Dhātu Nutrition May Revisit the Formation of the Solar System

First published 13 November 2011 · revised and expanded 7 September 2026.

Dhātus are the Āyurvedic tissue types: rasa (plasma), rakta (red blood), māṃsa (muscle), meda (fat), asthi (bone), majjā (marrow and nerve), śukra (reproductive tissue). Their nutrition flows in that order: the refined product of each becomes the food of the next. Vāgbhaṭa lists them in exactly this sequence in the opening chapter of the Aṣṭāṅgahṛdayam (Sūtrasthāna 1.13), and Caraka states the chain outright:

There is a corollary of planets that go along with each of these tissue types — the assignment used in Āyurvedic astrology as it is generally taught today, and the one I use:

	Dhātu	Tissue	Graha
1	rasa	plasma	Moon
2	rakta	red blood cells	Sun*
3	māṃsa	muscle	Mars
4	meda	fat	Jupiter
5	asthi	bone	Saturn
6	majjā	marrow, nerve	Mercury
7	śukra	reproductive tissue	Venus

Well, on a walk, I wondered if this linear sequence of dhātu nutrition, where the metabolic result of one leads to the next, is related to the sequence in which the respective planets formed in our solar system.

Some time with Wikipedia gave me the answer of the moment: definitely maybe.

This is exciting. That is to say, there is much to support and not anything definite to deny my claim that the sequence of dhātu nutrition may be the same as the sequence of planetary formation. That is a pretty high scientific standard to hold to, especially considering that the encyclopedic accounts are incomplete within themselves and somewhat conflicting when compared to each other.

What I found in 2011

In short:

a. The Moon looks like it may have been formed before the Sun, as rasa comes before rakta in dhātu nutrition. How is this possible? The Moon may have been part of the accretion disk that the Earth was part of before the Sun was turned on. Is this a certainty? No, but it is possible, still a maybe in contentious scientific circles. If I may, I’d like to also extrapolate that plasma may be plasma, i.e., the plasma of the blood may correspond to the truly vast plasma states of space, perhaps the original Prakṛti — states which have been shown to organise themselves into helical, cell-like structures (Tsytovich et al. 2007).

b. Jupiter and Saturn definitely appeared before Mercury and Venus, according to the research of the day (the 2005 “Nice model” papers in Nature, Gomes et al. among them).

c. The one anomaly is Mars, appropriate for the “crooked one,” vakra.

d. *Some old astrologers think Mars may be the assignation, the marker, for the red blood cells. Mars after all stabs you in war and makes you bleed. Who is in charge of the war, though? The king, the Sun. Plus, why give Mars two correspondences and the Sun none? Also consider that rakta carries prāṇa, much as the Sun distributes prāṇa to the solar system. Moreover, people who have rakta duṣṭi, problems with their red blood cells, such as sufferers of hepatitis C, will have an afflicted Sun in their astrological charts to describe their affected rakta and liver problems.

To think, with each breath you take, with each replenishment of every cell in your being, you may be recreating the formation of our solar system.

Fifteen years on: what the meteorites say

The encyclopedic accounts have firmed up considerably since 2011, mostly because of isotopic clocks read in meteorites, and the picture is now precise enough to score the hunch properly. Time zero is the condensation of the first solids, the calcium–aluminium-rich inclusions, 4,567.3 million years ago (Connelly et al. 2012). The proto-Sun was already shining on the disk when they formed; there is no version of the modern account in which any planet precedes the Sun.

Jupiter came first among the planets, and fast. Its core reached about twenty Earth masses within a million years of time zero and went on growing for three or four million more, while there was still nebular gas to swallow (Kruijer et al. 2017). Saturn, the other gas giant, must likewise have gathered its bulk while the gas lasted, within the first few million years; so, in all likelihood, did Uranus and Neptune, though their birth orbits were probably closer in than today’s.

Mars was the surprise. Six months before this article was first written, Dauphas and Pourmand showed from hafnium–tungsten chemistry that Mars reached half its present size in about two million years, the fastest-forming rocky body we can date (Dauphas & Pourmand 2011). It is, in their phrase, a stranded planetary embryo: a planet that stopped growing while its siblings kept feeding. A word on what such a clock can and cannot say: hafnium–tungsten dates how fast a body’s growth ran, not the moment it began. The models assume growth started with the first planetesimals, and in the inner disk those accreted within roughly half a million years of time zero, before Jupiter’s core was finished (Kruijer et al. 2017). So Mars and Jupiter began together, in the first few hundred thousand years; what the clocks separate is when each stopped. The same year, the “Grand Tack” model explained why — Jupiter’s early wander inward and back out again thinned the disk near Mars’s orbit and starved it (Walsh et al. 2011). So Mars is anomalous after all, only not in the way I thought. It is not late; it is stunted. And it was the guru who did it.

