100 Fun Facts About Ayurveda

Ashwagandha's Sanskrit name describes the strong odour of its root as resembling which animal?

Horse: ashva is Sanskrit for horse and gandha for smell, after the root's horsey reek. Tradition adds a second reading, that taking the root lends a horse's strength and stamina.

Formal Ayurveda study at Indian public institutions leads to a BAMS degree; the final S stands for what?

Surgery: the degree is the Bachelor of Ayurvedic Medicine and Surgery, and two of Ayurveda's classical branches are surgical. Its ancient surgeon Sushruta even described rebuilding a severed nose from a flap of cheek skin.

In Ayurvedic legend, Dhanvantari rose from the churned Ocean of Milk carrying a pot of what?

Amrita, the nectar of immortality, was what gods and demons churned the ocean to win. The demons grabbed for it first, and Vishnu, disguised as the enchantress Mohini, tricked them out of it.

In southern India, chewed twigs of which tree serve as a disposable toothbrush?

Neem twigs are a traditional chew stick in southern India. At Ugadi, the new year in Karnataka, neem flowers are eaten with jaggery, the bitter and the sweet standing for the sorrows and joys of the year ahead.

Which spice, nicknamed 'Indian saffron', is smeared on bride and groom before many Hindu weddings?

Turmeric paste is rubbed on the couple at the haldi, a rite Bengal calls gaye holud, 'yellow on the body'. The nickname fits: cooks still use it to colour food as a cheaper stand-in for real saffron.

In the Ayurvedic treatment shirodhara, a steady stream of warm oil is poured onto which part of the body?

The forehead: shiro means head and dhara a stream, and the warm oil trickles from a vessel hung above the brow. Practitioners prescribe it mainly to ease stress and sleeplessness.

Ayurveda credits all digestion and metabolism to a force that shares its name with which Vedic god?

Agni, Sanskrit for fire, is the digestive fire, known in the gut as jatharagni. When it burns low, half-digested food is said to leave ama, a toxic residue that Ayurveda blames for disease.

Which Ayurvedic consumer giant grew from remedies a physician began making in Kolkata in 1884?

Dabur is short for 'Daktar Burman', as patients knew its founder, a doctor who set out to make affordable cures for cholera and malaria and sold them around Bengal.

In India's AYUSH ministry acronym, A is Ayurveda, Y is yoga, U is Unani and S is Siddha; what is the H?

Homoeopathy, devised in Germany by Samuel Hahnemann in the 1790s, shares a ministry with healing traditions many centuries older.

Which dosha does Ayurveda describe as a blend of earth and water, the nourishing maker of the soft organs?

Kapha, the heavy, cold, slow humour, is said to carry nutrients and build the body's soft tissue. In excess it is blamed for mucus, weight gain and chest trouble such as bronchitis.

Alongside earth, water, fire and air, which element completes the panchamahabhuta of Ayurveda's classic treatises?

Ether, akasha in Sanskrit, completes Ayurveda's five, and its special quality is said to be sound. Metal and wood are real elements too, but in China's five phases, which leave out both air and ether.

Ayurveda names chyle, blood, muscle, fat, bone, marrow and semen as the body's seven what?

Dhatus are the seven tissues; the humours are the doshas and the wastes the malas. Ayurveda defines health as balance among all three, and blames lost vitality and disease on any that slips.

Which of Ayurveda's eight classical branches is devoted to rejuvenating tonics for longevity, intellect and strength?

Rasayana is the branch of tonics against ageing. Legend says the frail old sage Chyavana won back his youth on one, a recipe still sold across India as the jam chyawanprash.

Bhuta vidya, the Ayurvedic branch concerned with disturbed minds rather than the body, aims to pacify what?

Possessing spirits: bhuta means a ghost, and dictionaries gloss the branch as demonology. The reasoning is in the old texts, which blame some madness on a brahmarakshasa, the ghost of a sinful Brahmin.

Vajikarana, the Ayurvedic branch that also takes on infertility, is best known for which class of remedy?

Aphrodisiacs: the branch deals in virility and potency. Its declared aim was healthy offspring, which is why cures for infertility sit beside the love potions.

Kaumara-bhritya, one of Ayurveda's classical branches, corresponds to which modern medical specialty?

Paediatrics, though the branch starts before birth: it also treats the mother from pregnancy until weaning, on the reasoning that a nursing child can be reached only through her milk.

