Longevity & Rasayana – two paths to a long life
Longevity is a global trend in the Western world. Nutrition, exercise, prevention and biomedicine are supposed to help us live healthily for as long as possible.
However, Ayurveda has had its own concept for this for thousands of years: Rasayana – the art of rejuvenation and renewal..
Ayurveda does not view ageing as a deficiency, but rather as an opportunity: to gain more wisdom and time in one’s current lifetime, and thus liberation from samsara, the wheel or cycle of birth and rebirth. The Charaka Samhita, 100 AD – a classic work of Ayurvedic literature – opens its first chapter with the words:
„We shall now expound the chapter entitled The Quest for Longevity. (Wir werden nun das Kapitel mit dem Titel „Das Streben nach Langlebigkeit“ erläutern.)“
Nobelpreisträger Venkatraman Ramakrishnan: „These billionaires have realised, of course, that if you throw enough money at a particular problem, you can solve it. And there is this old saying that when they were young, they wanted to be rich, but now they’re rich, they want to be young. And of course, you can’t buy youth, but you can buy aging research.“