The short version
Chapter 7 of the Charaka Samhita's Kalpa Sthana takes a single root and builds one hundred and ten separate formulas out of it. Not a hundred and ten plants — one plant, a hundred and ten ways of handing it over. The chapter ends by counting itself, and the count is broken into sixteen groups: nine formulas made with sour liquids, twelve with the salts, eighteen with cow's urine, seven with milk, eight as a linctus, five as sweet balls, two as vinegars, and so on. Add the sixteen figures and you get exactly 110. Then look at what the sixteen groups are named after. Fifteen of them are named after the anupana — the vehicle the powder is taken with — or after the form it is rolled, boiled or fermented into. Exactly one is named after time, the six seasonal formulas. Not one of the sixteen is named after a disease.
📖 24 min read · Classical source: Charaka Samhita, Kalpa Sthana, Chapter 7 — the formulary half of the Trivrt Kalpa, verses Ka7#12 to Ka7#80 (Gabriel Van Loon's English rendering, pp.589–596)
What this article covers
- Where These Pages Sit: The Kalpa Sthana's Seventh Chapter
- Anupana: The Word the Chapter Is Actually Organised Around
- The Census That Adds Up: Sixteen Groups, One Hundred and Ten Formulas
- Fifteen of Sixteen: What This Chapter Refuses to Index By
- Gomutra, Kshira, Sharkara: The Vehicle Groups, Largest First
- Varsha, Sharad, Hemanta, Grishma: One Root Through the Ritus
- Avaleha, Modaka, Panaka: The Point Where the Formula Becomes Food
- Kalyana Guda, the Coated Bolus, and the Apathya Clause
- Sukumara, Krura, and the Formula "For Wealthy Persons"
- Sauviraka, Tusodaka, Sura: Three Fermentations in a Purgative Chapter
- Ka7#76: Cold Water on the Face, and a Favourite Thing to Smell
- What This Article Is Not
- From the Ayurveda Hub Shelf
- More to Read on This Topic
- Frequently Asked Questions
Where These Pages Sit: The Kalpa Sthana's Seventh Chapter
The Charaka Samhita is built in eight sections, and the seventh of them is the Kalpa Sthana. It is the least romantic part of the whole compendium and, for anyone interested in how classical Indian pharmacy actually worked, one of the most interesting. It is a pharmacy manual. Twelve chapters, each one taking a single plant used in the eliminative procedures, working through every way that plant can be prepared, and then — this is the part people rarely mention — counting the formulas at the end and printing the total.
Chapters 1 to 6 handle the plants of vamana, the upward procedure. Chapters 7 to 12 handle the plants of virechana, the downward one. Chapter 7 is therefore the hinge, and it opens by naming its subject: trivrt, the root the text calls the best of the purgative drugs. We have already written about the opening of that chapter — the plant's synonyms, its two root colours and the collection protocol — in the article on Kalpa Sthana chapters 4 to 7.
This article picks up where that one stopped. From verse Ka7#12 onward the chapter stops describing the plant and starts building with it, and it does not stop for eight pages. What follows is a formulary: recipe after recipe, each one a short block of ingredients with a quantity, a preparation and a way of taking it. Read straight through, it looks like a list. Read with an eye on how the list is ordered, it turns into an argument about what a formula actually is.
The window in one line
Ka7#12 to Ka7#80 — the formulary half of the Trivrt Kalpa, running from the first bolus taken in a sour liquid to the closing census of one hundred and ten formulas and the instruction about sprinkling cold water on the face.
A word on the text used. The rendering read here is Gabriel Van Loon's English edition of the Charaka Samhita, which sets the formulas out as ingredient blocks with the verse reference printed beside each one — Ka7#12, Ka7#40-45, and so on. That layout is the translator's, not the Sanskrit's, and it makes the chapter's structure visible in a way a running prose translation does not. Everything counted in this article was counted off that layout, and where the layout and the text disagree, this article says so rather than smoothing it over.
Anupana: The Word the Chapter Is Actually Organised Around
Anupana is one of those Sanskrit words that survives in Indian households long after the text it came from has been forgotten. It means the thing you take a preparation with — the liquid that carries it down, the drink that follows it, the medium it is mixed into before it ever reaches the mouth. Warm water is an anupana. So is milk. So is honey, buttermilk, rice gruel, a sour fruit juice, or the decoction of another plant entirely.
