āma: what the term means and how it is translated
āma आम is an Ayurvedic technical term. It is rendered into English in 7 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 | āma |
|---|---|
| Devanagari | आम |
| Also written | āmāvasthā, āmadoṣa, āmarasa, apakva rasa, sāma (adjectival: 'with āma') |
| Category, as gathered | pathology / core concept |
| 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.
Ama, a state of incomplete digestion, transformation or metabolism
WHO International Standard Terminologies on Ayurveda (2022) · ITA-4.6.2 (āma, āmāvasthā) · terminology-standard
WHO keeps the Sanskrit word in the English term rather than translating it, an explicit judgement that āma is untranslatable. WHO's description, verbatim: 'A transient state of the body wherein the digestive, metabolic processes come to a standstill and do not further transform to end products, by-products or waste products. This standstill leads to various changes in the body such as blockade of channels, excess secretions, unusual accumulation of waste materials, slowing down of movements and catabolic processes. It presents with the following generic symptoms: loss of strength, heaviness, laziness, tastelessness or altered taste, and exhaustion even without physical or mental exertion. The ama phase is an initial stage of almost all disorders, e.g. fever or diarrhoea, which arises due to vitiation of endogenous factors: dosha, fundamental structural components and excretory products. Physiologically, the ama phase denotes early digestion of food in the stomach.' Note WHO calls it a STATE or PHASE, never a substance.
Reproduced unaltered and attributed from the WHO International Standard Terminologies on Ayurveda, which is what that licence permits. It is deliberately absent from the downloadable dataset, which is offered under CC BY 4.0 and invites the modification a NoDerivs licence forbids.
Dosha associated with ama
WHO International Standard Terminologies on Ayurveda (2022) · ITA-4.8.23 (sāmadoṣaḥ); ITA-4.8.24 nirāmadoṣaḥ 'Dosha not associated with ama'; ITA-4.6.3 pacyamānāvasthā 'State of active digestion, and transformation of ama'; ITA-4.6.5 nirāmāvasthā 'Transformative stage devoid of ama pathology' · terminology-standard
WHO builds a whole staging vocabulary around āma. The sāma/nirāma pair is the clinically operative one.
Reproduced unaltered and attributed from the WHO International Standard Terminologies on Ayurveda, which is what that licence permits. It is deliberately absent from the downloadable dataset, which is offered under CC BY 4.0 and invites the modification a NoDerivs licence forbids.
vitiated आम (āmadoṣaḥ)
NAMASTE / National AYUSH Morbidity Codes (NAMC), Ministry of Ayush · NAMC code DA (AmadoShaH / आमदोषः), with DA-1 asAdhya-AmadoShaH 'irremediable vitiated-आम' · terminology-standard
NAMASTE leaves आम untranslated in its own English column, the same judgement WHO makes. It also codes a large family of sāma/nirāma conditions (AB-2 sāmapitta, AC-1 sāmakapha, CB-3 sāmamala, AAB-51 nirāmavāta, EB-7.5 āmajagrahaṇīdoṣa, EC-3.12 āmajajvara, EC-6 āmavāta).
Reproduced unaltered and attributed from the Government of India NAMASTE terminology, which is what that licence permits. It is deliberately absent from the downloadable dataset, which is offered under CC BY 4.0 and invites the modification a NoDerivs licence forbids.
undigested food (called Ama)
Charaka Samhita, tr. Avinash Chandra Kaviratna (1896-1913) · Cikitsāsthāna Lesson XV (= Ca.Ci.15.56) · public-domain-translation
Kaviratna's substance reading. He also writes 'the ama Rasa (i. e., the undigested juice of the food taken)'. Both are narrower than WHO's state reading.
rheumatism due to आम (āmavātaḥ)
NAMASTE / NAMC · NAMC code EC-6 · terminology-standard
The best-known compound. NAMASTE subtypes it EC-6.1/6.2/6.3 by doṣa.
Reproduced unaltered and attributed from the Government of India NAMASTE terminology, which is what that licence permits. It is deliberately absent from the downloadable dataset, which is offered under CC BY 4.0 and invites the modification a NoDerivs licence forbids.
no ICD-11 TM2 index term for āma itself found
ICD-11 MMS v2026-01, TM2 · classification · our paraphrase of the source, not its words
I retrieved the TM2 block index and three sub-blocks and found no category for āma as such. Statement limited to what I retrieved; āma-compounded disorders may well be indexed under individual codes I did not open.
toxin / metabolic toxin / endotoxin
Popular and some secondary literature · secondary-literature · our paraphrase of the source, not its words
Ubiquitous in lay and integrative writing. Conspicuously avoided by both WHO and NAMASTE. See mistranslations.
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 SaṃhitāCikitsāsthāna 15:56-57 · corrected against the source
The duct called 'Grahani' is the seat of the digestive fire, and because it takes the food that is eaten, therefore is it called 'Grahani' (taker). It is placed above the (region of the) navel. ... It holds the food in its undigested state. After digestion, it lets out the digested food through its lower opening. When the digestive fire is weak, the 'Grahani' becomes vitiated, It then discharges only undigested food (called Ama)
Kaviratna's only explicit English equation of āma with undigested food, and the causal chain from weak agni through grahaṇī vitiation to āma. Verse number fixed against the Sanskrit (Ca.Ci.15.56 'अग्न्यधिष्ठानमन्नस्य ग्रहणाद्ग्रहणी मता').
