In India, medical science developed almost five thousand years ago. And you will be surprised to know that whatever surgery we have today is exactly described by Sushrut, one of the greatest surgeons in the East, in ancient scriptures five to seven thousand years old. But it was abandoned — and that is the point I want you to notice. Why was a developed science abandoned? — because it was found that surgery takes man as a mechanism, and man is not a mechanism; so rather than destroying man they abandoned surgery.

All the finest instruments that surgery uses are described by Sushrut in his scripture.  All the operations, even the brain operations, are described in full detail as if it is a modern textbook on surgery. But it is seven thousand…or at least five thousand years old. They developed it to the same point where we are, and they must have faced the same problem that we are facing. They must have found that something is basically wrong.

We go on working so much…and the sickness and the disease go on increasing. Even if we make a person without sickness, that does not mean that he is healthy. Absence of sickness is not health; that is a very negative definition. Health should have something more positive, because health is the positive thing and sickness is the negative thing. Now the negative is defining the positive.

Health is the feeling of well-being, your whole body functioning at its peak without any disturbance. You feel a certain well-being, a certain atonement with existence. That was not happening through surgery.

India abandoned the whole science and developed a totally different approach, ayurveda, which means science of life. It is significant. In the West we call it medicine, and medicine simply indicates sickness. Health has nothing to do with medicine. Medicine means that the whole science is devoted to curing you from sicknesses.