In the modern reading of Ayurveda the anupana usually gets one sentence and a nod: take it with warm water. In the Kalpa Sthana it is doing considerably more work than that. Across these eight pages the drug is a constant. It is trivrt on page 589 and it is still trivrt on page 596. What changes, from formula to formula, is almost entirely the company it keeps.
Look at the first four formulas of the window and the pattern is already fixed. At Ka7#12 the paste is rolled into a bolus of about ten grams and dissolved in a sour liquid; the same verse then offers the urines of cow, sheep, goat and buffalo, two kinds of vinegar, clear wine, and a decoction of triphala as alternatives — six or seven different vehicles for the identical bolus. At Ka7#14 the twelve salts and dry ginger are added and the vehicle becomes hot water. At Ka7#15-16 eighteen pungent and bitter herbs are combined with trivrt and the vehicle becomes cow's urine. At Ka7#17 a half-part of madhuka is added and the vehicle becomes sugar-water.
Three vehicles, one unchanged powder.
Four formulas, one drug, four vehicles — sour, hot water, cow's urine, sugar-water. And the ordering criterion given in the text for the first three is the same each time: this is useful in conditions of K and V. Kapha and Vata. The vehicle changes; the target does not. A modern formulary would call these four variants of one product. The Kalpa Sthana counts them as four formulas, and at the end of the chapter it counts them again, by vehicle.
A note on the abbreviations. Where this translation prints K, V and P, it means Kapha, Vata and Pitta. The chapter uses them constantly — a formula is "for K and V" or "for V and P" — and never for a named illness. It is sorting by dosha profile, not by diagnosis.
This is the observation the rest of the article is built on. If you want to know what a classical pharmacist thought a formula was, look at what they thought made two formulas different. In Kalpa Sthana chapter 7, changing the anupana makes a new formula. That is a claim about pharmacy, and the chapter closes by proving it arithmetically.
The Census That Adds Up: Sixteen Groups, One Hundred and Ten Formulas
Every chapter of the Kalpa Sthana ends the same way: with a samgraha, a summing-up, in which the compiler counts what he has just written down. Chapter 7's summing-up sits at Ka7#77-80, and it is worth setting out in full because the shape of it is the finding.
| # | Group as the census names it | Formulas | What the group is named after |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | preparations with sour etc. | 9 | Vehicle — amla, the sour liquids |
| 2 | with rock salt etc. | 12 | Adjuvant — the lavana group |
| 3 | with cow's urine | 18 | Vehicle — gomutra |
| 4 | with madhuyasti | 2 | Adjuvant — liquorice |
| 5 | with jivaka etc. | 14 | Herb group — the jivakadi sweet drugs |
| 6 | with milk etc. | 7 | Vehicle — kshira |
| 7 | of linctus | 8 | Form — avaleha |
| 8 | with sugar | 4 | Vehicle — sharkara |
| 9 | with syrup etc. | 5 | Form — panaka |
| 10 | according to the seasons | 6 | Time — the ritus |
| 11 | sweet balls | 5 | Form — modaka |
| 12 | in ghrta and milk | 4 | Vehicle — ghee and milk |
| 13 | in saturating drink and powder | 2 | Form — manth and churna |
| 14 | in alcoholic beverage | 2 | Form — sura |
| 15 | in vinegars | 2 | Form — sauviraka, tusodaka |
| 16 | in sadava etc. | 10 | Form — the sadava preparations |
| Declared total | 110 |
Add the third column by hand: 9 + 12 + 18 + 2 + 14 + 7 + 8 + 4 + 5 + 6 + 5 + 4 + 2 + 2 + 2 + 10. The running total goes 21, 39, 41, 55, 62, 70, 74, 79, 85, 90, 94, 96, 98, 100, 110. One hundred and ten exactly, against a declared one hundred and ten. Sixteen figures, no rounding, no slack.
Why the arithmetic is worth checking
Because it does not always come out. In the neighbouring chapters of the same section the subtotals for dhamargava and vatsaka reconcile perfectly, while the subtotals printed for krtavedhana come to fifty-eight against a declared sixty. Two short. That is almost certainly a feature of how this particular English edition sets the blocks out rather than a slip in the Sanskrit — but it means the arithmetic here is a real check, not a formality. Chapter 7 passes it.
A census that reconciles to the digit tells you something about the working method behind it. Somebody wrote the formulas, then went back through them, sorted them into sixteen bins, counted each bin, and printed the tally. That is bookkeeping, and it is the kind of bookkeeping a person does when the list is meant to be used — when a reader is going to need to find one formula in a hundred and ten, quickly, at the moment they need it.
