The guru begins where the disciple’s sense of I sits most firmly, in the body, and verse 72 takes it apart into a list. The body is joined together of constituents the verse names one by one: marrow, bone, fat, flesh, blood, skin, and the outer skin named separately from it, seven in all. It is fitted out with limbs and lesser limbs, and the verse names those too: feet, thighs, chest, arms, back, head. Madhavananda’s rendering of verse 72 is missing from the scanned copy, so the sense here is taken from the Sanskrit alone, and the Sanskrit is only a list, with no verb of judgment in it. The judgment waits for verse 87; what verse 72 does is spread the body out in parts, so that a man can see, item by item, the thing he has been calling I all his life. A sculptor works the same way from the other end, taking from the stone everything that is not the figure, and the figure is what remains. The taking away here begins with the heaviest material, and the list of seven substances and six parts is its first cut.

72 · This body, what it is made of

Verse 73 gives the body its name and its reputation together. This body, known everywhere as the seat of the delusion I and mine, is what the wise call the gross body. Both halves of the delusion live here: I, which means I am this body, and mine, which means the house, the family and the possessions that gather around whatever is taken for I. The second half of the verse starts a separate thread. Space, air, fire, water and earth are the subtle elements, and verse 74 says what becomes of them. United with portions of one another, they become gross, and in that state they are the causes of the gross body; Madhavananda’s note describes the process, which the tradition calls panchikarana, the fivefold compounding: each element is halved, one half is divided into four, and each gross element is made of half of itself with an eighth of each of the other four. The “they” in his sentence is his own supplement to a verse whose subject is carried over from verse 73. Their subtle measures, the tanmatras, become the objects of the senses, the five groups beginning with sound, for the pleasure of the enjoyer; his note adds that pleasure here includes its opposite, since the same objects bring misery too. The two verses lay the body and the world it perceives on one table, made from the same five elements, the one in their gross form and the other in their subtle measures. The knower is a different matter. The verses count the body and its objects among the things perceived, and the one who perceives them is the Self, which no list of elements reaches.

73 · The seat of I and mine

74 · Elements, body, and the five objects of sense

Those who are bound to these objects, verse 75 says, are fools, and the thing that binds them is a rope: the stout rope of raga, attachment, which the verse calls exceedingly hard to subdue. Tied by it they come and go, down and up, carried at speed by the messenger of their own karma. The coming and going is birth and death. Madhavananda’s note reads the up and down as the bodies a man takes in turn, from those of the gods to those of brutes, each assigned by the merit of his work, and the messenger as the officer who seizes a culprit and carries him off to whatever sentence the court has fixed; the karma a man has made is the officer that takes him where he has earned to go. Verse 76 then shows the rope at work in five lives. The deer, the elephant, the moth, the fish and the bee met death bound each to one of the five objects beginning with sound, through its own guna, and Madhavananda points out that guna means both a rope and a tendency, so that each creature was tied by its own leaning. The pairing the commentators give is the deer to sound, the elephant to touch, the moth to form, the fish to taste and the bee to smell; the verse names only the animals and the five objects. Each of the five was undone by one open door. The verse ends on a question with its answer inside it: what of man, who is bound by all five.

75 · The rope of attachment

76 · Five animals, one sense each

Verse 77 measures the harm an object does against the most feared poison a village knows. An object of sense is tivra in its harm, fiercer, more virulent, than even the venom of the black snake. The comparison turns on reach. Poison kills the one who takes it, the man who swallows it or is bitten; an object kills even the one who sees it with the eye. The venom has to arrive in the body. The object has done its work at a distance, through a glance, when a wish has formed in the mind and the thing itself was never touched. Madhavananda’s note says the eye stands for all the organs here, so that contact through any sense is meant. From this measure verse 78 draws its condition for liberation. Whoever is released from the great snare of craving for objects, a snare the verse calls exceedingly hard to escape, he alone is fit for liberation, and no one else, even a man versed in the six shastras, the six systems of philosophy in Madhavananda’s note. The test the verse sets is the loosening of that snare, and learning is given no weight on the scale, since a man who has mastered six systems and kept his craving is counted among those who are unfit.

