Ayurvedic Mouth Freshener in the Charaka Samhita: Lavanga, Kakkola, Tambula and the Eight Dravyas of Sutrasthana 5

📖 25 min read · Classical sources: Charaka Samhita, Sutrasthana 5 (Gabriel Van Loon's English handbook edition) · Ashtanga Hridaya, Sutrasthana 2 (Dr. R. Vidyanath's translation) · Sushruta Samhita, Chikitsa Sthana 24 (Kaviraj Kunjalal Bhishagratna's translation)

Ayurvedic Mouth Freshener: The Short Answer From Sutrasthana 5

Type “Ayurvedic mouth freshener” into a search bar and you get three kinds of thing back: bowls of sugar-coated seeds sold as mukhwas, paan in its many regional forms, and small bottles of liquid. All three are real Indian traditions. None of them is quite what the classical texts describe.

What the Charaka Samhita describes is simpler and older. In the fifth chapter of its Sutrasthana, inside a long list of things a healthy person does in the course of an ordinary day, there is one entry that Gabriel Van Loon's English handbook heads “Mouth Refreshing”. It is two verses long, Sutrasthana 5#76–77, and it does not name a product or a recipe. It names eight dravyas (substances) to be kept in the mouth, and it names the three reasons for keeping them there: clarity, relish and fragrance.

That is the short answer. An Ayurvedic mouth freshener, in the sense the samhita itself uses, is an aromatic held in a clean mouth at the end of the morning routine, chosen from a named set, for three sensory aims. It is a daily-routine item, the same kind of thing as combing your hair. It is not presented as a medicine and the verse does not attach it to any condition.

Everything below is about reading that entry closely, because it repays the attention. We walk the eight dravyas one at a time and say honestly which ones the translations can identify and which they cannot. We follow the same aromatics into Vagbhata's Ashtanga Hridaya and into the Sushruta Samhita, where they turn up folded into a betel leaf. We stop where a classical list needs a modern warning. And then we turn the same scrutiny on our own bottle, dravya by dravya, and report what we found and what we did not.

Where Sutrasthana 5#76–77 Sits in Charaka's Morning

The mouth entry does not float on its own. It is the third of four consecutive stations that deal with the mouth, and the order is part of the meaning. In Van Loon's layout of Sutrasthana 5 they run like this.

Clean, scrape, hold, rinse. The aromatics come third, after the teeth have been cleaned with a twig and the tongue scraped. That placement says something the modern market tends to forget: in Charaka's routine the fragrant dravyas are a finishing step for a mouth that is already clean. They are not offered as a substitute for the first two stations, and the text never suggests they could be.

Notice also what kind of chapter this is. Sutrasthana 5 opens on the question of how much to eat and then widens into the whole shape of a healthy day: eyes, nose, mouth, hair, skin, feet, clothing and conduct. The mouth entry is one line in that inventory. It belongs to svasthavritta, the upkeep of someone who is already well, which is why its vocabulary is sensory rather than clinical. We have walked the whole chapter separately in our guide to Charaka Samhita Sutrasthana 5, and Vagbhata's version of the first station has its own article on tooth-cleaning twigs in the Ashtanga Hridaya. This page stays on the third station.

The Eight Dravyas Charaka Names for the Mouth

Here is the entry in full, as Van Loon renders it: “One desiring of clarity, relish and fragrance should keep in the mouth the fruits of jati, katuka, puga and lavanga; kakkola (fruit), auspicious leaves of betel, exudate of camphor and fruits of smaller cardamom.” (Sutrasthana 5#76–77.)

Count them and there are eight. Seven are plant parts the text calls fruits or leaves; one, camphor, is an exudate. The table sets out each one with the identification the translations support, and says plainly where they support none.

Charaka's eight, laid out as a set. The second heap is a stand-in for katuka, which no translation we hold identifies.

Three things stand out once the eight are laid side by side.

First, every one of them is aromatic, and not one of them is sweet. There is no sugar, no jaggery and no honey anywhere in the entry. The candied seed mixes that dominate the modern mukhwas shelf carry a great deal of sugar; Charaka's list carries none. Whatever else it is, the classical Ayurvedic mouth freshener was not a confection.

Second, the text is loose with botany in the way pre-modern texts usually are. It calls clove a fruit, phala; a botanist would call it a dried flower bud. That is not an error to correct so much as a reminder that the samhita sorts things by use and by the part that is handled, not by a modern taxonomy.

