āmaviṣa: what the term means and how it is translated
āmaviṣa आमविष is an Ayurvedic technical term. It is rendered into English in 6 different ways, which is the reason this page exists: the renderings do not agree, and the difference between them changes what the term is taken to mean.
| Transliteration | āmaviṣa |
|---|---|
| Devanagari | आमविष |
| Also written | āmadoṣa viṣasaṃjñaka, annaviṣa (the Charaka Cikitsā 15 form), viṣarūpa āma |
| Category, as gathered | pathology / clinical condition |
| Grouped here under | Causation and the course of disease |
| Classical citations | 5 |
| Citations checked | 2026-10-08 |
How it is translated, and whether the translation holds
Each rendering is given with the source that uses it. The assessment is ours.
NO ENTRY
WHO International Standard Terminologies on Ayurveda (2022) · searched the full extracted text of the live IRIS PDF for 'āmaviṣ' and 'amavis': zero hits · terminology-standard · our paraphrase of the source, not its words
WHO ISTA does not contain āmaviṣa. It covers the neighbouring ground with āma (ITA-4.6.2) and sāmadoṣa (ITA-4.8.23) only.
NO CODE
NAMASTE / National AYUSH Morbidity Codes (NAMC), Ministry of Ayush · searched the NAMC term list for the 'AmaviS' stem: all eleven hits are unrelated (kardamavisarpa, snake-venom stages) · terminology-standard · our paraphrase of the source, not its words
NAMC codes āmadoṣaḥ (DA) and asādhya-āmadoṣaḥ (DA-1, 'irremediable vitiated-आम'), which is arguably the same clinical territory under a different name, but it has no āmaviṣa code.
no ICD-11 TM2 category found
ICD-11 MMS v2026-01, TM2 · classification · our paraphrase of the source, not its words
Statement limited to the TM2 blocks I retrieved.
a terrible poison
Charaka Samhita, tr. Avinash Chandra Kaviratna (1896-1913) · Cikitsāsthāna Lesson XV (Kaviratna's vv.44-45 = Ca.Ci.15.45-46) · public-domain-translation
Kaviratna's rendering of annaviṣa: 'The food in the stomach that is not digested is a terrible poison.' The nearest thing to a public-domain English rendering, but it translates annaviṣa, not āmaviṣa.
no rendering identifiable
Charaka Samhita, tr. Avinash Chandra Kaviratna — Sūtrasthāna 26 · Sūtrasthāna Lesson XXVI, Kaviratna's v.22 (= Ca.Sū.26.102-103) · public-domain-translation · our paraphrase of the source, not its words
This is where the word āmaviṣa actually occurs in the mūla, in the list of diseases caused by incompatible food. Kaviratna's English list at this point ('Impotence, Blindness, Erysipelas, abdominal dropsy, malignant Boils, Lunacy, Fistula-in-ano, Swoons, Vertigo, Flatulence, choaking of the throat..., chlorosis and anaemia, acidity of the stomach (such that no food is capable of being retained), Leprous blotches, Leprosy, diseases that affect the Grahani...') does not align item-for-item with the Trikamji Sanskrit, and his verse numbering diverges wildly (his 22 for the standard 102-103). I could NOT confidently identify which English item renders āmaviṣa, and I am not guessing.
poisonous state of ama / ama-turned-toxin
Secondary literature · secondary-literature · our paraphrase of the source, not its words
Circulates in textbook and clinical writing. I found no peer-reviewed source that defines it operationally.
The classical passages
Each citation gives its address so a reader can check it in a printed edition, our account of what the passage establishes, and the result of reading it against its source.
Charaka Saṃhitā (Sanskrit)Sūtrasthāna 26 (Ātreyabhadrakāpyīya):102 · checked against the source
षाण्ढ्यान्ध्यवीसर्पदकोदराणां विस्फोटकोन्मादभगन्दराणाम्। मूर्च्छामदाध्मानगलग्रहाणां पाण्ड्वामयस्यामविषस्य चैव ॥१०२॥
The compound āmaviṣa occurs verbatim in the Charaka mūla, as a named disease in the list of conditions caused by viruddha āhāra (incompatible food). Independently corroborated from the GRETIL Charaka text ('pāṇḍvāmayasyāmaviṣasya caiva // car_1,26.102'), retrieved separately.
Charaka Saṃhitā with Cakrapāṇi's Āyurvedadīpikā (Sanskrit)Sūtrasthāna 26:84 (prose) · corrected against the source
sa hi mahābhiṣyanditvāt sthūlalakṣaṇatarān etān vyādhīn upajanayatyāmaviṣam udīrayati ca
A second mūla occurrence: the cilicima fish taken with milk 'provokes āmaviṣa'. Confirms āmaviṣa is used in Charaka as something that can be provoked by a specific incompatible combination, not merely as a general state.
Charaka Saṃhitā (Sanskrit)Cikitsāsthāna 15:46 · checked against the source
जृम्भाऽङ्गमर्दस्तृष्णा च ज्वरश्छर्दिः प्रवाहणम्। अरोचकोऽविपाकश्च, घोरमन्नविषं च तत्॥४६॥
A precision point that matters: the compound in the grahaṇī chapter is ANNAVIṢA ('food-poison'), not āmaviṣa. Much secondary writing quotes this verse as the locus for āmaviṣa. It is not; the āmaviṣa attestations are in Sūtrasthāna 26.
