Vaya in Bhavaprakasha: The Three Ages of Life in Ayurveda - Balya, Madhyama Vaya and Vriddhavastha

इस लेख को हिंदी में पढ़ें: भावप्रकाश में वय: बाल्य, मध्यम और वृद्धावस्था — जीवन के तीन काल

📖 26 min read · Bhavaprakasha, Purva Khanda, Bala Prakarana

Where the Vaya Passage Sits in the Bhavaprakasha's Bala Prakarana

The Bhavaprakasha is the youngest of the three books that Ayurveda calls the Laghu Trayi, the lesser triad, and it was compiled by Bhavamishra in sixteenth-century Varanasi. Its Purva Khanda, the first division, runs through the origin of the science, the elements, the dhatus, the anatomy of the body, and then a series of short prakaranas — topic-sections — of which the third is the Bala Prakarana, the section on the child.

Most of that section is about milk. It describes the nature of stanya, what makes it scanty, the test done in a bowl of water, the qualities asked of a dhatri or wet-nurse, and the first ordinary care of an infant. We covered that ground in a separate reading of the stanya and dhatri passages of the Bala Prakarana, and that article ends by pointing forward to exactly the lines this page now takes up.

Because after the milk, the section does something a reader does not expect. It stops describing infancy and starts counting the whole of a life. A bracketed editorial heading in the printed edition announces the shift:

bālādi-kramam āha suśrutaḥ
"Sushruta states the sequence beginning with the child."

That single line tells you two things. First, the eight verses that follow are not Bhavamishra's own scheme; he is quoting, and he says whose. Second, the subject has widened from the bala to vaya — age as such, the whole span from the first year to the last. The chapter on children ends by putting childhood in its place inside a life.

This habit of naming the source is one of the reasons the Bhavaprakasha is useful. It is a compendium that tells you it is a compendium. Elsewhere in the same Purva Khanda it quotes Vagbhata by name in the middle of the prakriti section a few verses later. It is visibly working from a library, and it says so — a point we made at more length in our reading of the Bhavaprakasha's opening and its place among the classical texts.

Vaya Is Threefold: Balya, Madhyama and Vriddha — and the Two Numbers That Fix Them

The first verse of the sequence is a definition, and it is unusually plain:

vayas tu trividham — bālyaṃ madhyamaṃ vārddhakaṃ tathā |
ūna-ṣoḍaśa-varṣeṣu naro bālo nigadyate ||

"Age is of three kinds: balya, madhyama and vardhaka. In the years under sixteen, a person is called bala."

Three ages, and immediately one hard number. Una-shodasha — "less than sixteen" — is the first boundary, and it is given as a word, shodasha, not as a numeral. That matters more than it sounds, for reasons the section on numbers below sets out.

The second boundary arrives two verses later, tucked into a line about the middle age: madhye ṣoḍaśa-saptatyoḥ, "in the middle of sixteen and seventy". So the whole scheme, in the text's own figures, is:

It is worth pausing on how little this scheme resembles the version most readers have met. Sixteen is early — earlier than any modern threshold of adulthood. Seventy is late, and it was later still relative to the life expectancy of the world that produced the verse. The middle age the text carves out is not a phase; it is fifty-four years, the great bulk of a counted life.

Note also what the verse does not do. It does not tie the ages to a dosha here — that comes five verses later, and separately. It does not tie them to a prakriti, the constitution fixed at conception, which the text takes up immediately afterwards as a different subject entirely. And it does not make the boundaries negotiable by the person. Vaya in this passage is arithmetic. Prakriti, which the same section turns to next, is the variable that is not.

Balya in Three: Kshirapa, Kshirannada and Annada

Having fixed the first sixteen years, the text immediately splits them. And it splits them by diet — not by size, not by schooling, not by any developmental marker, but by what the child is living on:

trividhaḥ so'pi — kṣīrapaḥ kṣīrānnādaḥ annabhuk |
kṣīrapo varṣa-paryantaṃ kṣīrānnāśī dvi-hāyanam ||
tad-uttaraṃ syād annādaḥ, evaṃ bālas tridhā mataḥ ||

"That too is of three kinds: kshirapa, kshirannada, annabhuk. The kshirapa to the end of a year; the one who eats milk-and-anna for two years; after that he is an annada. Thus the bala is held to be of three kinds."