Third, the list is plural on purpose. It names eight and then, in Van Loon's reading, stops without saying “all of them together”. Nothing in the entry reads like a formula with proportions. It reads like a set from which a person chooses. Where the aromatics do get combined into one preparation, it is in another book, and we will come to it.

Lavanga: The Clove Mouth Freshener in the Classical List

If one dravya could stand for the whole idea of a classical mouth freshener, it would be lavanga, clove. It is the one aromatic that all three of our sources share, and it is the one that survives into the bottle on our own shelf.

The first thing we checked surprised us. In the first volume of Van Loon's Charaka, a word-boundary search for lavanga or “clove” returns exactly one passage: this one. Clove is so ordinary in an Indian kitchen that it is easy to assume it runs all through the classical corpus. In the volume that carries the Sutrasthana, it appears once, and the one time it appears is as something to hold in the mouth.

In Van Loon's second volume, which carries the later sections of the samhita, lavanga appears five times, always as one ingredient among many in a compound preparation. The most telling of these is at Chikitsa Sthana 26#199–207, where the same aromatic group, lavanga, nakha, kakkola, jatikosha and camphor, is stirred in at the very end of a long cooked preparation that is made into pills to be kept in the mouth. That chapter belongs to the chikitsa half of the text, and we do not reproduce the formula or its purposes here. What it shows is continuity. The aromatic set of Sutrasthana 5 was not a one-off; the same fragrant family is reached for again whenever the text is thinking about the mouth.

Lavanga. In the first volume of Van Loon's Charaka, this verse is the only place clove appears.

Outside Charaka, clove is equally consistent. Sushruta's betel-leaf preparation is, in Bhishagratna's words, “prepared with cloves”, and Dr. Vidyanath's note to the tambula verse of the Ashtanga Hridaya lists lavanga alongside nutmeg, camphor and cubeb. So when someone asks whether clove as a mouth freshener has a classical source, the answer is unusually clean: yes, Sutrasthana 5#76–77, by name, as one of eight.

That is a narrower claim than the ones you will often see attached to clove, and it is meant to be. The verse places clove in the mouth for clarity, relish and fragrance. It does not rank it above the other seven, and it says nothing about teeth or gums. We have written about the wider place of clove in oral care in our separate article on clove in Ayurvedic oral care; this page keeps to clove as a mouth freshener and nothing more.

Sukshma Ela: The Cardamom Mouth Freshener and Its Traditional Source

One of the searches that led people to this subject was unusually precise: someone wanted the traditional source for cardamom as a mouth freshener. It is a fair question, because cardamom is everywhere in modern mukhwas and almost nobody names where the habit comes from.

The source is the same entry. The last item in Charaka's list of eight is “fruits of smaller cardamom”, sukshma ela. The adjective matters. Van Loon specifies the smaller cardamom, which is how the small green pod of an Indian kitchen is usually told apart from the large, dark, smoky kind. It is the small green one that Charaka puts in the mouth.

Sukshma ela, the smaller cardamom — the last of the eight in Sutrasthana 5#76–77.

Sushruta reaches cardamom by a different road, and it is worth tracing because it shows how commentary carries a tradition forward. In Chikitsa Sthana 24, the tooth-cleaning paste is made of honey, powdered trikatu, trivarga, tejovati, saindhava and oil (paragraph 4 in Bhishagratna). The word trivarga is ambiguous, and Bhishagratna's footnote records how the commentator Dallana resolved it: as tri-sugandhi, the three fragrant ones, “Tvak, Ela and Patra”. So in Sushruta, cardamom enters the mouth routine at the cleaning station, through a commentator's reading of one word, rather than at the holding station as in Charaka.

Put the two together and the traditional source for a cardamom mouth freshener has two addresses. The direct one is Charaka Samhita Sutrasthana 5#76–77, where sukshma ela is named outright. The indirect one is Sushruta Samhita Chikitsa Sthana 24, paragraph 4, by way of Dallana's tri-sugandhi. Neither says cardamom is superior to anything else. Both regard it as a fragrant dravya that belongs in a clean mouth.

Kakkola, Jati and Katuka: Three Names That Need a Gloss

Five of Charaka's eight are easy: clove, areca, betel leaf, camphor and cardamom are names that a modern reader can match with confidence. Three are not, and it is worth being slow about them.

