---
type: Concept
bundle: ayurveda-consciousness
bundle_version: 0.11.0
id: prajnaparadha
title: Prajñāparādha
iast: Prajñāparādha
devanagari: प्रज्ञापराध
description: 'Offense against wisdom: volitional action taken while judgment, restraint, and memory are impaired, formally counted among the fundamental causes of disease; NOT sin, NOT ignorance in general, NOT lifestyle mistakes moralized.'
darshana:
- Āyurveda
text_source: Charaka Śārīrasthāna 1.102
tags:
- prajnaparadha
- etiology
- cognition
- ayurveda
- consciousness
not:
- term: 'sin'
  why: 'Sin requires a lawgiver offended and a soul stained. Prajñāparādha is an etiological category: action against ones own available knowledge, committed when dhī (judgment), dhṛti (restraint), and smṛti (recall) are deranged, with disease as its lawful consequence. The register is medical causation, not divine offense.'
  instead: 'Render prajñāparādha as offense against wisdom, the cognitive failure that causes disease, and keep the Sanskrit term.'
- term: 'ignorance in general'
  why: 'The concept is sharper than not-knowing. The person KNOWS better and acts otherwise because the three faculties that would have applied the knowledge are impaired. It is a failure of applied cognition, which is what makes it correctable by training rather than by information alone.'
- term: 'moralized lifestyle mistakes'
  why: 'Wellness discourse converts this into blame for bad choices. The classical analysis runs the other way: it explains why choice fails, and hands the failure to therapy (sattvāvajaya) and regimen, not to shame.'
related:
- /concepts/manas.md
- /concepts/sattvavajaya.md
- /concepts/manasa-dosha.md
- /concepts/vega-dharana.md
timestamp: '2026-07-09'
okf_version: '0.2'
license: CC BY-SA 4.0
---

# Prajñāparādha -- प्रज्ञापराध

**Not:** sin, ignorance in general, moralized lifestyle mistakes

## What It Actually Means

Charaka lists three fundamental causes of disease: wrong contact of senses with objects, time and season, and prajñāparādha, and later texts and commentaries treat the third as the principal one. The claim is radical and precise: a defined failure mode of cognition is a formal cause of illness. Acting against your own better knowledge, suppressing what should be released, forcing what should rest, indulging what you know harms, is not a character flaw in this system; it is an etiological event with a mechanism (the derangement of dhī, dhṛti, and smṛti) and consequences (the immediate vitiation of all doṣas, bodily and mental). Nothing else in the corpus, and little in the history of medicine, states a cognitive etiology this formally. It is the keystone of the consciousness payload of this bundle: mind is not adjacent to disease causation, it is inside it.

## The Three Faculties

Dhī is judgment, the capacity to discriminate what is beneficial from what is harmful. Dhṛti is restraint, the will that holds a course against impulse. Smṛti is recall, the retrieval of relevant knowledge and experience at the moment of action. Charaka derives prajñāparādha from their joint derangement (dhī-dhṛti-smṛti-vibhraṣṭa): the person misjudges, or judges rightly and cannot hold, or could hold but does not recall. Every unwholesome act decomposes into a failure of one or more of the three, which is what makes the category diagnostic rather than rhetorical.

## Audience Metaphor

An experienced driver, licensed and sober, runs a red light he plainly saw: misread the intersection, or could not brake his own impatience, or forgot the school crossing he passes daily. No mechanical fault will be found in the car. Prajñāparādha is the crash report that names the failure in the driver, and the system files it under causes, not under blame.

## Citations

1. Charaka Saṃhitā Śārīrasthāna 1.102 on prajñāparādha as impaired dhī, dhṛti, and smṛti -- see [references/charaka-samhita.md](../references/charaka-samhita.md)
2. Charaka Saṃhitā Sūtrasthāna 11.43 on the three-fold causation of disease -- see [references/charaka-samhita.md](../references/charaka-samhita.md)
