Aragvadha to Snuhi: Charaka Samhita Kalpa Sthana 8, 9 and 10, the Mild Purgative, the Most Severe, and the Garland Between Them

इस लेख को हिंदी में पढ़ें: चरक संहिता कल्पस्थान 8, 9 और 10: आरग्वध, तिल्वक और स्नुही का अध्ययन

📖 26 min read · Charaka Samhita, Kalpa Sthana, chapters 8, 9 and 10 (Van Loon's English edition, pages 597–604)

Where Kalpa Sthana 8, 9 and 10 Sit in the Charaka Samhita

The Charaka Samhita is arranged in eight sections, or sthanas, and the seventh is the Kalpa Sthana: twelve chapters on the plants used in the two great evacuative procedures, vamana (therapeutic emesis) and virechana (therapeutic purgation). The first six chapters take the emetic plants, beginning with madanaphala. The last six take the purgatives, beginning with trivrt in chapter 7. Most chapters follow the same plan: the plant's other names, a line on its character, a note on collecting and storing it, the formulas, and finally a closing count, the summing-up, that states how many formulas the chapter has given.

This article covers the three chapters in the middle of the purgative half. Chapter 8 is the Caturangula Kalpa, on aragvadha. Chapter 9 is the Tilvaka Kalpa. Chapter 10 is the Sudha Kalpa, on the plant also called snuhi. In the English edition we read, Gabriel Van Loon's, they run across printed pages 597 to 604. Page 597 opens with the end of chapter 7's closing count, which belongs to our article on anupana and the 110 formulas of chapter 7. Page 605 holds chapter 10's last formula and its own closing count of twenty, which we read in the article on Kalpa Sthana 11 and 12.

A note on numbering. This edition prints a marker after each passage, such as Ka8#4-5, and we cite verses by those markers: Kalpa Sthana 8.4–5 means the passage the edition closes with that marker. The edition is in English throughout, so the quotations on this page are from the English, not from the Sanskrit.

The earlier chapters of the section have their own readings on this site: the general principles of preparation, madanaphala in chapter 1, chapters 2 to 4, and trivrt and the chapters before it. This page does not repeat them.

Aragvadha's Seven Names, and Why Chapter 8 Is Called Caturangula

Chapter 8 opens, as most Kalpa Sthana chapters do, with the plant's synonyms (paryaya). Aragvadha is also rajavrksa, sampaka, caturangula, pragraha, krtamala, karnikara and avaghataka (Kalpa Sthana 8.3). Seven names for one tree, which modern botany usually identifies as Cassia fistula, the Indian laburnum: amaltas in Hindi, the tree that hangs out long yellow flower clusters in the hot months and carries long dark pods.

A synonym list did practical work in a text that travelled. A physician reading a copy made far from where it was written needed to know that the tree in front of him and the word on the leaf were the same thing. Several of the names also describe the tree. Rajavrksa means the royal tree. Krtamala carries the word mala, a garland, a fair description of a tree that hangs its flowers in strings. Caturangula means four finger-breadths, a measurement, and it is the name the chapter takes for its title. What exactly the four fingers measured, the chapter does not say, and we have not found the answer stated anywhere we can check.

Two of these names will turn up again, for reasons the chapter could not have intended. Krtamala has a garland in it and rajavrksa has a king in it, and garlands and kings come back near the end of chapter 10. We claim nothing for the coincidence beyond noticing it.

The tree also gives its name to an earlier chapter. Sutrasthana 3 of the Charaka Samhita is the Aragvadhiya Adhyaya, named after its first word, and it is chiefly about pastes, powders and oils applied to the skin. Our reading of it is in Charaka Samhita part 3. The two chapters share a tree and nothing else.

Mrdu, Madhura, Shita: How Kalpa Sthana 8 Describes Aragvadha

After the names comes the character of the drug: it is mild, sweet and cold (Kalpa Sthana 8.4–5). In the tradition's own vocabulary those are mrdu, madhura and shita. A short list of conditions follows, in the text's own terms. We do not reproduce indication lists on this page; the section on what this page withholds explains why.