Kakkola. Dr. Vidyanath's note to the Ashtanga Hridaya identifies kankola as Piper cubeba, cubeb, sometimes called tailed pepper because each small dark berry keeps a short stalk attached to it. In Van Loon's first volume the word appears once, in this verse. In the second it appears three times, always inside compound preparations, and in Sushruta it is one of the named ingredients of the betel leaf. It is the least familiar of the eight to a modern Indian kitchen, and the most consistently present across the three texts after clove.

Kakkola, identified in Dr. Vidyanath's note as Piper cubeba — the tailed pepper.

Jati. Van Loon writes “the fruits of jati”. In Sushruta's parallel list Bhishagratna glosses the same word directly as nutmeg, “nutmeg (Jati)”, and Vidyanath's note lists jatiphala, the nutmeg, in the same aromatic group. Three translators, three independent routes, one answer; we are comfortable calling it nutmeg. The same word also appears in Charaka's list of tooth-cleaning twigs two verses earlier, and which plant is meant there is a separate question we leave open.

Katuka. Here the trail runs out. Van Loon gives the word without a gloss. Sushruta's list has a similar-looking name, katukahva, which Bhishagratna glosses as lata-kasturi, a musk-scented seed. It would be convenient to assume the two are the same thing, and many popular articles would. We have no source in hand that says so, and a similar-looking word in a different book is not evidence. So katuka stays unidentified on this page. We would rather leave a gap than fill it with a guess.

Tambula in the Ashtanga Hridaya: Vagbhata's Betel Leaf and Sutrasthana 2.7

Vagbhata's Ashtanga Hridaya compresses the morning routine into its second chapter, the Dinacharya Adhyaya, and the betel leaf, tambula, is given a place in the sequence. In Dr. Vidyanath's translation, after anjana for the eyes, “navana karma (nasya or nasal administration), gandusa (mouth gargles), dhumapana (inhalation of medicated fumes) and tambula-sevana (pana chewing) are to be conducted.” The betel leaf is the last item in that run.

Then comes the verse that most modern articles leave out. It is printed on page 33 of the Vidyanath edition as Sutrasthana 2.7, under the heading Tambula-sevana-nishedha, the contra-indications for betel:

Two things about this verse are worth holding on to. The first is its existence. Vagbhata does not present the betel leaf as something for everyone; he fences it with a list of exclusions in the very next verse. A classical routine is conditional all the way down, and deciding whether any of its items suits a particular person is a matter for a qualified practitioner who knows that person, not for a list on a web page.

Tambula. Vagbhata gives the betel leaf a place in the routine, and a verse of exclusions right after it.

The second is a distinction between the verse and the notes printed under it. Beneath 2.7, Dr. Vidyanath adds a practical note: tender betel leaves chewed with betel nut, jatiphala, lavanga, karpura, kankola and pudina keep “the mouth fresh, tasty and good smell”, and an “ideal combination” of two leaves with one nut, slaked lime and khadira extract. That is the translator's commentary, not Vagbhata's line, and it contains one small tell. Pudina, mint, appears in neither Charaka's list of eight nor Sushruta's betel list. It is a modern note describing modern practice. Nothing is wrong with that, but it is exactly the kind of join that disappears when an article says “the Ashtanga Hridaya recommends mint”. It does not. Its translator's note mentions it.

The Ashtanga Hridaya's daily routine as a whole is covered in our guide to Vagbhata's morning routine, and the text itself in our introduction to the Ashtanga Hridaya.

Sushruta Chikitsa Sthana 24: The Aromatics Folded Into a Betel Leaf

The Sushruta Samhita gives the daily routine its own chapter, Chikitsa Sthana 24, which Bhishagratna introduces as a discourse on “the rules of hygiene and the prophylactic measures in general”. Its mouth stations run in almost the same order as Charaka's, with instructive differences at every step.

The twig (paragraph 3). Sushruta's tooth-brush is a fresh twig, straight, not worm-eaten, “twelve fingers in length and like the small finger in girth”. Charaka allowed three tastes of twig; Sushruta allows four, adding sweet, and names a best twig for each: “Nimba is the best of all the bitter trees; Khadira of the astringent ones; Madhuka of the sweet; and Karanja of the pungent ones.” Hold on to nimba; it matters when we get to our own bottle.

