Original Text

सौमनस्यकृतो हृद्यान् वयस्यैः सहितः पिबेत् ।

निर्गदान् आसवारिष्टसीधुमार्द्वीकमाधवान् ॥ २२ ॥

Transliteration

saumanasya-kṛto hṛdyān vayasyaiḥ sahitaḥ pibet |

nirgadān āsavāriṣṭa-sīdhu-mārdvīka-mādhavān || 22 ||

Translation

— gladdened in spirit and in the company of friends, he may drink these heart-pleasing, harmless preparations: āsava, ariṣṭa, sīdhu, grape-wine (mārdvīka), and honey-wine (mādhava).

Commentary

This verse continues, without break, the long sentence that the spring regimen has been building since the cuckoo and the flowering groves of the preceding lines. The man of Vāgbhaṭa's world, having passed the heavy late winter and the kapha-melting of early spring, is pictured here at ease among companions, and the text names what he may take: the season's wholesome fermented drinks. It is one of the most openly sensuous moments in a medical treatise, and it asks to be read both as regimen and as a window into how the classical world wove care of the body together with delight.

Reading the Sanskrit Words

The half-verse opens with saumanasya-kṛtaḥ — "made glad of mind," "in a state of good cheer." Saumanasya derives from su-manas, the well-disposed or contented mind, and the past-participle compound describes the condition the drinker is already in before he lifts the cup. The order matters: gladness is the precondition, not the thing the drink is asked to manufacture. Hṛdyān, "heart-pleasing" or "agreeable to the heart," is the first of two adjectives qualifying the drinks; hṛd is the heart, and a hṛdya substance is one the body welcomes, easy and grateful rather than burdensome. Vayasyaiḥ sahitaḥ — "together with companions of one's own age" — fixes the social setting; a vayasya is a friend, specifically a peer, the word carrying the warmth of shared years. Pibet is the optative of √pā, "to drink" — "he may drink," the gentle prescriptive mood of the whole ṛtucaryā, which advises rather than commands; the optative carries permission and counsel, not the force of an imperative. The second line gives nirgadān, "free of fault, harmless, unobjectionable" (literally "without gada," without disease), and then the five names: āsava, ariṣṭa, sīdhu, mārdvīka, mādhava. It is worth pausing on how the two adjectives hṛdya and nirgada bracket the five drinks at either end of the couplet, so that the named substances arrive already qualified — heart-pleasing on the one side, fault-free on the other — and never stand bare. The grammar itself frames the drink within its conditions before it names it at all.

The Five Drinks Named

Each of the five terms is a distinct preparation in classical pharmacology, not a loose synonym for "wine." Āsava and ariṣṭa are the two great families of medicated fermented liquids of Ayurvedic pharmacy: an āsava is fermented from cold or raw decoctions and infusions, an ariṣṭa from drug materials first boiled into a decoction (kvātha) and then fermented, both raised with a fermenting agent and sweetened base. They occupy whole sections of the later pharmaceutical literature and survive on Ayurvedic pharmacy shelves to this day as a category of self-generating-alcohol tonics. Sīdhu is a sugarcane-juice wine, prepared either from the fresh juice or from boiled-down cane; mārdvīka is the wine of mṛdvīkā, the grape, hence "grape-wine"; and mādhava (from madhu, honey) is mead, honey-wine. That the verse lists five differentiated fermentations, each with its own base — herb-decoction, cane, grape, honey — shows how finely the tradition graded its drinks. The qualifier nirgadān is doing real work across all five: the regimen names the wholesome, well-made, fault-free versions, the ones that have fermented cleanly and carry no spoilage, and by implication holds apart the raw, sour, or badly kept drink that the same tradition elsewhere counts among the causes of disease. The classical literature was precise about this distinction. A properly matured fermented preparation was held to be light and kindling to the fire, while the freshly made, the unaged, or the spoiled draught (navīna, the new wine) was counted among the heavy and disturbing — so that the same family of substances could be medicine or poison depending on its making and its keeping. The single word nirgada gathers all of that pharmaceutical care into the verse: it specifies not merely "these drinks" but the sound, clean, well-prepared instances of them, and quietly excludes everything else. Read this way, the line is less an invitation than a careful naming of a small, conditioned class of substances suited to one season.