The three adjectives do different jobs. Madhura (sweet) and shita (cold) belong to the ordinary vocabulary of rasa and virya, the taste of a substance and the potency it shows. Any material in the classical pharmacy can be placed with them. Mrdu is different. It is not a taste and not a potency. It says how forcefully the drug acts, and in this part of the Kalpa Sthana it works almost like a safety rating.

Chapter 10 uses the other end of the same scale: its plant is the most severely acting one of all the purgatives. Chapter 8's mild drug and chapter 10's severe one are two points on one axis, with chapter 9 between them.

Five Kinds of Person: Who Kalpa Sthana 8 Is Written For

The same passage then gives the line that sets up all three chapters: Because of being mild and safe, aragvadha is particularly used in children, old, wounded, wasted and delicate persons (Kalpa Sthana 8.4–5). In the tradition's terms these are the bala (child, a word with a long first vowel, not to be confused with bala, strength), the vriddha (old), the kshata (wounded), the kshina (wasted) and the sukumara (the delicate, the person brought up soft).

It is not a list of illnesses. It is a list of people, and they have nothing in common except that each has little in reserve. The usual way to choose a drug is to ask what is wrong and find what acts on it. This line chooses by the person receiving it: before what the drug is for comes who can take it.

The idea behind it is bala in the second sense, strength. Classical method assesses the strength of the patient and of the illness separately, and the first limits what may be done about the second. All five categories can also be seen before any examination starts: a child, an old person, a wound, a wasted frame and a delicate build are visible across a room.

The same people appear one chapter earlier. Chapter 7 says the reddish kind of trivrt root is more important and useful for delicate, children, old patients and those with soft bowels; we read that line in the trivrt article. Chapter 8 gives the same group a whole plant.

A Week in Sand, Then the Sun

Chapter 8 then turns to the material. The fruits should be grown in time, ripe and possessed with good qualities, and they are kept within sand for a week. Thereafter they should be taken out and dried in the sun. Only then is the pulp taken out and stored in a clean container (Kalpa Sthana 8.6–7).

Nothing is added and nothing is heated: a week in sand, then the sun for as long as the sun takes.

Kalpa Sthana 8.6–7: the ripe fruit is kept in sand for a week, then dried in the sun.

Why sand? The chapter does not say, and any reason we offered would be a modern guess dressed up as classical doctrine, so we will not offer one. What we can say is that the Kalpa Sthana likes this kind of step. Chapter 1 buries madanaphala fruits for eight days in a heap of grain and takes them out when they smell of honey, a step we describe in the madanaphala article. The section counts waiting as part of the preparation. Chapter 8's other long wait is its arista, a fermented preparation left for a month and a half (Kalpa Sthana 8.15); chapter 9's fermentations take a fortnight; and chapter 10's garland powder takes two weeks before it is ready.

Anupana by the Patient's Own Taste: Kalpa Sthana 8.16

Near the end of chapter 8, after the formulas, comes one line that changes the tone of everything before it: Whatever sweet, pungent or salty drink or food which is palatable to the patient should be used as adjunct to the purgative drugs (Kalpa Sthana 8.16).

The technical idea behind it is anupana, the vehicle or after-drink a preparation is taken with, which the Kalpa Sthana handles as a real variable rather than a garnish. Our chapter 7 article covers how vehicles are chosen there. What is worth isolating here is the test this particular line uses. It is not the dosha, not the season and not the strength of the drug. It is whether the patient likes it.

Three broad tastes are allowed, sweet, pungent and salty, and inside that range the choice belongs to the person swallowing. That is a lot of freedom for a text so precise elsewhere about what goes with what. The reason is not hard to see: a patient handed an unpleasant thing in a form he finds repellent will not finish it, or will not agree to it a second time. In a procedure that depends on completion, palatability is part of the method.

The line is not a one-off. The section's opening chapter says its formulas are only a guide, because combinations multiply with every variation in the patient, the patient's inclination among them, and in the smell, colour, taste and touch of the vehicles, varied for easy administration (Kalpa Sthana 1.6). The section's last chapter closes its own count by saying its formulas were given with due consideration to inclination (of the patient), dosa and disease. Inclination comes first in that list. Chapter 8.16 is the principle at work on a single page.

