Bacopa

Dutt asks for brahmi

Calcutta, 1877. Udoy Chand Dutt had been asking for brahmi, and he kept getting the same herb.¹

Dutt was a government doctor writing an English guide to the medicines of the old Sanskrit books. He wanted every plant tied to its true Latin name, so he got his drugs from practising kavirajas, the physicians of the old school, and had them identified at the Royal Botanic Garden.¹

Brahmi would not add up. The botanist William Roxburgh, in his Flora Indica, gave brahmi as a Sanskrit name for rue, a plant he took to be Persian and which grew in Bengal "in gardens only."² The physicians of Calcutta used the name for something else, a creeping herb of wet ground.^{1, 3}

So Dutt asked around. He got specimens from different people, and "every where," he wrote, "I got the Herpestis Monniera under the name of brahmi."¹ It is the plant botanists now call Bacopa monnieri.⁴

He had settled what Calcutta meant by brahmi. What the ancient books meant by it was a harder question, and scholars are still arguing about it.^{5, 6}

A hundred words, twice heard

Dutt counted two books as the oldest that survive, the Charaka Samhita on medicine and the Sushruta Samhita on surgery.¹ Both use brahmi, and Sushruta turns it into a promise.^{7, 8}

First the body was cleansed with emetics and purges. The patient ate the set gruels, went into his room for the cure, and drank the pressed juice of brahmi after it had been blessed with a thousand recitations of sacred verses.⁷

After a week, the text says, his memory improved and his skin took on a heavenly glow. In the second week old and forgotten memories came back, and he grew better at writing out any book. By the third he could repeat a hundred words he had heard or read twice.⁷

Another twenty-one days, and the goddess of learning appeared to him in bodily form. All kinds of knowledge came rushing into his memory, a single hearing was enough to repeat what he heard, and he would live for five hundred years.⁷

The brahmi ghee in the next recipe was rougher. Worms and vermin were driven out, creeping from the upper, lower and side parts of the body. Then came a lotus bloom on the cheeks, lasting youth and a life of three centuries "of song and sunshine."⁷

In Charaka the herb arrives with a god. A band of sages had grown weary in the towns. Their lustre had faded and their voices had suffered, so they went back to the Himalayas, where Indra met them. "Town-dwelling is indeed the source of all evils," he told them. Then he named the mountain herbs they should take with cow's milk for six months, aindri and brahmi among them, for long life, a good voice, intelligence and memory.⁸

Charaka had a darker use for it too. Old ghee cooked in brahmi juice was a cure for "insanity, ill-luck, epilepsy and effects of evil deeds."⁹ The epileptic, the book warned, had to be kept away from water, fire, trees and mountains, any of which could kill him.⁹

Which brahmi?

The trouble starts with the word. Monier-Williams's Sanskrit dictionary of 1899 lists what brahmi can mean. The personified energy of the god Brahma. Speech, and Sarasvati, its goddess. A female fish or frog. A species of ant. A kind of brass. A river. And various plants, rue among them.¹⁰

In the twelfth century Dalhana, Sushruta's commentator, treated brahmi and mandukaparni as one herb.^{5, 6} Mandukaparni, named for leaves shaped like a frog's foot, is now taken to be gotu kola, a different plant altogether.⁶

The Pharmacographia Indica of 1893 was blunt. Calcutta's brahmi was "certainly not the Brahmi of the Nighantas," the old Sanskrit plant lists, but the plant Sanskrit writers called jala-brahmi, "water brahmi." The lists' own brahmi was gotu kola.¹¹

The argument has never closed. In 2014 B. N. Dhawan, a former director of the Central Drug Research Institute in Lucknow, wrote that Charaka classes bacopa as a herb for memory, and that bacopa is brahmi and gotu kola is mandukaparni. His authority for the names was a 1978 paper co-written by Ram H. Singh, a professor of Ayurvedic medicine at Banaras Hindu University.¹² In 2015 Singh himself read the classics and reached the opposite verdict. Brahmi, he wrote, "cannot be identified with Bacopa monnieri." On his reading bacopa is aindri, the herb named beside it in Indra's list.⁵

The muddle reaches the market. When researchers tested eight "brahmi" samples from South India's raw herb trade, three were gotu kola.⁶

Cows, delirium and Kingston harbour

The plant was easier to find than its name. It creeps over wet ground across Asia, Africa, Australia and the Americas.⁶

In 1690 it appeared in Amsterdam as "Brami," in the tenth volume of the Hortus Malabaricus, the great book of Malabar's plants compiled by Hendrik van Rheede, once the Dutch governor there.¹³ His key informant on the plants of the coast was the Ezhava physician Itty Achudan.¹⁴

Brami grew in watery places, creeping along the ground. Cows' udders, the book said, swelled with milk from frequent use of it. Boiled in cow's milk with fresh butter, it was rubbed on the temples against delirium. Ground with pepper, sweet flag and myrobalans in rice water and swallowed, it made the voice ring clear.¹³ The editor in Amsterdam took it for a kind of sea milkwort. In 1893 the Pharmacographia Indica matched the plate to this herb.^{13, 11}

