The Hindu-Yogi Science of Breath

A newborn draws in one long, deep breath, holds it for a moment, and lets it out as a wail. That, says Ramacharaka, is the instant a life on earth begins.

At the other end, an old man gives a faint gasp and stops. Between those two breaths lies everything a person will ever do, and the book will not let you forget it: "Life is but a series of breaths."

Read that as a pretty line and you miss the book. The manual means it literally. If a life is a series of breaths, then the quality of those breaths is the quality of the life, and everything that follows is built on that one sentence.

The book's case for putting breath first is blunt arithmetic. A person can go some time without eating, a shorter time without drinking, and without breathing only a few minutes.

So breathing is not one bodily function among many. The author calls it the most important of them all, because every other one depends on it. Digestion, circulation, thought: each of them is the function waiting on the next breath.

That ranking is the whole reason the manual exists. If you wanted a single place to intervene in a body, you would choose the function with the shortest margin and the widest reach. Breath has both, and the rest of the book is an argument for taking that seriously.

Why does the book treat breathing as the most important function of the body?

• Because it burns more energy than digestion, circulation or thought
• Because it is the one function yogis can control and doctors cannot
• Because every other function depends on it, and its margin is minutes✓Correct answer
• Because breath is where the soul enters, and the body comes second

The chapter's argument is practical: food can wait for a while, water for less, air only minutes, and all the other functions depend on breathing. The spiritual claims come later in the book, and they rest on this physical one rather than replacing it.

Here is the step most readers skip. You are breathing right now, without effort, and you will keep doing it in your sleep. So what is there to learn?

The book answers with a distinction. Staying alive depends on breath, but staying vital depends on correct habits of breathing. The first is guaranteed; the second is not. Careless breathing, the author says, lowers vitality and leaves a person open to illness, while intelligent control of the breath lengthens one's days.

Put plainly, the body will always keep you breathing. It will not, on its own, make sure you breathe well. The gap between enough to survive and enough to thrive is where every exercise in this manual lives.

Breath has a strange double citizenship. It runs by itself, like the heartbeat, and yet the moment you decide to, you can slow it, deepen it, hold it or let it go.

The book notes that the diaphragm works almost as automatically as the heart, but that an effort of the will can turn it into a semi-voluntary muscle. Try it as you read this: lengthen your next exhale. Very little else in the body answers you that quickly.

That is why "Breath is life" reads, in this manual, as an operating instruction rather than a motto. Breath is the automatic process you can steer, and whatever you can steer, you can train.

The book treats breathing as a purely automatic function, like the heartbeat, that the will cannot reach.

False✓Correct answer

False. The book says breathing runs almost as automatically as the heart, but the will can take it over and make the diaphragm semi-voluntary. That double nature is exactly what makes breath trainable, and the whole manual depends on it.