Twelve, "Delicate and Safe": The Smallest Count in the Kalpa Sthana

Every Kalpa Sthana chapter ends by counting itself, a habit covered in our trivrt article. Chapter 8's summing-up (samgraha) reads: one formula each in grape juice, wine, sidhu, curd, amalaka juice, sauviraka, the decoction of trivrt and that of bilva, a linctus and an arista, and two in ghrita, thus 12 formulations delicate and safe have been said in this chapter on pharmaceutical preparations of caturangula (Kalpa Sthana 8.17–18).

We checked the count against the chapter. Ten single entries plus two ghritas make twelve, and every entry can be found in the body of the chapter, in verses 8 to 15. Nothing is missing and nothing extra is written out. Not every chapter's count closes that neatly: our earlier articles found chapter 6's printed subtotals two short of its total, and chapter 11's thirty-nine built mostly from substitutions.

Two things about this count are worth more than the arithmetic.

It is the smallest. Set the twelve chapter totals side by side. The emetic chapters declare 133, 39, 45, 60, 18 and 60. The purgative chapters declare 110, 12, 16, 20, 39 and 48. Twelve is the smallest number in the whole section. And the totals add up: the six emetic chapters come to exactly 355 and the six purgative chapters to exactly 245, the two figures the section gives for itself at its close (Kalpa Sthana 12.41–42), which we discuss in the bhaishajya kalpana article. The six hundred is the sum of twelve chapter counts, and the gentlest chapter contributes the fewest.

It has an adjective in it. A count is bookkeeping. It tells a student reciting the chapter that nothing has been dropped. An adjective inside a count is a judgement. We read all twelve closing counts in this edition to see how often that happens.

Only chapter 8 describes its formulas by what they are like for the person who takes them. Read that way, the closing line is the compiler saying what the chapter is for: if the patient in front of you is a child, or old, or depleted, everything on this page was written with that patient in mind.

Tilvaka: Lodhra, Brhatpatra, Tiritaka, and a Root Bark With Its Inner Layer Removed

Chapter 9 opens the same way: tilvaka is also lodhra, brhatpatra and tiritaka (Kalpa Sthana 9.3). Three names instead of seven. The first will surprise readers who know lodhra as the name of a well-known bark used for quite different purposes. Which plant chapter 9 means is one of the old identification puzzles of Ayurvedic botany, and we leave it open. What the chapter itself says is enough to follow it.

The part used is more precise than chapter 8's: Root bark devoid of inner layer of tilvaka (Kalpa Sthana 9.4–5). Not the bark but the root bark, and not all of that either. Someone is expected to sit with the material and strip a layer away before anything else happens.

Kalpa Sthana 9.4–5 works with the root bark of tilvaka, its inner layer taken off.

Then comes a process rather than a formula. The prepared powder is divided. Part of it is dissolved in a decoction of tilvaka itself and strained out; the rest is soaked in that liquid, then soaked again in a decoction of dashamula, the ten roots, and dried (Kalpa Sthana 9.4–5). This is bhavana, impregnation: wetting a dry powder, letting it take up the liquid, drying it, and repeating. Our bhaishajya kalpana article explains the method in general. The window uses it twice more: chapter 9 calls for tilvaka impregnated ten times (Kalpa Sthana 9.10), and chapter 10's garland formula soaks and dries its powder daily for a week.

The rest of the chapter works through its forms: preparations taken in sour and fermented liquids, a sauviraka built on pearl millet, a sura, an arista, a preparation with kampillaka, three linctuses (leha) and four ghritas. The closing count gives sixteen: five with curd etc., one each in sura, sauviraka, arista and kampillaka, three linctuses and four ghritas (Kalpa Sthana 9.18). That adds up. Sixteen against chapter 8's twelve, with far more weight on fermented forms, which is about what one would expect one step up a scale of force.

Habit as Part of the Case: The Formula for Habitual Drinkers

One of chapter 9's formulas is introduced with a statement of who it is for. The English reads: The following [wine] is used as a purgative for alcoholic addicts (Kalpa Sthana 9.9). The closing count files it as the chapter's arista.

