SANDALWOOD : Santalam album

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Family : Santalaceae

Sanskrit name : Chandana

Hindi Name : Safed Chandan

 

In the 1920's a group of British engineers laying a railway track

near the holy city of varanasi unearthed an alabaster casket filled

with sandalwood paste. The alabaster casket was dated by archeologist

as having been made around AD 400, indicating that this scented

Indian wood which is used to make perfumes, incenses, face masks, and

soaps all over contemporary India was highly prized in early

classical India as well. Indian literature and mythology are replete

with references with sandalwood, especially as an erotic perfume and

paste.

 

This small tree, which seldom grows higher then twenty feet and which

is valued for the essential oil santalol, yield only by its heart

wood and roots, is depicted in Indian religious mythology surrounded

by snakes, their venom reduced by the tree's cooling fragrance.

Because the scent-yielding wood is in the center of the trunk or

underground, it is a favourite wood for Hindu religious rituals., in

which no offering, no matter how sweet its perfume, can be made to

the sacred file if it has been urinated on by an animals. Devotees

often rub their foreheads of religious idols with sandalwood paste,

and it is one of the woods place on a Hindu's funeral pyre.

 

All Indians value this scented wood, which has always provided so

many of their favourite unguents, and which is immune to the

deprecations of woodworms and white ants, but Ayervedic medicines

uses it for providing a paste that is not just cooling and antiseptic

but also anti inflammatory and styptic, capable of stopping local

bleeding in cuts and other wounds..

 

Taken in a drink, powdered sandalwood is used to relieve burning

sensations in urinary disorders or cases of ulcers. Applied as a

paste, it maintains skin health throughout the summer months and is

described by Ayurveda as a certain cure for heat rashes. Even in the

Traditional medicine especially the Tibetan, sandalwood is used to

treat fever.

 

 

OM ParaShaktiye Namaha