While epidemiologists and micro bacterium specialists are working round-the-clock all over the world to develop a medicine for COVID-19, Veda Patha Shalas (schools teaching Vedas and Upanishads) in Tamil Nadu villages echo with recitation of Dhanvantari mantras (shlokas invoking Lord Dhanvantari, believed to be an incarnation of Lord Mahavishnu) to ward off the disease and save mankind.
Children in the age group of 8-15, who study Vedas in Kumbakonam’s Veda Path Shala in Kathira Mangalam village, wake up early morning, finish their morning ablution and commence reciting the Dhanvantari mantra hundreds of thousands times. More than the songs of the cuckoos, what wakes up the villagers each morning is “Om Namo Bhagavate Vasudevaya Dhanvantarye Amritakalasha Hastaya…” the recitation of the time-tested Dhanvantari mahamantra, the famous shloka from Vedic times.
The shloka is recited by the students of Vedic science and they have only one prayer to make to the Maker: “Save the world and save the lives from this pandemic.”
Not only in Veda Patha Shalas in Tamil Nadu villages but even in far away the United States of America, one can hear the chanting of Dhanvantari mantra. Dr Rekha Sreekanth, paramedical scientist, begins her day reciting the Dhanvantari mantra by joining the deeparadhana in the temple in her native place through facebook daily. “We have facebook live from our temple at deeparadhana time (doesn’t show the sanctum sanctorum) but we have that feeling of visiting the temple and then the priest chants it,” she said over telephone from Houston.
Dr R Krishnamurthi Sastry, Mahamahopadhyaya and a scholar who has been honoured by the President of India, told The Pioneer that Dhanvantari himself is the embodiment of medicine and has the power to remove all diseases. “If children in the age group of 8-15, which is the period of innocence, collectively recite this shloka, it will have the power to remove not only COVID-19 but any disease. Otherwise this ritual would not have been there. Recitation of Dhanvantari mahamantra and Maha Mrityunjaya Mantra have been around for centuries,” said the Mahamahopadhyaya, widely respected scholar in Tamil Nadu.
Yet another proof of the influence of the movement of stars and planets on the well-being of the world was pointed out by Thantric and Vedic scholar Parappanangadi Unnikrishna Panikkar. He quoted from Western publications, especially from a book authored by Barbara Tuchman, the Pulitzer prize winning historian who had found that the Bubonic Plague (1346-1353) which had claimed nearly 200 million people in Eurasia was the fallout of the conjunction of the planets Saturn, Jupiter and Mars in the house of the Aquarius.
“This is not the claim of the author but what was found out by the Medical Faculty of the University of Paris in 1348,” said Panikkar.
“In the year of 1345, on March 20, there was a conjuction of the planets Saturn, Jupiter and Mars in the house of Aquarius. The conjuction of Saturn and Jupiter portends death and disaster. The conjuction of Mars and Jupiter portends pestilence in the air. For Jupiter is warm and humid and draws up evil vapours from earth and water; Mars is hot and dry and kindles the evil into an ineffective fire. We must therefore expect a terrible calamity,” Barbara Tuchman quotes the findings of the medical faculty which probed the reasons for the pandemic in her book A Distant Mirror: The Calamitious 14th Century. The book bagged the 1980 National Book Award in History.