77 · An object of sense, fiercer than poison

78 · Whoever is free of the craving is the one who is fit

Verse 79 is about seekers whose dispassion has not gone deep, and its word for their condition is apata-vairagya, a dispassion of the surface, of the first impression. Such seekers of liberation set out to cross the ocean of becoming; midway, the graha of craving seizes them by the throat, turns them back by force, and drowns them. Graha is a water-creature that seizes; Madhavananda renders it shark, and the usual reading of the image is the crocodile, which takes a swimmer from below and holds him. Either way the danger lies in the middle of the water, past the point where turning back is easy, and the seizure comes from the hope the seeker still carried, which had gone under with him and surfaced halfway across. Verse 80 keeps the same creature and adds a weapon. The man who has killed the graha named sense-object with the sword of firm dispassion, mature dispassion in Madhavananda’s phrase, crosses the ocean of becoming free of obstruction. The two verses set the two dispassions side by side, the one that looks like dispassion and drowns a man, and the one that has been honed until it cuts.

79 · Surface dispassion, and drowning midway

80 · The sword of dispassion

Two roads are laid out in verse 81, and each is sealed with the same word, viddhi, know this. On the first walks a man of unclean mind, which Madhavananda renders as the stupid man, along the rough roads of the objects of sense, and death comes to meet him at every step: know this. The Sringeri reading has death striking him at every step and calls that settled, and the sense is the same. On the second road walks a man who goes by the word of well-wishing good people and of the guru, and by his own reasoning, and for him the fruit comes about: know this to be true. Madhavananda takes the well-wishing and the goodness as the guru’s own qualities, so that the guidance in his rendering comes from one worthy teacher; the Sanskrit will also bear a reading in which friends, good men and the guru are three sources, and either way the verse joins what is heard from outside to the walker’s own reasoning, so that neither does the work alone. Verse 82 turns to the disciple in the second person with a condition and a prescription. If you have a longing for liberation, shun the objects of sense from a great distance, as you would poison; and like nectar cultivate contentment, compassion, forgiveness, straightness, calm and self-restraint. The verse’s last words set the manner: nityam adarat, always, and with care. These six are plain virtues, with no display in any of them, and the verse asks that they be tended every day with the attention a man gives to something he cannot afford to lose.

81 · Two roads

82 · Leave the poison, drink the nectar

Verse 83 names the one task that is to be attempted at every moment, release from the bondage made by beginningless ignorance, and then names the man who sets it aside. He gives himself to the nourishment of this body, and the verse says of the body that it is parartha, for others: it exists for the use of others, and Madhavananda’s note says what that comes to, that after death it is eaten perhaps by dogs and jackals. The man who abandons the task for the sake of such a body kills himself by that act. The verb for his condition is that he is attached to the body’s feeding, sunk in it, and this is the man the verse has in view: the one whose occupation has become the body’s care while the task that was always due goes undone. Verse 84 gives him a picture. One who wants to see the Self while remaining a seeker of the body’s nourishment is a man who sets out to cross a river holding a crocodile in the belief that it is a log. The log would carry him; the thing he has taken hold of will take him under, and the harder he grips it the surer his drowning. Seeing the Self and feeding the body as one’s purpose pull in opposite directions, and the verse says the second will win if the two are held together, because the support the seeker leans on is alive and has its own appetite.

83 · Leaving the real work to feed the body

84 · Mistaking a crocodile for a log

The word death changes its meaning in verse 85. For the seeker of liberation, moha alone is the great death, delusion regarding the body and the rest, and Madhavananda’s note defines the delusion exactly: that I am the body, or that the body and the things around it are mine. Whoever has fully conquered this delusion deserves the state of liberation. The body’s death comes to every man once; the death the verse names is lived in daily, as long as the equation I am this body stands, and conquering it is the condition the verse sets. Verse 86 turns the statement into an order. Conquer the delusion, jahi moham, that great death, in the body, in wife, in children and in the rest; conquering it, the munis go to that supreme abode of Vishnu, and Madhavananda’s note traces the phrase to the Rig Veda, 1.22.20. The object of the verb is the delusion. Wife and children are named as the places where the delusion of mine lodges deepest, and what the verse commands is the end of the identification by which a man’s I and mine are staked on them; the verse itself adds no softening and promises nothing about what remains once the delusion is gone, except the abode the sages reach.

