Arura is the Tibetan name for a fruit growing on a wild tree belonging to the Terminalia plant family. This is an extensive botanical group of trees that is specially adapted to the different variations of subtropical Asian mountain climate. The particular Terminalia tree which generates the
Arura fruit used to populate above all the south-east hot, dry zones of the Asian mountain slopes preferably between 500 and 1000 meters.
The fruit is a drupe remotely resembling olives. It has a yellowish-green color when ripe. The taste of the fruit is strange and unique. It is said to have all six kind of taste. After our preserving by a natural method it most resembles the taste of European olives.
At the beginning of the spice trading with India, fruits of this family of trees were traded in Europe under the name
Myrobalan. That time they were called
"purging plums".
The old scriptures of the Indian naturopathy, the Ayurveda as well as the Tibetan system of natural medicine mention seven to eight different kind of
Arura, which differ in shape, color, size and structure of skin. In both traditions, this fruit is regarded as something very special. Its mythological origin is the heaven of gods. Indra, the king of gods, was trying to safe Amrita, the nectar of long life from being stolen by the demons. By this intervention the nectar unintentionally fell to earth, mutated and became the
Aruratree.
The old prehistoric culture of India ardently worshipped this fruit tree and praised it as a powerful rejuvenator and a stimulating and strengthening tonic.
Shakyamuni, the Buddha of our present era, revealed the principles of the highest medicine, which until today is known as the Eightfold Essence Teaching.
Gautama Buddha sat down for meditation and transformed into the shape of a healer with an energetically radiant blue color while giving instructions about all aspects of human health-care and medicine. In this specific form of radiance the "king of healing" holds a fruit-carrying twig of the
Arura-tree in his right hand.
This special form of the Buddha's mystical manifestation is called
Vaidurya in Sanskrit or in Tibetan
Sangye Menla. In the east of his Mandala (a visual cosmogram) in which this blue "Medicine Buddha" resides, the "fragrant mountain",
Ponadan can be found. This is a forest of different myrobalan trees, whose fragrance can be smelled from a distance and which expels all "404 diseases" (- known in the Tibetan naturopathy).
Already the old scriptures of
VAGBHATA, the first Buddhist physician who recorded the secret medical teachings of Buddhist Ayurveda, ensuring us that one who consumes
"two Myrobalans daily along with either molasses, ginger, honey, sesame or salt lives happily for hundred years."!