Changes

Let's begin with Ayurveda, or literally the "knowledge of longevity". The oldest medical compendia from which Ayurveda took its rootsroot, are attributed to Sushruta (ca. 6th century BCE) and Charaka (between 100 BCE and 200 CE), which makes Ayurveda about as old Greek humoral medicine. If you look at the similarities between the two (as we will in a moment), it's hard to think that they've developed completely independently. But who copied from whom? That's hard to tell.

As the starting point we're going to take, again, the five elements: earth, water, fire, air and aether. Unlike in Greek thought, were aether only existed in celestial bodies and was thus of little importance to medicine, all five elements are relevant to Ayurveda. Besides , the Ayurvedic counterpart of aether is not so much a volatile substance as it's just vacuum, an empty space with the potential to be filled with something.

When describing the qualities of the Greek elements, we used two axes: ''hot'' vs. ''cold'' and ''dry'' vs. ''moist''. Ayurveda uses ten such axes, but we'll try to simplify it but boiling them down to only three: the two mentioned above plus ''light'' vs. ''heavy''. The next difference is that, in humoral medicine, each of the humours was mapped to one of the four terrestrial elements; in Ayurveda, on the other hand, the principal vital forces known as ''doshas'', which roughly correspond to the humours, are associated with pairs of elements. The good news is that there are only three ''doshas'', as not every possible pair of elements has its own ''dosha''.