Śivasaṃhitā 3.49

The instruction about sweat is a technically precise medical detail: during intense prāṇāyāma, especially in the first stage (ārambhāvasthā), the body perspires. The text prescribes mardana — rubbing, friction — to reabsorb sweat back into the body rather than letting it evaporate. In āyurvedic physiology, sweat carries dhātu (vital tissue); losing it is losing vital potency. Rubbing returns the minerals to the skin.

Sveda (sweat, perspiration) in advanced prāṇāyāma is the cutaneous manifestation that internal fire (agni) has activated with sufficient potency to burn accumulated āma (toxins) in the tissues. Mardana (friction, pressure massage) activates the cutaneous srotāṃsi (circulation channels) and returns heat inward rather than dispersing it. Sudhī (one of refined intelligence) is the one who recognizes the precise moment to apply this technique.

The promise of destroying karma — both present and past — through prāṇāyāma situates practice in the text’s deepest soteriological horizon. The sixteen prāṇāyāmas mentioned in following verses are sufficient, according to the text, to destroy the accumulated virtues and vices of previous existences — an affirmation that only makes sense from the conception of energy as the common substrate of both the physical and the karmic.