Madya, which Ayurvedic texts classify by raw material and fermentation process, is the term for what?

Alcoholic drinks: madya takes in wines brewed from sugar, fruit or grain. The same craft survives in the pharmacy tonics called arishta and asava, which are left to ferment until they generate their own alcohol.

Ayurveda pairs heavy with light, hot with cold and unctuous with dry in its list of twenty what?

Gunas, twenty qualities in ten opposed pairs, work as a prescribing tool: a complaint marked by one quality is treated with its opposite, so dryness calls for oily, unctuous remedies.

What does Ayurveda call the body's vulnerable points?

Marma points are where a blow or cut is held to maim or kill, which is why Kerala's martial art kalaripayattu teaches only its most trusted fighters how to strike them.

In Sanskrit, the name Charaka, attached to Ayurveda's foundational compendium, is a term for what kind of person?

A wanderer, or roaming ascetic, is what charaka means, recalling the itinerant physicians who carried their remedies and magico-religious rites from village to village.

Tradition places Sushruta, author of a great Ayurvedic compendium, in which city, seat of his teacher Divodasa?

Varanasi, ancient Kashi, is where tradition places Sushruta, and Buddhist Jatakas recall a physician named Divodasa teaching there. Hindu tradition goes further and has him learn his art from Dhanvantari, the god of medicine.

Before touching a patient, Sushruta's trainees practised the length and depth of incisions on what?

Vegetables such as gourds, watermelons and cucumbers took the practice cuts, because Sushruta wanted each skill drilled on something resembling the body part. Bandaging, for instance, was learned on a stuffed linen doll.

The Sushruta Samhita devotes a chapter to finding, collecting, keeping and applying which creatures?

Leeches get a whole chapter because Sushruta calls them the gentlest way to let blood, to be used on those unfit for the knife: the old, infants, women, and the timid or delicate.

Whose Ashtanga Hridaya completed Ayurveda's classical triad of authorities, alongside Charaka and Sushruta?

Vagbhata, usually placed around the 6th century, condensed the two older authorities into verse. In Kerala his digest became the core text of the hereditary physician families known as ashtavaidyas.

The Charaka and Sushruta compendia both tell physicians to declare their allegiance to which Veda in particular?

Atharvaveda is the Veda both compendia tell a physician to name. Its cures are hymns and charms against disease, though; systematic medical writing first appears in the compendia themselves.

Which Ayurvedic cleansing regimen is built around therapeutic vomiting, purging and medicated enemas?

Panchakarma opens with oiling and sweating, on the theory that they loosen the disordered humours and draw them into the gut, where the purges that follow can flush them out.

Unlike India's usual palm-leaf books, the Bower Manuscript of early medical texts, found near Kucha, was written on what?

Birch bark, the writing material of Kashmir and the far north-west. The leaves were bought in Kucha in 1890 by Lieutenant Hamilton Bower, a British officer who was there hunting a Scottish trader's killer.

Besides India, which neighbouring country has Ayurveda as a widely practised system, with public colleges awarding the BAMS degree?

Nepal's patients so often go to an Ayurvedic practitioner first that researchers there have drawn up and trialled a clinical guideline for Ayurvedic care of diabetes.

The word Ayurveda pairs veda, meaning 'knowledge', with ayus, a Sanskrit term usually translated as what?

Life, and a long one: ayus also means lifespan, which the Charaka Samhita sets at a hundred years, so the name is often rendered 'knowledge of longevity'. The same ancient root gave English age and eon.

Which endocrinologist quit a Massachusetts hospital chief-of-staff post after meeting Maharishi Mahesh Yogi in 1985?

Deepak Chopra left New England Memorial Hospital to run an Ayurvedic health centre in Lancaster, Massachusetts, having grown uneasy at how heavily Western medicine leaned on drugs.

Patanjali Ayurved, the Haridwar conglomerate founded in 2006, was set up by Balkrishna and which televised yoga guru?

Baba Ramdev is the brand's public face and Balkrishna its managing director. In 2024 India's Supreme Court had both men print newspaper apologies for misleading advertisements, then a bigger one when the first proved too small.

Which Bangalore-based Ayurvedic firm, founded by Mohammad Manal in Dehradun in 1930, makes Liv.52?

Himalaya grew from Manal's bet that Ayurvedic herbs would sell if modern laboratory science stood behind them. Liv.52, the liver tonic it launched in 1955, became the flagship and is still being put through clinical trials.

