Laksha in Ayurveda: A Complete Guide to the Lac Resin

What is Laksha?

Laksha is a hard, brittle resin produced by a scale insect that spends almost its whole life fixed to the twigs of certain trees. The insect settles on a young shoot, feeds on the sap and secretes resin around its own body. Thousands of individuals settle within a few centimetres of one another, and those separate secretions run together into a continuous crust that encases the twig. Scrape the crust off the wood and you have the raw material the Ayurvedic texts call Laksha.

Two things tend to surprise a reader meeting it for the first time. The first is that it is animal in origin rather than plant: the tree supplies the sap and the branch supplies the surface, but the material itself comes out of an insect. The second is that it is the same substance the modern world calls shellac. Nothing is added along the way. Shellac is Laksha carried several stages further in refining, a distinction set out in full in the difference between Laksha and shellac.

What does the word Laksha mean in Sanskrit?

The Sanskrit is lākṣā, written लाक्षा. The name is generally connected with laksha, the numeral for a hundred thousand, and read as an allusion to the number of insects behind even a small quantity of the crust. The same numeral survives in the modern word lakh.

Sanskrit uses Jatu for lac as well, familiar to readers of the Mahabharata from jatugriha, the house built of lac. The red colourant obtained from the same raw material appears under the name alaktaka, the lac dye used to colour the feet and the palms, which is why the substance turns up in classical poetry about as often as in the medical compendia. Descriptive names marking it as insect born are also recorded.

Which insect produces Laksha?

The producer is a scale insect known in current entomology as Kerria lacca. Most of the older literature, and much of what a reader will meet when searching, names it Laccifer lacca, and older still is Tachardia lacca. All three names refer to the same animal. It sits in the family Kerriidae among the scale insects, a group whose members are sedentary, sap feeding, and in the adult female almost shapeless.

The cycle runs roughly like this. Newly hatched nymphs, called crawlers, emerge in very large numbers and move over the branches until they reach tender shoots. There they insert their mouthparts into the bark and begin to feed. Once settled, the female never moves again. She enlarges, loses any obvious legs and antennae, and secretes resin from glands across the body surface until she is enclosed in a cell of it. Males are far fewer and short lived. Because the insects settle shoulder to shoulder, the individual cells fuse into one crust. Host species recorded in the literature include Butea monosperma, Ziziphus mauritiana and Schleichera oleosa, among others.

How is Laksha collected and processed?

Sticklac

Encrusted twigs are cut and the crust is scraped away from the wood. The material at this stage is called sticklac, and it is nothing like pure resin. Along with the resin it carries fragments of bark and wood, the bodies of the insects themselves, a quantity of soft wax and a strong red colourant.

Seedlac

Sticklac is crushed and sieved to take out the woody matter, then washed repeatedly in water. The washing carries off the colourant, which is water soluble and was for centuries collected in its own right as a dye. What remains is dried into small irregular grains. This is seedlac, and it is the form in which the material is most often handled before any further refining.

Beyond seedlac

Seedlac can be melted and filtered, traditionally through cloth over heat, and the molten resin then either stretched into a thin sheet that is broken up into flakes or dropped into small discs. Filtration takes out the remaining insect and plant matter along with most of the wax. A good deal of the original weight leaves the material across these stages. The further the refining goes, the further the result sits from what the classical authors had in front of them.

Is Laksha a plant resin or an animal product?

It is animal derived, and that deserves saying plainly, because the material looks, breaks and smells like a tree resin and is routinely shelved beside them. The resin is secreted by the insect, the raw crust contains the insects themselves, and no amount of refining alters the origin. It is therefore not a vegan material, and whether it falls inside a given definition of vegetarian is a question each reader will answer by the definition they hold.

The classical authors met the same oddity. Ayurvedic pharmacology sorts substances into those of plant origin, those of animal origin and those drawn from the earth and its minerals. Laksha belongs in the second group on any strict reading, yet it forms on a branch and behaves like a resin, and several of the lexicons list it alongside the fragrant tree exudates out of convenience rather than by origin.

The classical qualities of Laksha: Rasa, Guna, Virya and Vipaka

Classical pharmacology characterises a substance through a small set of attributes rather than through constituents. Rasa is taste as the tongue registers it. Guna are qualities, the physical characteristics such as heaviness, lightness or unctuousness. Virya is potency, usually given as heating or cooling. Vipaka is the taste the texts hold to remain once digestion is complete. Together these describe how a substance is expected to act on the three Dosha: Vata, Pitta and Kapha, the functional principles of movement, transformation and structure.

The listings usually given for Laksha are these.

• Rasa: Kashaya, astringent, with Tikta, bitter, commonly named beside it
• Guna: Laghu, light, and Snigdha, unctuous, in the familiar listings, though sources differ on the second
• Virya: Shita, cooling
• Vipaka: Katu, pungent
• Dosha: classically characterised as reducing Kapha and Pitta

These attributions are not uniform across every text and commentary, and a reader comparing two modern compilations will often find small differences, in the Guna column in particular. Where the attribution matters, the safest practice is to name the text being followed rather than to quote a bare list.

Where does Laksha sit in the classical materia medica?

Laksha is an old entry rather than a late addition. It is named in the major compendia and carried forward into the nighantus, the later lexicons that organise substances into chapters by kind. Bhavaprakasha Nighantu, the most widely consulted of them, places it in the chapter gathering the fragrant substances and resins, so a reader following the printed order finds it beside other exudates rather than beside the animal products.

The groupings it is assigned to, the synonyms each text prefers and the way the commentators handle the entry are the subject of Laksha in the classical Ayurvedic texts.

What forms does Laksha take?

A reader will meet the material in one of a few states, and the differences matter, because the name stays the same across all of them.

• the encrusted twig, cut and otherwise untouched
• sticklac, scraped from the wood
• seedlac, crushed, washed and dried into grains
• refined lac in flake or disc form
• the powder, prepared from a chosen grade and called Laksha Churnam, Churnam being the classical term for a finely powdered form

The powder has its own preparation and its own descriptions in the texts, which are covered in Laksha Churnam and the classical powdered form. Colour, grade and the marks that separate one quality from another, including what substitution and adulteration look like in practice, belong to Laksha identification and quality.

Frequently asked questions

Is Laksha the same thing as shellac?

They are the same raw material at different stages of refining. Laksha is the name the Ayurvedic texts use for the lac resin, generally as sticklac or seedlac. Shellac is what the same resin is called once it has been melted, filtered and formed into flakes or discs.

Is Laksha vegan?

No. The resin is secreted by an insect and the raw crust includes the insects themselves. Refining removes most of that matter but does not change the origin, so Laksha is an animal derived material.

What is Laksha called in English?

Lac, or lac resin. In its raw scraped state it is sticklac, after washing it is seedlac, and in refined form it is shellac.

What is the scientific name of the lac insect?

Kerria lacca is the currently accepted name. The same insect appears widely in earlier literature as Laccifer lacca and, earlier again, as Tachardia lacca.

What does the name Laksha mean?

It is read as a reference to laksha, the numeral for a hundred thousand, pointing to the number of insects whose secretions make up the crust. The word Jatu is also used for lac in Sanskrit, and the dye prepared from it is called alaktaka.

What is the difference between sticklac and seedlac?

Sticklac is the crust as it comes off the twig, still carrying wood, wax, the insects and the red colourant. Seedlac is the same material crushed, sieved, washed free of the water soluble colourant and dried into grains.