The text gives no reason. A person used to fermented drink may respond differently to a preparation delivered that way, or may simply accept it more readily; either way, the formula is shaped around a fact about the patient's life, not around an illness. His habit counts as part of the case, like his strength or his age.

Charaka does the same thing elsewhere. In the Sutrasthana's chapter on oleation, the people who should have their oil mixed into food instead of taking it straight are Those having aversion to uncting substance, habit of unction, soft bowels, intolerance for physical strain and habit of drinking (Sutrasthana 13.82). Habit of drinking sits in that list next to soft bowels, as one more fact about a person that changes how something is given. Our reading of that chapter is in Charaka Samhita part 13.

None of this is an endorsement. Alcohol harms health, and nothing in an ancient pharmacy changes that. A fermented drink was an ordinary pharmaceutical form in the world that wrote these chapters, for reasons that have nothing to do with how anyone should live now. What we are pointing at is the reasoning, not the ingredient.

"By the Method Described Under Caturangula": The Reference Chapters

Three times in this window the text stops writing out a procedure and points back. A linctus in chapter 9 should be prepared by the method described under caturangula (Kalpa Sthana 9.11). Two preparations of ghee should be made according to the method described under aragvadha (Kalpa Sthana 9.17). And in chapter 10, Ghrta may be cooked with the latex (of sudha) along with amalaka juice like that with caturangula (Kalpa Sthana 10.20), which points at one precise formula in chapter 8, the aragvadha ghee made with amalaka juice (Kalpa Sthana 8.13).

Charaka names this device himself. His list of the thirty-six devices of a treatise, the tantra-yukti, includes retrospective reference (Siddhi Sthana 12.41–44); Sushruta's list calls it atikranta-vekshana, "this has already been said". Our tantra-yukti article sets out Sushruta's thirty-two, and our chapter 11 and 12 article shows how much of chapter 11 is built from such pointers.

What this window adds is which chapters get pointed at. Chapter 8, the mild one, is the reference for chapters 9 and 10. Chapter 9 is in turn the reference for chapter 10's last ghee and, further on, for chapter 11's linctuses and wine and for chapter 12's sura and kampillaka preparations, which are the same as of lodhra, chapter 9's other name. The gentle chapters carry the procedures the harsher ones borrow.

The plants move between chapters too. Chapter 8's arista contains danti, the plant of chapter 12. Chapter 9's formula for habitual drinkers uses danti as well. And chapter 10's garland powder, which we come to below, combines five purgatives from four other chapters: trivrt from chapter 7, aragvadha from chapter 8, saptala and sankhini from chapter 11, and danti from chapter 12. The section is arranged one plant per chapter, but it is used as a single cabinet.

Sudha, or Snuhi: "Of All the Purgatives, the Most Severely Acting"

Chapter 10 does not open with names. After the formal opening it opens with a warning: Of all the purgatives, sudha is the most severely acting one. It breaks up the accumulated mass quickly and is harmful on faulty application (Kalpa Sthana 10.3–4). Only at verse 8 does the chapter give the plant's other names: snuk, guda, nanda, sudha and nistrimsapatraka (Kalpa Sthana 10.8). Nistrimsa is an old word for a sword, so the last name reads as something like "sword-leaved". The section's opening list of its fifteen plants calls this one mahavrksa, the great tree (Kalpa Sthana 1.6), a name chapter 10's own list leaves out.

The change of order is itself the message. Chapters 8 and 9 introduce their plant, then describe it. Chapter 10 tells the reader what the material can do to a patient before telling him what it is called.

The plant is usually identified with a thorny Euphorbia, the thuhar of Hindi, a hedge plant found across India. Its milky latex is what the chapter works with, and it is a well-known irritant that can seriously injure the eyes and the skin. That is a modern fact, and it is the main reason this page reproduces nothing from the chapter's formulas.

One word in the translation needs care. The English speaks of an accumulated mass of impurities. Behind "impurity" is the language of accumulated dosha, a technical category of the classical system, not a modern physiological substance; our guide to the three doshas sets out the definition.

