pitta: what the term means and how it is translated
pitta पित्त 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 | pitta |
|---|---|
| Devanagari | पित्त |
| Also written | pittam, pitha, agni (contextually), tejas (contextually) |
| Category, as gathered | dosha |
| Grouped here under | Dosha and its subtypes |
| 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.
Pitta, dosha regulating body temperature and metabolic activities
WHO International Standard Terminologies on Ayurveda (2022) · ITA-2.1.2.1 · standard
Headword untranslated plus functional apposition. WHO's description names fire and water as the predominant elements, which is why 'fire' alone is wrong.
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.
Vitiation of pitta pattern (TM2)
ICD-11 MMS v2026-01, Traditional Medicine Module 2 · SR15 · classification
With SR16-SR19 for accumulation, aggravation, spreading and depletion.
Reproduced unaltered and attributed from WHO ICD-11, 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.
bile
Charaka Samhita, tr. Kaviratna (1896-1913) · throughout · translation
Kaviratna's uniform rendering; public domain and quotable, and wrong in the same way as 'wind' for vāta.
Pitta (internal fire)
Sushruta Samhita, tr. Bhishagratna (1907) · Sutrasthana XXI · translation
Bhishagratna follows the text, which itself identifies pitta with fire; he does not impose this.
pitta (metabolic)
Prasher B et al., J Genet 2016 · PMID 27019453 · paper
Ayurgenomics gloss.
Pitta, Turnover (negative entropy production)
Hankey A, Anc Sci Life 2010 · PMID 22557353 · paper
Systems-theoretic gloss.
Diminution of pitta
WHO International Standard Terminologies on Ayurveda (2022) · ITA-5.2.2.6 (pittakṣayaḥ) · standard
Classified under 'Morbidity and diagnostic terms (disorders)', i.e. WHO treats depletion of a doṣa as a disorder in its own right.
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.
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.
Sushruta SamhitaSutrasthana 15 · checked against the source
Pigmentations or colouring (Ragakrit), the digestion of food and metabolism of tissues (Paktikrit), the vitalisation and nutrition of the protaplasmic cells (Ojakrit), the origination and preservation of eye-sight (Teja-Krit), the germination of heat and maintenance of the temperature of the body (Ushma-Krit), and the origination of the faculty of intellection (Medha-Krit) should be regarded as the functions of the five kinds of Pitta, which contribute to the preservation of the body through its thermogenetic potency (Agni-Karma).
Pitta's functions include pigmentation, vision and intellection as well as digestion and heat. No reading of pitta as bile can carry medhā-kṛt.
Sushruta SamhitaSutrasthana 21 · checked against the source
Now it may be asked whether the Pitta is identical with the elemental fire, or is it something other than that? The question may be answered by stating that the Pitta is the same as fire. Since such symptoms, as a burning sensation, digestion (boiling, and all other characteristics of fire can never exhibit themselves in the human body without the intervention of Pitta. Pitta therefore is called internal fire. ... There is no other fire (heat making factor) in the organism than Pitta.
Sushruta explicitly identifies pitta with agni and denies any other heat-producing factor in the body. This is the textual basis for the pitta/agni conflation and for the later scholastic effort to separate them.
Sushruta SamhitaSutrasthana 21 · checked against the source
The Pitta is a keen, sharp and warm liquid, of a blue colour (in its normal state), or yellowish (in its deranged condition). It emits a kind of fleshy smell and is possessed of a pungent taste which is transformed into an acid one when deranged or vitiated.
Gives pitta physical properties (liquid, coloured, odorous, tasting), the strongest classical support for a substance reading, and the reason 'bile' is a tempting though inadequate rendering.
Charaka SamhitaSutrasthana 1:60 (Kaviratna prints this as aphorism 69, evidently an OCR or typesetting error for 59)
Quotation withheld: nobody has yet read this quotation against its printed source, and an unchecked quotation is not published here. The passage is at this address.
The guṇas of pitta in lawfully quotable English. Note the printed number is unreliable in this scan; the verse number here is inferred from sequence and should be re-checked against a clean copy.
Charaka SamhitaSutrasthana 17:116 · checked against the source
पित्तादेवोष्मणः पक्तिर्नराणामुपजायते| तच्च पित्तं प्रकुपितं विकारान् कुरुते बहून्||११६|| / pittādēvōṣmaṇaḥ paktirnarāṇāmupajāyatē| tacca pittaṁ prakupitaṁ vikārān kurutē bahūn||116||
The prākṛta/vaikṛta duality applied to pitta: the same pitta that digests, when provoked, produces many disorders.
