Divinity Atlas

Sacred Correspondences
Articles

Annamaya and the Three Bodies Doctrine

Citation Formats

General Reference

APA Style

BibTeX

Learn More
Annamaya and the Three Bodies Doctrine

Alongside the five koshas, Vedantic thought describes a second, coarser scheme of three bodies, or sharira: the gross body, sthula sharira, the subtle body, sukshma sharira, and the causal body, karana sharira. The two schemes are laid over one another rather than kept separate, and Annamaya, the food sheath, is identified with the gross body alone, the only one of the five koshas built from and dissolved with physical matter; the remaining four koshas together make up the subtle and causal bodies.

This layering matters practically because Vedantic teaching on death and liberation is framed through the three bodies more often than the five koshas directly: at death the gross body, Annamaya, is left behind and decays, while the subtle body, carrying the mental and vital sheaths, is said to persist and transmigrate until liberation dissolves the causal body as well.

Twentieth century Theosophical writers, working from a different lineage than the Vedantic sources, adapted kosha language into their own sevenfold scheme of subtle bodies, using some of the same Sanskrit terms with different boundaries and a different total count. That adaptation is a distinct, later Western system and should not be read as a restatement of the Vedantic five kosha or three sharira teaching it borrowed its vocabulary from.

Sources The Principal Upanishads with Rainbow Body: A History of the Western Chakra System from Blavatsky to BrennanKurt Leland

Cross-Tradition Connections

Article On

Sources
Comments (0)
No comments yet. Be the first to share a thought.
Reader Challenges (0 open reader challenges)
No disputes yet. Spotted an error or a better source? Open the first one.

View At A Past Year

The atlas records no dated fact of its own for this entry, so there is no other year to choose.