भूमिरापोऽनलो वायुः खं मनो बुद्धिरेव च।अहङ्कार इतीयं मे भिन्ना प्रकृतिरष्टधा॥
bhūmir-āpo ’nalo vāyuḥ khaṃ mano buddhir eva caahankāra itīyaṃ me bhinnā prakṛtir aṣṭadhā
Word by word
The verse says
Earth, water, fire, air, space, mind, intellect and the sense of being someone — this is my nature, divided eight ways.
In plain words
Five of these you would expect. Earth, water, fire, air, space: the world outside you.
Then the list keeps going and picks up your mind, your reasoning, and your sense of being a particular person.
They are put on the same side as the mud.
Where you've felt this · in health
You skip lunch. By four in the afternoon the man at the next desk has become genuinely unbearable — the way he clears his throat, the way he says your name. You eat something at five, and the irritation quietly leaves, and he goes back to being an ordinary man with a throat. Nothing about him changed in that hour.
Going deeper
Putting the mind on the material side of the line is the move that makes this whole chapter work.
Prakṛti means nature in the sense of stuff — whatever can be observed, weighed, altered. We expect earth and water on that list. We do not expect thought, reason and the sense of being someone in particular, because those feel like us rather than like things happening to us.
The claim is that they are weather. They have causes: food, sleep, the hour of the day, what somebody said this morning. They move on their own.
What this changes is how much authority a mood gets. When the afternoon turns grey and your life briefly looks like a mistake, you are not required to treat that as a verdict. It is a reading taken by an instrument that is itself part of the weather.