Breath

The Five Tattvas in the Breath

The finer reading: how earth, water, fire, air and ākāśa are identified within the running svara — by the length of the breath, its taste, the visualised colour, the shapes of mirror-condensation — and what each element's presence is good for.

Knowing the nostril gives a reading in halves: lunar or solar, roughly by the hour. The tradition's second instrument cuts far finer. Within whichever nostril flows, one of the five elements is held to govern the breath at every moment, each with its own signature and its own province of acts — so that the practitioner who can name the tattva knows not merely whether the hour favours action but which action, to within minutes. This page is the applied face of that doctrine: the tests, and the uses.

What the finer reading is forप्रयोजन

Three uses, in ascending order of ambition. First, timing within the hour: the catalogue of acts sorts undertakings between two currents, and the tattva then locates the best minutes inside the favourable hour — the stable act to earth's portion, the urgent one to air's. Second, the content of answers: in the question-science the element running at the moment a question arrives supplies the substance of the reply, as questions answered from the breath sets out. Third, and beyond this page, the doctrinal claim that the elements in the breath are the same five that build the world — the ladder treated under the tattvas — so that reading them in the nostril is reading the cosmos at its nearest sampling point. The full doctrinal table — seat, colour, taste, extent, direction and duration for each element, with the Śiva Svarodaya's own verse-scheme — is given on the science of breath and is deliberately not reprinted here; this page is about acquiring and using the skill.

The order of testsपरीक्षा-क्रम

The Śiva Svarodaya compresses its method into four independent witnesses on a single breath — form, motion, taste, field — and the applied tradition turns that compression into a working sequence. A practitioner testing the tattva runs the quick tests first and the preparatory ones only when the answer matters:

Motion first. Feel where the stream leaves the nostril and how it travels — centred and straight, low and falling, high and rising, or slantwise from the sides. This single observation, made on the back of the hand in a second, sorts earth, water, fire and air respectively; a breath that barely leaves at all, felt as warmth more than as stream, announces ākāśa. It is the fastest of the four tests and the one used alone when only a rough answer is needed.
Then length. The distance the exhaled stream carries — measured in aṅgulas, finger-breadths — ranks the elements from water's long reach down to fire's short one. The traditional practice is to gauge it against one's own hand held below the nostrils, or with a wisp of cotton moved outward until it no longer stirs. Length corroborates motion; the two disagreeing means the tattva is changing, and one waits a breath or two.
The mirror for form. Breathe onto glass and read the figure the condensation leaves — the four geometric signatures and the scattered points of ākāśa, tabulated on the science of breath. This is the test of record: slower, needing an instrument, but the least dependent on the observer's skill.
Taste and colour last. The subtle pair: the flavour standing in the mouth, and the colour-field seen behind closed lids in ṣaṇmukhī mudrā, the gates of the face closed with the fingers. Both need a quiet body and a trained attention, and the tradition treats them as confirmations for the practised rather than entry points for the beginner.

The witnesses disagree at known points

The received handbooks do not transmit one clean scheme. Tastes, shapes and lengths are transposed between sources at several points — the divergences are catalogued with the doctrine on the science of breath — and the modern expositors inherit the tangle: Swami Muktibodhananda's edition of 1984 follows the Śiva Svarodaya's verse-list where S. Kannan's Svara Cintāmaṇi of 1967 carries its own text's variants; Rāma Kumār Rāy's Varanasi annotations transmit the Hindi-gloss tradition's readings, and the translator of the Tamil treatise Kannan appends notes himself that it differs from the Cintāmaṇi over the durations. The practical consequence is the one the texts themselves draw: the scheme is calibrated against one's own breath, by running the four tests together until their verdicts converge. A practitioner is not asked to believe a table; he is asked to check it.

What succeeds under each elementतत्त्व-कार्य

The assignments follow each element's character, and the svarodaya literature states them as rules of undertaking — begin the act while its element runs, and the act inherits the element's nature:

The provinces of the five tattvas in undertaking, as the svarodaya literature assigns them.
Tattva	Character	Begin under it	Avoid under it
Pṛthvī पृथ्वी	stable, heavy, enduring	Foundations and building; agreements meant to bind; planting; treasure laid down; any act whose whole virtue is that it should stand	Nothing in particular — the tradition treats earth's portion as the broad safe ground of the hour
Āpas आपस्	flowing, cool, fruitful	Nourishing and healing; commerce and gain; journeys by and over water; acts meant to grow and multiply; the auspicious beginnings generally	Acts requiring heat and force, which water quenches
Agni अग्नि	hot, sharp, consuming	Only the krūra acts: contest, punishment, force, the operations of kings against enemies	Every mild and auspicious undertaking; the texts treat fire's minutes as a time the householder simply sits out
Vāyu वायु	mobile, light, unsteady	The short, the swift and the movable: errands, messages, pursuits that end the same day	Anything meant to last — what is begun under air, the tradition says, disperses as air does
Ākāśa आकाश	empty, subtle, signless	Nothing worldly at all. Its minutes belong to practice — japa, meditation, dhāraṇā	All undertakings; like suṣumṇā, of which it is the elemental shadow, it gives the worldly machinery nothing to grip

The proportions matter for planning. Earth and water together are assigned the greater part of every hour, fire and air the lesser, ākāśa the least — which is why the tradition can be simultaneously strict and practicable. Most of any favourable hour is workable ground; the skill lies in catching the short adverse spans and letting them pass. A practitioner who has internalised the sequence of the elements within the hour, given with the doctrine on the science of breath, needs only one confirmed reading to know the whole hour's map.

Training the readingअभ्यास

The applied tradition treats tattva-reading as a skill with a syllabus. The beginner works with the mirror and the hand at fixed times of day, keeping a written record of test-results against outcomes; the practiser drops the instruments one by one as the subtler tests — taste, then colour — become reliable; the adept reads the element from the feel of the breath alone, continuously and without interrupting other work. The Svara Cintāmaṇi assumes this whole ladder in its longest chapter, which welds the mastered skill to the astrologer's planetary apparatus; the Narpati Jayacaryā assumes it in a king's advisor on the morning of battle. Neither text argues for the skill. Both legislate for men presumed already to have it, which is itself evidence of how ordinary the training once was in this milieu.