Healing & Ayurveda

That the body is not separate from the spirit. Grief, fear, unresolved trauma, and sustained condemnation register physically, and the traditions have understood this for millennia without the vocabulary of modern physiology. Practice — breath, stillness, prayer, ritual, disciplined attention — is how a person tends the whole system rather than the mind alone.

Yes, and it has a name: psychoneuroimmunology, the study of interactions among psychological processes, the nervous system, and immune function. The research literature documents that chronic stress affects immune response through cortisol and related pathways, and that contemplative practice measurably influences inflammatory markers. The traditions arrived at the relationship by observation over centuries. The laboratory arrived at it recently. They describe the same thing.

No, and any such claim would be false. What is taught is that practice supports the conditions in which a body can do what a body does, and that a person under sustained fear or condemnation is not in those conditions. The claim is about state, not cure.

Restoration of a person to themselves. That includes the body, and it also includes grief that has never been sat with, a nervous system that has never been quiet, and the specific injury of having been written off by other people. The traditions treat all of that as one field.

Spiritual murder is the practice of condemning a person with authority borrowed from a book one did not write. A person can be answerable for what he has done — that is justice, and no one asks exemption from it. But no person's soul is any other person's to write off, least of all with a scripture he did not author. The healing teaching begins there because condemnation is an injury, and a great many people arrive carrying it.

Frequently from within a person's own religious world. Practitioners of Buddhist and Hindu traditions are called idolaters and devil worshippers. African traditional practice is called witchcraft. The founder has taught that the pulpit can do damage the street cannot, because the street does not claim to speak for God.

Breath, and stillness. Not because it resolves the circumstance, but because a person cannot think, decide, or pray from inside panic. The founder has written that a person who cannot sit alone in a room for twenty minutes has no business negotiating a twenty-milliondollar deal — and the same principle applies to a diagnosis, a sentence, or a grief.

Both, and the traditions do not separate them as sharply as the modern West does. The founder began meditating at age four, taught by his father, who practiced transcendental meditation and kundalini yoga and could sit forty-five minutes in an unquiet house. He was taken to a Hare Krishna temple in Detroit by age six.

Because it does not stay in the mind. Grief lodges in the body, and traditions across every culture in this library — Yoruba, Buddhist, Shaiva, Siddhar, Vaishnava — have developed ritual precisely because the body needs an action, not only an explanation.

Yes, as a matter of practice and community rather than clinical treatment. The traditions offer discipline, accountability to something larger than the self, and a structure for daily life. Clinical treatment is a separate and necessary thing, and students are told so.

A large one. Isolation compounds every injury the teaching addresses. This is part of why the prison ministry exists, and why its newsletter prints letters — the knowledge that others

are studying the same material is itself a form of care.

It is taught as tradition, history, and ethics — including the founder's authorship of Detroit's Proposal E, approved by voters in November 2021 with 61.08 percent, which decriminalized personal possession and therapeutic use of entheogenic plants within the city. Instruction is educational. The university does not supply, administer, or recommend any controlled substance.

Because the framework is religious. The claim is not that a technique produces a result; it is that a person is not reducible to a body, that suffering has meaning, and that traditions preserved knowledge about both. A wellness company cannot say that without borrowing from the traditions anyway.

We are all connected. What is done to a person's spirit reaches their body, and what is done to their body reaches their spirit. Practice tends both.

One of the world's oldest continuous systems of medicine, originating in the Indian subcontinent and documented in classical texts including the Charaka Samhita and Sushruta Samhita. It is a complete system, with its own theory of physiology, diagnostic method, materia medica, surgical literature, and preventive regimen.

Yes. The World Health Organization recognizes Ayurveda as a traditional system of medicine. In India it is regulated as medicine, overseen by the National Commission for Indian System of Medicine, and practitioners earn the BAMS — Bachelor of Ayurvedic Medicine and Surgery — through a five-and-a-half-year program at recognized colleges, after which they are licensed physicians.

Different, and this distinction matters for anyone enrolling in an American program. No U.S. state currently licenses Ayurvedic practitioners, and there is no recognized American degree in Ayurvedic medicine. Practitioners work within wellness, education, and consultation frameworks. Voluntary professional certification is available through the National Ayurvedic Medical Association.

A Certificate in Ayurvedic Studies, and at advanced levels a Diploma in Ayurvedic Wellness. These are educational credentials in a traditional healing system. They are not medical degrees, they do not confer any license, and they do not authorize the practice of medicine in any U.S. jurisdiction.

