Chandana

What is Chandana?

Chandana is sandalwood, the heartwood of a small tree called Santalum album. The tree itself is easy to pass by. It is the pale, dense wood at its centre that Ayurveda values, ground to a smooth paste or a fine powder. You know good sandalwood by its smell. A true piece holds its sweet, cool scent for years.

The Sanskrit names carry the meaning. Chandana is read as “the cool one”, and Malayaja, another old name, means “born of the Malaya hills”, the southern ranges where the finest wood was once found. From the oldest texts onward, sandalwood is the herb against which every other cooling herb is measured.

One thing is worth keeping straight from the start. The Chandana of this entry is white sandalwood, Santalum album. A separate red wood, Pterocarpus santalinus, is called red sandalwood, and the texts treat it as a different herb with its own uses.

What Ayurveda uses it for

Chandana is the foremost cooling herb of the tradition, a pittahara substance, meaning it settles the hot, sharp quality the texts call Pitta. Charaka places it among the ten leading Pitta-pacifying herbs, and that single fact sits behind almost every use it has.

Two settings come up again and again. The first is the skin. A sandalwood paste is the classical answer to skin that feels hot, that burns, that is irritated or breaking out. It cools and it soothes, and it is light and a little oily, so it sinks in rather than sitting heavy. The second is the head. The same coolness is turned on a mind that runs hot, a person who is irritable, restless or quick to anger, and the texts hold that sandalwood quiets that heat.

It is also reached for wherever the body carries a sense of burning, and it is a herb of the hot season, worn and applied to keep the heat of summer at bay.

Its qualities, in plain words

A short list of qualities explains why sandalwood is used the way it is.

It is bitter and astringent in taste, the flavours Ayurveda ties to cooling and clearing rather than to heating. Above all it is cooling, the one quality the texts return to over and over, which is why it suits hot skin, a hot head and the fiery quality of Pitta. And it is light and slightly oily, so it penetrates and soothes without weighing the body down. A cool, soothing, fragrant herb with a real liking for the skin: that is the picture, and it stays remarkably steady across the old herbals.

How it is taken

Most often Chandana is used on the outside of the body. The wood is rubbed with a little water on a stone until it gives up a smooth, cool paste, the lepa, which is laid on hot or irritated skin and left to dry. This is the oldest and most direct use, part remedy and part cosmetic.

Taken inwardly, the fine powder is stirred into cool liquids such as rose water, or set into named preparations. It is the leading note in Chandanasavam, a gently fermented cooling tonic, and it gives its name to Chandanadi Thailam, a cooling medicated oil. It appears too in the cooling medicated ghees.

Good to know

Because sandalwood is so strongly cooling, the tradition favours it in the heat of summer and for warm constitutions, and is more careful with it in cold weather or for someone already chilled and dry. True sandalwood keeps its fragrance for a long time, and a fading scent is the old sign that the wood has lost its strength.

This entry sets out the classical Ayurvedic understanding of the herb. It is not medical advice, and anyone with a health condition should speak to a qualified practitioner.

Frequently asked

Is white sandalwood the same as red sandalwood? No. White sandalwood, Santalum album, is the Chandana of this entry. Red sandalwood is a different wood, Pterocarpus santalinus, with its own classical uses. The texts treat them as two separate herbs.

Why is sandalwood always called cooling? Because that is the quality the classical writers stress above every other. It is the standard cooling herb of Ayurveda, named first among the Pitta-pacifying substances, and it is reached for wherever there is heat or burning.

Which part is used? The heartwood, the dense pale wood at the centre of the tree. It is ground to a paste or a powder, and a fragrant oil is also drawn from it.