Fifteen of Sixteen: What This Chapter Refuses to Index By
Now read the fourth column of that table again, because this is the part that surprised me.
Group 1 is named after a vehicle. Group 3 is named after a vehicle. Groups 6, 8 and 12 are named after vehicles. Groups 2 and 4 are named after adjuvants — the substance mixed in alongside. Group 5 is named after a set of herbs. Groups 7, 9, 11, 13, 14, 15 and 16 are named after forms — is it a linctus, a syrup, a sweet ball, a powder, a beverage, a vinegar, a sadava.
That is fifteen of the sixteen groups named after either what the formula is taken with or what shape it has been given. The one remaining group, number 10, is named after the seasons. And there is no seventeenth group. Not one of the sixteen bins is named after an illness.
This is not because the chapter is silent about illness. It is not remotely silent. Individual formulas in these pages are attached to gulma, to splenomegaly, to halimaka, to anorexia, to fever, to sannipata, to dysuria, to wasting, to anaemia, to kustha, to jaundice, to disorders of the grahani, to arsha, to poisoning, to giddiness, to cough and to udavarta. The disease vocabulary is dense and it is precise. It simply is not the filing system.
Why that distinction matters for reading any classical text. A modern pharmacopoeia files by indication: you look up the condition and it gives you the drug. The Kalpa Sthana files by delivery: you look up the vehicle or the form and it gives you the formula. The indications are written on the individual entries, the way a note is written on a card — but the drawer the card sits in is labelled by how the thing is handed over.
You can argue about why. The most economical explanation is that the compiler already knew which drug he was reaching for — the whole chapter is about one root — so the question that remained was never what but how. Given a person who needs this drug, what will they actually be able to take, keep down, afford, tolerate in this season, and swallow without a fuss? Sorted that way, the vehicle stops being a footnote and becomes the principal variable. A hundred and ten answers to one question.
There is a second, quieter implication. Nothing in this filing system helps a reader who has a diagnosis and wants a drug. It only helps a reader who already has the drug and needs to fit it to a person. That is a formulary written for a dispensary, not for a diagnostic clinic — and it fits what we know about how the six hundred formulas of the Kalpa Sthana were meant to be worked with.
Gomutra, Kshira, Sharkara: The Vehicle Groups, Largest First
Sort the census by size and the chapter's priorities come out in order. The largest single bin is gomutra, cow's urine, with eighteen formulas. Then the jivakadi group with fourteen, the salts with twelve, the sour liquids with nine, the sadava preparations with ten, the linctuses with eight, milk with seven.
Eighteen formulas taken in cow's urine is a striking number to a modern reader, and it is worth understanding what the classical logic is rather than recoiling from it. Gomutra is classed as pungent, sharp and hot, which in the vocabulary of the tradition makes it the opposite of the heavy, cold, unctuous qualities attributed to Kapha. Almost every formula in these pages that takes cow's urine as its vehicle is marked for K and V. The vehicle is being chosen to point in the same direction as the intended effect, and it is being chosen consistently — eighteen times.
Contrast the kshira bin. Milk is heavy, cool and unctuous, and the milk-vehicle formulas cluster where the text writes V and P — Vata and Pitta. At Ka7#18-19 the sweet, cooling jivakadi drugs — jivaka, rsabhaka, meda, sravani, karkatasrngi, mudgaparni, masaparni, mahasravani, kakoli, ksirakakoli, guduci, ksirasukla, payasya, madhuyasti — are set out as the group "beneficial in disorders of V and P", and the very next verse pairs the two root colours of trivrt with half a part of haritaki to be taken "with milk, meat soup, juice of sugarcane" and various sweet fruits. Same root, and now every single thing around it is soft.
The vehicle carries the dosha logic, not the drug
Trivrt does not change its qualities between Ka7#15 and Ka7#19. What changes is that in one the escort is cow's urine and eighteen pungent herbs, and in the other it is milk, sugarcane juice and the sweet jivakadi group. The tradition's answer to "how do you give one sharp drug to a delicate person" is: you do not soften the drug, you soften everything you send with it.
The sharkara bin — sugar — has only four formulas but includes the most economical entry in the whole chapter, which we come to in the seasonal section below. The salts bin at twelve is the odd one out: saindhava and its eleven companions are not a vehicle at all but an adjuvant, added dry to the powder, with hot water doing the actual carrying at Ka7#14. The census has quietly mixed two different kinds of category, vehicles and adjuvants, into one list — which is exactly the sort of thing a working list accumulates and a theoretical one would not.
