Ulladu-Narpadu Verse 5: Kośas (Sheaths)
Channel: Consciousness Research Centre
Date: 2017-03-28

This series is classified Ajata-vāda | Jñāna-yoga | Turīya | Sahasrāra-cakra

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5. "If we scrutinize, the body is a form composed of five sheaths (pañca-kośa). Therefore, any or all of the five sheaths may be denoted by the term ‘body’. Without the body—that is, in the absence of the five sheaths—does any world, subtle or gross, exist? Is there anyone, having given up identifying the body as ‘I’—in sleep, death or Self-realization—who has seen the world?"

The body is a complex structure containing a large number of instruments or organs which the Self, as ego uses for a large number of purposes, including among others those of hearing, smelling, seeing, thinking, feeling, memorizing and reasoning. The materials out of which these instruments or parts are made vary from the grossest to the finest. The Shastras (scriptures) have arranged them in five groups. To each group one sheath of kosha is assigned. The kosha dealing with purely physical matter is called annamayakosha (the sheath of food). The pranamayakosha (the vital sheath) looks after the fivefold functions of the vital energies — breathing, assimilation, generation, excretion and locomotion. The manomayakosha (mental sheath) contains the faculties of mentation. The vijnanamayakosha is the sheath of the intellectual and reasoning faculties, of scientific and philosophic thinking, and last is the anandamayakosha, the sheath of bliss, or causal sheath, which stores up within itself the karmic seeds of every birth and is concerned with that state in which profound peace is enjoyed by the dreamless sleeper. This kosha is made of the finest substance, sattva, which in itself is happy, due to its freedom from grossness and its close proximity to the blissful Self.

Thus the term body includes all these koshas, whose appearance and disappearance cause the appearance and disappearance of all objective and subjective perceptions. Assumption of a body is therefore necessary for the world’s enjoyment and the body owes its existence, as we shall see in the next verse, to the five senses, which are the properties of the mind.

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