---
type: Concept
bundle: ayurveda-consciousness
bundle_version: 0.11.0
id: sadvritta
title: Sadvṛtta
iast: Sadvṛtta
devanagari: सद्वृत्त
description: 'Right conduct prescribed as preventive medicine: the code of personal, social, and mental behavior given by the physician for the sake of health of body and mind together; NOT etiquette, NOT moralism, NOT religious commandment.'
darshana:
- Āyurveda
text_source: Charaka Sūtrasthāna 8
tags:
- sadvritta
- conduct
- prevention
- ayurveda
- consciousness
not:
- term: 'etiquette'
  why: 'Manners aim at social smoothness. Sadvṛtta is prescribed by a medical text with a stated medical rationale: Charaka introduces the code as serving the health of the person who practices it, mastery of the senses and stability of mind included. The register is prescription, not politeness.'
  instead: 'Render sadvṛtta as the physician-prescribed code of conduct, hygiene of behavior and mind, and keep the Sanskrit term.'
- term: 'moralism'
  why: 'The code is not shaming; it is etiological. Conduct feeds back into doṣa, agni, and mind through the same channels food does, so behavior is a dosage form. The system that counts prajñāparādha among disease causes must, for consistency, prescribe its opposite.'
- term: 'religious commandment'
  why: 'Elements overlap with dharmic ethics (the corpus treats ācāra and the yamas in dharmic-ethics v0.5), but sadvṛtta is issued on medical authority for a medical end, health of āyus in all four of its constituents, not as scriptural command.'
related:
- /concepts/sattvavajaya.md
- /concepts/prajnaparadha.md
- /concepts/dinacharya.md
- /concepts/rasayana.md
timestamp: '2026-07-09'
okf_version: '0.2'
license: CC BY-SA 4.0
---

# Sadvṛtta -- सद्वृत्त

**Not:** etiquette, moralism, religious commandment

## What It Actually Means

Sadvṛtta is where the medicine of conduct is written out. Charaka Sūtrasthāna 8 prescribes it the way another chapter prescribes diet: speak truth measured and timely, restrain anger, honor teachers and guests, keep the body and senses clean, avoid harm, study, rest, neither hoard nor squander, and govern the traffic of the mind. The stated purpose is medical: the practitioner of sadvṛtta gains control of the senses and freedom from the self-inflicted causes of disease, which loops the code directly back to prajñāparādha, its diagnostic twin. Read with ācāra-rasāyana (conduct as rejuvenative) and sattvāvajaya (mind-mastery as therapy), a design emerges: conduct in this system is a therapeutic substance with sustained release, the one drug taken all day every day. This bundle documents the code as vocabulary; the ethical theory itself lives with ācāra and the yamas in dharmic-ethics v0.5.

## Audience Metaphor

Hospitals learned that hand-washing is not a courtesy but the cheapest intervention in medicine. Sadvṛtta generalizes the insight: conduct is hand-washing for the whole of life, an aseptic technique for the mind and its channels, prescribed because it measurably keeps pathology from being introduced.

## Citations

1. Charaka Saṃhitā Sūtrasthāna 8 on the code of right conduct -- see [references/charaka-samhita.md](../references/charaka-samhita.md)
2. Charaka Saṃhitā Cikitsāsthāna 1.4 on conduct as rasāyana -- see [references/charaka-samhita.md](../references/charaka-samhita.md)