Varsha, Sharad, Hemanta, Grishma: One Root Through the Ritus
Group 10 of the census — "6 according to the seasons" — is the only bin in the sixteen that indexes by time, and the formulas behind it are set out one after another at Ka7#56 to Ka7#61. They are short, and they are the clearest demonstration in the chapter of what the anupana is for.
| Ritu | Verse | What is combined with trivrt | Vehicle |
|---|---|---|---|
| Varsha — the rains | Ka7#56 | indrayava, pippali, sunthi | honey and grape juice |
| Sharad — autumn | Ka7#57 | duralabha, sarkara, balaka, candana, madhuyasti, satpala | grape juice |
| Hemanta — early winter | Ka7#58 | citraka, patha, jiraka, sarala, vaca, svarnaksiri | hot water |
| Grishma — summer | Ka7#59 | sugar, in equal parts — and nothing else | — |
| All seasons | Ka7#60-61 | trayamana, hapusa, saptala, katuka, svarnaksiri | cow's urine, steeped three days |
Grishma: equal parts, and nothing else.
Read down the third column. The hemanta formula is the hottest thing in the group — citraka, vaca, sarala, jiraka, all sharp and warming, and hot water on top of them. The sharad formula is the coolest — candana is sandalwood, madhuyasti is liquorice, sarkara is sugar, and the vehicle is grape juice. The varsha formula sits between, pungent but carried in honey. And grishma, high summer, gets the shortest formula in the chapter: equal parts trivrt and sugar. Two ingredients. That is the whole entry.
This maps onto classical seasonal doctrine without anyone having to say so. Sharad is the season the tradition associates with accumulated Pitta, so the autumn escort is a cooling one. Hemanta is the season in which agni is described as strongest and heavy food is tolerated, so the winter escort is heating and complex. Anyone who has read Vagbhata's chapter on ritucharya in the Ashtanga Hridaya will recognise the direction of travel immediately. What is unusual here is seeing seasonal doctrine applied not to diet or routine but to the escort of a single fixed drug.
An honest discrepancy, flagged rather than smoothed
The census declares six seasonal formulas. This English rendering of pp.593–594 prints four formulas named for a season — varsha, sharad, hemanta, grishma — plus one explicitly marked "all season", which is five. The two remaining seasons of the classical six, shishira and vasanta, are not given entries of their own in these pages as printed. The likeliest explanation is a feature of this edition's block layout, which sometimes merges adjacent verses, rather than a gap in the Sanskrit. It is recorded here because the alternative — quietly writing "six seasonal formulas" and moving on — would be reporting the census instead of reading it.
Avaleha, Modaka, Panaka: The Point Where the Formula Becomes Food
Seven of the sixteen census bins are named after a preparation form rather than an ingredient, and taken together they account for thirty-four of the hundred and ten formulas. Ranged in order they read: avaleha, the linctus, eight formulas; panaka, the syrup, five; modaka, the sweet ball, five; manth and churna, the saturating drink and the plain powder, two; sura, the alcoholic beverage, two; the two vinegars; and the ten sadava preparations carried over from chapter 1.
The five classical extraction forms — juice, paste, decoction, cold infusion and hot infusion — are the subject of the panchavidha kashaya kalpana, and they are about getting the active material out of the plant. The forms in this chapter are doing a different job. They are about getting the material in.
Where the formula becomes food.
Ka7#33 states it about as plainly as a classical text ever states anything. Having given a long, cooked, fruit-and-oil preparation at Ka7#30-32, the compiler adds that by the same method panaka (syrup), rasa (meat soup), vegetable soup, sweet balls and pickles may all be prepared for purgation in those with a Kapha predominance. Five ordinary items off a kitchen shelf, all of them named as delivery formats.
The same move happens again at Ka7#65. A powder of trivrt with triphala, danti, saptala, trikatu and rock salt is steeped in amalaka juice for a full week — a bhavana, the classical impregnation step — and the resulting powder, the text says, "should be used with saturating drinks, vegetable soups, meat and pickles". The preparation has stopped being something you take and become something you cook with.
And at Ka7#34-35 there is a formula built explicitly for people who will struggle with the ordinary route: nili, bhrnga and ela one part each, trivrt three parts, sugar six parts, ground to a powder — then that powder worked up with fruit juice, honey and parched grain flour into a manth, a saturating drink. The text calls it a safe preparation "for the delicate persons" and for those with a weak digestive fire. Six parts sugar to three parts drug. The formula is half confectionery by weight, and that is the point of it.
