The Classical Doctrine of Indian Medicine: Its Origins and its Greek Parallels c10.30

c10.30

Two breaths are most frequently named, *prāṇa* and *apāna*, mentioned separately or in a dual compound. Making a pair in this manner, they seem, at first view, to represent inspiration and expiration and the contexts generally go well with this natural interpretation. The texts of classical medicine sometimes use the compound *prāṇāpānau* in the same sense,³ when they refer to vital breaths in general and do not limit themselves to mention only *prāṇa*. As these texts interest themselves in the *apāna* chiefly insofar as it circulates downwards in the body, they can group under this name the totality of organic breaths opposed to *prāṇa*. That is why *prāṇāpānau*, even though nominally denoting only two breaths, can represent the complete series of five recognised by medical theory. One may be led to believe that here lies a later extension of the sense of *apāna*, at first limited to that of inspiration,⁴ but, if in the *Atharvaveda* the interpretation of *apāna* as inspiration fits in generally well with the contexts, it is not always so. Some of them are explicable only if the words *prāṇa* and *apāna* have already meanings approaching those attributed to them by the doctor and also by the Upaniṣads which frequently understand *prāṇa* in the sense of thoracic breath and *apāna* or the abdominal breath as has been very well demonstrated by G. W. Brown.¹