The scraper and the rinse (paragraphs 6–8). Sushruta's tongue scraper may be gold, silver or wood, ten fingers long, where Charaka listed five metals. An oil gargle, gandusha, follows the cleaning of the teeth. And the mouth may be washed with a decoction of the barks of the kshira trees mixed with milk, or of bhillodaka or amalaka, or simply with cold water. That wash is the closest thing in any of our three sources to a modern liquid mouth product.

The betel leaf (paragraph 12). Then the aromatics arrive, and this is where Sushruta differs most from Charaka. Instead of eight things held separately, Sushruta folds them into one quid: “A betel-leaf prepared with cloves, camphor, nutmeg (Jati), lime, araca-nut, Kakkola and Katukahva (Lata-kasturi), etc., should be taken (chewed after meals).” It is credited with making the mouth clean and with the power to “impart a sweet aroma to it”, followed by a longer list of effects on the voice, tongue, teeth and jaws that is the text's own claim, not ours. It is called wholesome after a bath, after meals, after anointing and after rising from sleep, and the paragraph closes with a list of people who should refrain from it that overlaps Vagbhata's closely.

Puga, the Areca Nut: Where a Classical List Needs a Modern Warning

One of Charaka's eight is puga, the areca nut, and Sushruta's betel leaf carries it too. This is the point where a faithful reading of a classical text has to be joined by a plain modern fact.

Tobacco deserves a separate sentence, because it is so often part of what is sold as paan today. Tobacco is an American plant that reached India only around the turn of the seventeenth century. No classical tambula, not Charaka's, not Vagbhata's and not Sushruta's, could have contained it. The pan masala and gutka of the modern market are not the preparation these texts describe, and no amount of classical vocabulary on a packet changes that.

We raise this not to be alarming but because it is the honest consequence of reading the verse carefully. A classical text is a record of what learned people did and valued in their own time. It is extraordinarily useful for understanding where our habits come from. It is not a safety certificate for every item it names, and it never claimed to be. The useful move is to read the list as history and to read every label, including our own, as a separate question.

Clarity, Relish and Fragrance: What Charaka Says the List Is For

The entry gives its own purpose, and it is worth taking at face value. Van Loon's three words are clarity, relish and fragrance. They describe how the mouth feels, how food tastes and how the breath smells. They are sensory aims, and the verse does not stretch them into anything larger.

Relish, in particular, runs through the whole mouth sequence like a thread. Tooth-cleaning, Charaka says, “brings relish immediately” (Sutrasthana 5#71–74). The oil gargle gives “maximum taste and relish in food” (Sutrasthana 5#78–80). Sushruta's tooth-cleaning paste “produces a good relish for food and a cheerfulness of mind” (Chikitsa Sthana 24, paragraph 4). In both texts the mouth routine is, among other things, a way of getting the palate ready for the day's food. The aromatics of Sutrasthana 5#76–77 belong to that project.

That gives a modest and rather useful standard for judging any Ayurvedic mouth freshener, old or new. Does it leave the mouth feeling clear? Does it leave the palate ready for food rather than coated? Is its fragrance its own, or a flavouring laid over the top? Those are the three questions Charaka's entry actually asks, and every one of them can be answered by the person using it.

Herbal Mouth Freshener Today: Mukhwas, Paan and the Liquid Bottle

“Herbal mouth freshener” is one of the phrases people search most often on this subject, and “herbal” covers a lot of ground. On an Indian shelf today it usually means one of three families.

Mukhwas. Roasted or sugar-coated seeds, most often fennel, with sesame, coriander seed, flavoured betel shreds and coloured sugar crystals in the more elaborate mixes. Its nearest classical relative is Charaka's holding station, but the seed set is almost entirely different and the sugar is new.

Paan. A betel leaf wrapped around areca, slaked lime and catechu, with sweeteners, flavourings and, in some forms, tobacco. Its ancestor is plainly Sushruta's betel leaf, minus the tobacco the classical texts could not have known.

The liquid bottle. Sprays, drops and concentrates. There is no liquid in Charaka's list of eight at all. The nearest classical relatives are at the rinsing station: Charaka's oil gargle and Sushruta's decoction wash of kshira-tree bark, bhillodaka or amalaka.

The useful distinction is that “herbal” and “classical” are different claims. A mix can be entirely herbal and share nothing with the eight dravyas of Sutrasthana 5. It can also share one or two of them and differ in every other respect. The label alone will not tell you which station of the routine a product belongs to; the ingredient list and the form will.

