The Peepal Tree in Ayurveda: Ashvattha and the Place of Trees in the Tradition

A tree that begins its life in the air

A Peepal seed rarely starts in soil. Birds eat the small figs and leave the seeds in the fork of another tree or in the mortar of an old wall, where the seedling takes hold and sends long aerial roots down until they reach the ground. Ficus religiosa spends its first years as a guest on something else, which is why saplings appear along temple cornices and on parapets nobody planted anything on.

The leaf is the recognisable part: a broad heart drawn out into a long narrow tip, carried on a stalk slender enough to turn in air too slight to move anything else. That movement, and the sound it makes, is part of why the tree was planted where people gathered. Ashvattha is its Sanskrit name, and the same species is called the Bodhi tree after the one the Buddha is said to have been sitting beneath. Individual Peepals are long lived, and the tree belonged to a settlement rather than to a household.

How Ayurveda reads a plant

Before a plant enters a formula it is described in the vocabulary of Dravyaguna, the classical study of substances and their properties, and the description has a fixed shape:

• Rasa, the taste, of which the tradition counts six.
• Guna, the qualities: heavy or light, dry or unctuous.
• Virya, the potency, either heating or cooling.
• Vipaka, the taste that remains once digestion has finished.
• Prabhava, the specific action the rest of the description cannot explain.

Read this way, the Peepal sits among the astringent, cooling substances: Kashaya in Rasa, dry and heavy in Guna, Shita or cooling in Virya. In the logic of the three Dosha (the functional principles Ayurveda uses to describe a body), the tradition reads that profile as settling Pitta (heat and transformation) and Kapha (structure and moisture) while tending to increase Vata (movement and dryness). None of this is a statement about illness. It is a statement about quality, which a practitioner matches against a person's Prakriti, the constitution they were born with.

The four barks that are used together

Ayurveda seldom uses the Peepal on its own. It belongs to a group of four related figs called Kshira Vriksha, a name that refers to the white latex a cut in the bark releases: the banyan, the Peepal, the cluster fig and the plaksha. Their barks share the same astringent, cooling character, close enough that classical pharmacy handles all four as one material under the name Nalpamaram, the four trees.

That group is the whole basis of Nalpamaradi Kera Thailam, a Thailam (a classical medicated oil) in which the four barks are processed into a coconut oil base until the oil carries their character. It is traditionally used in Ayurveda on the skin, its character coming from the group rather than from any single herb.

Which part, and when it is gathered

A classical formula does not simply name a plant. It names a part: root, bark, heartwood, leaf, flower, fruit, seed or resin, since these differ in quality within one plant. The ten roots of Dashmoola show how specific this becomes, since half of that group comes from trees and half from smaller plants, and the name itself asks for the root in each case.

Gathering has a season. Roots were taken once the growth above ground had died back, leaves during active growth, fruit at maturity. This is Ritucharya, the classical adjustment of daily life to the time of year, applied to the plant rather than the person. The tradition set limits too: bark was to be taken in strips from one side of a trunk so the tree could close over the wound, and trees standing on burial ground or beside a road were rejected.

The courtyard, the grove and the doorway

Planting mattered as much as gathering. The Panchavati is a deliberate grove of five trees, the Peepal among them, laid out in a set arrangement and meant as a place to sit rather than a place to harvest. Temples were built around existing Peepals as well as planted beside new ones.

At domestic scale the pattern repeats. Tulsi stood in a raised pot in the courtyard, watered in the morning as part of Dinacharya, the daily routine, which is a different relationship from the one a jar of Tulsi Capsules on a shelf implies. Neem was the tree by the door, its twigs used for cleaning the teeth and its leaves put among stored grain, long before anyone met Neem Capsules. The plants belonged to the architecture of the house.

How a plant part becomes a preparation

What a gathered part becomes depends on where its qualities will travel. Astringent character that passes into water is drawn out as a Kashayam, a decoction simmered until the volume falls by a fixed fraction, which is the plain form the four barks take. Qualities that move only into fat call for a Thailam, or for a Ghritham, the same idea in a fat base. A part dried and ground fine is a Churnam, which is how fruits usually reach a shelf and how a bark rarely does.

Haritaki is a tree material in exactly that last form: the fruit of a large tree, dried and ground, and classically placed in the Rasayana category, one of the groupings the tradition sorts its materials into. Haritaki Powder is also one of the three fruits that make up Triphala, a formula that is, quite literally, three trees ground together.

The branch of knowledge that looked after the trees

Classical India also produced a separate body of writing on the care of plants, gathered under the name Vrikshayurveda: soil, propagation, grafting, irrigation, planting times. Plants were a stock that had to be maintained, and a practitioner who exhausted a species had failed at something.

The same attitude survives where trees are places rather than supply. A practice carried out in the early shade at the base of a trunk is where the two classical systems described in yoga and Ayurveda meet in an ordinary way. The tree is not incidental. It is the room the practice happened in.

Questions we are asked

Is the Peepal the same as the banyan?

No, although they are close relatives and often confused. The banyan sends down aerial roots that thicken into secondary trunks, so an old one looks like a small forest. The Peepal keeps a single trunk and is identified by the long tip on its leaf. Ayurveda places both in the same group of four trees.

Which parts of the Peepal does Ayurveda use?

The bark is named most often, prepared as a decoction or processed into an oil. The leaf, the tender new shoots and the fruit also appear in classical descriptions, each with its own qualities. The fig itself is small and dry, and unrelated to the fruit sold as a fig in Europe, which is a different species.

Does Art of Vedas sell Peepal on its own?

Not as a single herb. The tree reaches our range inside the four tree group of Nalpamaradi Kera Thailam. If you want a single tree material on its own, a dried fruit powder such as Haritaki Powder is the straightforward place to begin.

Is it true that the Peepal releases oxygen at night?

That is a modern popular claim rather than an Ayurvedic one. The classical descriptions concern the taste of the bark, its cooling quality and the shade the tree gives, and say nothing about gas exchange. The two kinds of statement are better kept apart, since one does not stand in for the other.

Can a Peepal be grown in Europe?

Indoors, in most of the continent. Ficus religiosa is tropical and will not survive frost, so it is kept as a container plant above roughly ten degrees, outside in summer and indoors for the winter. It will never reach field size in a pot, but the leaf stays characteristic.