Milk-drinker to one year. Milk-and-food to two. Food-eater after that. Three names, three spans, and the classification is done.

This triad is not the Bhavaprakasha's invention, and it is the one part of today's passage that is already covered in depth on this site. The same three terms organise a whole chapter of the Sushruta Samhita, where they carry a consequence the Bhavaprakasha does not spell out here — the principle that what is given to a child must follow the form the child is taking in. Rather than repeat that, we have set it out at length in Sushruta's Garbhini Vyakarana chapter on kshirapa, kshirannada and annada, and this page simply notes that Bhavamishra carries the triad forward intact.

What is worth noticing here is the shape of the classification. The whole vaya scheme is going to work this way: each age gets subdivided by a criterion internal to that age. Childhood is divided by food. The middle age, as we are about to see, is divided by the rise and fall of the dhatus. Old age is not subdivided at all — it is described instead. The text applies a different instrument to each span.

Verse 53 divides childhood by what the child is living on: milk to the end of a year, milk and anna for two, anna after that. Three names, three spans.

Madhyama Vaya: Called Fourfold, Printed With Three Boundaries

Here the passage becomes genuinely interesting, and it is where a careful reader has to slow down. The verse opens by declaring a number:

caturdhā madhyamam āhur yuvā dvātriṃśato mataḥ |
catvāriṃśat samā yāvat tiṣṭhed dhīryādi-pūritaḥ ||
tataḥ krameṇa kṣīṇaḥ syāt yāvat saptatiḥ saṃhatiḥ ||

"They call the madhyama fourfold. The yuva is held to be to thirty-two. Until forty years he stands filled with dhi and the rest. Thereafter he declines by degrees, until the aggregate of seventy."

The Hindi commentary in this edition reads the same way: chār prakār kā madhyam kahā hai, yuvā battīs baras tak — "the madhyama is said to be of four kinds; the yuva up to thirty-two years" — and then carries the count to forty and on to seventy.

So the verse says four, and prints three boundaries inside the middle age: thirty-two, forty, seventy. Laid out, what the text actually gives you is:

We flag this rather than smooth it over, because smoothing it over is how a text acquires a tidiness it never had. The honest description is: the Bhavaprakasha's middle age is declared fourfold, is given three boundaries, and is completed to four by the commentators.

The content of the three printed spans is worth reading slowly. Yuva runs to thirty-two. Then comes the strangest and best phrase in the passage — dhiryadi-purita, standing "filled" with dhi and the rest. The following verse's own gloss tells us what "and the rest" covers: virya and the words after it mean, it says, rasadi sarva-dhatu, indriya, bala, utsaha — rasa and all the dhatus that follow it, the sense faculties, strength, and enthusiasm. So the plateau from thirty-two to forty is not described as a peak of any single thing. It is a state of being full across the whole inventory at once — the seven dhatus, the senses, bala, and the appetite for effort.

And then, from forty, kramena kshinah — diminished by degrees, in order. Not a fall. A slope, thirty years long, still inside the middle age. On this scheme a person of sixty-eight is madhyama.

Two numbers carry the whole scheme - sixteen and seventy - and the middle age they mark out is fifty-four years wide.

Vriddhavastha: What the Bhavaprakasha Lists After Seventy

The third age is the only one the text does not subdivide. It describes it instead, in two verses, and the description is entirely of things that can be seen from outside or reported by the person.

The first verse continues the inventory of decline:

"Thereafter the dhatus beginning with rasa stand diminished; the strength of the indriyas declines; and the shukra wanes day by day."

The Hindi gloss fixes the boundary explicitly: anantar sattar baras ūpar — "thereafter, above seventy". Then comes the definition proper:

palita-khālitya-yuktaḥ karmasu cākṣamaḥ |
kāsa-śvāsādibhiḥ kliṣṭo vṛddho bhavati mānavaḥ ||

"Marked by palita and khalitya, and unequal to works; distressed by kasa, shvasa and the rest — such a person becomes vriddha."

Four marks. Palita is the whitening of the hair. Khalitya is its loss. Karmasu cha akshamah — not equal to works, the tasks a person used to be able to do. And the fourth is a clause about breath: kasa and shvasa are the classical terms for cough and for laboured breathing, given here with an adi — "and the rest" — that leaves the list open.

