Food Sheath

The five koshas are the sheaths or coverings that, in Vedantic thought, veil the innermost self, the atman, like the layers of an onion or a series of nested cases; the teaching is set out in the Taittiriya Upanishad, one of the older Upanishads, and elaborated in the Vedanta tradition. Annamaya kosha is the outermost, the sheath made of food, the physical body, built from and sustained by the food it eats and returning to the earth as food for other beings, which is the sense of its name. It is the grossest and most tangible of the five, the layer with which ordinary identity begins and which the inquiry into the self must learn to see as a covering rather than as the self itself. The koshas are arranged from this dense physical sheath inward through the vital, mental and intellectual sheaths to the sheath of bliss nearest the atman. The doctrine is ancient and Indian, a central model of the subtle anatomy of the person in Vedanta and in yoga.

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