The oldest problem in pharmacy. A preparation nobody will finish does nothing at all. Six parts sugar in a manth, a fourteen-substance coating on a bolus, a pickle that happens to be a purgative — these are not decorative. They are the classical tradition solving a problem every pharmacist since has had to solve, using the only tools a kitchen offers.
Kalyana Guda, the Coated Bolus, and the Apathya Clause
Most of the formulas in these pages are anonymous — a list of ingredients and a verse number. A few carry names, and the one the compiler sets off with its own heading is Kalyana Guda, at Ka7#40-45. It is worth reading as a piece of manufacturing.
Twelve dry components at ten grams each: vidanga, pippalimula, triphala, dhanyaka (coriander), citraka, marica, indrayava, jiraka (cumin), pippali, gajapippali, the five salts, and ajamoda. Then the bulk: 320 grams of tila oil, 320 grams of trivrt powder, 1.92 litres of amalaka juice and two kilograms of jaggery. All of it cooked together over a mild fire and rolled into boluses the size of a jujube or a fig.
Two kilograms of jaggery as the matrix.
Two kilograms of guda. That is not seasoning; the jaggery is the matrix. The whole preparation is a guda in the technical sense — a jaggery-based confection with the drug carried inside it, cooked down until it will hold a shape and keep. The named dose is a bolus you can hold between two fingers.
Then comes the clause. The text says these boluses "can be taken in all seasons, and without any restriction of diet and activities." Apathya — the food and conduct a person is told to avoid during a course of treatment — is one of the heaviest obligations classical therapeutics places on a patient, and here it is being explicitly waived.
That waiver is not a one-off. It appears three times in this window, and each time it is presented as a selling point of the formula:
| Verse | Formula | What the text says about restriction |
|---|---|---|
| Ka7#37-39 | 7.5g trivrt with 7.5g of vidanga, pippali and yavakshara, taken in ghee and honey or as jaggery sweet balls | "an excellent evacuative without imposing any restriction of diet etc." |
| Ka7#40-45 | Kalyana Guda | "in all seasons, and without any restriction of diet and activities" |
| Ka7#46-49 | The 40g bolus with trikatu, twak, patra, musta, ela, vidanga, amalaka, haritaki, mukulaka, trivrt and sugar | "without restriction of diet", taken early in the morning followed by cold water |
Read those three rows together and a design brief emerges. Somebody wanted formulas that would work in an ordinary life — for a person who cannot stop working, cannot change what the household is cooking, cannot go into a week of dietary seclusion. The classical literature is full of regimens that assume the opposite. These three assume a patient with a job.
The coated bolus at Ka7#51-55
The most technically striking entry in the chapter. Ten substances at ten grams each — trivrt, haimavati, syama, nilini, gajapippali, pippalimula, pippali, musta, ajamoda, duralabha — plus forty grams of sunthi and eight hundred grams of jaggery, powdered together and rolled into boluses the size of a fig. Then a second, entirely separate list of fourteen powders — hingu, sauvarcala, trikatu, yavani, bida, jiraka, vaca, ajagandha, triphala, cavya, citraka, dhanyaka, tumburu and dadima — "should be used to coat the outside of boluses." An inner mass and a distinct outer coat, specified separately, in a text of this age.
Whatever the coating was for — keeping the boluses from sticking together, masking what the inner mass tasted like, adding a set of pungent and sour substances the swallower meets first — it is a two-layer dosage form with its own ingredient list. That is worth pausing on, because a coated tablet is usually told as a modern story.
Sukumara, Krura, and the Formula "For Wealthy Persons"
The chapter sorts by vehicle and by form. Underneath that, it also sorts by person — and the criteria it uses are not the ones a modern reader expects.
Some are familiar from the rest of the tradition. Koshtha, the bowel tendency classified as mrdu (soft), madhyama (medium) or krura (hard), does a great deal of work in this chapter's parent section, and it reappears here at Ka7#62, where a nine-drug combination of trivrt, syama, duralabha, indrayava, gajapippali, nilini, triphala, musta and katuka is called "the safest purgative useful even for the rough persons" and given at ten grams with ghee, meat soup or hot water. Frailty and delicacy do the same work in the other direction at Ka7#34-35, where the sugar-heavy manth is assigned to sukumara persons and to those whose digestive fire is weak. Where a person sits on the constitutional map — the subject of Vagbhata's chapter on prakriti and koshtha — decides which of the hundred and ten they are handed.
