Talk:Ayurveda

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Page scope

The page covers Ayurveda as a medical tradition in the parts that bear on cannabis: its texts and their dates, how its pharmacology classes a drug, purification, dose and diet, the forms of medicine, and the standards and laws that govern Ayurvedic medicines in India and Sri Lanka. The formulations with cannabis, their purification methods and the survey tables are covered on Cannabis in Ayurveda; the Sanskrit names and their attestations on Vijaya; the Vedic verses on Atharvaveda; the passages once read as cannabis in Suśruta on Sushruta Samhita; and religious use on Cannabis in Hinduism.

Data verification

Record source conflicts, dating problems and unresolved readings here. Keep narrative content on the article.

Discussion

Sources

Meulenbeld (1989) and Wujastyk (2002) are the philological studies behind the dating of cannabis in the Sanskrit medical texts.
Zysk (2002) gives the periodisation of Indian medicine, the place of the bṛhattrayī in practice and his account of the Ayurveda taught outside South Asia, from fieldwork at Banaras Hindu University and in Pune in 1997 and in North America.
Ranade, Tavhare, Acharya and Pawar (2022) is a review by Ayurvedic researchers of 26 medical compendia and 41 alchemical texts. It is the source for the doses, the times of administration, the dietary rules and the antidotes; its statements on soma and the Vedic period are the authors' and are attributed to them.
The Ayurvedic Pharmacopoeia of India, Part I, Volume I, monograph 78, gives the official description of cannabis leaf (vijayā): properties, actions, uses, dose and the purification note. The e-book edition carries no imprint date.
Monier-Williams (1899) gives the definition of āyurveda and its eight branches.
The Sri Lanka section rests on the UNODC South Asia Regional Profile of 2005 (p. 112) and Kalpani and others (2022), with the 1961 pharmacopoeia formula from Sandakelum and others (2025).

When Ayurveda began

Zysk (2002) dates the classical compendia from a few centuries before to several centuries after the beginning of the Common Era, and the beginnings of a codified system probably to about the sixth century BCE on the evidence of the Pāli texts. He treats the figure of 5,000 years as a claim of New Age Ayurveda.
Monier-Williams records the traditional classing of Ayurveda as a supplement of the Atharvaveda.

Cannabis and soma

Ranade and her co-authors (2022) write that bhaṅgā has been in use since the Vedic age and connect it with soma and with the five plants of Atharvaveda 11.6.15. Meulenbeld (1989) and Wujastyk (2002) find the Vedic passages explicable in other ways and date secure references from about 1000.

Speech

The Dhanvantarīyanighaṇṭu verse, in Wujastyk's translation, says the drug slows speech. Monograph 78 of the Ayurvedic Pharmacopoeia lists vākvardhana among its actions.

Doses and weights

Ranade and her co-authors equate one tolā with 10 g in their tables but write in their text that the largest modaka dose, two tolā, is 24 g, and that the largest dose of all, one pala of an electuary, is 48 g. The text and the tables therefore differ on the weight of the tolā.
The same review gives 33 aphrodisiac and 28 grahaṇī formulations without saying whether they are counted among the 102 with cannabis as a major ingredient or among all 193 for internal use.

Sri Lanka

The 2005 UNODC profile calls the supplier the Ayurvedic Drugs Corporation; Kalpani and others (2022) call it the Ayurvedic Drug Corporation.
Kalpani and others (2022) give 252 kg of cannabis used for Ayurvedic medicines in 2018, from the corporation's figures as reported in the Handbook of Drug Abuse Information of 2019. They name the medicines Madanamodaka and Kameshvarimodaka. Whether these are the same formulas as the Indian madana modaka and the Kameshwari modakaya of the 1961 pharmacopoeia is not stated.