Why Spring, and Why These Drinks

The placement is not incidental to the season's physiology. Vāgbhaṭa's seasonal argument turns on a single hinge: through hemanta and śiśira (the cold seasons) the body's kapha accumulates and, in late winter, lies condensed and heavy; the rising warmth of vasanta liquefies it ("the kapha hoarded in winter, melted by the spring sun"), and this loosened kapha, if left, smothers agni, the digestive fire, and breeds the heaviness, congestion, and loss of appetite the spring verses describe. The whole vasanta regimen is therefore a clearing regimen: emesis and the lighter therapies to remove the melted kapha, then dry, light, pungent, and astringent foods, exercise, and dry massage to keep the loosened humor from settling. Within that logic the named drinks are read by the commentators as laghu (light) and agni-dīpana (kindling to the fire) — fermented, warming, mobilizing liquids that move with the season's lightening current rather than against it, the opposite of the cold, heavy, sweet, kapha-building foods that the same chapter sets aside for spring. The fault-free fermented drink, in this reading, belongs to the same family of measures as the pungency and the dryness: it stirs a sluggish agni and helps carry off what winter laid down.

How the Commentators Read It

Aruṇadatta, in the Sarvāṅgasundarā, and Hemādri, in the Āyurvedarasāyana, take up the two adjectives hṛdya and nirgada as the governing qualifications, reading them as the safeguard built into the verse: it is the heart-pleasing and the fault-free drink that is named, the cleanly fermented and well-aged, and the discussion turns on dose, on the suitable constitution, and on the company and gladness that frame the act. The commentarial tradition consistently reads the spring drink as conditioned — bound to the season, to moderation, to the prepared and contented mind, to good company — rather than as an open license. This is consistent with how the broader Aṣṭāṅga Hṛdaya treats fermented drink elsewhere: it is at once a recognized therapeutic substance with named uses and a thing whose misuse (the unaged, the excessive, the solitary, the joyless draught) the same author counts among the roads to ruin. The verse holds both truths in its two qualifiers.

The Spring-Recreation Passage as Literature

Verses 21 to 25 of this chapter form the vihāra — the recreation, the seasonal pleasures — and they are among the most lyrical lines in the entire saṃhitā. Around this verse sit cooling waters scented with flowers, courtyards bright with gems and shaded against the strengthening sun, the call of the cuckoo (kokila), groves heavy with bloom, and mango-juice drinks offered by the beloved. Vāgbhaṭa, writing in cultivated Sanskrit verse, lets the regimen become almost a poem of spring: the body's care is set inside a whole sensory world of company, music of birds, fragrance, coolness, and shared gladness. This is the classical ṛtu-vihāra, the seasonal recreation proper to vasanta in the courtly society Vāgbhaṭa knew — a world in which spring was the festival season, the time of the love-god Kāma and of celebration, and in which the well-lived season included pleasure alongside cleansing. The verse reflects that culture rather than abstracting from it. To read it well is to hold the medical and the literary together: the same lines that grade five fermentations by their base also tell us that the tradition imagined renewal not as austerity but as a measured turn toward delight, taken in good cheer and among friends — gladness, company, and a light and fault-free draught all named in a single breath as the texture of a well-met spring.

Cross-Tradition Connections

The instinct that spring is a season for clearing what the cold months laid down, and for meeting renewal with a measured turn toward lightness and pleasure, runs far wider than Vāgbhaṭa's chapter. Across the classical medical and ritual worlds, the turn of winter into spring is read as a threshold the body crosses with the year, and most traditions answer it with some combination of clearing, lightening, and seasonal recreation. Reading them beside the vasanta-ṛtucaryā shows how distinctive the Ayurvedic synthesis is — and where the parallels genuinely hold.

In the Hippocratic and Galenic stream of Greek and later European medicine, the regimen of health (diaita) was likewise seasonal, and spring carried a strong clearing logic. The humoral system held that the cold and moist winter favored an accumulation of phlegm, and the warming of spring set the blood in motion; the season was therefore widely associated with the rising and "boiling up" of blood and with the clearing therapies that answered it. Spring blood-letting — the venesection performed seasonally as a prophylactic emptying — became one of the most durable habits of European medicine, persisting in almanacs and folk practice for centuries; the spring purge and the spring tonic belong to the same instinct. The structural likeness to the Ayurvedic picture is striking: a humor (phlegm there, kapha here) thought to gather in the cold and to require active removal as the warmth returns, with the season itself read as the agent that loosens it. The substances differ, the clearing methods differ, but the seasonal grammar — winter accumulates, spring sets in motion, the body is helped to empty — is held in common. The Greek world also kept its spring festivals of wine and the returning year, the rites of Dionysos clustering near the turn toward warmth, so that there too the season of clearing was also the season of celebration.

