I thought I would, but frankly I found it a bit depressing. 
One of the unfortunate things we find in Buddhism is that it’s not uncommon for silly ideas, once published, to gain traction. So indulge me while I respond to Flatulence and breathing meditation.
##Sources for farting mediation?
Leaving aside the various comments on problems in Buddhism, which make up the bulk of the article, I’ll just deal with the central thesis. This is that the term ānāpāna, usually translated as “in-breathing and out-breathing”, actually means, so far as I can tell, “burping and farting”. Amid the discussion of the various Yogic conceptions of “breath”, I was unclear exactly what the claim was, and probably it is a little more subtle that this, but anyway this is the gist.
The basis for this claim is an article written in 1919, Prāṇa and Apāna by G.W. Brown, which you can read in the internet archive. The article is briefly referenced in the PTS dictionary entry for apāna, but the dictionary doesn’t draw any inference from it, merely referring the reader to the discussion.
Flatulence and breathing meditation doesn’t discuss Prāṇa and Apāna in any depth, or at all really, merely asserting that this is common knowledge among students of Hinduism. To what extent its arguments are valid in brahmanical texts is beyond our concern here. What it fails to mention is that Prāṇa and Apāna doesn’t mention Buddhist sources at all, and is solely concerned with the meaning as defined in Sanskrit brahmanical sources. Nor does it discuss meditation, being concerned with the organic/spiritual concept of breath so central to the brahmanical philosophy.
Flatulence doesn’t attempt to argue why such a meaning must apply in the Buddhist context. The Buddhist terms are quite different, as I will show below. And the article doesn’t even mention the main terms actually used in Buddhism to describe breath meditation.
The only additional support adduced for the main thesis of Flatulence is the published Phd thesis by Ven Vajirañāṇa, Buddhist Meditation In Theory And Practice. Unfortunately, only a later edition of this text is available online, and the relevant footnote has been removed. Flatulence and breathing meditation doesn’t actually discuss the content of this note, preferring conspiratorial speculation to analysis. Given that, as acknowledged by the author of the article and reinforced by comments on the article, Vajirañāṇa elsewhere treated ānāpāna as “breath”, this can safely be dismissed.
This is the entire extent of the argumentation. Based on a mere allusion to an old article, Flatulence then sustains a series of allegations of lies, corruption, and failure that apparently characterize the whole Buddhist scholarly tradition since then.
Ignoring this, let us consider what the Buddhist texts actually say.
##On the breath in Buddhist meditation
First of all, in Pali we have two complementary sets of terms to deal with. The usual noun term for breath is ānāpāna. The normal Pali idiom is that a complementary verb form is formed from the same root, but here we use verbs from a different root, assasati and passasati. These resolve to ā + śvas and pa + śvas respectively.
Now, the situation is this. The basic description of breath meditation uses the verb form. This occurs perhaps 4 times as often as the noun form. Nowhere in Prāṇa and Apāna or any of the other sources discussed in Flatulence are these verbal forms even mentioned. Yet clearly they make up the primary source material. And they obviously mean “breathing in and out”: no-one disputes this.
One of the objections to the interpretation of apāna in particular in the meaning “breath” is that the prefix apa has the general meaning of “away, out, dispell”. But this is also the meaning of the pra- in prāṇa, so we have two terms meaning “outbreath”. We will return to this in due course, but for now, note that this objection does not apply to the verb forms. Indeed, a basic signification of ā- is “in” and pa- is “out”. So they fit perfectly.
So now to the noun forms. The individual word apāna doesn’t seem to occur in the texts at all. Indeed the term ānāpāna is almost entirely restricted to the compound ānāpānassati, describing “mindfulness of breathing”.
Note that this is a summary word, referring in brief to a concept and a practice that is already well understood by the student. Like other such terms, it is clearly derivative and secondary to the actual description of the practice, where, to repeat, we find only the verb forms.
Here is a typical example of how these are used together in the texts, from SN 54.1.
