Anapannasati - Why the breath?

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It's simple. Breathing affects body, feeling (or sensations) and mind.

When you breath, your abdomen inflates or deflates, and your rib cage also moves.

When you breath, you can feel the sensation of the breath on your upper lip, nostril and/or nasal passage.

If you breath fast, your mind becomes agitated. If you breath slowly, your mind calms down.

So, anapanasati includes realistic observation of body, feeling and mind, whereas meditation on bright white light or a mantra would only include observation and manipulation of mental objects.

Realistic observation of body, feeling and mind is needed to gain understanding into the nature of the five aggregates (form, feeling, perception, mental formations and consciousness) and dependent origination.

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When I first started serious meditation in 1975, I heard the breath being called the maha mantra - 'the great mantra'. This was also a term used by Hare Krishna for a chant. At the time I was meditating on 4 objects/subjects: the breath, light, music and nectar. Breath was always my favourite :-)

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The Buddha did not chose the breath. Instead, the breath chose the Buddha.

When the mind surrenders or abandons craving, the sense organs/objects of sight, sound, smelling, tasting, external touching & pre-occupation with thinking disengage.

What remains, as the most coarse or gross sense object, is the breathing.

When the mind is quiet, empty & free, i.e., when "mindfulness is established to the fore", the breathing automatically, without choosing, becomes the natural object of meditation.

This is the meaning of Anapanasati, namely, 'mindfulness with breathing' rather than 'awareness of breathing'.

Those who attempt to practise 'awareness of breathing' may experience some samatha (calmness) but will not progress very far because the path of the Buddha is the path of abandoning craving.

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The first good thing about the breath is that while you are alive, it is always available. Another good thing is that it is internal, not an external object. The purpose of this kind of meditation is to train the mind to be able to focus single pointedly. Ultimately, this ability can be used to meditate on the emptiness of self and all phenomena, eventually resulting in a direct perception of emptiness, AKA, Nirvana.

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Does it mean then that in daily life our main object should also be the breath?

In the context of Buddhist meditation, there are 40 subjects of meditation (Kammaṭṭhāna). These are divided into

The Noble Eightfold Path has 3 subdivisions:

Anapanasati is one of the meditation techniques under Vipassanā to develop the 4 Satipatthana. Vipassanā is easier to develop in daily life as Samatha requires longer hours of meditation to develop concentration (Samadhi). Anapanasati helps develop both Samadhi and Paññā at the same time, but this is not the only technique at your disposal.

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Seems that moderators are expecting a particular style in these answers, and so deleted my initial answer. I'll rephrase...

The reason that the breath is the most important meditation object is that unlike other objects they are always available. For example, you might forget your TM mantra or misplace your mandala. Other objects of meditation, such as decaying corpses, aren't usually freely available in the UK either :-)

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