The Religion and Philosophy of the Veda and Upanishads v2.c34.s1.2

v2.c34.s1.2

Long before the period of the Rigveda, it is clear that the Indian had realized the difference between life and death and had separated in his imagination the two elements of the man, his body and his spirit,¹ but the distinction must have been vague in the extreme.² Of the spirit as distinct from the body we have two expressions which occur frequently enough to let us believe that their meaning was more or less definitely known: of these the first was what we would regard as physical, but what doubtless seemed just as psychical to the Vedic India as any other aspect of the spirit: it is the *asu*,³ life, which seems clearly to have been based on the conception of the breath of the man, which is the visible sign of life and intellect: later, but not in the Rigveda, the term Ātman, the breath, is the most characteristic term for the self, and the breaths, Prāṇas, are a constant subject of investigation in the Upaniṣads, where often they appear as essentially representing the life and spirit of man. The identification of breath and the *asu* is made formally in the Çatapatha Brāhmaṇa,⁴ but this fact is of much less importance than the clear indications of the Rigveda. The other term is, unlike *asu*, which never in later times became an expression of any philosophical importance, one which never loses a place in the thought of India, though it does not achieve the rank of the Ātman. It is Manas, the mind, which in later Indian thought is of importance as the means of knowledge of all internal events,¹ and a necessary link in the knowledge of external events *en route* from the senses. The conception of the Rigveda is seen clearly in the case² when the mind of a senseless person is said to have gone away to Yama, the lord of the dead, to sky and earth, to the sea and the mountains, to the sun and the dawn. It is also probable that the conception later prevalent that the mind has its abode in the heart was already developed:³ the connexion of mind and heart is not rare in the Rigveda. The further view that the mind had the dimensions of a pigmy or a thumb in size, which is found said of the Puruṣa as the principle of life in the Upaniṣads and often later, is not to be proved for the period of the Rigveda.⁴