In a forest hermitage, long ago, six seekers came to the sage Pippalāda with their hardest questions, and one of them — Kausalya — asked the one that everything else rests upon: what powers hold this body together? and of them, which is supreme? The sage’s answer was the map of the breath. Not the single in-and-out we usually mean by breathing, but a fivefold living force the tradition calls prāṇa — the vital current that enlivens the body, moves it, digests for it, speaks through it, and, when it finally departs, leaves behind what we then call a corpse. A person is not called dead when the mind stops, the old texts observe, but when the life-force leaves. Everything the yogas of Haṭha, of Patañjali, of Kuṇḍalinī aim at is the harmonising of this one force.

Prāṇa is not one thing doing one job. The scriptures see it as a single power wearing five faces, each governing one of the tasks that keep a body alive — and the old Sanskrit names have quietly entered the vocabulary of every serious practitioner:

• Prāṇa (the face that shares the whole force’s name) — the inward and upward current in the chest, governing the breath and the heart, the taking-in of the world.
• Apāna — the downward current below the navel, governing elimination and reproduction, the letting-go and the giving-forth.
• Samāna — the balancing current at the navel, governing digestion and assimilation, the fire that turns food into a body.
• Udāna — the upward current in the throat and head, governing speech, the swallowing, and — the Upaniṣads say — the soul’s passage upward at the moment of death.
• Vyāna — the pervading current that fills the whole body, governing circulation and coordinating the other four, the field in which they all move.

The Mahābhārata, in the Śānti Parva, gives the same fivefold teaching in the voice of the epic itself:

“Through the breath called Prana a living creature is enabled to move. Through that called Vyana, they put forth strength for action. That called Apana moves downwards. That called Samana resides within the heart. Through that called Udana one eructates and is enabled to speak in consequence of its piercing through (the lungs, the throat, and the mouth). These are the five kinds of wind that cause an embodied creature to live and move.” — Mahābhārata, Śānti Parva, Section 184

The breath in the body is the breath of the world

Here is where the Praśna Upaniṣad does something that ought to stop us in our tracks. Having named the five breaths inside the human body, the sage Pippalāda turns and names them again — outside, at the scale of the cosmos. The sun, he says, is the prāṇa of the universe; it rises each morning to help the prāṇa in the eye of every creature to see. The power of the earth, drawing all things downward, is the world’s apāna. The space between sun and earth is its samāna; the all-pervading air is its vyāna; the cosmic fire, its udāna. The very same five currents that move your one small body are the currents moving the sky.

This is not a poetic flourish laid over dry physiology. It is the deepest claim the tradition makes about what breathing is: that the breath in your chest and the breath of the planet are not two systems politely corresponding, but one circulation observed at two scales. When you draw a breath, you are not operating a private bellows — you are the point at which the atmosphere of a living world briefly becomes a person and then is returned. The sun’s rising is your inhale written large; the earth’s gravity is your apāna. To sit and breathe with awareness, then, is the most intimate ecology there is: it is the moment the body remembers it was never sealed off from the air of the forest, the sea, the mountain — that it has been, this whole time, one of the ways the Earth breathes.

References

1. Praśna Upaniṣad, the Third Question (Kausalya’s question to Pippalāda on the five prāṇas), including the cosmic correspondences (sun as prāṇa, earth as apāna) and the passage of udāna at death (3.5–7). See Swami Gambhirananda’s translation (Advaita Ashrama) or Eknath Easwaran, The Upanishads (Nilgiri Press, 1987).
2. Mahābhārata, Śānti Parva, Section 184 — the fivefold teaching of the winds (quoted in full above; Kisari Mohan Ganguli translation).
3. On the classical yoga-physiology of the five vāyus and their role in prāṇāyāma, see Swami Niranjanananda Saraswati, Prana and Pranayama (Yoga Publications Trust, Munger, 2009).