The food sheath
What is the sheath made of food? That which arises from the essence of food alone, grows by the essence of food alone, and dissolves into the earth that is itself food. This is the sheath made of food: the gross body.
What is the food sheath (annamaya-kośa)? It comes into being from food, grows by food, and finally merges back into the earth, which is itself food. This is the food sheath, the gross body.
- annamaya-kośa
The food sheath is set aside as not the Self mainly because
- it is impure and the Self is pure
- it depends on food to arise, grow, and end, while the Self is what abides through it
- it is visible and the Self is invisible
- it belongs to the body and the Self belongs to the mind
Show the answer
The covering made of food
The five sheaths begin with the one nearest to hand, the body made of food. Its life is borrowed from the start: it forms out of the food a mother eats, it thickens and lengthens on the food it takes in day after day, and at the end it is laid back into the earth, which is itself only food in another form. Nothing about it stands on its own. It is fed into being and fed into growth, and when the feeding stops it returns to the ground it was drawn from.
A sheath is a covering, the scabbard around a blade, near to the blade and shaped to it, yet not the blade. That is why the body is met here first. It is the covering a person presses closest to the word I, the one we mean when we say that we are well or unwell, young or old. The teaching does not deny the body or call it worthless; it only asks you to watch its three plain marks, arising from food, growing by food, dissolving into food, and to notice that whatever is carried along by a process like this is a thing within change, not the one who is aware of change.
This is the same gross body the text has already described under the three bodies, now seen again as the outermost sheath; the two ways of mapping a person overlap here. Beginning at the food sheath is the kindest entry to the inquiry, because this covering is the easiest to recognize as not oneself once its borrowed life is named, and yet it is the one we forget ourselves into most readily. Set it gently in its place, and the next covering, the breath, comes into view.
When you say I am tired or I am hungry, who is the one that knows the body is tired?
In the commentaries
The word here is kośa, a sheath, the scabbard that covers a blade without being the blade. The teaching now turns from the three bodies to the five sheaths, and it begins at the outermost and most obvious covering, the one made of food. Its whole character is given in three strokes: it comes to be from the essence of food, it grows by the essence of food, and it dissolves back into the earth, which is itself food. Whatever is born, increases, and returns in this way is an effect, a thing carried along in a process, and so it cannot be the being that watches the process without itself beginning or ending. To call the body annamaya, a modification of food, is already to set it down on the side of the not-Self. This is the gentlest place to start, because the body is the covering a person clings to most plainly, saying I am stout, I am thin, I am aging, and yet it is the easiest to see through once its borrowed, food-fed life is named.