Trāṭaka Yoga Nourishes Āyurveda

All of Āyurveda's pathology is folded into this verse. Three things can be joined with us wrongly: time (season, age, the hours), understanding (our own judgment and conduct), and the objects of the senses. And each can go wrong in three ways: mithyā-yoga, wrong use; ayoga, no use or too little; atiyoga, too much. The diseases "of both seats" are those of the body and those of the mind: one list of causes for both.

Elsewhere Caraka gives the three causes their technical names: asātmyendriyārtha-saṃyoga, unwholesome contact of the senses with their objects; prajñāparādha, the fault of understanding; and pariṇāma, the turning of time. In that list, in his eleventh chapter, the senses come first.

Here Caraka applies the principle to the eye, and it reads as though written this morning. Atiyoga: gazing too much at things that are too bright. Mithyā-yoga: looking at what is fierce, frightening, astonishing, hateful, disgusting, distorted, terrifying. I can think of no more exact description of an evening spent with a glowing screen.

And notice what follows from it. If there is a wrong use, an over-use and a non-use of the eye, there must be a right use, samyag-yoga: looking in due measure at what is mild, pleasing and steadying. Trāṭaka, as I practise it, is a deliberate daily dose of right use: no brilliance, a mild and neutral object, a gentle gaze, the lids half lowered. It is the eye's medicine in the strict Āyurvedic sense: the opposite of what caused the harm.

The body has three doshas; the mind has two, rajas, restless agitation, and tamas, dull inertia. And Caraka prescribes a different pharmacy for each. For the body: herbs, diet, procedures. For the mind, five medicines, and not one of them is a substance: jñāna (knowledge), vijñāna (discernment), dhairya (steadiness, fortitude), smṛti (remembrance, presence of mind), and samādhi (the gathering of the mind into one).

The father of Indian medicine names samādhi as a medicine. Trāṭaka is the practice of the last three on that list: steadiness of the gaze, the continual remembering of the point, and the gathering of the mind.

This is Āyurveda's psychology in four lines, and it explains exactly why a single point works. The mind has two properties: it is minute (aṇu) and it is one (eka). Being one, it can join with only one sense at a time. When it seems to attend to many things it is in fact darting between them, and that darting is what we feel as restlessness and what Āyurveda calls disturbed Vāta in the mind.

And the mind's first two duties are indriyābhigraha, taking the senses in hand, and svasya nigraha, restraining itself. A mind that cannot do these is, for Caraka, not doing its job; the fault of understanding and the misuse of the senses both follow. In Trāṭaka the mind takes its chief sense in hand and, by that very act, holds itself. Both duties, in one gesture.

Āyurveda defines itself as knowledge of āyus, life, and then defines life: the union of body, senses, mind and self. Four things, joined. Not the body alone. The senses and the mind are named as two of the four strands of which a living being is twisted.

So a medicine of life must have something to say to each strand. Diet and herbs speak to the body. What speaks to the senses and the mind? This is the gap that the plate cannot fill, and it is where a practice of the chief sense and the mind belongs.

A tripod stands only on all three legs. Shorten one and the whole thing leans. Much of modern life, and much of modern self-care, attends to the leg called body and leaves the leg called mind to look after itself.

Āyurveda's whole idea of disease in one word: vaiṣamya, unevenness; and of health: sāmya, evenness. Remember the word. It returns in the definition of the healthy fire, the healthy doshas, the healthy breath. And it is what I find at the end of every sitting: the breath flowing evenly in both nostrils.

The classical definition of health, and the table of contents of this page. First line: doshas, fire, tissues, wastes, each of them even. Second line: self, senses and mind, each of them prasanna, clear and glad. We will take them in that order.

The word for a healthy person is svastha: "established in oneself". The definition of health ends where the practice of the gaze begins.

Three doshas; one sentence on what they do, depending on their state; and their three regions of the trunk: Vāta below the navel, Pitta in the middle, Kapha above the heart.

These three lines are the key to all Āyurvedic treatment, because a dosha is known, and treated, by its qualities. Find the last quality given to Vāta: cala, mobile. Find the last quality given to Kapha: sthira, steady. They are exact opposites. Kapha's own steadiness is the natural counterweight to Vāta's motion.

A steady gaze lends the mind a little of Kapha's best quality, steadiness, without its heaviness. That is the Āyurvedic meaning of "a single point".

The law of like and opposite, on which every prescription rests. Movement increases Vāta; stillness decreases it. Heat and glare increase Pitta; coolness and mildness decrease it. Heaviness and sloth increase Kapha; wakeful lightness decreases it. One need only ask of any food, habit or practice: what are its qualities?

