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If you pull pranayama apart, you’ll find two smaller words, prana and ayama. Prana literally means “to breathe forth.” It comes from the prefix pra, “to bring forth,” and the verb an, “to breathe” or simply “to live.” The entry for prana in my Sanskrit-English dictionary reads, “breath of life, breath, respiration, vitality, vigor, energy, power, and spirit.”
Prana is a subtle energy that pervades every corner of the universe. While we can’t see and touch it directly, at least not as beginning breathers, we can do so indirectly, through one of its most obvious physical manifestations and significant vehicles, our breath. As Lama Govinda writes in Foundations of Tibetan Mysticism, “As long as there is breath, there is life. We can do without all conscious functions of the mind and the senses for a comparatively long time, but not without breath. Breath therefore is the symbol of all the forces of life and stands first among the bodily functions of prana.”1
The old guides agree that, just as each of us breathes along and so lives in and through prana, so, too, does the entire universe. “Like the spokes on the hub of a wheel,” says a famous verse from the Prashna-Upanishad, “Everything is established on prana.” This undifferentiated cosmic prana is called first prana (mukhya-prana) or whole prana (samasti-prana).
In some old guides cosmic prana is one among several emanations or breathings of the Great Self. Suffused with its intelligence and creativity, prana isn’t only the mainspring of all the various worlds, both physical and subtle, but their source and so master as well. “As a spider might come out with his thread, as small sparks come forth from the fire, even so from this Soul come forth all vital energies (prana), all worlds, all gods, all beings.”2 In other guides prana seems to be equated with the Great Self and by extension the embodied self itself: “The breathing spirit (prana) is Brahma . . . the intelligential self (prajnatman); [it is] bliss, ageless, immortal.”3 We can say, then, that prana creates, sustains, and illuminates the universe and links us to the source and essence of our lives.
Ayama literally means “to stretch, extend; restrain, stop; expand, lengthen either in space or time.” Interestingly its root word, yama, means “rein, curb, bridle; a driver, charioteer.” Usually ayama is translated as “control,” a word that has several denotations in English: to dominate, direct, regulate, and limit, in the sense of restrain. I caution you right away that you can’t dominate the breath or the prana. As one of my students once said, trying to impose severe discipline on the breath invariably makes pranayama all the more difficult. But you can say that pranayama is the process of expanding our usually small reservoir of prana by lengthening, directing, and regulating the movement of the breath and then limiting or restraining the increased pranic energy in the body-mind.
The origin of pranayama, like the origin of just about all time-honored yoga practices, is obscure. Some scholars trace its lineage back to the Brahman priests who might have ministered to our charioteer’s soul. These holy men had in their possession an extraordinary collection of hymns, prayers, incantations, and litanies, together called the Vedas. Veda means “knowledge.” Its root word, vid, means “to know, understand, perceive, learn, have a correct notion of.” This isn’t the kind of knowledge we carry around in our heads, accumulated over the years, to help us manage the business of everyday life. Rather, it’s knowledge revealed by the Great Self and heard (shruti) and then passed along by high-minded sages, knowledge that’s considered eternal and infallible.
What’s most remarkable to me about the Vedas is that, before the work assumed its written form some four thousand years ago, it was preserved entirely in the memories of the priests and transmitted orally from generation to generation. I have a translation of the oldest of the four main Vedic texts, the Rig-Veda, which runs to more than 650 pages with more than a thousand hymns. The priests were able to recite every syllable of this enormous hymnal without recourse to a written text. I think about this accomplishment every time I forget where I left my glasses or what I was supposed to buy at the grocery store.
As befitting their divine source, the hymns were always recited or sung with the utmost solemnity and concentration. Scholars speculate that, in order to say the words with the proper force and intonation, and so please the petitioned gods, the priests learned to regulate their breathing. In doing this, they discovered that when they changed their normal breathing rhythm to accommodate the rhythms of the hymns, they also changed their state of consciousness. This ritual regulation of the breath, scholars conclude, was the first step in the development of pranayama.
Notes
1 Lama Anagarika Govinda, Foundations of Tibetan Mysticism (New Delhi: B.I. Publications, 1977), p. 152–53.
2 The Thirteen Principal Upanishads, trans. Robert Ernest Hume (London: Oxford University Press, 1931), p. 95.
3 Ibid., pp. 307, 328. |