Kathaṃ bhāvitā ca, bhikkhave, ānāpānassati kathaṃ bahulīkatā mahapphalā hoti mahānisaṃsā? Idha, bhikkhave, bhikkhu araññagato vā rukkhamūlagato vā suññāgāragato vā nisīdati pallaṅkaṃ ābhujitvā ujuṃ kāyaṃ paṇidhāya parimukhaṃ satiṃ upaṭṭhapetvā. So satova assasati, satova passasati
And how is mindfulness of breathing, when developed and cultivated, of great fruit and benefit? It’s when a mendicant, gone to a wilderness, the root of a tree, or an empty hut, sits down in meditation posture, sets their body upright, and establishes presence of mindfulness. Mindful they breath in, mindful they breath out.
So here you can see that the the two sets of terms—the noun and the verb—are clearly coordinated: they refer to the same thing. It is a little curious that this coordinated pair relies on prefixes that don’t match up. It’s also striking how the noun phrase, with -ssati appended, resembles the verbal forms. Without wanting to say anything too definite on this, it seems to me that there’s an ambiguity—perhaps a confusion, perhaps a dialectical variation—in how these sets of terms ended up together.
To return once more to the Sanskrit terms, we know from the very title of the article that they are prāṇa and apāna. Remember, one of the basic problems with the Sanskrit terms is that both prefixes pra- and apa- have the sense of “out, away”, thus rendering the sense of “in and out breaths” problematic.
This is, however, not the case with the Pali terms. In Pali the compound ānāpāna resolves to āna + apāna. Here the prefixes are pa- (= Sanskrit pra-) and ā- (which does not equal Sanskrit apa-). Both the prefixes pa- in the verb form and apa- in the noun form provide the necessary sense of “out, ex-” to contrast with ā- as “in”. Thus the linguistic problem of the Sanskrit prefixes is not found in the Pali, and the sets of terms are clearly not equivalent.
##Bodily winds in Pali texts
As pointed out by some commenters in Flatulence, there are indeed references in Pali to the various winds in the body, in a manner comparable to that found in brahmanical texts. For example, at MN 28 we have:
Katamā cāvuso, ajjhattikā vāyodhātu? Yaṃ ajjhattaṃ paccattaṃ vāyo vāyogataṃ upādinnaṃ, seyyathidaṃ—uddhaṅgamā vātā, adhogamā vātā, kucchisayā vātā, koṭṭhāsayā vātā, aṅgamaṅgānusārino vātā, assāso passāso iti, yaṃ vā panaññampi kiñci ajjhattaṃ paccattaṃ vāyo vāyogataṃ upādinnaṃ
And what, reverend, is the interior air element? That which is internally and individually air, airy, and has been grasped. That is: upwards winds, downwards winds, winds in the belly, winds in the bowels, winds blowing through the limbs, in-breath and out-breath; and whatever else is interior and individual, air, airy, and has been grasped.
I don’t want to stray into the connections or lack thereof between this passage and the brahmanical texts. The most common list used in such contexts is the five vāyu, which are prāṇa, apāna, uḍāna, samāna, vyāna. Obviously these are not closely related to the Buddhist terminology, and any argument from one to the other would require clear support.
It is simply enough to note that the Buddhist texts do explicitly talk about various bodily winds, including flatulence and so on, but they use a quite distinct vocabulary. The operative term here is neither ānāpāna nor assasati but vātā, the normal word for “wind”. (Note that here the noun forms for “breath” are here derived from assasati rather than ānāpāna as we have seen earlier.)
##In conclusion
There are multiple other passages that confirm that these terms do, in fact, refer to the breath, several of which may be found in the comments of the original article. But I will beg leave to stop here. This has been an all-too-long rebuttal of an article that doesn’t deserve it. To sum up:
- The Pali ānāpāna and Sanskrit prāṇa/apāna are not equivalent.
- The essay that Flatulence relies on does not refer to Pali or Buddhist texts or terms at all.
- The central usage of ānāpāna is as a noun equivalent of assasati/passasati, which just means breath.
- When Pali texts refer to various bodily winds, they use different terms.
The article’s central thesis is without merit. The real reason the later dictionaries have not referred to Brown’s Prāṇa and Apāna is not because the compilers lacked critical faculties, but because the reference—a mere aside in a self-described “provisional” dictionary—is irrelevant.
