Sanskrit
अपाने जुह्वति प्राणं प्राणेऽपानं तथाऽपरे । प्राणापानगती रुद्ध्वा प्राणायामपरायणाः ॥
apāne juhvati prāṇaṃ prāṇe 'pānaṃ tathāpare prāṇāpāna-gatī ruddhvā prāṇāyāma-parāyaṇāḥ
Translation
Yet others pour as sacrifice the outgoing breath in the incoming, and the incoming in the outgoing, restraining the flow of the outgoing and incoming breaths, solely absorbed in the control of breathing.
Annie Besant · The Bhagavad-Gita, translated by Annie Besant (4th ed., 1922) — Wikisource · Public Domain
Explanation
The catalogue turns from ritual and sense-discipline to raw physiology: some pour apāna (the downward, exhaling breath) into prāṇa (the upward, inhaling breath) and the reverse, holding both in check as a discipline in its own right — prāṇāyāma, breath-retention, treated here as a yajña rather than a separate technique bolted onto Vedic sacrifice. The move is consistent with what’s come before: verse 26 already widened “sacrifice” to sense-restraint and verse 27 to the offering of the senses’ functions into the fire of self-control, so extending it to the mechanics of breathing is the same gesture applied one layer deeper. Verse 27’s phrase prāṇa-karmāṇi, “functions of life,” gets its concrete referent here — this is what regulating the life-breath actually looks like in practice.