Sixty-six years later it turned up on the far side of the Atlantic. The doctor Patrick Browne found it "very common in every ouzey spot, about the harbour of Kingston" in Jamaica, spreading in beds with "a pretty beautiful appearance, when in flower" and a bitterish taste.¹⁵ He called it Moniera, a name given by Bernard de Jussieu, who had raised the plant in the garden at Paris.¹⁵ That same year, 1756, Linnaeus named it Lysimachia monnieri, and the monnieri has since travelled through six more genera.⁴

Roxburgh, who knew it in Bengal as a native of moist places, filed it under Gratiola and then complained that it had "no one claim, that I can observe, to a place in this genus."³ Its juice, mixed with petroleum, was rubbed on rheumatic pains.³ By 1893 it was an aphrodisiac in Pondicherry and a fever remedy in Ceylon.¹¹

Strychnine in a marsh herb

In 1931 two researchers named Bose, K. C. and N. K., tested this brahmi from several sources and found an alkaloid in every sample. It was given the name brahmine, and it was highly toxic. Frogs dosed with it died within ten minutes, rats and guinea pigs within a day.¹⁶

In medicinal doses, they found, it acted like strychnine. Bose gave the powdered leaves to patients with "asthenia, nervous breakdown and other run-down conditions," and preferred them to strychnine, then a common tonic.¹⁶

In 1959 the pharmacologist C. L. Malhotra and two colleagues isolated a saponin from the plant, hersaponin.^{12, 17} By 1967 he and D. K. Ganguly, at Lady Hardinge Medical College in New Delhi, noted that brahmi was "extensively used in folk medicines particularly in cases of insanity, hysteria and epilepsy." So they tested an active fraction of the plant as a tranquilliser, against chlorpromazine. Rats sat in a cage that traced their movements on a turning drum. Mice were set on a spinning wooden rod and timed until they fell. The fraction calmed the rats much as chlorpromazine did.¹⁷

Rats in the dark tunnel

Lucknow made the plant a project of decades. At the Central Drug Research Institute, chemists isolated its main saponins, bacosides A and B, in papers from 1963 to 1967.¹²

Then came the rats. In an early experiment by the institute's H. K. Singh, rats got a shock whenever they went into the dark tunnels they naturally prefer. Treated with bacosides, they learned to keep to the lit ones. The untreated rats went back to the dark again and again, shock after shock.^{18, 19}

By 1994 the institute's director, V. P. Kamboj, was waiting for the Drug Controller of India to let him test the memory drug on human volunteers. A Madras firm had already signed a deal to make "memory toffees."²⁰ Two years later a bacoside capsule was on sale, and Singh said none of the 35 people who had taken bacosides reported side effects.¹⁸

"Drug manufacturers seem to have hit a goldmine," Down To Earth wrote in 1997. A Chennai maker said users would feel "fresh and tireless through the day." The magazine judged such claims too tall for a drug that "has been tested only on rats."²¹

In 2001 a team in Australia published a twelve-week trial of a bacopa extract against a dummy pill in healthy volunteers.²² What that trial and the many after it found is in the Research tab.

The Vedic scholars who weren't there

Supplement pages reach past Charaka and Sushruta to the Vedas, the sacred hymns older than either book.¹ In their telling, Vedic scholars took brahmi to memorise these long texts.²³

Follow it back and the trail is short. In 2013 a review in the journal Rejuvenation Research said the herb "was allegedly used by ancient Vedic scholars to memorize lengthy sacred hymns and scriptures." It cited no source. The same paragraph dated the plant's first description to around the sixth century AD, in texts it spelled "Athar-Ved" and "Susrutu Samhita."²⁴

At two minutes to midnight on 6 January 2014, someone editing Wikipedia without an account pasted both sentences into its article on the plant, odd spellings and all. They stayed for five years, until an editor cut them in 2019 as unsourced.²⁵ The scholars outlived the edit.²³

The magazine that covered Lucknow had already reached for the Vedas. In 1994 Down To Earth said brahmi "has even been mentioned in the Rig Veda as a memory stimulator," and in 1996 it named the Atharva Veda.^{20, 18}

Search the hymns for brahmi and the herb never turns up. The Rig Veda has the word brahmi once, as an adjective in a hymn to Soma, which Monier-Williams glossed "holy, devout" with a question mark. The standard text of the Atharvaveda has no brahmi, aindri or mandukaparni at all.²⁶

The nearest real thing is Sushruta's recipe, with its single hearing and its goddess of learning. It is a promise in a medical book, made to anyone who would take the course.⁷ The Vedic reciters had their own method. Pupils learned the texts in their teens or younger, by special techniques meant to make sure that no syllable was lost.²⁷

Still in the wet ground

Every age has found its own brahmi. A god's gift to weary sages, a rub for delirium on the Malabar coast, a rival to strychnine, a tranquilliser on trial in Delhi, a capsule from Lucknow.

It still creeps wherever the ground stays wet, from the Americas to Australia. Ask for brahmi in a South Indian herb market today, as Dutt asked in Calcutta, and the herb you are handed may not be his. In one test of eight samples, three were the frog-foot plant.⁶