Saunf Is Not on the List: Where Modern Mukhwas Parts From the Samhitas

The single biggest difference between modern mukhwas and the classical texts is a seed. Fennel, saunf, is the base of most after-meal mixes in India. It does not appear in Charaka's list of eight, in Sushruta's betel leaf or in Dr. Vidyanath's note to the Ashtanga Hridaya's tambula verse.

The closest classical names are shatapushpa and mishi. In our copy of Charaka they occur in fomentation and basti formulas, never in the mouth. And the identification itself is contested. Vidyanath's glossary gives misi, or satapuspa, as Peucedanum graveolens, which is dill rather than fennel, and at one occurrence in Sutrasthana 14 Van Loon adds a bracketed query, “[satavari?]”, because even he was unsure what was meant.

None of this makes fennel less Indian or less old. The after-meal bowl of fennel is a real and long-standing food tradition in its own right. It is simply not Charaka's tradition, and an article that calls fennel “the classical Ayurvedic mouth freshener” is quoting a habit, not a samhita.

Our Five Dravyas, Audited Against the Charaka and Sushruta Samhitas

It would be easy to write all of the above and then point at our own bottle as the embodiment of it. We would rather test it the way we tested the texts. So we took the five dravyas listed on our live product page, clove, babool pod, alum, majuphal and neem, and searched four books for each of them with word-boundary matching and every name we know: both volumes of Van Loon's Charaka Samhita, Dr. Vidyanath's Ashtanga Hridaya Sutrasthana, and the volume of Bhishagratna's Sushruta Samhita that carries the Chikitsa Sthana. It is the same kind of audit we ran on the twenty dravyas of our Musli Pak.

The five dravyas in our bottle. Two appear in the classical oral-care passages; three do not, under any name we searched.

Two of five are there. Three are not, under any name we could search. And the method is not described in the passages we read.

Read the other way, the result is just as plain. Of Charaka's eight mouth dravyas, our bottle carries one: lavanga. Nimba earns its place from a different station of the routine altogether, the cleaning twig rather than the held aromatic. Babool twigs are a living North Indian datun tradition, and our product page leans on that tradition, but babbula does not appear under that name in any of the four books. So on this page we say only what we found.

What We Did Not Find

An audit is only as honest as its limits, so here they are.

No Sanskrit for Charaka's verse. Van Loon's edition is an English handbook with verse markers. We quote his English and do not reconstruct the Sanskrit from memory. The Sanskrit on this page is the Ashtanga Hridaya verse, read off the printed page.

The Bhavaprakasha was not searched. The later nighantu literature is where babool and majuphal would most likely turn up, and the Bhavaprakasha is its usual reference point. Our copy is an image-only scan that could not be searched for this article. So our three “not found” results are about four named books, not about Ayurveda as a whole.

One of the eight is still unidentified. We did not find a gloss for Charaka's katuka, and we have not supplied one.

Nothing about bottles, sprays or the laboratory. None of the passages describes a distilled liquid, and none speaks the modern language of the laboratory about the mouth. Their register is clarity, relish and fragrance. “We did not find” is the narrow, true claim in every case, and we have not stretched it into anything broader.

Held, Rinsed or Chewed: Three Classical Forms and a Distilled Fourth

Step back from the individual dravyas and the three texts describe three ways of bringing a fragrant substance to the mouth.

Held. Charaka's eight, kept in a clean mouth. Nothing is swished and nothing is chewed in the instruction; the verb is simply to keep.

Rinsed. Charaka's oil gargle at Sutrasthana 5#78–80 and Sushruta's decoction wash in Chikitsa Sthana 24, paragraph 8. Vagbhata gives the rinsing station a whole chapter of its own, which we have covered in our article on Ashtanga Hridaya Sutrasthana 22.

Chewed. Sushruta's betel leaf and Vagbhata's tambula, taken after meals.

Our own bottle fits none of the three exactly. Its pack describes a rinse, diluted in water and spat out, which puts it at the rinsing station. Its contents are made by steam distillation, a method none of the passages describes. The most accurate name for it is the plain one: a distilled herbal rinse built on one of Charaka's eight aromatics, lavanga, and one of Sushruta's cleaning twigs, nimba. That is a real link to the classical routine, and it is also exactly as far as the link goes.

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