Classical Chinese medicine reads the same threshold through a different cosmology and arrives at a recognizably parallel conduct. In the Huangdi Neijing, spring is the season of wood and of the liver, governed by the rising, generating force the text calls sheng — the upward and outward movement of new growth. The seasonal counsel for spring directs one to rise with the dawn, to walk freely in the open with the hair loosened and the body unbound, to let the will come to life and to give rather than take, to nourish what is being born and not to kill or punish it — to move with the expanding current of the season rather than against it. There is no humor to purge in this system; the work is alignment with the directional energy of the year, keeping the liver's free coursing unobstructed so that stagnation does not gather. Yet the shared principle is clear: spring is a season of release and rising, the body opens, and conduct that suppresses or weighs down the rising current breeds later illness. Where Ayurveda speaks of melting and clearing a settled humor, the Chinese tradition speaks of freeing a stalled movement — two ways of saying that spring asks the body to be unburdened, not loaded.

Sowa Rigpa, the Tibetan medical tradition that drew on Ayurveda and on Chinese and Greco-Arab sources while developing its own framework, keeps a fully seasonal regimen (dü kyi chö) in which spring is given particular weight. In the Tibetan reading, the cold of winter increases bad kan — the phlegm humor that is the close cousin of kapha — and the warmth of spring loosens this accumulated bad kan

The Greco-Arabic Unani tradition, which carried the Hippocratic-Galenic humors into the Islamic medical world, kept seasonal regulation (tadbir) at the center of its preservation of health, and read spring (rabīʿ) as the most temperate and balanced of the seasons — warm and moist, the season most agreeable to the blood. Precisely because spring sets the blood in motion and brings residues to the surface, the Unani physicians counseled seasonal evacuation in spring — phlebotomy, gentle purging, and a lightening of the diet — to remove what the winter had thickened before the heat of summer could spoil it. Here again the seasonal threshold calls for active clearing, and the well-tempered spring is the one met with emptying rather than filling.

Beneath these medical systems lies a still older and nearly universal seasonal sense: the spring cleanse and the spring festival, twinned. The fasts and purifications that cluster at the end of winter across many cultures — and the feasts of release that follow them — encode the same bodily intuition the physicians formalized: that the close, stored, heavy season has ended, that the body and the household alike want clearing out, and that the return of warmth and light is met with renewal, gathering, and shared gladness. Vāgbhaṭa's verse sits exactly at this confluence. It names the clearing logic (the wholesome, light, fire-kindling drink for the kapha-loosened body) and the festival logic (gladness, company, the season's recreation) in a single line. What is most distinctive in the Ayurvedic version is not the cleansing or the celebration taken alone — both are widely shared — but the seamlessness with which the tradition binds the two, so that the care of the body in spring and the delight proper to spring are written as one continuous regimen rather than set against each other.

Universal Application

Underneath the named drinks and the courtly grove, this verse carries a reading of spring that does not belong only to the seventh century or to one medical system. It is a claim about what a body does when a long cold, heavy, closed season ends — and about what renewal asks of us when it comes.

The first of these is simple and physical: the season loosens what the season laid down, and the loosened thing has to go somewhere. Through the dark months the body gathers and stores — it thickens, slows, holds heat in, eats heavier, moves less. None of that is a failure; it is exactly what the cold asks for. But when the warmth returns, what was stored as protection becomes excess, and it liquefies. The old traditions felt this as melting kapha or rising phlegm or stalled liver-wood; we might feel it as the spring heaviness, the congestion, the sluggishness, the strange tiredness of the first warm weeks. The teaching common to them all is that this loosened surplus is not cleared by adding to it. Spring is one of the few moments the body itself is doing the work of letting go, and the regimen's whole instinct is to help the emptying rather than to load the body further. Renewal, in this reading, is subtractive before it is additive: you clear before you fill.

The second is that the body is porous to the season — that we are not sealed against the turning year but move with it, accumulate with it, and have to release with it. The traditions that survived all built their conduct on this assumption: that there is no fixed right way to eat or move or rest, only the way that meets the season the body is truly in. Winter conduct loaded into spring becomes a burden; the heavy, warming, building habits that were medicine in the cold become the very thing that smothers the fire when the warmth returns. To live well, on this view, is to live in time — to let the regimen turn as the year turns, lightening when the world lightens, clearing when the body is already clearing. The body keeps the calendar whether we attend to it or not; the only question is whether our conduct moves with that current or fights it.

