Why one Ayurvedic herb has several botanical names

Ask what Shankhpushpi is and you get three different plants, plus a fourth name that is the same plant renamed. That combination, real disagreement tangled up with nomenclature, is what makes these names hard to read on a label.

The Ayurvedic Pharmacopoeia of India names Convolvulus pluricaulis. The GBIF backbone treats that as a synonym of Convolvulus prostratus, so those two are one plant under two names, and the monograph page here shows both. Two genuinely different plants, Evolvulus alsinoides and Clitoria ternatea, are also sold under the name; Clitoria is a different genus in a different family altogether. The Pharmacopoeia itself records that both are used as Shankhpushpi in parts of India.

Why it happens

The classical texts describe drugs by what they do and what they look like: taste, potency, post-digestive effect, habitat, the shape of a leaf. They were written long before binomial nomenclature, which dates from 1753, and they were used across a subcontinent where the plant matching a description in Kerala was not the plant matching it in Punjab.

When botanical names were attached to classical drugs, from the late eighteenth century on, several plausible candidates often fitted one description. Regional practice had already settled the question locally, in different directions, and each answer was the established one in its own region.

What the Pharmacopoeia does about it

It names one source plant per drug as the official identity, and that is what gives its choice force: a manufacturer selling that drug in India is held to the species in the monograph. This site follows it, cites the monograph, and lists the other names on the same page.

The examples below are all checkable on their pages, but they are not all the same kind of disagreement, and the difference is the thing worth taking away:

• Shankhpushpi, Convolvulus pluricaulis, with Evolvulus alsinoides and Clitoria ternatea named by the Pharmacopoeia itself as also used under the name. Regional tradition, documented in the official source.
• Patha, Cissampelos pareira, with Cyclea peltata in Kerala practice and Stephania japonica reported as an eastern-India trade substitute. Neither is in the Pharmacopoeia, and this site records them without a citation to the literature that reports them: only the binomials themselves have been checked, against GBIF.
• Katuki, Picrorhiza kurroa. Neopicrorhiza scrophulariiflora, a related Himalayan species, is traded under the same name as a substitute. That is a substitution, not a second tradition, and its page labels it as one.
• Bhumyamalaki, Phyllanthus fraternus, also attributed to Phyllanthus amarus. The third name in circulation, Phyllanthus niruri, is worse than ambiguous: the Pharmacopoeia uses it only as a misapplied synonym for P. fraternus, while elsewhere it means a different species entirely.

Where this site refuses to answer

Some identities are contested in a way no source settles, and there the botanical field stays empty rather than being filled with a guess. A wrong binomial is worse than a blank one: it renders as a fact and pulls in research about a different plant.

309 herb pages here once carried no botanical name. Verification passes have since resolved 169 of them, and classified another 107 as substances that are not plants at all: 32 examined individually, 75 from the category they were filed under. 42 are still deliberately blank. Bhasmas, rasa preparations, salts and animal products now say what they are in place of a Latin name, because a blank on those pages reads as “we do not know” when the answer is “the question does not apply”.

Not every name on this site carries the same weight. 356 herb pages state a botanical name. 53 cite a Pharmacopoeia monograph, which you can check in a single lookup. 116 were resolved by this site’s own identification passes and checked against the GBIF backbone. The remainder are as stated by the Amidha Ayurveda Herb Database this corpus derives from, and are best treated as a starting point.

Why it matters when you are buying

The research literature is indexed by species. A study of Evolvulus alsinoides is not evidence about Convolvulus pluricaulis, whatever the shared Sanskrit name on the packaging suggests. So:

1. Prefer a product that names the species. One that names none has told you nothing checkable.
2. Check it against the Pharmacopoeia’s species, which the monograph on each page gives you where one exists.
3. If it differs, read which kind of difference it is. A regional tradition and a trade substitution are not the same thing, and the page for each herb distinguishes them.