85 · Delusion, the real great death

86 · Conquer this delusion

The body’s constituents return in verse 87, listed again with sinew added, and with the judgment that verse 72 withheld. This gross body, crowded with skin, flesh, blood, sinew, fat, marrow and bone, and full of urine and feces, is nindya, to be censured. Madhavananda has “to be deprecated” and gathers the last two items into “other offensive things”; the verse names them. The censure is medicine for the blind attachment the body attracts, the grooming, the pride and the fear taken past any limit, and the verse administers it by showing a man what he is grooming. Verse 88 then places this body in a scheme that will hold for the two bodies still to come, each body paired with a state. From the gross elements, compounded fivefold as verse 74 described, and by past karma, this gross body came into being, and it is the Self’s abode of experience, bhoga-ayatana, the place where enjoyment happens. Its state is waking, because gross objects are experienced in it. The body is the house in which experience is had; the one who has the experience is named in the verse’s genitive, atmanah, of the Self, and the house belongs to that occupant.

87 · The body, a clear look

88 · The gross body and the waking state

Waking is the gross body’s own state, and verse 89 says what fills it. Through the outer senses the jiva itself, identifying with this body, enjoys gross things in their many forms, and the verse lists them: garlands, sandal paste, women and the rest. Madhavananda’s rendering gives garlands and sandal paste and leaves the third item out; the Sanskrit has it. Because this enjoyment happens here, the body’s prominence is in waking. The verse’s hinge is identification. The jiva enjoys as this body, having taken the body for itself, and the enjoyment the senses bring in is counted as the jiva’s own on that basis. Verse 90 gives the body its image, and the word viddhi, know, appears again: know this gross body, on which a man’s whole outer world rests, to be like the house of a householder. Everything that happens between a man and the world outside him is transacted through this body, as a householder’s dealings are transacted from his house, and a householder, however he loves the house, knows it as the place he lives from.

89 · In waking, the outer world

90 · The body, a householder’s house

Verse 91 closes the account of the gross body with a list of its properties, and the list reaches further than most men would allow. Birth, decay and death are properties of the gross body. Stoutness and the like, in their many kinds, are its properties. Childhood and the other stages are its conditions. The rules of varna and ashrama, of class and stage of life, belong to it, and so do diseases of many kinds, and the treatments it meets with, worship, insult and high honor among them. The verse assigns every item to the body. The man who says I am growing old is naming a change in the body; the man who says I was insulted is naming something that landed on the body and the name attached to it; the man who says I am a Brahmin is naming a rule that governs the body’s birth and conduct. The verse makes no exception for the items a man holds closest, and that is its force: the social self, with its honors and its wounds, is placed among the body’s properties beside stoutness and disease.

91 · These are all properties of the body

With the gross body laid down, verse 92 turns to its instruments, the ten senses, and sorts them by what they do. Ear, skin, eye, nose and tongue are the organs of knowledge, so called from their knowing of objects; speech, hands, feet, anus and the generative organ are the organs of action, so called from their inclination toward works. Five bring the world in and five act on it. The division is by function, and so is the reason given for each name, which is how the verses that follow will proceed with the mind as well: a thing is named by the work it does. The ten are instruments, and the same method that laid the body down is already at work on them, since an instrument is something used, and the verses are looking for the one who uses it.

92 · The ten senses

The inner organ comes next, and verses 93 and 94 treat it as verse 92 treated the senses, by naming it from its functions. The antahkarana, the inner instrument, is called manas, buddhi, ahamkara and chitta according to its own operations, one organ under four names. It is manas, mind, from considering and doubting, sankalpa and vikalpa, the weighing of one thing against another, which Madhavananda calls considering the pros and cons; it is buddhi, intellect, from its property of determining the truth of a thing, the settling of what was weighed. Verse 94 gives the other two. It is ahamkara, ego, from abhimana here, which is identification: it takes this body as itself and says I, and Madhavananda renders the phrase as its identification with this body as one’s own self. It is chitta from the quality of seeking what serves it, which his note reads as the seeking of pleasurable objects, the function that keeps returning to what it wants and recalling what it has had. The I that a man takes for one solid thing is thus shown as a set of operations: a wanting and doubting, a deciding, a claiming of the body as oneself, a seeking after one’s own ends. What is made of operations is something that operates, and the verses are tracing it as an instrument, the finest so far.

