ṣaṭkriyākāla: what the term means and how it is translated
ṣaṭkriyākāla षट्क्रियाकाल is an Ayurvedic technical term. It is rendered into English in 4 different ways across 5 sources, 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 | ṣaṭkriyākāla |
|---|---|
| Devanagari | षट्क्रियाकाल |
| Also written | kriyākāla, क्रियाकाल, shat kriya kala, shad kriyakala, shatkriyakala |
| Category, as gathered | kriyakala |
| Grouped here under | Causation and the course of disease |
| Classical citations | 4 |
| 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.
Stages of disease manifestation and management
WHO International Standard Terminologies on Ayurveda · ITA-4.6.6 (kriyākālaḥ/ṣaṭkriyākālaḥ), ch. 4, printed p. 114 · who-ista
WHO's own description, verbatim: 'A comprehensive term for the six prominent stages in disease management indicating the stepwise progression of its pathogenesis.' Re-read from the PDF. Recorded as a fact about WHO, not adopted as this entry's definition. WHO puts the simplex kriyākāla and the compound ṣaṭkriyākāla under ONE term ID, i.e. it does not distinguish them.
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.
occasion for medical treatment / occasion which calls for medical aid ('the first ... the sixth occasion')
Sushruta Samhita, tr. Kaviraj Kunja Lal Bhishagratna (1907) · Sutrasthana ch. XXI (Vrana-prashna-adhyaya) · public-domain-translation
Bhishagratna coins no collective noun; he renders each kriyākāla as an 'occasion for medical treatment' or 'occasion which calls for medical aid'. All six occasion-phrases were located on the retrieved page. This is the only public-domain English rendering found, and it preserves the kriyā (action/treatment) element that most modern renderings drop.
Shatkriyakala (six stages of progress of a disease)
Chauhan A et al., J Integr Med 2017 (PMID 28285613) · abstract · peer-reviewed-paper
Abstract re-read from NCBI eutils; wording is verbatim including the lower-case 'six'. An earlier version of this record printed it as 'Six stages of progress of a disease', which is not what the abstract says. The same abstract glosses the simplex as 'the recognition of the stage of a disease's progress', with Kriya = 'the choice to treatment (medicine, food and daily-routine)' and Kala = 'the stage of progress of a disease', all three phrases string-matched.
Shad Kriyakala (six stages of Dosha imbalance)
Menon M, Shukla A, J Ayurveda Integr Med 2018 (PMID 29153383) · abstract · peer-reviewed-paper
String-matched in the retrieved abstract. Note 'Dosha imbalance', not 'disease', a different scope claim from the WHO and Chauhan renderings, and the disagreement is real.
easyayurveda.com (Dr Raghuram Y.S. / Dr J.V. Hebbar), 'Shat Kriya Kala – Stage-Wise Disease Management' · https://www.easyayurveda.com/2016/06/13/shat-kriya-kala-stage-wise-disease-management/ · practitioner-reference
The source's rendering runs to a full definition and is not reproduced here, because this project has not cleared that source for quotation.
String-matched on the retrieved page. Widely used non-academic practitioner reference; representative of Indian BAMS teaching usage. The same page splits the six into 'Dosha Kriyakala' (sanchaya, prakopa, prasara) and 'Vyadhi Kriyakala' (sthana samshraya, vyakta, bheda), a subdivision not found in the mula text.
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 21 (Vrana-prashna-adhyaya):36 · checked against the source
भवन्ति चात्र- सञ्चयं च प्रकोपं च प्रसरं स्थानसंश्रयम् । व्यक्तिं भेदं च यो वेत्ति दोषाणां स भवेद्भिषक् ॥३६॥
The locus classicus listing all six members in order: sañcaya, prakopa, prasara, sthānasaṃśraya, vyakti, bheda. Note the verse does not use the word kriyākāla at all; it names the six and says one who knows them is a physician.
Sushruta SamhitaSutrasthana 21:36 · checked against the source
The physician, who fully knows about the accumulation ( Sancaya ) , disturbance or aggravation ( Prakopa ), expansion (Prasara), and differentiating traits of the deranged humours ( Bheda ), and is well conversant with the specific localities in which they are respectively confined in the course of their expansion (Sthana-samshrayam), and with the symptoms which they respectively exhibit in connection with the incidental disease ( Vyakti ), is alone worthy of that epithet.
Bhishagratna's English for the six-member list. Verse number 36 is assigned by matching content to the verse-numbered Sanskrit at siva.sh; the wisdomlib page itself carries no verse numbers.