The definition is worth one further observation. Three of the four marks are losses of capacity or appearance; only the fourth touches on being unwell. The classical vriddha is defined primarily by what has gone, not by what has arrived. That is a different emphasis from the modern habit of defining old age by its ailments, and it is the emphasis the next verse but one will extend into an entire scheme.

The vriddha of verse 57 is defined by what has gone rather than by what has arrived: palita, khalitya, and no longer being equal to the work.

Kapha in Balya, Pitta in Madhyama, Vata in Vardhakya — and the Fifty-Four-Year Middle

Now the doshas arrive, in one verse, late, and only once the ages are already fixed:

bālye vivardhate śleṣmā pitte syān madhyame'dhikam |
vārdhake vardhate vāyur vicāryaitad upakramet ||

"In balya, shleshma increases. In the madhyama, pitta is the greater. In vardhaka, vayu increases. Having considered this, one should proceed accordingly."

Three ages, three doshas, in order. Shleshma is kapha under its other classical name. Vayu is vata under its. And the final quarter-verse is an instruction to the physician: vicharya — having weighed this — etat upakramet. The commentator's note on the line glosses upakrama with chikitsa, the technical term for clinical management, which tells you the verse is addressed to a practitioner and not to a reader deciding something about themselves.

This is one of the most quoted ideas in all of Ayurveda, and the version that circulates is almost never this one. The popular retelling maps the three doshas onto decades: kapha in the twenties and thirties, pitta arriving in the forties, vata taking over after fifty. It is a neat scheme and it is easy to remember. It is also not what the verse says.

Which of the two is right is not a question this page can settle, and it is not the interesting question anyway. What is worth holding onto is that the classical statement is far less discriminating than the modern one. It offers three coarse bands over a lifetime and then, in its very next clause, tells the physician to weigh the case rather than apply the band. The refinement people expect from the age-and-dosha rule is not in the verse; the verse is a starting orientation, not a result.

Vagbhata puts the same three-way mapping to harder work. In the Ashtanga Hridaya, Sutrasthana 1, the Ayushkamiya Adhyaya, a single compact line assigns vata, pitta and kapha to the last, middle and first stages respectively of four different cycles at once — of vaya (age), of aho (the day), of ratri (the night), and of bhukta (the food taken, across the course of its digestion). Age is one cycle among four, and the same rule covers all four.

That is a genuinely elegant piece of construction, and it means the age rule is not a standalone claim about ageing at all — it is one instance of a general pattern the text sees in every span that has a beginning, a middle and an end. The day-and-night half of that line is a subject of its own, worked out separately in the Dosha-Kala Sambandha section of our Prakriti guide; the seasonal cycle is a different scheme again, worked out in Vagbhata's Ritucharya. For the doshas themselves in their normal and disturbed states, see our reading of Vagbhata's Tridosha theory.

The Decade Verse: What Bhavaprakasha Says Falls Away Ten Years at a Time

The passage closes on its most famous line, and its most difficult. It is a list, and the list is the whole verse:

bālyaṃ vṛddhiś chavir medhā tvag dṛṣṭiḥ śukra-vikramau |
buddhiḥ karmendriyaṃ ceto jīvitaṃ daśato hraset ||

"Balya, vriddhi, chavi, medha, tvak, drishti, shukra and vikrama; buddhi, karmendriya, chetas, jivita — these decline by tens."

The Hindi commentary spells out the mechanism: ye sab krama ke sāth das das baras uttarottara mein kshīnatā ko prāpta hote hain — "all of these, in order, reach diminution ten years at a time, one after another." One item per decade, in sequence.

The twelve, with what each word carries:

Read it as a sequence and it is a remarkable piece of observation compressed into eleven words. Childhood goes first, then growth stops, then the surface dulls, then memory, then the skin, then the eyes. Only after all of that does shukra appear, and only after shukra does physical prowess. The faculties of judgement and action come late. Awareness is eleventh. Life is twelfth, and by the arithmetic of the verse it is the last thing to go, which is either a tautology or the whole point, depending on how you read it.

Two things about this list deserve care.