93 · The inner instrument, mind and intellect

94 · Ego and chitta

Verse 95 treats the vital breath the same way, as one thing under several names. This same prana becomes prana, apana, vyana, udana and samana by itself, through difference of function and difference of modification, as gold and water do; Madhavananda’s note fills the comparison in, the one gold fashioned into many ornaments, the one water taking the forms of foam and waves. The five breaths are one breath at five tasks. Verse 96 then gathers the whole subtle body into a single count. The five beginning with speech, the organs of action; the five beginning with the ear, the organs of knowledge; the five beginning with prana; the five elements beginning with space; buddhi and the rest, the inner organ under its four names; and avidya, ignorance, together with desire and action, kama and karma: these are the puryashtaka, the eight cities in Madhavananda’s rendering, eight groups, and together they are called the subtle body. The count is of eight groups: four groups of five, then the inner organ, ignorance, desire and action, each counted as one. Everything that was taken apart from verse 92 to verse 95 is here, and the two drivers of a life, the wanting and the doing, are added to the inventory beside the ignorance the verse lists with them.

95 · One prana, five works

96 · Puryashtaka, the city of eight

A call to listen opens verse 97, and what follows is the subtle body’s definition in one sentence. This body called subtle, also named the linga, is born of the elements before their compounding, carries the vasanas, the stored impressions, makes the fruits of karma experienced, and is a beginningless upadhi of the Self, brought about by the Self’s own ignorance. Upadhi is the word to hold. An upadhi is a limiting adjunct, something set beside a thing that makes the thing appear to have the adjunct’s qualities; a red flower set beside a clear crystal makes the crystal look red, and the crystal has taken on nothing, since the redness goes when the flower is moved. Madhavananda renders upadhi as superimposition. The verse says this adjunct has no beginning and that it rests on ignorance, so that what removes it is knowledge, as the crystal’s redness is removed by taking the flower away. Verse 98 gives the subtle body its state, as verse 88 gave the gross body waking. Dream is its distinct state, in which it shines with itself alone remaining, the outer world withdrawn and the subtle body left as the only material; in dream the buddhi, by itself, which Madhavananda’s note reads as independently of any object outside, works from the manifold vasanas of waking time, and the sentence runs on into verse 99 to say what the buddhi does with them.

97 · The subtle body, an upadhi of the self

98 · Dream, the state of the subtle body

Verse 99 completes the sentence of verse 98, and the grammar of it decides a doctrine. In dream the buddhi, from the vasanas of waking, takes on the role of doer and the rest and shines in that role; the subject of taking on doership is the buddhi. Where this happens, the Supreme Self shines by itself, with the intellect as its only upadhi, the witness of everything, sakshi, and it is not stained by the least trace of the works the buddhi does; because it is unattached, asanga, it is not stained in the slightest by the works its upadhi performs. Doership belongs to the buddhi, and the buddhi, Madhavananda’s note says, stands here for the whole inner organ, which does whatever it does by borrowing the Self’s light. Among these verses this is the first to describe the Self in its own right, and two words carry the description, witness and unattached. A screen on which a fire is shown is a modern picture of the same relation: the fire runs its course on the screen, and the screen is unburnt, since showing is all it does. Verse 100 gives the older picture. This subtle body is the instrument of all the activity of the Self who is consciousness, as the adze and the other tools are the instruments of a carpenter; by that fact alone, the verse says, the Self is unattached. The adze takes the marks of the work and wears down with it, and the carpenter’s hand carries no mark of the cutting. The activity passes through the instrument, and what the verse concludes from the instrument’s being an instrument is the owner’s freedom from everything done with it.

99 · The witness stays untouched

100 · The carpenter’s tool

The carpenter’s rule is applied to the instruments one by one in verses 101 and 102. Blindness, dimness and sharpness are properties of the eye, from its fitness or its defect; in the same way deafness, dumbness and the rest are properties of the ear and the other organs, and never, the verse says, of the Self, the knower. A clouded glass gives a clouded view, and the sight of the one looking through it is unchanged; the fault is in the instrument’s condition, and the knower sees through whatever condition the instrument is in. Verse 102 does the same for the breath. Inhalation and exhalation, yawning, sneezing, secretion, and the departure from the body at death, with the rest of that kind, are called by those who know them the works of prana and its companions, and hunger and thirst are properties of prana itself. The verse puts the most forceful of the body’s demands, the ones that feel most like one’s own, on the side of the instrument. The one who knows the hunger is the knower of verse 101; the hunger is a condition of the breath, and the verses place even the going out of the breath at death among the things done by an instrument the Self is aware of.

