The Religion and Philosophy of the Veda and Upanishads v2.c39.s2.106

v2.c39.s2.106

The importance of the breath is due obviously to its connexion with the life of man or beast, and we find in the Çatapatha Brāhmaṇa⁴ the express statement that the victim is the breath, since only while it breathes is it a beast at all, and, when the breath departs, it is a mere inert mass. But the term is naturally enough extended to other forms of the activity of life, the speech, the hearing, the sight, and the mind, and further in the Vedic view between the organ and the activity there was no very clear distinction:⁵ the ear is what hears and the hearing, the eye what sees and the sight, and so on. The number of the vital airs is very various: they can be reckoned pretty much at pleasure as two, three, five, seven, nine, twelve, thirteen, and so on. But nine are often mentioned: seven in the head and two below.⁶ The seven in the head are the mind, speech, the breath itself, the two eyes and the two ears, and those below the organs of reproduction and evacuation. But the seven can be reduced to five by counting the ears and eyes as one organ each, and from quite different points of view we have six,⁷ two eyes, nostrils and ears, or two, Prāṇa and Udāna, or three, Prāṇa, Udāna, and Apāna.⁸ These vital airs are repeatedly called the gods, Devas: they are produced from the ascending airs of Prajāpati with which he created the gods, and the view that these activities are divine is a perfectly natural one from the point of view of Vedic religion, and it is quite unnecessary¹ to attribute the use of the term to the fact that no word for nature powers existed.