The chapter then gives its conditions of use, with one qualification that matters more than the list: they apply if the patient is strong (Kalpa Sthana 10.5–6). Strength is the gate. Chapter 8 was written for those with the least reserve; chapter 10 is closed to everyone who lacks it.

Three Refusals: Soft Bowels, Little to Remove, Another Option

Then comes the line this article has been building towards. Sudha should never be used in patients with soft bowels, little accumulation of impurity and presence of other alternative (Kalpa Sthana 10.3–4). Three refusals, governed by one "never".

The first two are proportion rules. Soft bowels is the classical mrdu koshtha, a person whose system responds readily and needs little; the classification is explained in our article on prakriti and koshtha. Charaka's Sutrasthana is blunt about such a person. The intestines of that with soft bowels have excessive P, scanty K and slow V and as such he is purgated easily, so easily that ordinary foods such as milk and jaggery, or even hot water, are enough to move him (Sutrasthana 13.65–69). A person who can be moved by milk has no business with the most severe purgative in the pharmacy. A small accumulation, likewise, does not call for a large intervention.

The Siddhi Sthana, the section on what goes right and wrong in these procedures, describes what happens if the rule is broken, and it names the same two conditions in the same order: If a very drastic drug is administered to a patient with soft bowels and little impurity, after eliminating the impurities it takes away vital blood by churning (Siddhi Sthana 6.78–84). The refusal in the pharmacy chapter and the complication in the Siddhi Sthana describe one scenario from two sides.

The third refusal is a different kind of rule. It does not describe the patient or the illness. It describes the physician's situation. If another option exists, sudha is ruled out, whatever the answer to the first two questions. In this edition the word "alternative" appears in that sense exactly once in the whole volume, here. The other two places it occurs are a list item ("alternative statement", one of the devices of a treatise) and an adverb in a prognosis chapter.

Two Kinds of Snuhi, Sorted by Thorns

Before the formulas, chapter 10 makes a distinction. Sudha is regarded as of 2 types- one with a few thorns and the other with plentiful ones, and the thornier kind is the better one (Kalpa Sthana 10.7).

The most dangerous material in the section is sorted by a feature anyone can check by standing in front of the plant and counting. No tasting, which would be unwise with this plant, and no trial. A written pharmacy has to work in the hands of people its author will never meet, and criteria that depend on looking or counting survive that journey far better than criteria that depend on judgement. The Kalpa Sthana keeps reaching for them: the colour of a trivrt root, the ripeness of a fruit, the number of thorns.

Two kinds of snuhi, few thorns and many: Kalpa Sthana 10.7 prefers the thornier one.

The chapter also fixes the age of the plant and the time of year: a plant two or three years old, particularly at the end of late winter, the end of shishira (Kalpa Sthana 10.9). Again the reason is not stated, and again the precision is the evidence that it mattered to someone.

The Garland and the Cloth: A Purgative for Kings With Soft Bowels

Near the end of chapter 10 is a passage that reads at first like something from a story. The edition introduces it as two methods of purgation by inhalation for kings with soft bowels (Kalpa Sthana 10.15–17).

The preparation is long. Five purgatives, trivrt, aragvadha, danti, sankhini and saptala, are powdered and worked for a week, steeped and sun-dried each day, and the powder is then impregnated with sudha latex for a second week. The finished powder is not swallowed. It is used to impregnate a garland or a cloth, and By inhaling the garland and being wrapped with the cloth, kings with soft bowels are purged easily.

A garland and a cloth: the smell-route formula of Kalpa Sthana 10 reaches the patient through both.

Set that beside the opening of the same chapter. Sudha is the most severe purgative there is, never to be used in soft bowels, never where anything else would do. And here is a soft-bowelled patient of the most protected kind, and the chapter's answer is neither to give up the material nor to break its own rule about swallowing it. It changes the route. Two weeks of work go into the powder, and all of it goes into a form that reaches the patient through the air and the skin rather than the mouth, in whatever amount a garland and a cloth can carry.

The garland is not the only medicine in the Kalpa Sthana that arrives by smell, and that is what makes it interesting. We read all twelve chapters for the others.

