Engineer by profession, Vaidya by tradition

VIJAYAWADA: Know who has the largest collection of ancient ayurvedic texts? A retired railway engineer!

In fact, his collection of 3,000 ancient native medical texts is by far the largest in the South India by any institution.

Pammi Satyanarayana Murthy, an engineer by profession, but an ayurvedic vaidya by tradition, has converted his flat in Ayodhyanagar into a library.

His collection includes rare texts such as Rasaratna Samucchayam of 1919 vintage, మునిభావ బోధిని (Munibhava Bodhini), which contains a chapter on వృక్ష ఆయుర్వేద (Vruksha Ayurveda) (medicinal botany), రసయోగ రత్నాకరం (Rasayoga Ratnakaram), a 1933 text prescribed by the then British Government for making medicinal compositions as per the Drugs Act, వైద్య వల్లభం (Vaidya Vallabham), భిషగ్ సుధర్నవం (Bhishag Sudharnavam) and నేత్ర దర్పణం (Netra Darpanam), a rare text wholly devoted to ophthalmology.

"Ayurveda is a family tradition for me. My grand father Chivukula Satyanarayana Sastry was a great ayurvedic doctor and he was called Rasacharya for his mastery over alchemy".

"My father Pammi Suryanarayana Murthy too was an ayurvedic physician of repute. Though an engineer in the railways, I and my wife studied ayurveda," Murthy told to this website's newspaper.

He also has palm leaf text collections on ayurveda. "My guru told me that some persons in Pithapuram were consigning palm leaf texts into the dust bin. I went and collected them. Now I am planning to digitise them", he said.

He has already come out with two volumes of ayurvedic dictionary and penned scores of books on ayurveda. Digitising palm leaf texts, collecting native medical knowledge from various communities and reducing the ancient texts into Telugu and English occupies most of his time.

"There is a dire need to train people in unravelling Granthic, Brahmi and Nandi Nagari scripts, in which most of the texts are written.

The number of those capable of deciphering these texts is going down. If we do not prepare a second line of scholars, this valuable information would be lost for ever", he says.

Courtesy: NewIndPress