The Classical Doctrine of Indian Medicine: Its Origins and its Greek Parallels c10.36

c10.36

The identification of *prāṇa* with barley and of *apāna* with rice has not been explained. Henry³ and Deussen⁴ have contented themselves by noting that rice and barley were the chief bases of nourishment, but this does not show in the least how the idea of identifying barley with expiration and rice with inspiration could arise if *prāṇa* and *apāna* had denoted nothing but these two phases of breath. Now in hymn XIII, 3, there is the question of an all-powerful god “who, with *prāṇa*, fills up the Sky and the Earth, who with *apāna* fills up the stomach of the Ocean”.⁵ This shows the idea of a connection between *prāṇa* and nourishment and also of a connection between *apāna* and the waters. These connections will be purely absurd if *prāṇa* here denotes inspiration and *apāna* expiration. But in the classical tradition of physiology, *prāṇa* sits in the mouth and is the agent of digestion of the aliments; *apāna* sits in the lower part of the body where it pushes the liquids to excretion. If it is admitted that their rôles could have been already envisaged in this manner at the time of the Atharvaveda, one can understand the relation established between prāṇa and nourishment and apāna and the waters. Moreover, as barley is a cereal of high terrain and rice is a plant of flooded terrain, in a theoretical repartition of the two aliments between two types of breaths, barley naturally had to be assigned to prāṇa and rice to apāna. Besides it is not only in the physiological traditions of Suśruta and Caraka that prāṇa and apāna are conceived under forms other than those of breath. The Chāndogya-upaniṣad says of the prāṇa, “of the mouth” (mukhya), which is the principal one at the same time¹: “Because therewith one eats, one drinks, one supports the other breaths”². In the Atharvaveda the epithet of bhuridhāyas³ is given to prāṇa. The localisation of apāna in the lower part of the body is current in later Vedic literature.