Akasha, usually translated “space” or “ether,” is the first and subtlest of the five great elements, the panchamahabhuta, in Sanatana Dharma’s account of the physical world. Before air, fire, water, or earth, there is akasha: the field of pure extension and openness within which everything else can exist and move. Where the later four elements are increasingly dense and tangible, akasha has almost no qualities at all beyond sound, which Vedic thought holds to be its defining characteristic, the medium through which sound travels and in which it is first heard.
In Vedantic cosmology, akasha is the first element to emerge from Brahman in the process of creation, arising directly from the unmanifest before giving rise, in turn, to air, fire, water, and earth. Because it comes first and is subtlest, akasha pervades all the other elements without being altered by them; it is present equally inside a stone, inside a flame, inside a body, and in the emptiness between the stars. Some schools distinguish several kinds of akasha: the physical space we move through, the space within the heart understood as the seat of consciousness, and the space of pure awareness itself, chidakasha, which is not spatial at all but is spoken of in spatial terms because ordinary language has no better way to point at something without boundary.
The Chandogya Upanishad uses akasha as a teaching device for exactly this reason: because space has no shape, cannot be grasped, is never used up no matter how many things are placed within it, and yet is the condition for anything at all to have a location. The individual self, it suggests, is like the space within a pot, apparently bounded and separate, while Brahman is like the space that pervades everywhere; when the pot breaks, the space within was never actually different from the space without. Akasha, in this sense, becomes less a physical element and more a metaphor for the boundless awareness in which all boundaries turn out to be provisional.
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Related reading
- Panca Mahabhuta — the five elements, of which akasha is the first
- Shabda Brahman — sound as the property akasha carries
- Tattva — where akasha sits among the building blocks of reality
- Mantra Vidya — the science of sacred sound
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