The healthy work of each dosha. Look for the eye and the mind in the list. Under Vāta: akṣāṇāṃ pāṭava, "the keenness of the senses". Under Pitta: darśana, sight itself, with medhā and dhī, intelligence and understanding. Under Kapha: sthiratva, steadiness, and kṣamā, patience.

So seeing is a function of Pitta, the sharpness of the senses a function of Vāta, and steadiness a function of Kapha. The act of steady seeing calls on the healthy function of all three at once.

Vāgbhaṭa restates Caraka's three causes and adds the fourth term that makes them a medicine: samyag-yoga, the right joining. The same three things, time, the senses' objects and our own actions, cause disease when joined wrongly and health when joined rightly. Rogārogyaika-kāraṇam: the single cause of both.

The word is yoga. For the physician, health is the right yoga of the senses with their objects.

Vāgbhaṭa's version of the mind's pharmacy, in three words: dhī, clear understanding; dhairya, steadiness; ātmādi-vijñāna, knowledge of oneself, one's place, one's time, one's strength. He calls these param auṣadham, the supreme medicine.

Dhairya is from the same root as dhṛti, "holding". It is the capacity to hold: to hold one's ground, one's purpose, one's attention. A daily practice of holding the gaze, gently, is dhairya in its simplest and most trainable form.

Prāṇa, the wind at the front door. Its seat is the head. It upholds, the word is dhṛk, four things: buddhi, the intellect; hṛdaya, the heart; indriya, the senses; citta, the mind. All that we mean by "a person's attention" is in the keeping of this one wind.

This is the wind the gaze speaks to directly. To steady the chief sense and the mind is to steady Prāṇa at its seat. And because the other four winds follow their leader, the texts and my own experience agree on what happens next: the breath becomes even.

Here is the same connection from the side of disease. When Prāṇa is disturbed, the first harm Vāgbhaṭa names is to cakṣur-ādi, "the eye and the rest" of the senses. The eye is named first, as the sense most closely bound to Prāṇa. What is harmed first by a disturbed Prāṇa is the natural place from which to settle it.

Udāna, the upward wind. It lifts: the voice, the will, the energy, the colour in the face, and smṛti, memory. When it is disturbed speech falters, effort fails, memory slips.

The practice is a training of exactly two of its functions: prayatna, sustained effort of the gentlest kind, and smṛti, remembering to return. Meanwhile outer and inner speech fall quiet, and Udāna rests from its heaviest labour. I have seen memory hold better and attention last longer in those who sit.

Vyāna, the wind in every corridor. From the heart it carries nourishment everywhere and powers every movement. Vāgbhaṭa chooses, as his examples of movement, the lowering and lifting of the limbs and nimeṣa-unmeṣa, the blinking of the eyelids.

In the practice the body is still and the lids rest half-lowered: Vyāna's outward work is set down, and what it carries from the heart can flow evenly. In students I have seen the pulse steady and cold hands and feet grow warm.

Samāna, the wind at the kitchen fire. Its name means "the equaliser". It fans the digestive fire and sorts nourishment from waste. A fire fanned in gusts smokes; a fire given an even draught burns clean.

When the breath in the nostrils becomes even, I believe the breath at the navel becomes even too. I have written of this at length in Trāṭaka Yoga and the gut.

Apāna, the wind at the back door. It moves down and out. Fear, hurry and the habit of holding back the urges turn it upward, and then the whole trunk is reversed: constipation below, and gas, reflux and anxiety above.

When the mind's alarm settles, what was gripped below lets go. I have seen constipation ease in those who practise, and I understand it as Apāna allowed back into its own direction.

The later physician Śārṅgadhara gives the reason Vāta is treated first in everything. Nothing else in the body can move by itself. Pitta's heat, Kapha's fluid, the tissues and the wastes are all carried, like clouds, by the wind. Steady the wind and the clouds come to rest where they belong.

Pācaka, the hearth. The digestive fire itself. The last two lines are the important ones here: while staying in its own place, it gives strength to the other four. Every other fire in the body, the eye's included, is fed from the belly.

Rañjaka, "the colourer", turns the pale essence of food into red blood; Suśruta places it in the liver and spleen. Sādhaka, "the accomplisher", burns in the heart; by it we understand, discern, hold ourselves in regard and achieve what we intend. Ālocaka, "the beholder", is the fire in the eye by which form is seen. Bhrājaka, "the illuminator", gives the skin its glow.

The physician Bhela adds that Ālocaka is of two kinds: one in the eye, which sees, and one in the intellect, which understands what is seen. The fire of seeing and the fire of understanding are one fire in two rooms. This is why resting the first clears the second.

