Ayurveda Trivia
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100 free Ayurveda trivia questions with answers — history quiz, new questions added Oct 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.
30 of 100 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Ashwagandha's Sanskrit name describes the strong odour of its root as resembling which animal?
Horse
Horse: ashva is Sanskrit for horse and gandha for smell, after the root's horsey reek. Tradition adds a second reading, that taking the root lends a horse's strength and stamina.
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, and two of Ayurveda's classical branches are surgical. Its ancient surgeon Sushruta even described rebuilding a severed nose from a flap of cheek skin.
Q 03In Ayurvedic legend, Dhanvantari rose from the churned Ocean of Milk carrying a pot of what?
Amrita
Amrita, the nectar of immortality, was what gods and demons churned the ocean to win. The demons grabbed for it first, and Vishnu, disguised as the enchantress Mohini, tricked them out of it.
Q 04In southern India, chewed twigs of which tree serve as a disposable toothbrush?
Neem
Neem twigs are a traditional chew stick in southern India. At Ugadi, the new year in Karnataka, neem flowers are eaten with jaggery, the bitter and the sweet standing for the sorrows and joys of the year ahead.
Q 05Which spice, nicknamed 'Indian saffron', is smeared on bride and groom before many Hindu weddings?
Turmeric
Turmeric paste is rubbed on the couple at the haldi, a rite Bengal calls gaye holud, 'yellow on the body'. The nickname fits: cooks still use it to colour food as a cheaper stand-in for real saffron.
Q 06In the Ayurvedic treatment shirodhara, a steady stream of warm oil is poured onto which part of the body?
The forehead
The forehead: shiro means head and dhara a stream, and the warm oil trickles from a vessel hung above the brow. Practitioners prescribe it mainly to ease stress and sleeplessness.
Q 07Ayurveda credits all digestion and metabolism to a force that shares its name with which Vedic god?
Agni
Agni, Sanskrit for fire, is the digestive fire, known in the gut as jatharagni. When it burns low, half-digested food is said to leave ama, a toxic residue that Ayurveda blames for disease.
Q 08Which Ayurvedic consumer giant grew from remedies a physician began making in Kolkata in 1884?
Dabur
Dabur is short for 'Daktar Burman', as patients knew its founder, a doctor who set out to make affordable cures for cholera and malaria and sold them around Bengal.
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, devised in Germany by Samuel Hahnemann in the 1790s, shares a ministry with healing traditions many centuries older.
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, slow humour, is said to carry nutrients and build the body's soft tissue. In excess it is blamed for mucus, weight gain and chest trouble such as bronchitis.
Q 11Alongside earth, water, fire and air, which element completes the panchamahabhuta of Ayurveda's classic treatises?
Ether
Ether, akasha in Sanskrit, completes Ayurveda's five, and its special quality is said to be sound. Metal and wood are real elements too, but in China's five phases, which leave out both air and ether.
Q 12Ayurveda names chyle, blood, muscle, fat, bone, marrow and semen as the body's seven what?
Dhatus
Dhatus are the seven tissues; the humours are the doshas and the wastes the malas. Ayurveda defines health as balance among all three, and blames lost vitality and disease on any that slips.
Q 13Which of Ayurveda's eight classical branches is devoted to rejuvenating tonics for longevity, intellect and strength?
Rasayana
Q 21Tradition places Sushruta, author of a great Ayurvedic compendium, in which city, seat of his teacher Divodasa?
Varanasi
Varanasi, ancient Kashi, is where tradition places Sushruta, and Buddhist Jatakas recall a physician named Divodasa teaching there. Hindu tradition goes further and has him learn his art from Dhanvantari, the god of medicine.
Q 22Before touching a patient, Sushruta's trainees practised the length and depth of incisions on what?
Vegetables
Vegetables such as gourds, watermelons and cucumbers took the practice cuts, because Sushruta wanted each skill drilled on something resembling the body part. Bandaging, for instance, was learned on a stuffed linen doll.
Q 23The Sushruta Samhita devotes a chapter to finding, collecting, keeping and applying which creatures?
Rasayana is the branch of tonics against ageing. Legend says the frail old sage Chyavana won back his youth on one, a recipe still sold across India as the jam chyawanprash.