And then there is Ka7#50. The heading, in this translation, reads: The following boluses are purgative for wealthy persons. The formula is a hundred and sixty grams each of haritaki, amalaki and eranda, with forty grams of trivrt, made into ten sweet balls.
Sorted by purse. There is no disease in that heading and no constitution either. The variable is what the patient can afford. A classical formulary that keeps a separate entry for the well-off is telling you, in one line, that the other hundred and nine had to be affordable — that cost was a live constraint on the compiler's desk, alongside season, dosha and bowel type.
Put the sorting criteria of this chapter side by side and you get: the season, the dosha profile, the bowel type, the person's delicacy or robustness, the strength of their digestion, whether they can accept dietary restriction, what form they will actually swallow — and what they can pay. That is a considerably more social list of variables than the word "formulary" usually suggests.
Sauviraka, Tusodaka, Sura: Three Fermentations in a Purgative Chapter
Near the end of the window, at Ka7#71 to Ka7#73, the chapter does something no reader would predict from its title: it teaches fermentation. Three times.
The first is brief. Sura, an alcoholic beverage, "may also be prepared with decoction of trivrt and combining yeast of the same" — the decoction of the drug taking the place of the ordinary liquid, and a starter culture added.
The second and third are set out step by step, and the translator marks them with an editorial note calling them "perhaps the only direct instructions for creation of vinegar" in the text.
Six days, banked in a heap of grain.
| Preparation | Grain | Method |
|---|---|---|
| Sauviraka (Ka7#72-73) | Kulmasa — boiled barley, unhusked | Steam-cooked with a decoction of syama and trivrt, then fermented in water for six days, the container kept buried in a heap of grain |
| Tusodaka (Ka7#72-73) | Husked barley | Crushed and parched dry, then fermented in water together with the same powder |
The two differ in exactly one variable — whether the barley keeps its husk — and everything else about the method holds. That is a controlled pair, and it is the reason both names exist in classical Indian food vocabulary as two distinguishable sour liquids rather than one.
The detail that has stayed with me is the storage instruction: the fermenting container is kept in a heap of grains. A large mass of dry grain is a slow, stable insulator; a vessel buried in it holds a steadier temperature over six days than a vessel standing in a room. Nobody in the text explains this. It is simply how you do it — a piece of practical process control written down as a step.
The loop closes
Look back at Ka7#12, the very first formula of the window. Among the vehicles offered for that bolus are sauviraka and tusodaka. Sixty verses later the chapter stops and explains how they are made, using its own drug in the mash. The formulary has quietly become self-supplying: the escort listed on page 589 is manufactured on page 596.
There is one more preparation of this kind, at Ka7#69-70, and it is the longest process in the chapter. Trivrt "in measure of eight closed fists" is boiled in 10.24 litres of water until a quarter remains, filtered, and mixed with four kilograms of jaggery. The vessel it goes into is first smeared inside with honey, pippali and citraka, and the whole thing is left for a month. A jaggery-and-decoction preparation, matured in a treated vessel — the ancestor of the arishta and asava class of preparations that Indian pharmacies still make today.
Ka7#76: Cold Water on the Face, and a Favourite Thing to Smell
The chapter's last instruction before the census is not about a formula at all, and it is the most human sentence in the window.
Ka7#76: "When the patient has taken the drug he should be sprinkled with cold water on his face to prevent vomiting." And then, in the same verse: "Moreover, he should be given favourite earth, flower, fruit, tender leaves and sour substances to inhale."
Cold water, and something to inhale.
Two instructions, and both of them are about the minutes immediately after swallowing — the window in which an unpleasant preparation is most likely to come straight back up. Cold water on the face is a physical intervention. The second is not: it is an aromatic counter-stimulus, a set of ordinary things to hold near the nose while the taste passes.
The word that carries the weight is favourite. Not a flower — the patient's preferred one. Not a fruit — the one they like. The text has spent eight pages specifying weights to the half-part and steeping times to the day, and then, on the very last practical instruction, it hands the choice to the person being treated. That single adjective tells you the compiler had watched this moment happen, more than once, and knew that what settles a person is not standardisable.
Ka7#75, the sentence before it
The immediately preceding verse rounds off the whole formulary with a general rule: purgative preparations "should be given on mixing with twak, nagakesara, amrataka, dadima, ela, sugar candy, honey, matulunga and with suitable alcoholic or sour beverages." Cinnamon, cassia flower, hog plum, pomegranate, cardamom, sugar, honey, citron. A spice cupboard, offered as a closing instruction. The chapter ends the way it ran: the drug is settled, the escort is negotiable.