Avalambaka bears up the heart and lungs and the frame of the upper back, and from the chest it sustains the other four. It is the body's quality of being held. Grief and long anxiety collapse the chest; steadiness restores it.

Kledaka wets the food in the stomach so the fire can work on it. Bodhaka on the tongue makes taste known. Śleṣaka oils and binds every joint. And Tarpaka, seated in the head, is named akṣa-tarpaṇāt: "from the tarpaṇa of the senses", their nourishing, their satisfying, their being made content.

I ask you to notice that word. When Caraka lists what brings back lost sleep, he includes cakṣuṣos tarpaṇam, the tarpaṇa of the two eyes. As a procedure, tarpaṇa is a bath of medicated ghee for the eyes. As a function, it is this cool pool in the head keeping the senses satisfied. Eyes that hunt all day drain the pool. Eyes that rest on one thing are being given tarpaṇa from within.

Seven tissues, seven verbs. Rasa (plasma) nourishes. Rakta (blood) gives life. Māṃsa (muscle) covers. Medas (fat) lubricates. Asthi (bone) upholds. Majjā (marrow and nerve) fills. Śukra (the reproductive essence) begets.

Ojas is the cream of all seven tissues: vitality, immunity, radiance, the capacity to bear things. Caraka seats it in the heart. Where it is full, a person is calm, strong, hard to make ill and quick to recover. Where it is low, the person is fearful, weak, worried, dull of sense, and falls ill at every turn.

Caraka's list of what wastes Ojas. Count the causes that belong to the mind: cintā, worry; bhaya, fear; śoka, grief; and prajāgara, sleeplessness, which is so often their child. Four of the ten. (Vāgbhaṭa's shorter list adds anger.) The most precious substance in the body is spent, nearly half the time, by the mind.

So here is the plainest Āyurvedic reason for a daily practice of a quiet mind: it stops the leak. Whatever a good diet and a rasāyana tonic pour into the vessel, worry, fear and grief pour out again. The gaze does not make Ojas. It stops it being wasted.

Thirteen fires are counted: one in the belly, five that digest the five elements in food, and one in each of the seven tissues. The belly's fire is their king. Even Ojas is on the list of what depends on it.

Vāta makes the fire irregular; Pitta makes it sharp; Kapha makes it slow. Balanced, it is even. The even fire is the only healthy one.

The verse that joins the fire to the mind. The same four, worry, grief, fear and anger, that waste Ojas also put out the fire. When the fire fails, food is left half-cooked; that residue is Āma, heavy, sticky and foul, which clogs the channels and, joined with the doshas, becomes the seed of disease.

I have set out the whole subject of the fire, with all its verses, in Trāṭaka Yoga and the gut.

Three wastes, three functions. Purīṣa, stool, gives avaṣṭambha, support and firmness to the body and holds Vāta and the fire in place; this is why a person emptied by diarrhoea is weak at once. Mūtra, urine, carries away excess moisture. Sveda, sweat, keeps the skin's moisture in balance.

Three kinds of bowel, by constitution. Krūra, "cruel", the hard bowel of Vāta, slow to move even with a purgative. Mṛdu, "soft", the easy bowel of Pitta, loosened even by milk. Madhya, "middling", of Kapha, and of the balanced.

Vāgbhaṭa describes a kind of stool whose cause is purely in the mind: bhayena kṣobhite citte, "the mind being agitated by fear". Vāta and Pitta together melt the stool and it is passed suddenly, hot, watery and floating. Every student before an examination knows it. Caraka lists a sixth kind beside it, born of grief, and says both are treated first by gladdening and reassuring the patient.

So the texts themselves teach that the stool can be changed by the mind alone, in minutes. What a frightened mind can loosen, a settled mind can restore.

The first rule of preventing disease. Wind, stool and urine head the list. And notice the eye's own urge in it: aśru, tears. Vāgbhaṭa says that holding back tears brings disease of the eyes and head. This is one reason I teach a gaze with no forcing: the eye is allowed to blink and to moisten itself as it wishes. Nothing in the practice suppresses a natural urge.

Cintyānāṃ cāticintanāt: "and from thinking too much about the things one thinks about". Caraka puts over-thinking on the same line as over-eating, as a cause of spoiling the channels of the very first tissue, Rasa, from which all the other six are fed. Rumination, in Āyurveda, is not a state of mind only. It is a material cause of disease at the head of the whole chain of nourishment.

If I had to choose one verse to justify a daily practice of one-pointedness to an Āyurvedic physician, it would be this one. The gaze is the end of aticintana.

The channels of the skin and sweat are spoiled by three emotions: anger, grief and fear. Anyone who has broken into a cold sweat, or flushed with rage, has felt this verse.