P. S. Varier founded the Arya Vaidya Sala, a famous Ayurvedic institution, in 1902 in which Kerala town?

Kottakkal's Arya Vaidya Sala began as a village clinic and has run as a charitable trust under its founder's will since he died in 1944. He also started a drama troupe there, which still tours as a Kathakali company.

Which Gujarat city, home of the state's Ayurved university, hosts the WHO's Global Centre for Traditional Medicine?

Jamnagar became the hub in 2022, when India agreed to put 250 million US dollars behind the WHO centre, which is meant to test traditional remedies from every region against modern science.

India set up the Traditional Knowledge Digital Library of Ayurvedic formulations in 2001 to fight what?

Biopiracy became a national cause in 1997, when India had a US patent on a kitchen spice's wound-healing power revoked by proving the remedy had been known at home for centuries. The library puts such proof before patent examiners.

Unani medicine, grouped with Ayurveda under AYUSH, takes its name from an Arabic word for which people?

The Greeks' four humours of Hippocrates and Galen underpin Unani, against Ayurveda's three doshas; the word traces to Ionia, the Aegean coast that Arabic and Persian speakers used as shorthand for all of Greece.

Siddha medicine, Ayurveda's southern sibling credited to the sage Agastya, has its original texts in which language?

Tamil is the tongue of Siddha's treatises. Tradition says the knowledge came down from the god Shiva, by way of Parvati and Nandi in one telling, to the 18 siddhars who shaped the system.

Sowa Rigpa, the 'science of healing', is better known in English as which people's medicine?

Tibetan medicine took shape from Indian, Chinese, Persian and Central Asian learning, then travelled with Tibetan Buddhism to Mongolia and across the high mountain valleys.

When India first observed National Ayurveda Day in 2016, it was tied to Dhanteras, the opening day of which festival?

Diwali opens with Dhanteras, the day Dhanvantari is worshipped, which is why the ministry chose it. The link lasted nine years: in 2025 Ayurveda Day moved to a fixed 23 September, since Dhanteras shifts with the lunar calendar.

Abhyanga, the head-to-toe Ayurvedic massage with warm herb-infused oil, uses which oil as its base in the classical texts?

Sesame is so much the default that taila, the Sanskrit word for oil, is itself formed from tila, sesame. Therapists today vary the blend with a person's constitution and the season.

Rasashastra, Ayurveda's alchemical branch, gives its metal-based medicines as bhasma, a Sanskrit word meaning what?

Ash is the literal meaning: a bhasma is what is left when a metal or mineral, first 'purified' in a step called shodhana, is roasted in a crucible. A 2008 JAMA study found lead, mercury or arsenic in a fifth of 193 products sold online.

Ayurveda lists nadi first among its diagnostic signs, ahead of urine, stool, tongue and speech; what is nadi?

The pulse is read with three fingers on the wrist, each said to sense one of the three doshas. The texts liken its movement to animals, so a beat that slithers like a snake points to one particular humour.

Which Ayurvedic powder blends the chebulic, beleric and emblic myrobalans?

Triphala, 'three fruits', travelled well: it reached China along the Silk Road, and a Chinese record of about 820 is said to list a version among the wines on sale in the Tang capital.

Chyawanprash, the Ayurvedic jam that legend says the Ashvin twins first made for the sage Chyavana, is based on which fruit?

Amla, the Indian gooseberry, is the jam's main ingredient. In Buddhist legend half of one was all the dying emperor Ashoka still owned, and he gave it to the monks as his final gift.

Shatavari, a traditional Indian women's tonic, shares its genus with which vegetable?

Asparagus racemosus is a climbing cousin of garden asparagus, used at the opposite end: cooks cut asparagus for its young shoots, while shatavari is the plant's tuberous roots, dried and powdered.

Guggul, the Ayurvedic resin tapped from Commiphora wightii, smells almost identical to which related resin?

Myrrh comes from a sister species of the same genus, hence the shared scent. Demand has cost the guggul tree dearly: years of unregulated tapping have left it Critically Endangered in the wild.

Which European country, where a Maharishi Ayurveda clinic opened in 1987, recognised a federal Ayurveda diploma in 2015?

Switzerland had already put alternative healing to a national vote: in a 2009 referendum two-thirds of voters backed writing complementary medicine into the federal constitution.

Which tar-like Ayurvedic tonic, called mumijo in Russia, oozes from high mountain rocks in the summer heat?

