Combretaceae

Terminalia chebula

Haritaki · Chebulic myrobalan · Black myrobalan

Untested Caution

Part used: fruit
Native range: South and Southeast Asia
Morphology: A deciduous tree to thirty metres with oval leaves and small dull-yellow flowers, bearing ribbed oval fruit that dries hard, dark and intensely astringent.

What is in it

hydrolysable tannins chebulagic acid, chebulinic acid, corilagin

anthraquinones

Evidence

Very little controlled human evidence for the fruit alone. Triphala, the three-fruit combination in which it is the principal, has a slightly larger literature, still mostly small studies from one region.

Safety

Very high tannin content reduces absorption of iron and of many drugs, and causes gastrointestinal irritation at higher doses. Anthraquinone content gives a laxative effect. Not established in pregnancy.

Interactions: Reduces absorption of iron and of drugs taken at the same time; Additive with laxatives; May lower blood glucose

Regulatory: Permitted as a listed medicine ingredient in Australia.

How the traditions classify it

Chinese He zi — bitter, sour and astringent; used to bind and to stop chronic diarrhoea and cough.

Ayurvedic Contains five of the six tastes, lacking only salt, with astringent predominating; heating in potency; sweet after digestion. The chief of the three fruits of triphala, and called the king of medicines in the classical texts.

Three systems, rating the same plant. Where they disagree, none of them is correcting the others — they are separate frameworks that arrived at their categories independently.

Historical use

Central to Ayurveda and to Tibetan medicine, where it is depicted in the hand of the Medicine Buddha. Also long used industrially as a tanning and dyeing material.

Recorded as history and attributed where possible. Long use establishes that a plant was widely used, not that it worked, and not that it was safe.

Worth knowing

Haritaki is held in the right hand of the Medicine Buddha in Tibetan iconography, which makes it one of very few plants with a recognised place in religious art as a plant rather than a symbol.

Its industrial history is at least as significant as its medicinal one. Myrobalan fruit was a major tanning and dyeing material traded out of India for centuries, and the same tannins that made it valuable to leatherworkers are what make it astringent in the mouth — and what interfere with iron absorption and drug uptake.

That is a useful thing to hold onto: tannin-rich plants are astringent, are useful for tanning hide, and will reduce how much of anything else you absorb alongside them.

Nomenclature verified against GBIF backbone taxonomy.