Because that title means something specific and different. In India it is a licensed medical degree. In the United States it would imply a medical qualification that no state recognizes and no graduate could act on. Naming the credential accurately protects the student, who is the person who would suffer if a title turned out to mean less than it appeared to. Leading American Ayurveda programs and NAMA itself use non-medical titles for the same reason.

Not at all. The curriculum covers the classical system in full: the tridosha framework of vata, pitta, and kapha; the seven dhatus; agni and digestion; ama and the theory of accumulated waste; prakriti and vikriti, meaning constitution and current imbalance; dinacharya, the daily regimen; ritucharya, seasonal regimen; ahara, food as medicine; classical herbal foundations; and the principles of panchakarma.

The classical account of three functional principles present in every person in individual proportion. Vata governs movement, pitta transformation, kapha structure and cohesion. Health is understood as each operating in its proper measure for that individual, which is why Ayurveda begins with constitution rather than with symptom.

The daily regimen — waking, cleansing, eating, working, and resting in accordance with natural rhythm. It is among the tradition's most practical contributions, and it is the part students most often report changes their lives, because it is available immediately and requires nothing to be purchased.

As the primary daily intervention. Ahara refers to diet ordered by constitution, season, and digestive capacity rather than by universal prescription — an approach modern nutrition science has been converging on under the heading of personalization.

Classical herbal knowledge is taught as tradition and pharmacognosy — what the texts say, how preparations were made, and what contemporary research has examined. The university does not sell herbs, does not prescribe, and instructs students clearly that herbal

products can interact with prescription medication and that a physician and pharmacist should be consulted.

Its principles and classical description are taught. Panchakarma procedures are clinical and should be undertaken only with qualified supervision in an appropriate setting. Reading about them does not qualify a person to perform them, and the curriculum says so.

No. Graduates are educated in a traditional system; they are not licensed clinicians. Diagnosis and treatment of disease is the practice of medicine, which requires a license in every U.S. state. Students are taught the boundary as part of the ethics module, because crossing it is how well-meaning practitioners get prosecuted.

Teach, write, advise on lifestyle and dietary practice within a wellness framework, integrate the tradition into existing spiritual or coaching work, and pursue further certification through NAMA or study in India. Many students enroll for their own practice rather than professionally.

Because the library treats healing traditions comparatively. Ayurveda sits naturally with the Shaiva and Siddhar curriculum, since the Tamil Siddhar tradition has its own medical lineage in Siddha medicine, and the founder is initiated in that tradition. The Yoruba material includes Osain, the Òrìṣà of plant medicine and herbal knowledge. These are parallel systems, and studying them together is illuminating.

Yes, within the Shiva University curriculum — the Tamil Siddhar corpus, its account of the body, breath disciplines, and its relationship to Ayurveda as a related but distinct South Indian system.

Instruction is delivered by the university's AI tutor from the published curriculum, as with all courses. This is disclosed plainly: courses are AI-delivered from written texts, not live clinical instruction by a physician.

For the study of the tradition, yes — it is text-based knowledge, and text is how Ayurveda has been transmitted for two thousand years. For clinical training it is not adequate, which is precisely why the credential is titled as studies rather than as medicine.

Pricing is published on the site. The design intent is accessibility: a tradition concerned with daily life should not be available only to people who can afford a graduate degree.

No. Neither this nor any other program of the temple is accredited by any body recognized by the U.S. Department of Education or the Council for Higher Education Accreditation. That is stated on every credential issued.

Within Buddha University and Shiva University, both services of Buddha Digital Temple, a Wyoming non-profit corporation. BUDDHA UNIVERSITY is a federally registered service mark, Serial No. 99533592, in Class 041, for providing online courses of instruction — verifiable at tmsearch.uspto.gov. A trademark registration establishes rights in a name; it is not accreditation and is not represented as such.

No. The temple operates educational programs in traditional healing systems. It does not operate a licensed medical facility, does not provide clinical care, and does not employ licensed clinicians in a treatment capacity. Any future clinical facility would require state licensure, which has not been sought.

No. Instruction is offered. No diagnosis, prescription, procedure, or clinical service is provided by the university or its instructors.

No, and no instructor or course material will ever advise it. Decisions about prescription medication belong to the student and their physician. A student who believes a practice conflicts with their treatment should raise it with their doctor.

No. The credentials are not recognized for professional licensure, insurance credentialing, or veterans education benefits.

They should be under the care of a physician. The traditions taught here counsel care for the whole person, and in the present era competent medical treatment is part of what that means. Nothing in this curriculum is offered as an alternative to it.

Because the alternative harms the student. A person who is told a credential is more than it is bears the loss when the truth emerges, and a person who is told a practice will cure them may delay care they need. Precision is not a legal formality here; it is the ethical content of teaching a healing tradition honestly.