Shilajit is still something of a puzzle: one leading theory is that it forms over centuries as plant matter slowly decomposes among the rocks.

Sushruta's compendium counts 300 bones in the human body, against the modern 206, partly by counting which of these?

Teeth: all thirty-two are on his list of the bones above the collarbone. Even so, Sushruta was the modest one, noting that the general physicians of his day put the total at 360.

Baba Hari Dass, the silent monk who helped bring Ayurveda to America in the 1970s, inspired Mount Madonna Institute in which state?

California: he arrived in 1971 and taught in Santa Cruz County for decades without speaking a word, keeping a vow of silence from 1952 until his death in 2018 and answering students in writing.

Which English word comes from a Hindi verb meaning to press or knead the muscles?

Shampoo at first named an Indian head rub, not a soap. Dean Mahomed, a traveller from Patna, introduced the practice to Britain in the early 1800s.

Which facial feature does the Sushruta Samhita describe rebuilding with a flap of skin from the cheek?

The nose repair in Sushruta's compendium is the first written record of a cheek-flap rhinoplasty, a technique still used to rebuild a nose today.

Velvet bean, a legume used for centuries in Ayurveda, is a natural source of L-DOPA, the main drug for what?

Parkinson's disease patients in a double-blind trial felt the seed powder take effect in about half the time of standard levodopa pills. The plant is also notorious for pod hairs that cause a severe itch.

Chewing leaves of gurmar, a vine used in Ayurvedic medicine, briefly blocks the sense of which taste?

Sweet tastes vanish for 15 to 50 minutes as the leaf's gymnemic acids act on the tongue's taste receptors. The Hindi name gurmar means 'sugar destroyer'.

India's medical regulator proposed replacing which pledge with a 'Charaka Shapath' for new medical students?

The Hippocratic Oath was to give way to a passage of the Charaka Samhita written as a teacher's instructions to prospective students. Many Indian doctors protested against the swap.

Jivaka, honoured as a patron of Indian healing, was personal physician to which religious founder?

The Buddha shared his doctor with royalty: Jivaka also served the Indian kings Bimbisara and Ajatashatru. Texts describe him travelling far from home to train under a respected teacher.

Pippali, a pungent spice common in ancient Rome, is the Sanskrit source of which English word?

Pepper reached English through Latin piper, though pippali named the catkin-like long variety, not the black peppercorn. Ayurveda blends it into the digestive remedy trikatu.

Panchagavya, a mixture used in Hindu ritual and Ayurveda, is made from five products of which animal?

The cow supplies all five: dung, urine, milk, curd and ghee. Promoters call the practice cowpathy, but studies of drinking the urine have found no benefit and serious side effects.

Gajayurveda, a science credited to the sage Palakapya, applies Ayurvedic ideas to which animals?

Elephants were prized enough to earn their own medical literature. One treatise opens with a king ordering crop-raiding herds captured for the royal stables, where a sage tends the wounded animals.

Tulsi, an Ayurvedic herb that Hindu households plant in courtyards and worship, is a species of what?

Basil of this species is known in English as holy basil. Away from the shrine it is brewed as a herbal tea and stir-fried with meat in Southeast Asian kitchens.

Which island nation set up a Ministry of Indigenous Medicine in 1980 to revive and regulate Ayurveda?

Sri Lanka's chronicles credit King Pandukabhaya, who reigned until 367 BCE, with building Ayurvedic hospitals. The ruins at Mihintale are cited as the oldest hospital in the world.

Which plant, called vijaya in many Ayurvedic texts, is the source of the Holi preparation bhang?

Cannabis goes into Ayurvedic pain remedies in small quantities, never into smoking mixtures. Bhang powder is legally sold at Ayurvedic dispensaries in parts of India.

Dhanvantari, the physician of the gods in Ayurvedic lore, is regarded as an avatar of which deity?

Vishnu's healer form is usually shown with four hands. Printed editions of Sushruta's compendium frame the whole work as Dhanvantari's teaching, though the oldest manuscripts leave that out.

Which Indian emperor's edicts record medical care for people and animals and the planting of healing herbs?

Ashoka's second major rock edict says herbs useful to people and animals were imported and planted wherever they were lacking. He claimed the same care reached kingdoms beyond his borders.

In which city was the Sushruta Samhita put into Arabic in the 8th century for the Barmakid family?

Baghdad was where Yahya ibn Barmak sponsored a drive to collect and translate Sanskrit medical works. The Arabic version of Sushruta reached Europe by the end of the medieval period.

