Vipaka

Vipaka is the final post-digestive effect of taste, completed in the colon, where it acts on the excreta — urine, feces, and sweat — while its influence reaches through the dhatus down to the cellular level. To simplify a complex process, Ayurveda recognizes only three post-digestive tastes: sweet, sour, and pungent. Sweet and salty rasas yield a sweet vipaka, sour rasa yields a sour vipaka, and pungent, bitter, and astringent rasas all yield a pungent vipaka, with a few exceptions.

Working in conjunction with the bhuta agnis, vipaka carries molecules of food, water, and air to the cell membrane within ahara rasa, the digested food precursor to the bodily tissues. At the membrane, pilu agni selects the appropriate molecules for that cell, and at the dhatu level each dhatu agni selects nutrients from the products of vipaka. Vipaka therefore precedes both dhatu paka (tissue nutrition) and pilu paka (cellular metabolism).

A cell isolated from the body dies within minutes under a microscope because it is cut off from the end products of vipaka that ordinarily sustain it.