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50 free Ayurveda trivia questions with answers — history quiz, new questions added Aug 2026.
Ayurveda has been practised on the Indian subcontinent for well over two thousand years, and it still shapes how hundreds of millions of people eat, bathe, sleep and treat a cold. Its ideas travelled early too, reaching Tibet, China, the Arab world and, eventually, Renaissance Europe. This quiz treats Ayurveda as culture and history. You will meet the doshas and the elements they are built from, the compendia of Charaka and Sushruta, the roots and resins of the classical pharmacy, the daily routines of oil, tongue and bath, and the companies and gurus that turned an ancient tradition into a global industry. It suits quiz nights, yoga and wellness groups, and anyone curious about South Asian history. Nothing here is medical advice; every answer is cited to the page that establishes it.
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Q 01Ashwagandha's Sanskrit name describes the strong odour of its root as resembling which animal?
Horse
Horse: ashva means horse and gandha means smell, a reference to the root's horsey reek. Its Latin species name, somnifera, means 'sleep-inducing', and the shrub is a nightshade, kin to the tomato.
Q 02Formal Ayurveda study at Indian public institutions leads to a BAMS degree; the final S stands for what?
Surgery
Surgery: the degree is the Bachelor of Ayurvedic Medicine and Surgery, a reminder that two of the tradition's classical branches are surgical. Its legal standing is still not equal to that of conventional medicine.
Q 03In Ayurvedic legend, Dhanvantari rose from the churned Ocean of Milk carrying a pot of what?
Amrita
Amrita, the nectar of immortality, was the prize of the Samudra Manthana, churned with Mount Mandara as the rod and the serpent Vasuki as the rope. The asuras snatched the pot before Vishnu won it back.
Q 04In southern India, chewed twigs of which tree, a mahogany relative, serve as a disposable toothbrush?
Neem
Neem twigs double as a teeth-cleaning stick in southern India and the Middle East. At the Karnataka new year, Ugadi, its bitter leaves are mixed with jaggery as 'bevu bella' to stand for the bitter and the sweet of the year ahead.
Q 05Which rhizome, 'Indian saffron' to medieval Europe, is smeared on bride and groom before many Hindu weddings?
Turmeric
Turmeric paste is applied to bride and groom at the haldi, Bengal's 'yellow on the body' rite. A ginger-family rhizome, it was found at Farmana in the Indus Valley dating to 2600–2200 BCE.
Q 06In the Ayurvedic treatment shirodhara, a steady stream of warm oil is poured onto which part of the body?
The forehead
The forehead receives the warm oil in shirodhara, one of many Ayurvedic uses of oil that also include head massage, anointing, drinking it and oil pulling.
Q 07Ayurveda credits all digestion and metabolism to a force that shares its name with which Vedic god?
Agni
Agni, Sanskrit for fire, is Ayurveda's name for the digestive force, split into jatharagni in the gut and later stages after absorption. Ghee is offered to the same fire in Vedic yajna rituals.
Q 08Which Ayurvedic consumer giant did a physician who sold his remedies by bicycle found in Kolkata in 1884?
Dabur
Dabur began when S. K. Burman formulated Ayurvedic medicines for cholera, constipation and malaria in Kolkata and pedalled them around Bengal; the name is his patients' portmanteau of daktar (doctor) and Burman.
Q 09In India's AYUSH ministry acronym, A is Ayurveda, Y is yoga, U is Unani and S is Siddha; what is the H?
Homoeopathy
Homoeopathy, a German-born system, shares the ministry with India's own traditions. The department was elevated to a standing ministry under Narendra Modi on 9 November 2014.
Q 10Which dosha does Ayurveda describe as a blend of earth and water, the nourishing maker of the soft organs?
Kapha
Kapha, the heavy, cold and slow humour, also carries nutrients and shapes the perception of taste. A person's natural mix of the doshas is their prakriti, said to set both constitution and personality.
Q 11Alongside earth, water, fire and air, which element completes the panchamahabhuta of Ayurveda's classic treatises?
Ether
Ether completes the list, which the classic treatises share with the medicine of classical antiquity. Every substance also carries paired qualities such as heavy and light, hot and cold, unctuous and dry.
Q 12Ayurveda counts how many dhatus, the body tissues running from chyle and blood through bone to marrow?
Seven
Seven dhatus — chyle, blood, muscle, fat, bone, marrow and semen — sit beside the malas (wastes) and the doshas in Ayurveda's model of the body, each said to nourish the next in sequence.
Q 13The classical division of Ayurveda into components, first attested in the Mahabharata, counts how many of them?
Eight
Q 21Sushruta wrote his Ayurvedic compendium after moving to which Ganges city, seat of his teacher Divodasa?
Varanasi
Varanasi, ancient Kashi, is where Sushruta settled after leaving his birthplace Kanyakubja; early Buddhist Jatakas remember Divodasa as a physician who taught there. The earliest manuscripts frame the whole text as Divodasa's discourse.
Q 22Before touching a patient, Sushruta's trainees practised the length and depth of incisions on what?