Charaka SaṃhitāCikitsāsthāna 15:45-46 (Kaviratna prints 44-45) · checked against the source
The following are the symptoms of indigestion (of the food taken): flatulence of the stomach, langour of the body, headache, swoons, vertigo, pains in the back and the waist, yawns, lassitude of the limbs, thirst, fever, vomiting, dysentery (white flux), disgust for food, and absence of transformation into healthy stools. The food in the stomach that is not digested is a terrible poison.
Public-domain English for the annaviṣa verse and its symptom list. Kaviratna continues: undigested food combining with excited bile, phlegm or wind produces the corresponding disease families, and 'When it goes into the urine, that poison causes diseases of the urine...', i.e. the poison is mobile and organ-tropic.
Aṣṭāṅga Hṛdaya (Sanskrit)Sūtrasthāna 8:14 · checked against the source
āma-doṣaṃ mahā-ghoraṃ varjayed viṣa-saṃjñakam | viṣa-rūpāśu-kāri-tvād viruddhopakrama-tvataḥ || 14 ||
The clearest classical statement of the concept, though not using the compound āmaviṣa: the most terrible āmadoṣa is 'viṣa-saṃjñaka', called by the name of poison, because it acts rapidly like poison and because its treatment is self-contradictory (what relieves one aspect aggravates another). Vāgbhaṭa says such a case is to be refused. Chapter fixed by the file's own internal variant markers (8.11bv, 8.16bv).
Where this term does work in the theory
One concept record names this term as one of its components, and glosses it there as follows.
- Ama and its formation as Ama-visha
- The acute toxic form, named because its presentation mimics poisoning. In Charaka this arises from incompatible food, eating on top of an undigested meal, or overloading, and is stated to be incurable because the indicated treatments are mutually contradictory.
Not to be confused with
- āma
- āma is the state of arrested digestion; āmaviṣa is the further stage in which that state acts with the rapidity and lethality of poison. Vāgbhaṭa marks the difference prognostically, āmaviṣa/viṣasaṃjñaka āmadoṣa is to be refused as a case.
- annaviṣa
- The compound actually used at Ca.Ci.15.46. Widely misquoted as āmaviṣa. Whether Charaka intended two terms or one is an open philological question; a lexicon should keep them as separate headwords until it is settled.
- viṣa (poison proper)
- Classical toxicology treats exogenous poisons as a separate discipline with its own nidāna and cikitsā (NAMASTE codes P, PA, PE series). āmaviṣa is endogenous and is called poison by analogy of behaviour, not by class membership.
- gara viṣa / dūṣīviṣa
- Artificial compounded poison and latent residual poison respectively, both exogenous, both distinct from āmaviṣa, and all three are routinely lumped together in popular 'ama = toxin' writing.
- asādhya-āmadoṣa
- NAMASTE's DA-1 'irremediable vitiated-आम' occupies the same prognostic slot Vāgbhaṭa assigns to viṣasaṃjñaka āmadoṣa. It may be the modern code equivalent, but no source I found says so.
Renderings that do not hold
- ama toxin. Compounds the 'ama = toxin' error with redundancy: if āma is already a toxin, āmaviṣa becomes 'toxin-poison'. The whole point of the compound is that āma is NOT ordinarily a poison and becomes one only under specific conditions.
- food poisoning. Tempting because of the viruddha-āhāra aetiology at Ca.Sū.26 and the 'annaviṣa' wording, but food poisoning is an acute exogenous microbial or chemical event; Ca.Sū.26.102 lists āmaviṣa alongside chronic conditions such as impotence, blindness, fistula-in-ano and leprosy.
- autointoxication. Imports a discredited late-19th-century Western theory. Convenient rhetorically, historically loaded, and not what any source I retrieved says.
- endotoxaemia. A specific biomedical identification with no supporting study of any kind. I found zero peer-reviewed literature on this term.
Open questions
Recorded rather than resolved. Each one is something this entry cannot currently settle.
- Do printed critical editions read āmaviṣa or annaviṣa at Ca.Ci.15.46?
- Which item in Kaviratna's Sūtrasthāna 26 English list renders āmaviṣa? Requires a page-level collation against his Sanskrit base text (Gaṅgādhara's recension).
- Does Cakrapāṇi gloss āmaviṣa at Ca.Sū.26.102, and how?
- Is NAMASTE's asādhya-āmadoṣa (DA-1) intended as the code equivalent of Vāgbhaṭa's viṣasaṃjñaka āmadoṣa?
How to cite this entry
Age Ayurveda Nighantu, āmaviṣa
, https://nighantu.ageayurveda.com/lexicon/ama-visha/, CC BY 4.0.
The whole lexicon is downloadable from the index.
Machine-readable source: Markdown.
Data exported 2026-10-08.
Educational reference only. A term entry explains what a word means and how it has been translated. Nothing here is advice, and nothing here describes how any condition should be treated.