Q 14Bhuta vidya, the Ayurvedic branch concerned with disturbed minds rather than the body, aims to pacify what?
Possessing spirits
Possessing spirits: bhuta means a ghost, and dictionaries gloss the branch as demonology. The reasoning is in the old texts, which blame some madness on a brahmarakshasa, the ghost of a sinful Brahmin.
Q 15Vajikarana, the Ayurvedic branch that also takes on infertility, is best known for which class of remedy?
Aphrodisiacs
Aphrodisiacs: the branch deals in virility and potency. Its declared aim was healthy offspring, which is why cures for infertility sit beside the love potions.
Q 16Kaumara-bhritya, one of Ayurveda's classical branches, corresponds to which modern medical specialty?
Paediatrics
Paediatrics, though the branch starts before birth: it also treats the mother from pregnancy until weaning, on the reasoning that a nursing child can be reached only through her milk.
Q 17Madya, which Ayurvedic texts classify by raw material and fermentation process, is the term for what?
Alcoholic drinks
Alcoholic drinks: madya takes in wines brewed from sugar, fruit or grain. The same craft survives in the pharmacy tonics called arishta and asava, which are left to ferment until they generate their own alcohol.
Q 18Ayurveda pairs heavy with light, hot with cold and unctuous with dry in its list of twenty what?
Gunas
Gunas, twenty qualities in ten opposed pairs, work as a prescribing tool: a complaint marked by one quality is treated with its opposite, so dryness calls for oily, unctuous remedies.
Q 19What does Ayurveda call the body's vulnerable points?
Marma
Marma points are where a blow or cut is held to maim or kill, which is why Kerala's martial art kalaripayattu teaches only its most trusted fighters how to strike them.
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 roaming ascetic, is what charaka means, recalling the itinerant physicians who carried their remedies and magico-religious rites from village to village.
Leeches
Leeches get a whole chapter because Sushruta calls them the gentlest way to let blood, to be used on those unfit for the knife: the old, infants, women, and the timid or delicate.
Q 24Whose Ashtanga Hridaya completed Ayurveda's classical triad of authorities, alongside Charaka and Sushruta?
Vagbhata
Vagbhata, usually placed around the 6th century, condensed the two older authorities into verse. In Kerala his digest became the core text of the hereditary physician families known as ashtavaidyas.
Q 25The Charaka and Sushruta compendia both tell physicians to declare their allegiance to which Veda in particular?
Atharvaveda
Atharvaveda is the Veda both compendia tell a physician to name. Its cures are hymns and charms against disease, though; systematic medical writing first appears in the compendia themselves.
Q 26Which Ayurvedic cleansing regimen is built around therapeutic vomiting, purging and medicated enemas?
Panchakarma
Panchakarma opens with oiling and sweating, on the theory that they loosen the disordered humours and draw them into the gut, where the purges that follow can flush them out.
Q 27Unlike India's usual palm-leaf books, the Bower Manuscript of early medical texts, found near Kucha, was written on what?
Birch bark
Birch bark, the writing material of Kashmir and the far north-west. The leaves were bought in Kucha in 1890 by Lieutenant Hamilton Bower, a British officer who was there hunting a Scottish trader's killer.
Q 28Besides India, which neighbouring country has Ayurveda as a widely practised system, with public colleges awarding the BAMS degree?
Nepal
Nepal's patients so often go to an Ayurvedic practitioner first that researchers there have drawn up and trialled a clinical guideline for Ayurvedic care of diabetes.
Q 29The word Ayurveda pairs veda, meaning 'knowledge', with ayus, a Sanskrit term usually translated as what?
Life
Life, and a long one: ayus also means lifespan, which the Charaka Samhita sets at a hundred years, so the name is often rendered 'knowledge of longevity'. The same ancient root gave English age and eon.
Q 30Which endocrinologist quit a Massachusetts hospital chief-of-staff post after meeting Maharishi Mahesh Yogi in 1985?
Deepak Chopra
Deepak Chopra left New England Memorial Hospital to run an Ayurvedic health centre in Lancaster, Massachusetts, having grown uneasy at how heavily Western medicine leaned on drugs.