In every depiction of the Medicine Buddha — the blue-bodied deity of healing in Tibetan and East Asian Buddhist tradition — he holds two objects. In his left hand, a bowl of nectar. In his right hand, a small plant with distinctive oval leaves.
That plant is haritaki.
It is the only plant given this distinction in all of Buddhist iconography. And for practitioners of Ayurveda, Tibetan medicine, and traditional Chinese medicine, that honour is not symbolic — it reflects more than a thousand years of accumulated knowledge about one of the most versatile medicinal herbs the world has ever known.
“A kind of Halileh has six flavors and can eliminate all diseases. It is worthy of the King of Medicine.” — Zui Sheng Yao Wang (The Best King’s Sutra)
What the Names Reveal
What makes haritaki’s story so remarkable is how far it travelled, and how many cultures adopted it so completely that they gave it their own name. Each name reveals something different about how that culture understood the herb.
In Sanskrit and early Buddhist texts, it was known as Halileh — arriving in China with the Indian Buddhist monks who travelled the Silk Road during the Tang Dynasty (618–907 CE). The great monk Master Xuanzang, whose journey inspired the famous novel Journey to the West, is said to have encountered this herb on his travels westward.
In Tibetan medicine, haritaki became Arura — a name with its own layered meaning. ‘A’ represents the first sound of all language, signalling haritaki’s primacy among herbs. ‘Ru’ means gathering, reflecting its many properties. ‘Ra’ is an abbreviation for rhinoceros horn — one of the most precious medicinal substances in the Tibetan tradition — used to convey that haritaki was equally valuable. Among all the prescriptions in the vast Tibetan materia medica, Arura appears most frequently.
In Chinese medicine, it became He Zi (诃子) — a name that carries the meaning of both ‘speaking loudly’ (reflecting the urgency and seriousness of its indications) and ‘care and nurturing’ (reflecting its gentle, restorative nature). The character He also aligns with the Buddhist purpose of universalising compassion to all living beings.
In Ayurveda, where Kailash Herbals roots its tradition, haritaki stands alone as the King of Herbs — the single fruit of the three in Triphala considered complete enough to be taken alone, for life.
Then there is its most evocative folk name in Chinese culture: the Big Golden Fruit. Not simply because of the fruit’s brown-gold colour, but because gold was used to describe something of the highest possible value. And the Wind-Floating Fruit — a name given to the immature fruits that fall before harvest, carrying within it an image of the tree’s legendary resilience. Haritaki grows in arid, barren terrain. Even if its trunk is felled, new branches sprout from the stump and a full crown regrows — a living symbol of regeneration that the Buddhist tradition did not miss.
The Silk Road and the Spread of a Sacred Herb
The story of how haritaki reached China is inseparable from the story of Buddhism’s journey eastward. During the Han Dynasty (206 BCE – 220 CE), Indian merchants and monks began travelling the Silk Road into central China, bringing with them not only sacred texts and beliefs but the plants of the Indian subcontinent.
By the time of the Tang Dynasty, haritaki was well established in Chinese medicine. The oldest surviving Chinese pharmacopeia to record it is the Xin Xiu Ben Cao (Newly Revised Materia Medica), dating to that era, which describes it as ‘bitter flavour, warm, nontoxic.’
One account preserved in historical records describes a Sanskrit monk arriving at Guangxiao Temple in Guangzhou during the Song Dynasty. He planted haritaki trees in the temple garden — trees which, according to the records, still stood centuries later, their trunks witnessing generations of monks chanting scripture beneath their canopy. The monks, it is recorded, would chew the fruits when thirsty during long recitations. The fruit quenched their thirst and sharpened their minds — a practical discovery that aligned entirely with what Ayurvedic practitioners had known for millennia.
The monks would chew the fruits when thirsty during long recitations. The fruit quenched their thirst and sharpened their minds.
The Legend of Yichaoma
Every great herb has its origin story. Haritaki’s is the legend of Yichaoma, preserved in Buddhist records and passed down through the Chinese medical tradition.
Long ago, there was a young woman named Yichaoma, the daughter of an innkeeper. She was known for her intelligence, her kindness, and above all for her rice wine — said to taste like nectar. Bodhisattva, the king of medicine, saw her charity and chose to reward it. He gave her a tree and said: ‘This tree is the best medicine in the world. Its roots, trunks, and branches can remove diseases of flesh, bone, and skin, while its fruits can treat diseases of the internal organs.’
Yichaoma planted the tree carefully and tended it until it bore fruit. Each year, she gave the fruits to travellers passing through her father’s inn, explaining how to use them. Later generations named the tree and its fruit in her honour.
It is, at its heart, a story about generosity — the idea that the most powerful medicines are gifts to be shared, not hoarded. It is a fitting origin story for an herb that has crossed oceans and centuries to reach people around the world.
Why the Medicine Buddha Holds Haritaki
The Pharmacist Buddha — known in Sanskrit as Bhaishajyaguru, in Tibetan as Sangye Menla — is one of the most revered figures in Mahayana Buddhism. His specific domain is healing: the healing of physical illness, yes, but more profoundly the healing of the mental poisons that cause suffering.