Sushruta SamhitaSutrasthana 21:18, 27, 32, 33, 34, 35 · checked against the source
तत्र प्रथमः क्रियाकालः ॥१८॥ ... तत्र द्वितीयः क्रियाकालः ॥२७॥ ... तत्र तृतीयः क्रियाकालः ॥३२॥ ... तत्र पूर्वरूपगतेषु चतुर्थः क्रियाकालः ॥३३॥ ... तत्र पञ्चमः क्रियाकालः ॥३४॥ ... षष्ठः क्रियाकालः ॥३५॥
The text numbers the six intervention points serially (first... sixth kriyākāla) across verses 18-35. Each fragment was retrieved from its own siva.sh verse page (/21/18, /21/27, /21/32, /21/33, /21/34, /21/35) and string-matched against that page individually; they are concatenated here with ellipses. Crucially, in the verses retrieved (21.16-21.38) the compound ṣaṭkriyākāla does NOT occur, the mula text uses only the simplex kriyākāla with ordinals.
Ashtanga HridayaSutrasthana 12 (doṣabhedīya-adhyāya) · address only, nothing quoted to check
Vagbhata treats dosha caya / kopa / praśama, a three-fold, largely seasonal scheme, in this chapter, not the six-fold kriyākāla. CHAPTER IDENTIFICATION ONLY, and weakly held: the wisdomlib Sanskrit chapter page is titled 'Chapter 12: doṣabhedīya-adhyāya', but that page returned HTTP 403 to both curl and the fetch tool, so the chapter title is known only from the search result and from secondary sources. No verse number is claimed and no quotation is given.
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 Shatkriyakala
- Sushruta's six stages of a deranged dosha: sanchaya, prakopa, prasara, sthanasamshraya, vyakti, bheda (Su. Su. 21/36, with the stage declarations at 21/18, 27, 32, 33, 34, 35). The summary verse is quoted below; the stage-by-stage text, Dalhana's commentary and the textual variants are carried in the shat-kriyakala record and are not duplicated here
Not to be confused with
- samprāpti
- WHO ITA-4.5.16 gives the English term 'Evolution or natural course of disease' and describes it as 'The sequence of events from etiology to manifestation of a disease, which is classified into six stages .' (Sanskrit column: samprāptiḥ, jātiḥ, āgatiḥ.) Same sequence, but named as pathogenesis. Kriyākāla names that sequence as a series of treatment opportunities. Treating the two as synonyms erases the kriyā (action) element, which is the whole point of Sushruta's term. WHO keeps them as separate term IDs.
- nidāna-pañcaka
- The five-fold diagnostic set (nidana, purvarupa, rupa, upashaya, samprapti). Kriyakala is one axis inside it, it expands samprapti, not a parallel diagnostic pentad.
- doṣa-caya / kopa / praśama (Vagbhata's three-fold seasonal scheme)
- A three-member cycle tied to seasons, ending in spontaneous subsidence (praśama). The six-fold kriyakala has no praśama member and is not seasonal. Charaka and Vagbhata work mainly with the three-fold scheme; the six-fold list is Sushruta's.
Renderings that do not hold
- 'Six stages of disease'. Drops kriyā entirely. The compound names six times for ACTION, not six phases of an illness. Bhishagratna's 'occasion for medical treatment' is the rendering that keeps this; almost every modern source loses it.
- 'Six stages of pathogenesis' used interchangeably with samprapti. Conflates the diagnostic description (samprapti) with the therapeutic-window framing (kriyakala). WHO ISTA keeps these as separate term IDs (ITA-4.5.16 vs ITA-4.6.6).
- Presenting ṣaṭkriyākāla as a term used by Sushruta. In the retrieved Sanskrit of Sutrasthana 21.16-21.38 the text uses only kriyākāla with ordinals (prathamaḥ ... ṣaṣṭhaḥ). The compound ṣaṭkriyākāla appears in later usage, in WHO ISTA and in modern literature, but was not found in any mula verse retrieved.
Open questions
Recorded rather than resolved. Each one is something this entry cannot currently settle.
- Whether ṣaṭkriyākāla occurs anywhere in the Sushruta mula text or only in Dalhana's Nibandhasangraha and later works, still open.
- Whether NAMASTE's Ayurveda Standardized Terminologies module carries kriyakala, and under what code. The portal is reachable but every path resolves to the same 60,493-byte homepage and the one form action found (ayurveda_morb_code_downexcel) returns a 302 with no body to an unauthenticated POST. Needs a logged-in human.
- Whether ICD-11 TM2 represents kriyakala stages. TM2 (Chapter 26, Module 2, Ayurveda/Siddha/Unani) exists, but the ICD-11 browser serves only an SPA shell and its search endpoint 404s without a token. Since TM2 is a morbidity classification, stage entities are a priori unlikely, but this is unverified either way.
- Whether the Devanagari orthography of the compound षट्क्रियाकाल can be confirmed from a clean source, see gathering notes.
How to cite this entry
Age Ayurveda Nighantu, ṣaṭkriyākāla
, https://nighantu.ageayurveda.com/lexicon/shat-kriyakala/, 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.