First, medha and buddhi are separated by five decades. They are usually translated with the same English word. The verse puts one at the fourth position and the other at the ninth, which means the text is distinguishing a faculty that takes things in and holds them from a faculty that weighs and decides — and is saying the first goes long before the second. That distinction is not available in the English word "intelligence", and it is the single strongest argument for keeping the Sanskrit in front of you.

Second, the arithmetic does not close where it is usually said to close. Twelve nouns, declining dashato — by tens — is a hundred and twenty years, not a hundred. The parallel version of this verse in the older tradition carries an explicit clause about those "of a hundred years' life", and on that reading the count must be compressed: shukra-vikramau is a dual compound and can be taken as one item, and cheto jivitam can be taken as a pair, which brings twelve down to ten and the total to a hundred. Both readings are defensible. The Bhavaprakasha line as printed in this edition gives the twelve nouns and the word dashato, and does not print the hundred-year clause.

So: the tidy "one faculty per decade of a hundred-year life" is a real reading, it is the traditional one, and it requires you to read two of the twelve as pairs. The page in front of us reads to a hundred and twenty. We record both rather than choose, because choosing silently is how a text gets quietly edited by the people transmitting it.

The closing verse names twelve things and says they diminish dashato, by tens. Twelve tens is a hundred and twenty, not the hundred usually quoted.

A Note on the Numbers: Why We Quote the Sanskrit Word, Not the Printed Digit

Our copy of the Bhavaprakasha is a scanned Hindi-commentary edition with no text layer, so every line on this page was read off a high-resolution render of the page image. In that scan, single Devanagari numerals are frequently ambiguous — the ink has spread into the fibre and a ३ can be hard to separate from a ५, a ६ from a ९. The Sanskrit number-words in the verse body do not have this problem: shodasha, dvatrimshat, catvarimshat, saptati are long enough to be unmistakable even in a poor impression.

So the standing rule for every figure we quote from this text is: take the word, never the digit, and then check whether the sums close.

Today that rule earned its place on the third boundary. The closing quarter-verse of the madhyama passage — the one that should end at seventy — is the least legible line in the window. But the figure is fixed three separate times by material that is legible:

• verse 54 sets the middle age madhye shodasha-saptatyoh, between sixteen and seventy, in unambiguous word form;
• the Hindi gloss on verse 55 closes the decline sattar baras tak — "up to seventy";
• the Hindi gloss on the next verse opens the third age sattar baras ūpar — "above seventy".

Three independent statements, one number, and the scheme only closes without a gap or an overlap if that number is seventy. That is what settles it — not the digit, which cannot be read with confidence, but the arithmetic, which can. We follow the same method for citation: this passage is referenced as Bhavaprakasha, Purva Khanda, Bala Prakarana, at section level, with the transliterated line quoted, rather than with a verse number we cannot verify from the scan.

Our copy is an image-only scan. Single Devanagari numerals blur; the Sanskrit number-words do not, so every figure here is taken from the word.

Vaya Elsewhere in the Classical Library

Age is not only a topic in Ayurveda; it is a formal instrument. Vagbhata's Ashtanga Hridaya, Sutrasthana 12 — the Doshabhediya Adhyaya — lists the dashavidha pariksha, the ten things a physician examines before forming a view, and vaya is one of the ten, sitting alongside the constitution, the country, the season, the strength, the digestive capacity and the rest. We worked through that whole list, and the sixty-two dosha combinations that chapter counts, in our reading of Ashtanga Hridaya Sutrasthana 12.

That placement is the real point of today's passage. Age in the classical texts is never a conclusion. It is one input among ten, and the Bhavaprakasha's own verse says as much when it ends on vicharya — having weighed this. A text that wanted age to be decisive would not have put it in a list of ten, and would not have told the reader to consider before proceeding.

The other neighbour worth naming is prakriti, and the Bhavaprakasha places it with deliberate care: the very next line after the decade verse is the bracketed heading atha prakriti-lakshanani, "now, the marks of the constitution". Vaya and prakriti are set side by side because they are opposites in kind. Vaya changes and is the same for everyone. Prakriti is fixed at conception and is different for everyone. The section that follows runs through the vata, pitta and kapha constitutions in detail, and because we have already covered prakriti at length from Vagbhata's fuller treatment, we deliberately leave those verses to that article rather than repeat them here.