Vegetables
Vegetables and dead animals stood in for patients, and only after proving their skill were students allowed to operate. The course itself ran six years before hands-on training began.
Q 23The Sushruta Samhita devotes a chapter to finding, collecting and keeping which creatures, used to draw vitiated blood?
Eight components run from general medicine and toxicology to the eyes, ears and nose, though the great compendia never follow the scheme in their own chapter divisions. The Mahabharata reference dates to about the 4th century BCE.
Q 14Bhuta vidya, the Ayurvedic branch concerned with disturbed minds rather than the body, aims to pacify what?
Possessing spirits
Possessing spirits and the minds they trouble are bhuta vidya's domain, a branch that sits beside toxicology and paediatrics in the classical scheme. Ayurveda treats mind, body and personality as three parts of one whole.
Q 15Vajikarana, the Ayurvedic branch that also takes on infertility, is best known for which class of remedy?
Aphrodisiacs
Aphrodisiacs and fertility treatments make up vajikarana, which shares the classical scheme with rasayana, the branch of tonics for lifespan, intellect and strength.
Q 16Kaumara-bhritya, one of Ayurveda's eight classical branches, corresponds to which modern medical specialty?
Paediatrics
Paediatrics is kaumara-bhritya, which also takes in midwifery, prenatal care and even choosing a baby's sex, intelligence and constitution; the Kashyapa Samhita remains its key text.
Q 17Madya, which Ayurvedic texts classify by raw material and fermentation process, is the term for what?
Alcoholic drinks
Alcoholic drinks called madya come in sugar-, fruit- and cereal-based classes and tonic wines, described as fast-acting and able to clean the body's minute pores. Opium, too, appears in a handful of classical recipes.
Q 18Ayurveda holds that all matter carries how many gunas, qualities paired off as heavy and light, hot and cold and so on?
Twenty
Twenty gunas form ten opposed pairs, from unctuous and dry to slimy and non-slimy, minute and gross, viscous and liquid. Ayurveda shares these ideas with the Samkhya and Vaisheshika schools.
Q 19What does Ayurveda call the body's vulnerable points, whose study it treats as a discipline of its own?
Marma
Marma points are peculiar to Ayurveda; the related srotas are channels thought to carry fluids, which oil massage and fomentation are said to open when blocked.
Q 20In Sanskrit, the name Charaka, attached to Ayurveda's foundational compendium, is a term for what kind of person?
A wanderer
A wanderer, or sannyasi, is what charaka means, recalling the itinerant physicians who carried medicine and magico-religious rites from village to village. One scholar argues the name denotes a whole lineage rather than one man.
Leeches
Leeches get their own chapter, down to telling good ones from bad, and at Kerala's Thottuva temple the idol of Dhanvantari, the divine physician, holds one in his left hand beside a conch.
Q 24Whose 7,120-verse Ashtanga Hridaya completed Ayurveda's classical triad of authorities with Charaka and Sushruta?
Vagbhata
Vagbhata, placed around the 6th century CE and probably from the north-west of the subcontinent, wrote in verse; his work was translated into Tibetan, Arabic and Persian and excerpted in Penguin Classics.
Q 25The Charaka and Sushruta compendia both tell physicians to declare their allegiance to which Veda in particular?
Atharvaveda
Atharvaveda, with its hymns against disease and herb-based potions, is the Veda the medical texts claim as their inspiration, and medieval taxonomies file Ayurveda as a subsidiary Veda, or upaveda.
Q 26Which later editor completed the Charaka Samhita, adding 17 chapters of therapeutics and two whole books of his own?
Dridhabala
Dridhabala, whose revision is dated to about the 6th century CE, supplied the Kalpa and Siddhi books plus 17 chapters of the Cikitsa section, and every surviving manuscript descends from his recension. The text runs to 120 chapters in all.
Q 27The Bower Manuscript, holding the oldest dated fragments of an Indian medical text, was written on which material?
Birch bark
Birch bark leaves, 56 of them in Gupta script, were dug from a Buddhist stupa near Kucha in north-west China and bought in 1890 by Lieutenant Hamilton Bower, who was chasing a murderer at the time.
Q 28In which Himalayan country did an estimated 75 to 80 percent of people use Ayurveda, its most popular medicine in 2009?
Nepal
Nepal trains its practitioners to the same BAMS degree as India, and its National Ayurvedic Training and Research Centre promotes the country's medicinal herbs.
Q 29The word Ayurveda pairs veda, meaning 'knowledge', with ayus, a Sanskrit term usually translated as what?
Life
Life, or longevity, is ayus, so the whole name reads 'knowledge of longevity'; some schools of thought even rank Ayurveda as an additional Veda in its own right.
Q 30Which endocrinologist quit a Boston hospital chief-of-staff post after meeting Maharishi Mahesh Yogi in 1985?
Deepak Chopra
Deepak Chopra resigned from New England Memorial Hospital to set up the Maharishi Ayurveda Health Center, having first been steered towards Ayurveda by physician Brihaspati Dev Triguna in New Delhi in 1981.