Trikatu, an Ayurvedic remedy for gastric distress, combines two pungent Piper fruits with which rhizome?

Ginger is the one rhizome in the mix, taken as an aid to digestion. It has been used in Asian traditional medicine for centuries and is sold as a modern dietary supplement.

Which fragrant timber, known in Sanskrit as chandana, does Ayurveda grind with water into a skin paste?

Sandalwood paste is made by rubbing a dry piece against a slab with a little water. At Tirupati it is spread on pilgrims' freshly shaved heads to protect the skin.

Charaka names three pillars of a healthy body: proper diet, sexual restraint, and which other habit?

Sleep completes the trio alongside food and abstinence. Ayurvedic texts ask for moderation in all three, warning against both excess and denial.

Which toxic metal turned up in 13 of 70 Ayurvedic remedies bought in Boston-area shops for a 2004 study?

Lead was in 13 of the 14 products that failed, at up to 37,000 micrograms per gram. The authors concluded that such Ayurvedic products should be tested for heavy-metal contamination.

Rasashastra, Ayurveda's alchemy, is named for rasa, a word its commentators read as which metal?

Mercury was the star ingredient: the tradition's texts describe purifying and calcining it for medicine, and one devotes all 19 chapters to processing it and to transmuting metals and the body.

Which Ayurvedic regimen is a set of purging procedures performed in a fixed sequence to restore balance?

Panchakarma means 'five actions', and Ayurveda presents them as techniques for eliminating toxic elements. The intended results range from purgation to better digestion and looser joints.

Which Ayurvedic mouth-swishing habit, said to draw out toxins, gets no backing from the American Dental Association?

Oil pulling means swishing sunflower, coconut or olive oil around the mouth. Promoters say it pulls out toxins, but there is no credible evidence that it does.

Brahma muhurta, a 48-minute window that yoga and Ayurveda hold auspicious, falls at what time of day?

Before sunrise by exactly two muhurtas: the window opens one hour 36 minutes ahead of the sun and closes 48 minutes ahead, so its clock time shifts with the season and the place.

Navarakizhi, a Kerala therapy for stiff joints and sore muscles, uses which grain cooked in milk?

Rice of the navara variety is cooked with milk and herbs for the treatment. The same grain is powdered into a cereal and goes into baby food and broth for pregnant women.

Which pungent bulb is the subject of the Bower Manuscript's first treatise, complete with its own festival?

Garlic gets 43 verses in the manuscript, which tell of its origin, its medicinal properties and its use for eye complaints, and mention an ancient Indian 'garlic festival'.

Which Ayurvedic pain reliever's maker sued over its name being sung in the Dabangg hit 'Munni Badnaam Hui'?

Zandu Balm came out ahead: after an out-of-court settlement with the producer, Emami hired the song's dancer, Malaika Arora, to front its adverts.

Which rose-flavoured syrup did the Unani physician Hafiz Abdul Majeed introduce in 1906 as a summer cooler?

Rooh Afza, 'refresher of the soul', blends thirteen herbs with rose as a remedy for the loo, the hot summer wind of the northern plains. It is a fixture of Ramadan fast-breaking.

Under which prime minister was India's traditional medicine department raised into the Ministry of AYUSH?

Narendra Modi's administration elevated it to a standing ministry in November 2014. The department itself went back to 1995, when the Narasimha Rao government created it.

In the Ramayana, Hanuman carries off a whole hillside to bring the healing herb sanjeevani to whom?

Lakshmana had been struck down in battle, and Hanuman could not tell which plant was the right one. Ayurveda credits the herb with real power, and people have hunted for it for centuries.

Which sedative drug is first mentioned in Ayurveda in the Sarngadhara Samhita, a 14th-century pharmacy manual?

Opium may have reached India with or ahead of the Muslim conquests. Later recipes pair it with camphor, whose stimulating effect on breathing was meant to offset the drug's depressant one.

Reserpine, a 1950s blood-pressure drug, comes from which Ayurvedic plant long given for insanity and fever?

Indian snakeroot, or sarpagandha, was also given for snakebite. Mahatma Gandhi took it as a tranquilliser years ahead of the drug's isolation in 1952.

Tradition makes Charaka, compiler of Ayurveda's founding text, court physician to which Kushan emperor?

Kanishka's reign fits the scholarship: the author called Charaka is placed no earlier than about 100 BCE and no later than about 200 CE.

