Seasonal Notes

Three notes on order and season.

These describe classical schemes. They are not advice, and nothing in them is addressed to you or your circumstances.

Note 01 Ritucharya

On the idea of a seasonal regimen

The classical calendar divides the year into six ritus of roughly two months each — shishira, vasanta, grishma, varsha, sharad and hemanta. Ritucharya is the name for the regimen described against each of them: what is eaten, when one rises, how one bathes, what is worn.

The scheme is a description of a particular year in a particular place. It was written where six seasons could be told apart, and it reads as an account of that year rather than a rule for every year.

Note 02 The Gulf calendar

The Gulf year does not have six seasons

Between roughly May and September the Gulf has one season, and it is largely an indoor one. The six-fold classical division maps onto it poorly, and the two months assigned to each ritu do not correspond to anything observable here.

That is worth stating rather than papering over. Where a regimen is described on this site, it is described as the text gives it, with the mismatch noted. We are not going to invent a seventh ritu for Dubai.

Note 03 Dinacharya

Dinacharya, read as a list

The texts give the daily order as a sequence: rising before sunrise, cleaning the teeth and tongue, rinsing the eyes and mouth, oil applied to the scalp and ears, movement stopping short of exertion, bathing, and then the first meal of the day.

Set out plainly like that, it is a description of an ordering — what comes before what. The interesting part is the insistence on sequence: the texts are more specific about the order of the list than about most of the items in it.

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