Charaka Saṃhitā (Sanskrit)Cikitsāsthāna 15:44 · checked against the source
अपच्यमानं शुक्तत्वं यात्यन्नं विषरूपताम् ॥४४॥
The transformation: undigested food becomes sour and takes on the nature of poison. The word here is anna, not āma; the āma terminology is applied to this state by the tradition rather than by this verse.
Charaka SaṃhitāCikitsāsthāna 15:75 (Kaviratna prints 74) · checked against the source
When the 'ama Rasa' (i. e., the undigested juice of the food taken) spreads over the whole body, fasting and the administration of 'Pachana' (i. e., drugs which assist in digesting undigested food, without increasing the appetite) are prescribable.
āma is mobile and can spread systemically (śarīrānugate sāme rase), and its management is laṅghana plus pācana. Kaviratna transliterates 'ama Rasa' rather than translating. The Sanskrit at Ca.Ci.15.75 reads 'शरीरानुगते सामे रसे लङ्घनपाचनम्'.
Charaka Saṃhitā (Sanskrit)Cikitsāsthāna 15:75 · checked against the source
लीनं पक्वाशयस्थं वाऽऽप्यामं स्राव्यं सदीपनैः। शरीरानुगते सामे रसे लङ्घनपाचनम्॥७५॥
Two locations of āma (adherent in the pakvāśaya vs following the rasa through the body) with two different treatments. This is the textual basis for the sthānika/systemic distinction that modern writing usually flattens.
Aṣṭāṅga Hṛdaya (Sanskrit)Sūtrasthāna 8:12-15 · checked against the source
so 'laso 'ty-artha-duṣṭās tu doṣā duṣṭāma-baddha-khāḥ | yāntas tiryak tanuṃ sarvāṃ daṇḍa-vat stambhayanti cet || 12 || daṇḍakālasakaṃ nāma taṃ tyajed āśu-kāriṇam | viruddhādhyaśanā-jīrṇa-śīlino viṣa-lakṣaṇam || 13 || āma-doṣaṃ mahā-ghoraṃ varjayed viṣa-saṃjñakam || 14 (opening) || athāmam alasī-bhūtaṃ sādhyaṃ tvaritam ullikhet || 15 (opening) ||
Vāgbhaṭa's āmadoṣa chapter: āma blocking the channels, the daṇḍakālasaka emergency, and the declaration that the gravest āmadoṣa is 'viṣa-saṃjñaka', bearing the name of poison. Chapter fixed by the file's own internal variant markers (8.11bv, 8.16bv) bracketing the passage.
The concept record for this term
A term entry answers what the word means. It does not answer whether the thing the word names is settled, and often it is not. That is what the concept record is for: it sets out the questions on which the sources disagree about this term, with each position attributed, and states what is not established.
Not to be confused with
- āmadoṣa
- WHO separates āma (ITA-4.6.2, the state) from sāmadoṣa (ITA-4.8.23, a doṣa carrying āma). NAMASTE codes āmadoṣaḥ (DA) as the vitiated condition. āma is the state; āmadoṣa is the pathological entity that state produces.
- ajīrṇa
- Ajīrṇa is the failure of a meal to digest. āma is the residue/state that failure creates and which can then travel and lodge. WHO's own gloss makes āma an early phase of almost all disorders, which ajīrṇa is not.
- mala / kiṭṭa
- Normal waste products of properly completed digestion (Ca.Ci.15.15 kiṭṭa-prasāda). āma is the product of digestion that did NOT complete. NAMASTE codes sāmamala (CB-3) precisely because mala can additionally carry āma.
- āma (raw/unripe, ordinary Sanskrit)
- The everyday adjective 'raw, unripe', the same word. Kaviratna's scan has 'āmamāṃsa' (raw meat) in unrelated contexts. Automated term extraction will over-match badly.
- antimitochondrial antibody (AMA)
- A live retrieval hazard rather than a conceptual one: PubMed searches on 'AMA' return hepatology literature. I had to search on compounds (āmavāta, āmadoṣa) to get anything relevant.
- āma-viṣa
- See the separate record. āma becoming poison is a further stage, not a synonym.
Renderings that do not hold
- toxin / toxins. The most consequential error in this whole cluster. Both WHO ISTA and NAMASTE conspicuously decline to translate āma at all rather than use 'toxin'. 'Toxin' implies an identified exogenous or endogenous poisonous substance with a mechanism; āma as WHO defines it is a transient state of arrested transformation. The 'toxin' rendering also feeds directly into detox marketing.
- undigested food. Kaviratna's own rendering, and defensible for the gut-level sense at Ca.Ci.15.56, but it cannot account for āma following the rasa through the body (Ca.Ci.15.75) or for sāmapitta, sāmakapha and sāmamala, where the āma is not food.
- endotoxin / lipopolysaccharide. A specific biomedical identification with no supporting study. The one paper that goes near it (PMID 22556911) proposes free radicals, not endotoxin, and proposes rather than demonstrates.
- metabolic waste. Collides with mala/kiṭṭa, which are the normal waste products and are explicitly distinguished from āma in the same chapter.
Open questions
Recorded rather than resolved. Each one is something this entry cannot currently settle.
- Is there a classical definitional sentence for āma, or is it defined only ostensively?
- Is āma a substance, a state, or deliberately both? WHO and Kaviratna give different answers.
- What are the exact Aṣṭāṅga Hṛdaya Sū.13 verses for sāma/nirāma lakṣaṇa that NAMASTE cites?
- Has any study proposed a measurable biomarker for āma that survived replication? I found none.
How to cite this entry
Age Ayurveda Nighantu, āma
, https://nighantu.ageayurveda.com/lexicon/ama/, 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.