The Five Tattvas

A wheel inside the breath

The Shiva Svarodaya does not stop at left and right. Within each nostril’s reign it describes five elemental phases, the tattvas, taking turns: earth, water, fire, air and ether, each with its own quality and duration.

The durations are given in palas, the old time unit of about twenty-four seconds. Fifty for earth, forty for water, thirty for fire, twenty for air, ten for ether: one hundred and fifty palas, which is sixty minutes to the second. The text’s arithmetic is exact even where its clock is idealised.

Earth to ether

Each tattva carries a signature in the old system. Earth is yellow, square, sweet, and suits steady, stationary work. Water is white, a crescent, saline, and suits movement and flow. Fire is red, a triangle, bitter, and suits effort and heat.

Air is green, six-sided, sour, and belongs to motion and change. Ether is many-coloured, dotted, pungent, and belongs to space and pause. The mirror test reads these signatures in the shape of the breath’s mist; the thumb-on-ears method reads them as colour. She teaches them as a vocabulary of attention, not as chemistry.

The old clock was poetry. The noticing is real.

What the tradition assigns

The text is generous with lists. Under the lunar breath it places marriage, building, business, study, music, planting, entering a new home. Under the solar breath it places exertion, confrontation, medicine, weapons, hard bargaining. Its governing verse is blunt: the favourable swara makes impossible work possible, and the unfavourable makes possible work impossible.

She reads the lists as a culture’s memory of when people do their best work: settled things from a settled state, forceful things from a forceful one. You do not need the metaphysics to recognise that pattern in yourself.

Sushumna, the pause between

When dominance changes sides, there is a passage where both nostrils flow evenly. The tradition names it sushumna and treats it with respect: not a time for contracts or quarrels, but for stillness, worship and meditation.

Even read plainly, there is wisdom in marking transitions as transitions, and letting the in-between be quiet.

The honest note

Measurement has kept some of this and returned the rest to poetry. The alternation is real and involuntary; medicine has known it since 1895. But the tidy hour is an ideal: modern recordings find cycles from a quarter of an hour to ten hours, varying by person, posture and time of day.

She holds both without embarrassment. The old text taught people to watch the breath closely enough to build a clock from it. The clock was wrong and the watching was right.

Keep reading

• Swar Vigyan →
• Reading Your Breath →
• Swar Vigyan, Asked Plainly →

Common questions