Earth, Venus and Mercury took much longer, assembling from embryos and collisions over roughly thirty to a hundred million years (Kleine et al. 2009). Only Earth has been dated directly; Venus and Mercury, unsampled, are placed in the same slow window by the models. And the Moon, the very first dhātu in the chain, is the youngest body in the table: it condensed from the debris of the giant impact on the proto-Earth about 4,510 million years ago, some sixty million years after time zero (Barboni et al. 2017).

The scoreboard

Line the two orders up and count the pairs. Seven grahas make twenty-one pairs. Thirteen of them run the same way in the dhātu chain and in the rocks; seven run the opposite way, and six of those seven involve the Moon; one pair, Mercury and Venus, cannot be called, because neither has been dated. Set the Moon aside and the remaining six bodies read Sun, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Mercury, Venus in the chain against Sun, Jupiter, Mars, Saturn, then Mercury and Venus in the record: one swap, between two bodies that began together and differ only in when they stopped growing, in fifteen pairs. That is a far better fit than I had any right to expect in 2011, and better than the 2011 encyclopedias could have shown me, because the two results that make it work — the ages of Jupiter and of Mars — were published in 2017 and in 2011.

Two cautions, both fair. The right-hand ladder is soft in the middle: Saturn, Venus and Mercury are placed by models, not clocks. And the classical verse would score differently. With Varāhamihira’s bone for the Sun and blood for the Moon the chain does not even close, because his list has no rasa and no māṃsa to begin with. The fit belongs to the seven-dhātu completion, not to the verse — which is, I think, an argument for the completion.

And the Moon?

The Moon is the genuine anomaly, and I would rather look at it than hide it. In 2011 I guessed it might be older than the Sun; it is not. It is the youngest thing in the table. But the extrapolation I made in the same breath now looks like the better half of the thought. Rasa is not a tissue in the way bone is a tissue; it is the nourishing fluid that everything else is refined from, and the Moon is Soma, the sap and the waters. If the first rung of the ladder is read not as the rock in our sky but as what rasa actually is — the undifferentiated feed-stock, the cloud out of which the rest condenses — then it belongs where Caraka put it: first. The pre-solar cloud was gas and dust, a thin plasma where starlight ionised it, and it was there before the Sun had gathered itself out of it. On that reading the sequence holds from end to end: the waters, then the Sun, then the giants and the stunted Mars, then the inner planets that took their time. I offer that as interpretation, not as evidence, and the figure draws it as a dashed line for that reason.

Next, in a series on the astronomical and astrological realities of the cosmic human: the blastomere in human embryology may be seen as the incoming gestating bubble from the Multiverse, and the three pancake layers of human development, the germ layers, perhaps can be considered as revisiting the formation of our flat Universe — flat, Planck now says, to within a couple of parts in a thousand. That series has since grown into two long essays on the womb: The Ten Descents and The Twenty-Seven Stations.

References

1. Caraka Saṃhitā, Cikitsāsthāna 15.16 — text and translation at Charak Samhita Online.
2. Vāgbhaṭa, Aṣṭāṅgahṛdayam, Sūtrasthāna 1.13 (the seven dhātus, in order) — Vāgbhaṭa’s Aṣṭāṅgahṛdayam: A Full English Translation, tr. Renay Oshop (2026).
3. Varāhamihira, Bṛhat Jātaka 2.11 — Sanskrit and translation at Wisdom Library.
4. Connelly, J. N. et al. (2012). The absolute chronology and thermal processing of solids in the solar protoplanetary disk. Science 338, 651–655. doi:10.1126/science.1226919
5. Kruijer, T. S., Burkhardt, C., Budde, G. & Kleine, T. (2017). Age of Jupiter inferred from the distinct genetics and formation times of meteorites. PNAS 114, 6712–6716. doi:10.1073/pnas.1704461114
6. Dauphas, N. & Pourmand, A. (2011). Hf–W–Th evidence for rapid growth of Mars and its status as a planetary embryo. Nature 473, 489–492. doi:10.1038/nature10077
7. Walsh, K. J. et al. (2011). A low mass for Mars from Jupiter’s early gas-driven migration. Nature 475, 206–209. doi:10.1038/nature10201
8. Kleine, T. et al. (2009). Hf–W chronology of the accretion and early evolution of asteroids and terrestrial planets. Geochimica et Cosmochimica Acta 73, 5150–5188. ADS
9. Barboni, M. et al. (2017). Early formation of the Moon 4.51 billion years ago. Science Advances 3, e1602365. doi:10.1126/sciadv.1602365
10. Gomes, R., Levison, H. F., Tsiganis, K. & Morbidelli, A. (2005). Origin of the cataclysmic Late Heavy Bombardment period of the terrestrial planets. Nature 435, 466–469. doi:10.1038/nature03676
11. Tsytovich, V. N. et al. (2007). From plasma crystals and helical structures towards inorganic living matter. New Journal of Physics 9, 263. doi:10.1088/1367-2630/9/8/263
12. Planck Collaboration (2020). Planck 2018 results. VI. Cosmological parameters. Astronomy & Astrophysics 641, A6 — Ω_K = 0.001 ± 0.002. doi:10.1051/0004-6361/201833910