Fear spoils the channels of water: the dry mouth and parched throat of dread. It is the same fact the gut page describes from the side of the stomach's juices.

Two channels share one first cause: sandhāraṇa, holding back. Holding back the natural urges spoils the channels of breath and of stool alike. The body that braces against itself below braces above. And it is the anxious, hurried mind that holds back.

How do we know there is a mind at all? Caraka's proof: the eye may be open, the object in front of it, and yet, if the mind is elsewhere, we do not see. "I was looking straight at it and did not notice." Seeing needs four things in contact: self, mind, sense, object. The mind is the link that is usually missing.

And the mind has five kinds of object of its own: things to think about, to consider, to reason upon, to contemplate (dhyeya) and to resolve. In Trāṭaka the mind is given a single dhyeya, and the eye a single object, and the two are held together. The chain of knowing is made whole.

Prajñāparādha, "the offence against wisdom", is Āyurveda's name for the moment we do what we know is bad for us. Caraka analyses it into three failures. Of dhī, understanding: we misjudge what is good and harmful. Of dhṛti, steadiness: we know, but cannot hold ourselves back. Of smṛti, remembrance: we knew, and forgot. And he calls it sarva-doṣa-prakopaṇa: it provokes all three doshas.

The middle one is the hinge. Dhṛti, he says elsewhere, is what restrains a mind running toward its objects. It is a capacity, and like any capacity it grows with use. To hold the gaze gently on one point, and to bring it back when it strays, is dhṛti and smṛti exercised a hundred times in a sitting. I know of no simpler gymnasium for the two faculties whose failure Caraka calls the provoker of all disease.

Few people know that Caraka, in the middle of a medical treatise, defines yoga. His definition: pleasure and pain arise from the contact of self, senses, mind and objects; when the mind is sthira, steady, and ātma-stha, resting in itself, both cease, and vaśitva, self-mastery, is born. That steadiness of mind, he says, is what the sages call yoga.

Manasi sthire: "when the mind is steady". The physician and the yogi define the goal with the same word.

Three kinds of treatment. The first rests on the sacred: mantra, offerings, vows. The second on reasoning: diet, drugs, procedures. The third is sattvāvajaya, literally "victory over the mind", and Caraka defines it in four words: ahitebhyo 'rthebhyo mano-nigrahaḥ, restraining the mind from objects that harm.

This is the heading in Āyurveda's own classification under which Trāṭaka belongs. It is not an import. It is the third limb of medicine.

Āyurveda's statement of purpose, and the order matters: first the keeping of health, then the curing of disease. A daily practice that keeps the senses and the mind in order belongs to the first purpose.

Immediately after naming the three causes of disease, Caraka names the one cause of well-being: yogaḥ samaḥ, the even, balanced joining of time, understanding and the senses with their objects. Health is not the absence of contact with the world. It is contact in right measure.

The three pillars under the three doshas. I have given a page to each of the first two: food and the fire, and sleep. The third pillar, the governing of one's energies, is what any discipline of the senses serves.

Suśruta's five-word anatomy, which Vāgbhaṭa turns into verse. The body is a tree whose roots are three: what moves it, what builds it, and what it sheds. This page has gone through all three.

Vāgbhaṭa on Ojas. His list of what wastes it is shorter than Caraka's and adds anger at its head: kopa, anger; kṣut, hunger; dhyāna, here meaning anxious brooding; śoka, grief; śrama, exhaustion. Three of the five are of the mind.

The full list of seats. Dṛk, the eye, is named among the seats of Pitta, beside the navel. The fire of the belly and the fire of the eye are listed in one breath.

Vāgbhaṭa places this in the chapter on daily routine, between the care of the body and the rules of conduct. Every creature is looking for ease. The physician's observation is that it is not found by chasing it through the senses.

What the yoga manuals themselves claim for Trāṭaka, in two terms an Āyurvedic physician will recognise. Netra-roga, diseases of the eye: the organ where Prāṇa, Ālocaka and Tarpaka meet. And tandrā: Āyurveda defines it as a heavy, half-asleep dullness of the senses in which Kapha and tamas predominate. The manuals' two claims are a Pitta-and-Vāta claim and a Kapha claim. I have discussed the manner of practice these texts describe, and how mine differs, at Trāṭaka Yoga.

The yogi's verse that agrees most exactly with Caraka's three kinds of medicine. What is born of the mind's affliction wanes as that wanes: sattvāvajaya. What is not is treated "by substances, mantra and good procedures, as taught in the physicians' books": the reasoned and the sacred medicines. Vasiṣṭha sends us to Āyurveda for the second kind; Āyurveda, as we have seen, leaves room for yoga in the first.