. But in fact they are not the same, nor are red and white ginseng, nor aconite harvested on the summer solstice and aconite harvested at some other time of year. They each have their own qualities.
This is all a very convoluted way of saying that it's helpful for an aspiring herbalist to be interested in these qualities. To wonder what the spicy sweetness of American Spikenard root might signify, and how this sets it apart from the closely related but blander-tasting Wild Sarsaparilla. To be the sort of person who can entertain themself for hours in a tea shop, sampling and reading about different varieties of Camella sinensis. Some might say, "it's all just tea." But they'd be missing so much! The devil may be in the details, but so is the magic.
Magic is indeed in the details. We had a talk about hedgehog ideas around Church leadership at the end of first quarter (back in December sometime), and it's interesting to see how well this works as a business model, but I cannot help but think that perhaps religion, church, like the study of herbs, should look deeper than for this one overarching theme. There is a way in which being interested in the unique qualities of an herb, or a situation, or a particular community seems to be a much richer way of engaging with the world at large. Perhaps there's just the part of me that always aims to be a bit more foxy (albeit minus the long legs and red hair)!
ReplyDelete