And the third, which this verse insists on more openly than almost any line in the medical literature, is that delight has its season too — that renewal is not only austerity and emptying but also gladness, company, and a measured turn toward pleasure. The same chapter that prescribes the spring cleansing also names the cuckoo and the flowering grove, the cool scented water and the wine taken in good cheer among friends. It does not set the discipline against the delight; it writes them as one continuous regimen. There is a wisdom in that refusal to split them. A renewal that is only clearing, only restriction, only the subtractive work, curdles; the body that empties also wants to be glad, to gather with its people, to meet the returning light with celebration and not only with abstinence. The verse holds the two together precisely — gladness as the precondition, company as the setting, and even the wholesome, fault-free draught named in the same breath as the cleansing. The season that asks us to let go of winter's weight also asks us to be glad that it is spring. The lasting lesson is not the drink but the wholeness: that to renew well is to clear and to celebrate at once, lightly, in good company, in time with the turning year.

Modern Application

The vasanta regimen reads, across many centuries, like a coherent account of what late winter and early spring do to a body and how a life might move with that turn. Read descriptively rather than as a set of orders, it maps onto several recognizable contemporary experiences of the season.

1. The Spring Heaviness and the Body's Thaw

Many people notice a particular sluggishness in the first warm weeks — a heaviness, a congestion, a fogged appetite, a tiredness that does not match the lengthening days. The Ayurvedic seasonal model gives this a clean description: the cold months build and condense kapha, the heavy, cool, stable humor, and the rising spring warmth liquefies it, so that the loosened surplus briefly clogs the system before it clears. Whatever one makes of the humoral frame, the lived observation it organizes is real and widely shared — the body that stored and slowed through winter takes some weeks to lighten again as the season turns. The tradition reads this thaw not as illness but as transition, the predictable cost of having been well-adapted to the cold, and it frames spring as the season in which the body is already trying to clear what it banked. That reframing alone — heaviness as thaw, not failure — is much of what the regimen offers.

2. The Allergy Season and the Kapha-Melt

The congestion, the heavy head, the running and blocked passages, the loss of appetite that the spring verses describe map with uncanny closeness onto what the modern world calls the allergy season. The classical literature, of course, was describing the kapha-melt rather than pollen and histamine, and the mechanisms are not the same; the parallel is observational, not etiological. But the overlap of the picture is worth naming honestly: spring, in both accounts, is the season of the congested, heavy, mucus-laden upper body, the time of year the head and the breathing passages feel most loaded. The Ayurvedic regimen's whole answer to this picture is lightening — the dry, light, warming, pungent and astringent direction, the clearing therapies, the avoidance of the cold, heavy, sweet, mucus-building foods — which is to say it treats the spring congestion as a thing to clear and not to feed. As a descriptive correspondence between an ancient seasonal map and a modern seasonal complaint, it is one of the more striking in the whole ritucarya.

3. Seasonal Eating and the Turn Toward Lightness

The dietary direction of the spring chapter is consistent and specific: as the season warms and the body's stored heaviness loosens, the regimen turns away from the rich, heavy, sweet, oily, cold foods that suited the winter and toward lighter, drier, warming, more pungent and astringent ones — the foods that do not add to the loosened kapha. This is a clear instance of a principle the contemporary world has rediscovered under the name of eating with the seasons: that the right food is not fixed but turns with the year, and that the heavy fare which nourished through the cold becomes a burden once the warmth returns. The tradition states it as a matter of the body's changing fire and the season's changing demand rather than of local availability, but the practical shape — heavier in the cold, lighter as it warms — is the same intuition. The spring table, in this reading, is a lightening table.

4. Renewal as Clearing, Not Adding

Spring has become, in much of modern life, a season of resolutions and additions — the new routine, the new program, the things taken on. The vasanta regimen points in the opposite direction. Its entire logic is subtractive: the season has loosened a surplus, and the work is to clear it, lighten, move, and let the body empty what it stored, before anything is built back up. This is a quietly countercultural reading of renewal — that the spring reset is first an unburdening, a clearing-out of what the closed season accumulated, and only then a season of growth. The older instinct of the spring clean, the spring fast, the spring purge all sit inside this same logic, and the regimen names it plainly: in spring the body is already letting go, and conduct that helps the letting-go moves with the season while conduct that loads it fights the current.

