Did Ayurveda medicine have any influence on regions other than the Indian subcontinent?

by spotifyadprob

Thanks in advance for your responses.

TheMadPoet

Basically no - not until modernity. Since the texts of aayurveda (long aa) were written in Sanskrit their sphere extends across a geographic and temporal area that eminent scholar Sheldon Pollock calls the 'Sanskrit cosmopolis'. This area includes south-east asia as well as the sub-continent. The other major powers are Imperial China and the Islamic cultural sphere.

The difficulty transmitting ideas may be illustrated by the monumental state supported effort required to translate the Lotus Suutra from Sanskrit into Chinese overseen by the monk Kumarila.

Likewise from the efforts of Islamic scholarship, even a casual read of the translated work Alberuni's India illustrates how little Sanskrit and Islamic cultures interpenetrated.

Because of the historical difficulties in transmitting Sanskrit cultural products to non-Sanskrit cultures that existed well into the Common Era, it is unlikely that aayurveda had any influence outside the Sanskrit cosmopolis until rather recently.

Perhaps someone could discuss the modern history of aayurveda and gloss the extent the tradition was preserved and practiced as a part of living Indian culture and the extent to which Orientalist scholarship discovered and re-popularized these works for eventual re-assimilation into contemporary Indian culture and export to the west.