Annamaya, the Sheath Made of Food

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.