सत्रे ह जाताविषिता नमोभिः कुम्भे रेतः सिषिचतुः समानम |
ततो ह मान उदियाय मध्यात ततो जातं रषिमाहुर्वसिष्ठम ||
- A hymn from the Rig Veda (7-33-13)
If you suppose this is another shloka sung in praise of some god or goddess, then you are totally mistaken. Surprisingly, this contains valuable information as regards the medical practice during the Vedic period, as we proceed to unravel in this post. This hymn on translating into English yields- "Pleased by the sacrifice and the praises, Mitra deva( Sun ) and Varuna deva(Air) effused into the Vasativara vessel the "Fluid of Birth" from which arose Agasthya and Vasishtha".
Under the impression that this is one of those old fairy tales, wherein a magician brandishes a wand and voila, a rabbit pops out, we hardly try to see the hidden logic in it. This process certainly refers to the creation of the "Test tube baby". Our sages had achieved, several thousand years ago, what our modern scientists recently have. This clearly shows the brilliance of the Vedic Indians. It is highly probable that most instances in our history wherein a person was gifted a child by a deity could have followed the same technique. In fact the well known Dronacharya too was born off such a strange process. Sage Vedavyasa narrates in the Mahabharata that "Sage Bharadwaja who had gone to the forest for his routine ablutions, happens to see a beautiful Apsara (Apsaras are by default, beautiful). Unable to keep his desires for her in control, he drops his Fluid of Birth into an earthern pot which later develops into Drona(Droni in sanskrit means "pot"). Naturally, the intricate details as to how the process is carried about is not discussed in the Mahabharata. However it is very certain that the same could have been ciphered into the vedas, which as we shall see, in future posts, are a massive source of knowledge in encrypted form.