Look at whom they are written for, where the text says: the delicate person who refuses medicine, the person used to fine perfumes, and the king (chapter 4 names no one). These are patients who will not swallow something unpleasant, or should not be asked to. Our articles on madanaphala's lotus and on chapters 2 to 4 read the emetic three. Chapter 10 is where the purgative half of the section finally does the same, and it does it with its harshest material.

Whether the method worked as described is not something this page can answer, and we claim nothing for it. But the passage is not a flourish. It is written in the same flat register as everything around it, and it follows from the rule a dozen verses earlier: if the patient's fragility decides and the material is fixed, the only thing left to change is the route.

Reading Kalpa Sthana 8, 9 and 10 as One Scale

Put the three chapters side by side and the pattern is clear.

Pod, bark, thorny stem: three chapters, from the mild drug to the most severe.

The scale runs one way on force and the other way on permission. As the material gets stronger, the text gets stricter, until at the strongest it writes a rule that would keep a careful physician away from it in most cases he will ever meet. The gradient of power and the gradient of prohibition run against each other and meet in chapter 10.

Across all three chapters, the things that decide can be seen or counted: who the patient is, what he will accept, how ripe the fruit is, how many thorns the plant has, what season it is. Vagbhata shows the same instinct when he asks whether a dosha is ready to be moved, in our reading of Ashtanga Hridaya Sutrasthana 13.

What This Page Withholds, and Why

These three chapters are a formulary of purgatives, and this page reproduces none of it. Withheld: every quantity and every proportion; every preparation step beyond the outlines given above; the children's formula with its age range and its figure; the lists of conditions each plant is said to address; the liquids and proportions of the garland powder; and the practical detail of how the latex is gathered.

There are three reasons. The first is harm: snuhi latex is a real irritant, purgation is a supervised procedure with preparatory and follow-up stages these chapters assume rather than describe, and a quantity copied from a translation is not something anyone should act on. The procedure itself, with its preparation of the patient, is described in Charaka Samhita part 15, as history. The second is law: India's law on drug advertising restricts how a seller of preparations may connect any formula with a list of illnesses, and we would rather stay well clear of that line. The third is that none of it is needed. What makes these chapters interesting is how they are organised, and that can be shown without a single formula.

Nothing on this page is medical advice. For any question about your own health, consult a qualified doctor.

What We Did Not Find

Some things we looked for and could not establish, so we have not claimed them.

Why sand, and why four fingers. Neither the sand step in chapter 8 nor the name caturangula is explained in the chapter, and we found no explanation we could check. We have not invented one.

Which plant tilvaka is. The chapter calls it lodhra; modern identifications differ. Left open.

The sixth liquid in chapter 9. Six in the English, five in the count. Named above, not resolved.

The Sanskrit. The edition is in English, so every quotation here is the translator's wording. Where we give a Sanskrit word, it is the tradition's ordinary term for the idea, not a claim about the verse's exact wording.

How many people search for this. In Google Search Console, over the ninety days to 11 October 2026, searches for aragvadha, tilvaka or snuhi as Kalpa Sthana subjects barely register for our site; the only aragvadha query with any impressions was aragvadhiya adhyaya, which is Sutrasthana 3, with 4 impressions, and one query, charak kalpa sudha book, drew 12, which may mean this chapter or a book of that name; we cannot tell. Demand for these three chapters is unknown, not low. Searches for the section as a whole do appear: charaka kalpa sthana chapter 1 drew 113 impressions in the same period, and kalpa sthana chapters 74. We have not estimated a number for the rest, and we will not invent one.

From Our Shelf

A short note on what we make, kept deliberately apart from everything above. Ayurveda Hub is a small Indian maker of everyday household and grooming preparations, worked in small batches. Nothing we sell appears anywhere in the reading above, and nothing we sell is offered in connection with it. The single item below is an ordinary daily-care article of the plainest kind. If it does not interest you, please skip it.

That is the whole of the sales pitch. If you came for the reading and leave having bought nothing, that is a perfectly good outcome from where we sit.

More to Read on This Topic

For more of the Kalpa Sthana, start with the five basic preparations and their order of strength, which Charaka sets out in the Sutrasthana, and then follow the section chapter by chapter through the articles linked above.

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