101 · Blindness is a property of the eye, not yours

102 · Hunger and thirst are properties of prana

Verse 103 explains how an instrument came to feel like a self. The inner organ stays in these, the eye and the other organs, and in the body, with the identification I, and it does so by the light of a reflection, abhasa, the reflected consciousness of the Self. The moon is bright at night by a light that comes from the sun, and the inner organ is conscious in the same way, by a light it has borrowed; it says I, it appears to know, and the knowing is the Self’s, reflected in it. Verse 104 names the borrower’s work. Know that to be the ahamkara, the ego, which identifies itself and is the doer and the enjoyer, and which, through its union with sattva and the other gunas, attains the three states, waking, dream and deep sleep, as Madhavananda’s note specifies. The two verses describe the whole entanglement in a few words: the Self is the witness of verse 99 and the unattached owner of the adze of verse 100, the ego is the part of the instrument that, by the Self’s borrowed light, claims the doing and the enjoying as its own and passes through the three states on the strength of the claim. The adze has taken the carpenter’s name.

103 · The inner instrument, by borrowed light

104 · The ego, doer and enjoyer

Pleasure and pain are assigned in verse 105. When the objects are favorable the ego is happy, and when they turn against it the ego is unhappy; pleasure and pain are properties of the ego, and the verse closes by saying whose properties they are not, the ever-blissful Self’s. What rises and falls with the objects is a property of something that depends on the objects, and the Self’s bliss, the verse says, is sadananda, constant. Verse 106 gives the ground for that word in an argument. An object is dear for the sake of the Self, and never dear of itself; because the Self is by its own nature the dearest of all; therefore the Self is ever blissful, and sorrow never touches it. Madhavananda’s note sends the argument to its source, the Brihadaranyaka Upanishad, Yajnavalkya’s teaching to his wife Maitreyi, where the husband is said to be dear for the sake of the self and the same is said of everything else that is dear. The reasoning runs in two steps: everything a man wants he wants for the sake of his own self, so the self is what he holds dearest; and what is dearest of all, and dear without any further reason, is bliss by its own nature. The bliss men look for in the objects is the Self’s, which the objects borrow for the time they are dear.

105 · Pleasure and pain, whose properties

106 · The dearest, the self

Verse 106 called the Self ever blissful, and verse 107 supplies the evidence. That in deep sleep, with no object present, the bliss of the Self is experienced, is attested by four witnesses, and the verse names them: shruti, the revealed word; direct perception; tradition; and inference. Madhavananda’s note lists the Chandogya, the Brihadaranyaka and the Kaushitaki among the Upanishads that attest it, and observes that the verb is plural, the four testifying together. The direct perception is every man’s own: in dreamless sleep nothing was gained, nothing was seen, no object was there, and on waking he says that he slept well, with the memory of a rest he can call nothing else. The verse’s point is the absence of objects. Bliss was had with nothing outside to supply it, so the bliss was the Self’s own, as verse 106 argued, and every night it is tasted and left behind unrecognized.

107 · The proof of deep sleep

The subtlest layer of the not-Self is maya, and verse 108 gives her titles before her nature. She is named the unmanifest, avyakta; she is the power of the supreme Lord; she is beginningless ignorance, made of the three gunas; and she is para, which Madhavananda renders as superior to her effects and glosses, in a parenthesis of his own, as their cause. She is to be inferred from her effects, and only by a man of clear intellect, since she is never seen in herself; and by her this whole universe is brought forth. Madhavananda’s note draws out two of the titles. The unmanifest is the state in which the three gunas lie in balance and no universe has yet appeared, and the balance disturbed is the beginning of the world; and the power of the Lord marks the Vedanta view off from the Sankhya, whose prakriti is insentient and independent, where maya has no standing apart from the Lord whose power she is. Verse 109 then says what cannot be said of her, in three pairs with a third member each. She is neither being nor non-being, nor of both natures; neither different nor non-different, from Brahman as the commentators supply, nor both; neither made of parts nor without parts, nor both. She is most wonderful, and her form is anirvachaniya, indescribable, beyond any account in words. The Advaita reasoning behind the first pair is that what knowledge removes cannot be called being, and what is experienced cannot be called non-being; the verse itself only closes each door in turn, including the door marked both, and leaves her where no category reaches.

