ABSTRACT
The monk Moliya Sīvaka once approached the Buddha and asked him whether it was true, as many said, that all pleasant, painful, or neutral sensations were the results of past deeds, of karma. 1 The Buddha replied to Sīvaka that people who held this view were over-generalizing. In fact, he said, some pain arises from bile, some from phlegm, some from wind, some from humoral colligation, some from changing climate, some from being ambushed by difficulties, some from external attacks, and some, indeed, from the ripening of karma. 2 This is the first moment in documented Indian history that these medical categories and explanations are combined in a clearly systematic manner, and it is these very eight factors which later become the cornerstones of the nosology of classical ayurveda.
