AN INTRODUCTION ABOUT SODHALA NIGHANTU

Abstract

Ayurveda classics have many effective herbs to be evaluated for its own identity. In order to have a perfect understanding of the medicinal plants it is therefore most essential to be familiar with the branch of Ayur-vedic Pharmacology i.e. “Dravyaguna Vigyan” which provides the scientific knowledge of the fundamen-tals of Ayurvedic medicinal properties with their pharmacological action. Ayurvedic history can be divided into three time periods – Vedic period, Samhita period, Nighantu period. The Nighantu period is the golden period of the Ayurvedic Materia Medica literature. Many Nighantus or lexicons were written after the sam-hita period. Initially the Ayurvedic Nighantus are based on different samhitas containing only the syno-nyms which communicated the prevalent names, morphological characters, and properties, actions of drugs, habitat and relevant information. As time passed many species enters in India from their native plac-es for economical and medicinal importance. Many of them were added in various lexicons on the basis of their pharmacological or therapeutic properties. Mainly the literature of Dravyaguna is available in two forms one is texts which describe only synonyms of drugs e.g. Ashtanga Nighantu, Paryaya Ratnamala, Hridaya Deepaka Nighantu, Nighantu Sesha, etc., and second is texts which explain synonyms along with properties, Indications and actions e.g. Dhanwantari Nighantu, Sodhala Nighantu, Madanpal Nighantu etc. Sodhala Nighantu is written by Acharya Sodhala in 12th century. In the introductory verses Sodhala ex-press his view that students of Ayurveda in his time are facing great difficulty as the list of drugs, proper classification, nomenclature etc. are not available. Therefore, he composed this work after consulting earli-er works of Agnivesa, Sushruta and mainly the author of Ashtang - Vagabhattacharya. He claims that this text will solve controversies among various texts.