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.
- Tridosha: vata, pitta and kapha as the regulatory principles of the body as Pitta
- Principle of transformation: digestion and tissue metabolism, pigmentation, body heat, vision, and (per Sushruta) production of ojas and of intellect. Gunas at Ca. Su. 1.60, read from the Sanskrit: sasneha, ushna, tikshna, drava, amla, sara, katu (slightly unctuous, hot, sharp, liquid, sour, flowing, pungent). The gathered record's 'light' and the earlier 'cold' and 'bitter' were artefacts of Kaviratna's English and are withdrawn. Five subtypes named as agnis by Sushruta at Su. Su. 21/10: pachaka, ranjaka, sadhaka, alochaka, bhrajaka
Not to be confused with
- agni / jāṭharāgni
- Sushruta Sutrasthana 21 identifies pitta with fire and denies any other heat source, yet later tradition and WHO ISTA treat agni as a separate entry (WHO ITA-2.6.x, samāgniḥ ITA-2.6.8). Whether pitta and agni are one thing is a live scholastic question, not a settled equivalence.
- rakta
- Sushruta says the factors that derange pitta vitiate blood as well and gives rakta its own constitutive standing. Pittaja and raktaja disorders are separately enumerated.
- pācaka, rañjaka, sādhaka, ālocaka, bhrājaka pitta
- The five subtypes are separately coded (WHO ITA-2.1.2.2 to 2.1.2.6) and are not interchangeable with pitta as a whole.
- pitta prakṛti
- A constitutional category (WHO ITA-2.8.4, 'Body constitution with a predominance of pitta'), not a statement about current pitta level.
- bile / bilirubin
- A physical secretion with a measurable concentration. Pitta has no assay; equating them turns a functional category into a lab value and invites false clinical inference.
Renderings that do not hold
- bile. Kaviratna's rendering and the standard 19th-century one. Cannot carry medhā-kṛt (intellection), ālocaka (vision) or bhrājaka (complexion), all of which Sushruta Sutrasthana 15 and 21 assign to pitta.
- fire. Defensible from Sushruta Sutrasthana 21 but incomplete: WHO ISTA names fire and water as the predominant elements, and pitta is repeatedly described as a liquid.
- yellow bile. Imports the specific Galenic humour, adding a Greek taxonomy on top of an already inadequate substance reading.
- acid / stomach acid. Modern clinical shorthand in Indian practice. Takes the amla-vidagdha state of vitiated pitta as the definition of pitta.
- metabolism. Common modern gloss (including in the Ayurgenomics literature). Better than 'bile', but it silently drops the thermal, visual and cognitive functions.
- 'cold' among pitta's qualities. Not a rendering of the term but of its guna list, and the clearest case in this corpus of a translator's word choice being mistaken for a doctrine. Kaviratna gives Ca. Su. 1.60 as 'Bile, which may be cold, hot, keen, soft, sour, liquid, and bitter'. The mula reads sasneham usnam tiksnam ca dravam amlam saram katu: unctuous, hot, keen, liquid, sour, mobile, pungent. 'Cold' stands where the text has sasneham (unctuous), 'soft' where it has saram (mobile) and 'bitter' where it has katu (pungent). Pitta is hot in every reading of the Sanskrit and no commentator supports a cold pitta, so a reader meeting 'cold' first in a public-domain English text meets the opposite of the doctrine. The citation is kept at classical[3] marked superseded, with the mula beside it, because the error is itself evidence of how the text was read in 1896.
Open questions
Recorded rather than resolved. Each one is something this entry cannot currently settle.
- No peer-reviewed literature was found that treats pitta specifically, as opposed to tridosha or prakriti collectively. Whether this is a real gap or an artefact of PubMed indexing is unresolved.
- The relation of pitta to agni is the single largest unresolved question in this record and cannot be settled from the two public-domain translations alone; Ashtanga Hridaya Sutrasthana 12-13 and Sharngadhara are the places to look, and neither has a quotable English translation.
How to cite this entry
Age Ayurveda Nighantu, pitta
, https://nighantu.ageayurveda.com/lexicon/pitta/, 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.