5. The Place of Pleasure and Company in Renewal

What sets this passage apart from a purely clinical seasonal regimen is its open insistence that the well-lived spring includes delight — gladness of spirit, the company of friends, the cool scented waters and shaded courtyards, the season's recreation taken in good cheer. This verse names the wholesome fermented drinks of the classical spring among friends; honesty about the text requires saying plainly that fermented drink was part of the courtly spring regimen Vāgbhaṭa described, presented there as one element of a whole sensory celebration of the season rather than recommended here for anyone. What carries forward is not the drink but the structure around it: that the tradition refused to split the body's clearing from the heart's gladness, and wrote renewal as something met in company, with pleasure, in good spirit — not as restriction alone. The contemporary reader can take the wider shape of that — that a season of lightening is also a season for gathering, for being glad of the returning warmth, for meeting people in the open and celebrating the turn of the year — without any reference to what is in the cup. The lasting note of the passage is that renewal and delight belong to the same season, and that the tradition saw no contradiction between clearing the body and gladdening it.

Further Reading

  • Ashtanga Hridayam — The Source Text — Vagbhata's compendium in full, with the Sutrasthana and its third chapter on the regimen of the seasons (ritucarya).
  • Ritucharya — The Regimen of the Seasons — The Ayurvedic framework of seasonal conduct in which this verse sits — how diet, activity, and recreation turn with the year across the six seasons.
  • Kapha Dosha — The heavy, cool, stable humor that accumulates through winter and melts in spring — the physiological hinge of the entire vasanta regimen.
  • Agni — The Digestive Fire — The digestive and metabolic fire that the loosened spring kapha can smother, and that the season's light, warming, fire-kindling foods and drinks are meant to rekindle.
  • Arunadatta, Sarvangasundara, and Hemadri, Ayurvedarasayana — The two standard classical commentaries on the Ashtanga Hridaya, which read the spring drink through its qualifiers hridya (heart-pleasing) and nirgada (fault-free), binding it to season, moderation, company, and a gladdened mind.

Frequently Asked Questions

What are the five drinks named in this verse?

The verse names five distinct fermented preparations: asava (fermented from cold or raw decoctions and infusions), arishta (fermented from boiled drug decoctions), sidhu (a sugarcane-juice wine), mardvika (grape-wine, from mridvika, the grape), and madhava (honey-wine or mead, from madhu, honey). Each is a separate preparation with its own base in classical pharmacology, not a loose synonym for wine. Asava and arishta in particular are major families of medicated fermented liquids in Ayurvedic pharmacy and survive as a recognized category to this day.

Is this verse recommending that people drink alcohol?

No. The verse is a descriptive record of the classical spring regimen (vasanta-ritucarya) in Vagbhata's courtly world of roughly the seventh century, where wholesome fermented drinks taken in good cheer among friends were named as one element of the season's recreation. Read as history and literature, it shows how the tradition tied seasonal care of the body to delight. It is not a contemporary health recommendation, and the qualifiers in the verse itself — heart-pleasing (hridya) and fault-free (nirgada) — make clear that even within the classical frame the drink was conditioned by season, moderation, company, and a gladdened mind.

Why does the spring regimen include fermented drinks at all?

Within the seasonal logic of the chapter, spring is when the kapha hoarded through winter melts under the rising sun and must be cleared, since the loosened humor smothers the digestive fire (agni) and brings heaviness and congestion. The commentators read the named drinks as light (laghu) and fire-kindling (agni-dipana) — warming, mobilizing fermented liquids that move with the season's lightening and help carry off what winter laid down, in the same family of measures as the pungent, dry, and astringent foods the chapter directs for spring. The verse names only the wholesome, fault-free versions, holding apart the raw or spoiled drink the same tradition counts among causes of disease.

What do the words saumanasya-krita and nirgada add to the verse?

Saumanasya-krita means made glad of mind, in good cheer — and its position at the head of the verse makes gladness the precondition for the act, not something the drink is asked to manufacture. Nirgada means free of fault, harmless, literally without disease (gada), and together with hridya (heart-pleasing) it is the safeguard built into the line: it is the cleanly fermented, well-aged, agreeable drink that is named. The commentators Arunadatta and Hemadri take these two qualifiers as the governing conditions, reading the spring drink as bound to moderation, good company, and a prepared and contented mind rather than as an open license.

How does this verse fit into the larger spring chapter?

It sits in the middle of the spring-recreation passage (verses 21 to 25), the vihara or seasonal pleasures, which is among the most lyrical stretches of the whole treatise. Around it are cooling scented waters, jeweled and shaded courtyards, the call of the cuckoo, flowering groves, and mango-juice drinks offered by the beloved. The chapter as a whole first directs the clearing of melted kapha through emesis and light therapies (the earlier verses) and the care and diet after cleansing, then turns to this sensory celebration of the season. The placement shows that Vagbhata imagined spring renewal not as austerity alone but as clearing and delight written together as one continuous regimen.