Atreya, whose teaching underlies the Charaka Samhita, is linked to which seat of learning in Gandhara?

Taxila, the Takshashila of Sanskrit sources, is where one early text places Atreya as the teacher of the physician Jivaka. Some historians date him to the 6th century BCE.

Which god teaches medicine to the sage Bharadvaja in the Charaka Samhita's story of its own origins?

Indra agrees after Bharadvaja pleads that poor health is keeping people from their spiritual journey, then hands over both the method and the specifics of medical knowledge.

Which medicinal tree has three-part leaves offered to Shiva and a fruit that must be cracked with a hammer?

Bael leaves are offered because their three-lobed shape is seen as Shiva's trident. The leaves, bark, roots, fruit and seeds all go into traditional remedies.

Bacopa monnieri, a creeping wetland herb that Ayurveda uses for memory, goes by which Sanskrit name?

Brahmi keeps its reputation as a memory herb, yet there is no good evidence that it improves cognitive performance, and its safety remains uncertain.

Jatamansi, a plant of the honeysuckle family used in Ayurveda, yields which perfume named in the Bible?

Spikenard, also called nard or muskroot, is an aromatic essence drawn from the plant and burned as incense as well as worn as perfume.

Agada tantra, the Ayurvedic branch on harmful substances in animals and minerals, matches which modern field?

Toxicology in its Ayurvedic form took in epidemics as well as poisons, with keys for recognising each hazard and its antidote.

Rasayana, the Ayurvedic branch behind tonics for lifespan, intellect and strength, is devoted to what goal?

Rejuvenation was a formal specialty, listed among the components into which the earliest classical Sanskrit works divide medicine.

India's National Institute of Ayurveda, founded in 1976 as an autonomous body, is in which Rajasthan city?

Jaipur has hosted the institute since February 1976. It was declared a deemed university in 2020 and combines teaching and clinical training with research and patient care.

The Ayurvedic text Bhavaprakasha calls syphilis 'firanga roga' and says it was brought to India by whom?

Portuguese traders gave the illness its Sanskrit label: firanga roga is glossed as 'the disease of the white men'. Bhavamishra's book also offers a remedy for it.

The Charaka Samhita names four parts of medical practice: patient, physician, medicines and which other?

The nurse must be knowledgeable, skilled at preparing formulations and doses, sympathetic to everyone and clean, the text says. All four parts are called essential to recovery.

The Bower Manuscript, an early Sanskrit medical text, was found buried in a stupa near Kucha in which country?

China's far north-west gave up the find in 1890, when Lieutenant Hamilton Bower bought it while chasing a man wanted for murder. It shows medical ideas travelling between India and Central Asia.

Dinacharya, an Ayurvedic concept covering waking, hygiene, bathing and meals, is a Sanskrit word meaning what?

Daily routine matters in Ayurveda because each day is said to bring two cycles of change tied to the doshas, and regular habits are meant to keep a person in step with them.

Which country's governor compiled Hortus Malabaricus, 12 volumes built on the healer Itty Achudan's plant lore?

Netherlands official Hendrik van Rheede governed Dutch Malabar in the 1670s. Achudan dictated the Ayurvedic plant knowledge in Malayalam, and it was translated into Latin and printed in Amsterdam.

Which bodywork tradition reveres Jivaka, a physician of ancient India, as its creator?

Thai massage practitioners honour him as the founder of their art, and legends even tell of his travels to Thailand, far from the Indian courts where he worked.

Lithotomy, an operation described in the ancient Sushruta Samhita, removes what from the body?

Bladder stones were cut out through the perineum with no anaesthetic, which made the operation intensely painful and often deadly through infection.

Maharishi Ayur-Veda, a branded Ayurveda launched in the mid-1980s, came from the founder of which movement?

Transcendental Meditation is built into the system, which differs from traditional Ayurveda in its stress on consciousness. It helped popularise Ayurveda in the West but was later marginalised.

Which Persian polymath's Canon of Medicine helped shape Unani, a system India regulates alongside Ayurveda?

Avicenna, also called Ibn Sina, finished the Canon in Hamadan, where he died in 1037. Unani doctors in India carry the title hakim.

Couching, an operation of early Indian medicine, was the original treatment for which eye condition?

Cataracts were treated this way from antiquity until 1750, when the Frenchman Jacques Daviel performed the first planned extraction of the lens.