And that, finally, is what one hundred and ten formulas from one root are for. Not a hundred and ten different effects. One effect, and a hundred and ten different ways of getting a particular human being to accept it — in this season, at this age, with this constitution, at this price, in a form this household can actually make.
What This Article Is Not
This is a reading of an old book. It is not medical advice, and nothing in it should be acted on.
The plant at the centre of Kalpa Sthana chapter 7 is a drastic one. The chapter's own parent section grades its two root colours precisely because the darker one is dangerous, and prints what it does to people who are given the wrong grade. The procedure these hundred and ten formulas belong to — virechana — is not a thing anyone does by themselves. In classical practice it sits inside a long supervised sequence with preparation before it and a graded return to ordinary food after it, and it is assessed, timed and stopped by a trained physician who is present.
Ayurveda Hub does not sell trivrt, or any of the plants named on this page, in any form. Nothing here is a formula to reproduce, a dose to copy or a preparation to attempt at home. The weights and steeping times are quoted because they are historical evidence about how a classical pharmacy worked, in the same spirit that a historian of metallurgy quotes a furnace temperature.
The physiology this chapter assumes — dosha, koshtha, agni — is a historical model, and this article describes it as one. It is not presented as a description of how the human body actually works, and the disease names that appear above appear only as the subjects of an ancient scholarly discussion. If you have a health concern of any kind, consult a qualified doctor.
From the Ayurveda Hub Shelf
The link between the pages above and our own shelf is arithmetic, and nothing else. The chapter ends by counting itself — sixteen groups, one hundred and ten entries, a total printed at the bottom. It is a habit worth borrowing, because a count is one of the few things about a manufactured item that can be checked rather than believed. Each item below is followed by how many things go into it. That number is a fact about composition. It is not a claim of any kind.
Please read this first. Each item below is an ordinary everyday preparation for external and cosmetic use, and is not a treatment for any medical condition; consult a qualified healthcare professional. None of them is a treatment or a preventive for any condition whatsoever, none has any connection at all to the procedures discussed above, and each is described here only by what it is made of. If you are pregnant, nursing or taking prescribed medicines, please speak to a qualified healthcare professional before beginning any new preparation.
Divya Snaan Multani Mitti Soap — sixteen
Sixteen things go into it, and the pack says so. Multani mitti from Barmer as the base, four flours — masoor, rice, barley and rose petal — four cold-pressed oils, shea butter, rose water, turmeric, liquorice, ajwain, peppermint and camphor. A plain handmade bar, 100g, sold as a pack of four. Sixteen is the whole list; there is no seventeenth thing in it.
★★★★★ "I am so happy to be using soap that has almost no artificial and harming chemicals. A little higher price is understandable to maintain quality." — Uttam Dutta, verified buyer, Divya Snaan Multani Mitti Soap (rated 4.6 out of 5 across 147 reviews)
Panchagavya Twacha Shodhak Ubtan Soap — sixteen
A partner-made bar that also counts to sixteen on its own pack, and lists them out one at a time: multani mitti, cold-pressed coconut oil, castor oil, neem oil, neem extract, karanj oil, chaulmoogra oil, turmeric, banana oil, camphor, mint extract, the soap-making base, gomay, aloe vera enzyme, agnihotra ash and panchagavya. 100g, pack of four. Two items on this shelf independently arriving at sixteen is a coincidence, and it is stated as one.
Face Ubtan Powder — nine
The shortest list of the three. Nine things: cow's milk, multani mitti, rose powder, masoor dal flour, rice flour, rose extract with rose water, neem enzymes, aloe vera, and cow's ghee. A dry powder you mix fresh yourself, 200g, pack of two. Nine is not a smaller version of sixteen — it is a different list, and both numbers are printed rather than implied.
More to Read on This Topic
Keep going through the Kalpa Sthana with us
- The Ayurvedic Rule That Ends Dieting — a short visual story on food as the thing a tradition works with first.
- Three Signs Your Skin Barrier Is Damaged — a short visual story from the everyday end of the tradition.
- Spring Allergies? Your Gut Is the Real Problem — a short visual story on the seasonal turn.
- Trivrt, Vatsaka and Krtavedhana — the opening of this same chapter: the plant, its two root colours and the collection protocol.