And for the text this passage quotes: Bhavamishra names Sushruta, but our copy of the Sushruta Samhita does not include the Sutra Sthana, so we quote the attribution exactly as the Bhavaprakasha prints it — baladi-kramam aha sushrutah — and do not put a chapter number on it. The same restraint applies throughout: we cite what we have read, at the level at which we have read it. Our broader survey of the classical corpus is in the guide to Vagbhata's Ashtanga Hridaya, and the anatomical sections of this same Purva Khanda are read in our article on the 107 marma.

What This Passage Is Not

It is worth being explicit about the limits of eight verses, because this particular passage attracts more freight than it can carry.

It is not a schedule. The verse says that certain faculties diminish decade by decade. It does not say on which birthday, in which person, to what degree, or with what variation. A list of twelve nouns in metrical order is a teaching device — the even step and the round number are what make it memorable — and an even step is exactly what a real biological process does not have.

It is not a claim we are endorsing. Everything above is a report of what a sixteenth-century compendium says, quoting a still older text. Whether the dhatus decline in this order, whether medha really precedes buddhi by fifty years, whether seventy is the right boundary — none of that is asserted here. The subject of this page is the text.

It is not a guide to anything. The one imperative in the whole passage — vicharya etat upakramet — is addressed to a physician, and the commentator says so plainly by glossing it with the word for clinical management. There is no instruction in these verses for a reader to act on, and this page adds none.

And it names things we are deliberately leaving bare. The decade verse names medha, tvak, drishti, shukra, buddhi and the rest. Each of those words sits next to a large modern market — preparations sold for memory, preparations sold for the skin against age, preparations sold for sight, preparations sold for vigour. We have not put a single product beside any of them, we do not suggest that anything supports any item on that list, and the section below explains what we did put on the page and why.

An Adult's Ordinary Daily Shelf, Kept Apart From This Chapter

This chapter is a hard one to sell beside, and the honest thing is to say why rather than to quietly pick something.

The Bala Prakarana's own list of what suits a child, a few verses before today's window, is taila-abhyanga, udvartana, snana and anjana — oil massage, the rubbing-powder, bathing and the eye application, named as fitting from birth onward. Those four categories map straight onto oils, ubtans, bathing bars and eye preparations. And the decade verse then names tvak, drishti, medha, buddhi and shukra as the things that fall away.

Put those two facts together and almost our entire shelf is disqualified on this page — not because any product is unsuitable, but because placing it here would let a reader draw a line between a verse about decline and a thing we sell. So the oils, the ubtans, the face and body preparations, the eye-adjacent items, and every ingestible on our shelf are kept off this article by category. The ingestibles in particular stay off: an article about ageing next to a tonic is exactly the adjacency that makes a claim without ever writing one.

What is left is the part of an ordinary adult morning that this chapter says nothing about at all. The text's vriddha is marked by palita, khalitya, incapacity for work and difficulty with breath. Teeth are not in the list. Daily mouth care is simply absent from the passage, which makes it the one thing we can mention here without borrowing a single word from the verses above. It belongs to dinacharya, the daily regimen, which is a separate classical subject with its own chapter — set out in our reading of Vagbhata's morning routine.

The Same Subject Elsewhere on This Site

This article is one window in a long sequential reading of the classical texts. The pieces closest to it:

• Stanya and the Dhatri — the rest of this same Bala Prakarana, immediately before today's verses.
• Kshirapa, Kshirannada, Annada in Sushruta — the triad of verse 53, at full length.
• Prakriti and the seven constitutions — the subject the Bhavaprakasha turns to on the very next line.
• Dashavidha Pariksha — the ten examinations, of which vaya is one.
• Tridosha theory in Vagbhata — vata, pitta and kapha in their normal and risen states.
• The seven dhatus — rasa to shukra, the inventory the decline verses run down.
• Ritucharya — the seasonal cycle, the other great span Ayurveda counts.
• The Bhavaprakasha itself — who Bhavamishra was and how the Purva Khanda is built.
• Ashtanga Hridaya — Vagbhata's text, source of the Sutrasthana 1 and 12 passages cited above.
• The 107 marma — another anatomical section of this same Purva Khanda.
• Dinacharya — the daily regimen, a separate classical subject from vaya.

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