That he holds haritaki rather than any other plant is a statement about what the tradition considered most important. Not a rare, exotic cure for a specific disease, but a broadly applicable herb for daily use — something that supports the whole system, brings clarity to the mind, and sustains the body over a lifetime.
In the Tibetan tradition, the fruit he holds is sometimes called dug-bcom — “that which renders poison inactive.” It serves as a healing symbol and a metaphor for the Three Poisons of Buddhist thought: desire, hatred, and confusion. Tibetan medicine recognises three basic types of illness whose root causes are these same conflicting emotions — passion, aggression, and ignorance — and haritaki was regarded as the one herb in the pharmacopoeia associated with all three. The symbolism is deliberate: the herb in the deity’s hand mirrors the deity’s own power to see the true cause of an affliction and address it at the root.
“Myrobalan (Tib: A-ru-ra) affects the mind as well as the body. It underlines the nature of the Buddha of Healing. In Tibetan medicine, Myrobalan is considered as the universal treatment, which may cure all 404 diseases known in Tibetan clinical medicine.” — Dr. Natalia Bolsokhoyeva, Buddhist Himalaya, Vol. V, 1993
The Buddhist concept of haritaki as one of four longevity medicines — herbs that can be taken safely for one’s entire life — aligns precisely with how practitioners in the yogic tradition understand it. This is not emergency medicine. It is daily practice. The support that keeps the body clean and the mind clear, day after day, year after year.
The Chinese medical description is consistent with this view. Haritaki ‘astringes the lung to relieve cough, and astringes the intestine to relieve diarrhea’ — two of the most fundamental functions in maintaining daily wellness. It is, at its core, a herb of maintenance and restoration.
The Buddhist concept of haritaki as one of four longevity medicines — herbs that can be taken safely for one’s entire life.
The Medicine Buddha Sutra
The reverence for the Medicine Buddha is captured in the Medicine Buddha Sutra, which records the mantra said to have been pronounced while he rested in the contemplation known as the Removal of Suffering for All Beings:
NAMO BHAGAVATE BHAISAJAYA-GURU-VAIDURYA-PRABHA-RAJAYA TATHAGATAYA ARHATE SAMYAKSAMBUDDHAYA TADYATHA
OM BHAISAJYE BHAISAJYE BHAISAJYA SAMUDGATE SVAHA
What runs through all of it — the Sanskrit etymology, the Tibetan symbolism, the Chinese pharmacopeia, the Sutra itself — is the placing of the mind at the centre of healing. In the Buddhist reading, haritaki is valued not only for what it does for the body but for its association with mental clarity, a dimension of the herb that older traditions emphasised far more than modern marketing does.
Peer-Reviewed Research Examines the Tradition
In 2019, researchers Miaoqing Sha and Baican Yang at Shanghai University of Traditional Chinese Medicine published a study in the peer-reviewed journal Chinese Medicine and Culture examining haritaki’s cultural and medical history across Buddhist, Ayurvedic, Tibetan, and Chinese traditions. Their conclusion was that haritaki represents a unique intersection: a herb that has been documented by four distinct medical and spiritual traditions over more than a thousand years, each arriving at remarkably consistent descriptions of its properties.
This kind of cross-cultural consistency is notable. It suggests that the observations were not simply cultural transmission — that different civilisations, working independently, kept describing the same qualities. What the Indian Ayurvedic tradition called the King of Herbs, the Tibetan tradition called as precious as rhinoceros horn, and the Chinese tradition recorded as suitable for lifelong use. The convergence is striking.
A Living Tradition
The haritaki tree growing in the courtyard of Guangxiao Temple in Guangzhou — the one planted by the travelling monk during the Song Dynasty — is still there. Hundreds of years old, still bearing fruit, still standing as a quiet witness to one of the most remarkable journeys in the history of medicinal plants.
For those of us who take haritaki daily, that continuity matters. We are not doing something new. We are participating in a practice that Tibetan monks, Tang Dynasty scholars, Indian practitioners, and Chinese physicians all recognised as worthwhile. The Medicine Buddha holds haritaki in his right hand for a reason.
If you are new to haritaki and want to explore the tradition yourself, Kailash Herbals’ Third Eye Awakening capsules are one of the most reviewed haritaki supplements on Amazon — formulated by Martyn S. Williams, a former Himalayan monk with seven years of direct Ayurvedic study in India.
| Further Reading & Source: Sha M, Yang B. Haritaki (诃子), Holy Medicine of Buddhism. Chinese Medicine and Culture, 2019;2:141-4. DOI: 10.4103/CMAC.CMAC_26_19. Published by Wolters Kluwer – Medknow. Open access under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 License. |
This article describes the traditional and historical uses of haritaki across Ayurvedic, Tibetan, and Buddhist medical traditions. It is provided for educational and cultural interest only. These statements have not been evaluated by the Food and Drug Administration. Haritaki is a traditional herb and food, not a drug, and is not intended to diagnose, treat, cure, or prevent any disease. Consult a qualified healthcare provider before beginning any new supplement.