Soham: The Mantra of the Breath

The last chapter ended on japa as effort: the mantra repeated, bead by bead, ten thousand times, a discipline that reshapes the one who keeps it. This chapter turns that effort inside out. The deepest japa, the tradition says, is not an effort at all. It is already happening. It has been happening since your first breath, and it will continue until your last, whether you attend to it or not. The work is not to start it. The work is to notice it.

It is the mantra of the breath.

The sound the breath is making

Sit still and listen to your own breathing, the tradition says, and you will hear two syllables. As the breath comes in, there is a sound like so, and a soft ham as it settles: so’ham. As the breath goes out, the sound reverses: ham’sa. They are the same two sounds, read in two directions, the in-breath and the out-breath of a single mantra that the body sounds without being told.

And the two readings are two of the most charged phrases in the tradition. So’ham means “I am That,” the great identification of the individual self with the absolute reality, the That of the Upanishads, the one without a second. To breathe in is, on this hearing, to say “I am That” with every inhalation. And hamsa means “the swan,” the bird that has been, since the Vedas, the symbol of the liberated soul, the one who moves between the worlds and is at home in neither, who can, the old image says, separate milk from water and take only the pure. To breathe out is to say “swan,” to name the soul that is free. So the breath, all day, is reciting the identity of the self with the absolute, and naming the soul’s freedom, in a mantra no one taught it.

The repetition that is not recited

The tradition has a precise name for this: ajapa-japa, which is a small paradox in two words. Japa is repetition; a-japa is “not-repeated,” “unrecited.” Ajapa-japa is the “repetition that is not recited,” the japa that goes on without anyone doing it. Ordinary japa, the last chapter’s discipline, is done: you take up the mantra and repeat it by an act of will. Ajapa-japa is found: the mantra is already being repeated by the breath, and the practice is simply to become conscious of it, to ride the attention on the breath until the self-sounding mantra comes into awareness.

It is called the ajapa-gayatri, the gayatri that recites itself, and the tradition gives it a number. The breath, it says, performs this mantra roughly twenty-one thousand six hundred times in a day and a night. A reader should hold that figure as the tradition holds it, as a schematization of an average breath-count rather than a measured datum, a way of saying constantly, without ceasing, more times than you could ever count by hand. The point of the number is not its arithmetic but its scale: the holiest mantra is being said in you all the time, tens of thousands of times a day, and you have never once had to remember to say it.

Where mantra meets the breath

This is the place where the path of sound joins the path of breath, and the two great yogic disciplines become one. The treatise on the chakras and the subtle body describes the nadis, the channels, and the prana, the life-force that rides on the breath, and the work of pranayama, the discipline of the breath, in drawing that force inward and upward. Ajapa-japa sits exactly at that junction. The mantra is carried on the breath; to attend to the breath-mantra is to attend to the prana; and as the breath is gathered and stilled, the mantra deepens with it. The sound and the breath are a single thread, and pulling on either draws in the other. This treatise will not teach the technique, which belongs to the subtle-body tradition and its teachers, but it can name the meeting-point: the mantra of the breath is where the science of sound and the science of breath turn out to be the same science.

The mantra you cannot lose

There is a consolation in this teaching that the more elaborate practices cannot offer, and it is worth ending on. The mantras of the third volume could be lost: forgotten, mistransmitted, locked behind an initiation one never received. But the mantra of the breath cannot be lost, because you did not acquire it and you cannot put it down. As long as you are breathing, so’ham and ham’sa are being said in you, the identity of the self with the absolute affirmed on every in-breath, the freedom of the soul named on every out-breath. The whole towering edifice of mantra, the Word as the Absolute, the heard Veda, the Tantric seed, the guarded transmission, comes to rest, in the end, on something already given, free, ceaseless, and yours: the sound your own breathing has been making all along.

The practice is not to begin the mantra.

The practice is to hear what you have been saying since you were born.