Prasna Upanishad

1. Then Kausalya Asvalayana asked him, ‘Blessed one,
from where is the breath bom? How does it arrive in the
body? How does it divide itself up and become established?
How does it support what is outside and what is concerned
with oneself?’

2. He told him, ‘You ask very advanced questions: but
since I think you are a most true Brahmana, I will tell
you.

3. ‘The breath is born from the self. It reaches up to it
like the shadow to a person. It arrives in the body through
the action of mind.

4. ‘Just as a monarch appoints his officials, saying, “Take
charge of these villages.” Take charge of these villages,’ the
breath sets the other breaths in their various different places.

5. ‘The lower breath (apana) is in the anus and the loins.
The breath {prana) itself is established in the eye and the
ear, the mouth and the nostrils. The central breath {samana)
is in the middle: it makes equal (sama) all that is offered as
food. From it the seven flames come to be.

6. ‘The self is in the heart: here are the hundred and one
channels. Each of them has a hundred; and every one of
those has seventy-two thousand branch-channels. In them
moves the diffused breath (vydna).

7. ‘Through one of them, the up-breath (uddna) rises: it
leads to a pure world through pure action, to an evil one
through evil, through both to the human world.

8. ‘The sun rises as the external breath, for it takes care
of the breath of the eye?with the deity that is in the earth
supporting the lower breath, and the space between as the
central breath. Air is the diffused breath.

9. ‘Heat (tejas) is the up-breath, so when one’s heat has
died down one goes on to rebirth, with faculties absorbed
into mind.

10. ‘With whatever consciousness30 one has, one goes to
breath. The breath, joined with heat, along with the self,
leads one to the kind of world that is fitting.

11. ‘If one, knowing this, knows the breath, one’s progeny
do not cease. One becomes immortal. There is a verse about
it:

12. ‘Knowing the arising, the arriving, and the place
And the pervading in five ways
Of the breath in relation to the self,
One attains immortality:
Knowing, one attains immortality.’