By Ritambhara
The second book of the Taittiriya Upanishad, the Brahmanandavalli, belongs to the Krishna Yajurveda. Its first section gives the Taittiriya Upanishad creation sequence, the clearest account in the early Upanishads of how the elements arise. It runs from the Self down to the human body in eight steps.
tasmād vā etasmād ātmana ākāśaḥ sambhūtaḥ | ākāśād vāyuḥ | vāyor agniḥ | agner āpaḥ | adbhyaḥ pṛthivī |
pṛthivyā oṣadhayaḥ | oṣadhībhyo ‘nnam | annāt puruṣaḥ | sa vā eṣa puruṣo ‘nnarasamayaḥ ||
From this Self space arose; from space, air; from air, fire; from fire, water; from water, earth. From earth, plants; from plants, food; from food, the person. This person is made of the essence of food.
What the passage claims
Ākāśa is space, the room in which things exist. Sambhūta, from sam and bhū, “to become”, means “came into being”. Anna, food, comes from the root ad, “to eat”. The compound annarasamaya describes a body made of rasa, the sap or essence of food. Shankara reads the ablatives as proof that Brahman is the material cause of each element. He gives space sound as its property and says each later element carries the qualities of those before it. Water therefore has taste plus sound, touch and colour.
The sequence in the rest of the text
The order matters to the argument. Plants come from earth, food from plants, and the human being from food. The body is the last link in a chain that starts with the elements. Shankara adds that this evolution stands for the whole material world. The next sections set four further selves inside this one, made of breath, mind, understanding and bliss, and each rests within the body of food. The Upanishad places no human life outside the chain of earth, plants and food.
The sequence and a measured loss
The chain now carries a measurable strain. Ariel Ortiz-Bobea and colleagues at Cornell University reported in Nature Climate Change in 2021 that human-caused climate change has cut global farm productivity growth by about 21 per cent since the 1960s. The loss equals roughly seven years of productivity growth. Warmer regions in the tropics, where farming supports a larger share of the economy, took the heaviest losses. The fire and water of the sequence are the heat and rain that set every harvest. When fire rises, the link from plants to food weakens, and the body made of food bears the loss.
The passage requires the reader to treat the elements, the plants and food as the body’s own source. A person made of the essence of food has a direct duty to keep fire, water and earth in the measure that lets plants grow.
