The role English plays worldwide is reflected not only in the development of distinct regional varieties like American or Australian English, but also in the wealth and multifariousness of its vocabulary. The original fusion of West Germanic languages with a later heavy dose of Latin, Greek,and French has, in terms of lexicon, become by now a colourful international potpourri. With each new word carrying some cultural baggage with it, the Anglo-Saxon world has gradually expanded to -among others- Asian shores.

"Prana", for example, is one of the Indian expressions which have popped up in recent years. (1) It is explained as "life-force" and appears in exotic contexts: yoga, aryuvedic medicine, Hindu meditation, and so forth. The obvious equivalent even farther East is the Chinese "ch'i" (or as the politically correct spelling goes, "qi") with all the fanciful associations it evokes. No wonder the alarmed rationalist smells New Age "energy" around the corner and hurries to profess healthy skepticism.(2)

Actually, however, the whole idea is nothing new for the West. Deriving from the root Ãpraa.n which expresses the concepts of "breathing" or "blowing (of the wind, etc.)", prana (or the middle-Indian Pali equivalent "pana") means "breath" and then "life" and also "living being". (3) Doesn't this remind us of the very beginning of the Bible (4) where "YHWH, God, formed the human, of dust from the soil, he blew into his nostrils the breath of life and the human became a living being" (5)?

Now, Carl Gustav Jung once indicated in passing that the Indian prana corresponds to the Greek pneuma. (6) This sounds convincing given the fact that pneuma a) originally simply indicated "air in motion" (7) which fits both, breath and wind, and b) is connected with the idea of life (8). Not only this, another correlation exists: prana is sometimes related to the mind (9) and rendered as "spirit" (10) which is exactly one meaning pneuma too was to acquire (11).

This picture seems, to put it mildly, a little bit different from the idea that everything "has" prana. Only living beings do or to be more exact, according to Jewish-Christian traditions, only human beings. As a matter of fact, "the breath of life" (nishmat hayyim in Hebrew) is understood to be "God's image" in which man was created. (12)

Now let us follow this line of reasoning a little bit further. What is necessary for speech? Obviously breath, life, and at least a human mind -in short, prana. Thus language is indeed something special, something not shared by animals, and so is its visible representation, script. And here, I believe, lies the reason for the power perceived in speech by our forebears, the magical might which they sensed in the spoken word and utilized to bless and to curse; here is the root for the aura of the written sound, the reverence and sense of holiness with which many cultures treated letters or the signs they used to give language form for the eye and shape fixed unlike ephemeral sounds. (13)

But this topic is not confined to mere "mystic" ruminations. If language is bound by breath and life and mind, if it is grounded in something "higher" so to speak (14), its use should be a reflection of this fact. We should employ it in a way which bears witness to its nature. This, at least, is the advice all time-honoured religious traditions impart, and in our era of virtually unlimited speech misuse in politics, economics, mass media and everyday communication, it might be not a bad idea to heed ancient wisdom and reclaim what could be healthy and pure in the first place. Let's welcome prana and its vital message to the English world.

Notes

1)See for example Webster's Third New International Dictionary of the English Language (Springfield: Merriam-Webster Inc., 1986, unabridged) p. 1782.

2) Both "prana" and "ch'i" can be found in the Skeptic's Dictionary which also glosses the epitome of fuzziness, said "energy".

3) See Monier Monier-Williams, A Sanskrit-English Dictionary (Tokyo: Meicho Fukyukai Co., 1986 repr.) p. 705; T. W. Rhys Davids and William Stede, Pali-English Dictionary (Delhi: Oriental Books Reprint Corporation, 1st Indian ed. 1975) p. 451.

4) If we follow Richard Elliott Friedman in his The Hidden Book in the Bible: The Discovery of the First Prose Masterpiece (HarperSanFrancisco, 1998) p. 69.

5) See Everett Fox, tr., The Five Books of Moses (New York: Schocken Books, 1995) p. 19.

6) See C. G. Jung, Symbols of Transformation (Bollingen Series XX: The Collected Works of C. G. Jung. Volume 5)(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990) p. 422.

7) See C. G. Jung, The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious (The Collected Works of C. G. Jung. Volume 9, Part 1) (London: Routledge, 1991) p. 209.

8) See Jung (1990) p. 316.

9) See Surendranath Dasgupta, A History of Indian Philosophy. Volume II (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1973 repr.) pp. 262-264.

10) See Monier-Williams, loc. cit..

11) See Jung (1991) p. 46. One is further reminded of the Hebrew ruah which means both "wind" and "spirit" (see Fox, op. cit., p. 13 n. 2), and of the idea of consciousness "riding on the wind" which is found in some Buddhist traditions. Compare further "wind is air, air is life, and life is soul" quoted from the Rosarium philosophorum in Jung, Psychology and Alchemy (Bollingen Series XX: The Collected Works of C. G. Jung. Volume 12)(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993) p. 178. The difference and/or relationship between the concepts spirit, consciousness and soul is far too complicated to be discussed here but it might at least be of interest to mention that, according to the text approved by the Deutscher Evangelischer Kirchenausschuß in 1912, Luther translated the last line of Gen. 2:7 as "und also ward der Mensch eine lebendige Seele". The use of "soul" (Seele) where the English says "being" may have been influenced by the understanding of the New Testament since the passage in question is alluded to by Paul in 1 Corinthians 15:45 where the first and the latest Adam are related to a living psyche and the pneuma which enlivens respectively (see Eberhard Nestle, Erwin Nestle and Alland, Novum Testamentum Graece et Latine [Stuttgart: WŸrttembergische Bibelanstalt, 1969] p. 454).

12) See Geoffrey Wigoder, editor-in-chief,The Encyclopedia of Judaism (New York: Macmillan Publishing Company, 1989) p. 666f.

13)See e.g. the Hebrew work entitled Sefer ha-Temunah which "can mean both 'Book of Configuration,' namely, the configuration of the Hebrew letters, or 'Book of the Image,' namely, the image of God". See Gershom Scholem, On the Kabbalah and Its Symbolism (New York: Schocken Books, 1996) p. 78. Compare further the use of Indian alphabets for meditative purposes as documented in Buddhist texts.

14)Interestingly enough, George Lakoff and Mark Johnson mention "breath" as one of the metaphors through which an "ineffable God becomes vital". See their recent Philosophy in the Flesh: The Embodied Mind and Its Challenge to Western Thought (New York; Basic Books, 1999) p. 568.