- Bhaishajya Kalpana — how the six hundred formulas of the Kalpa Sthana are actually put together.
- Panchavidha Kashaya Kalpana — the five extraction forms, the counterpart to this chapter's delivery forms.
- Madanaphala — the drug crowned in chapter 1, whose ten sadava preparations chapter 7 borrows at Ka7#74.
- Ritucharya in the Ashtanga Hridaya — Vagbhata on the six seasons, the doctrine behind this chapter's seasonal set.
- The Charaka Samhita in full — the eight sections and hundred and twenty chapters, and where the Kalpa Sthana sits among them.
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Frequently Asked Questions
What does anupana mean in Ayurveda? +
Anupana is the vehicle — the liquid or medium a preparation is taken with, mixed into, or followed by. Warm water, milk, honey, ghee, buttermilk, a fruit juice or the decoction of another plant can all serve as one. In Charaka Samhita Kalpa Sthana chapter 7 the anupana is not a footnote but the organising principle: the drug stays fixed across a hundred and ten formulas while the vehicle changes, and the chapter's closing census sorts the formulas by which vehicle each one uses.
How many formulas are in Charaka Samhita Kalpa Sthana chapter 7? +
One hundred and ten. The chapter states the total itself at verses Ka7#77-80 and breaks it into sixteen groups: 9 with sour liquids, 12 with the salts, 18 with cow's urine, 2 with madhuyasti, 14 with the jivakadi drugs, 7 with milk, 8 as linctus, 4 with sugar, 5 as syrups, 6 by season, 5 as sweet balls, 4 in ghee and milk, 2 as a saturating drink and powder, 2 as alcoholic beverages, 2 as vinegars and 10 as sadava preparations. Those sixteen figures add to exactly 110.
Why does one chapter need so many versions of the same drug? +
Because in this chapter's logic the drug is only half the preparation. The other half is what a particular person, in a particular season, with a particular constitution and a particular budget, will actually accept. Changing the vehicle or the form counts as making a new formula, so a single root generates a hundred and ten entries — one effect, many routes to it.
What are sauviraka and tusodaka? +
Two classical sour fermented barley liquids, both described in Kalpa Sthana chapter 7 at Ka7#72-73. Sauviraka is made from kulmasa, boiled unhusked barley, steam-cooked with a herbal decoction and then fermented in water for six days with the container kept in a heap of grain. Tusodaka is made the same way from husked barley that has been crushed and parched first. The husk is the only variable that differs between them.
What is Kalyana Guda? +
A named jaggery-based preparation set out at Ka7#40-45 of the Charaka Samhita's Kalpa Sthana. Twelve dry components at ten grams each are cooked together with sesame oil, the powdered root, amalaka juice and two kilograms of jaggery, then rolled into boluses the size of a jujube or fig. The text notes it may be taken in any season and without the usual restriction of diet and activity. It is described here as a historical formulation only.
Does the Charaka Samhita really give a formula for wealthy people? +
In this English rendering, yes — Ka7#50 is headed as a preparation for wealthy persons, and the entry uses a hundred and sixty grams each of haritaki, amalaki and eranda with forty grams of the root, made into ten sweet balls. The heading names no illness and no constitution. It is one of several places where the chapter sorts by the patient's circumstances rather than by their diagnosis.
What is apathya, and why does this chapter keep waiving it? +
Apathya is the set of foods and activities a person is told to avoid while a course of therapy is under way. It is a heavy obligation in classical practice. Three separate formulas in this chapter — at Ka7#37-39, Ka7#40-45 and Ka7#46-49 — are advertised as requiring no such restriction, which suggests the compiler was deliberately building options for people who could not rearrange their life around a course of therapy.
What is the Kalpa Sthana of the Charaka Samhita? +
It is the seventh of the Charaka Samhita's eight sections and functions as a pharmacy manual. Each of its twelve chapters takes one plant used in the eliminative procedures, works through every way it can be prepared, and counts the resulting formulas at the end. Chapters 1 to 6 cover the emetic plants and chapters 7 to 12 the purgative ones, which makes chapter 7 the hinge between the two halves.
Why does the chapter tell you to sprinkle cold water on the face? +
Verse Ka7#76 gives it as an aftercare instruction, to stop the preparation from being brought straight back up. The same verse adds that the person should be given a favourite earth, flower, fruit, tender leaf or sour substance to inhale. The word "favourite" is the notable part: after eight pages of exact weights, the last practical instruction leaves the choice to the person being cared for.