108 · Maya, the unmanifest power

109 · Maya, neither this nor that

What verse 109 could not describe, verse 110 says can be destroyed. Maya is destroyed by the awakening to the pure, non-dual Brahman, as the error of the snake is destroyed by discrimination of the rope; the knowledge of what is there ends the appearance of what was never there, and nothing is removed from the path except an error. The second half of the verse introduces her gunas, well known as rajas, tamas and sattva, each known by its own evident effects, and verses 111 to 119 take them in that order. Verse 111 begins with rajas, whose power is vikshepa, projection, the throwing out of forms, and the verse calls this power activity by nature. From it the primeval flow of activity spread, which Madhavananda’s note reads as the world-process itself, the phenomenal world evolving and withdrawing in turn; and from it also arise, without pause, attachment and the rest, and grief and the rest, which the verse calls modifications of the mind. The projecting power has a cosmic scale and a private one in the same verse: the stream of activity that is the world, and the stir in one mind that will not let a wish end before the next begins. Madhavananda’s note adds that this power projects a new form only after the real nature of a thing has been veiled, and that veiling is the power of tamas, taken up in verse 113.

110 · Knowledge destroys it, and its three gunas

111 · Rajas, the power of projection

Verse 112 lists the properties of rajas and calls them dire, ghorah: lust, anger, greed, arrogance, spite, egoism, envy and jealousy, with the rest of their kind. From rajas comes a man’s outward drive, pravritti, the push toward things, and therefore, the verse concludes, rajas is a cause of bondage. The list is uncomfortable because every item on it is familiar from the inside. The verse offers it as a diagnosis: when anger rises, or envy at another’s good, what has risen is a property of rajas, a guna at work, and the verse’s own classification places it among the stirrings of maya and outside the Self the preceding verses described as witness and unattached. The outward drive is the bond itself, since what pushes a man toward objects is what ties him to them, and rajas is the name for the push.

112 · The works of rajas, and bondage

Tamas has its own power, and verse 113 names it avriti, the veiling, by which a thing appears other than it is. This veiling is the root cause of a man’s samsara, his passage through births, and it is the cause that sets the projecting power going. The rope and the snake show the order. First the dusk veils the rope, so that its true nature does not show; then onto the veiled rope the mind projects a snake. Veiling comes first and projection after, and the false can rise only where the real has been covered, which is why verse 113 calls the veiling the cause of the projection. Verse 114 says how far the veiling reaches. Even a man of understanding, even a scholar, even a clever man, even one adept at seeing the exceedingly subtle Self, when he is licked over by tamas, which Madhavananda softens to overpowered, does not understand, though the matter is explained to him clearly and in many ways; he takes what delusion has superimposed as the right account and clings to its qualities. The verse ends with an exclamation of its own, that the great veiling power of dreadful tamas is strong. The warning is to the able. Intelligence and learning are given no exemption, and the man most sure that he will understand is named among those the veil can cover.

113 · Tamas, the power of covering

114 · Tamas clouds even the learned

Verse 115 names four forms the veiling takes, and each can be recognized in one’s own mind. Absence of judgment, the mind unable to form a thought about the matter at all; contrary judgment, the mind thinking the reverse of what is so; the holding of a thing to be impossible, which Madhavananda renders as want of definite belief, a vague notion with no conviction in it; and doubt. These, the verse says, never leave a man who has any connection with the veiling power, and meanwhile the projecting power torments him ceaselessly. The two powers work as a pair: one holds a man in the dark, the other fills the dark with fears and wants, so that he is both held and struck. Verse 116 lists the everyday forms of tamas: ignorance, lassitude, dullness, sleep, heedlessness and stupidity, with the rest of their kind. A man driven by these understands nothing whatever, and stays like a sleeper or like a post, which Madhavananda renders as a stock or stone. The mark of rajas was motion without rest; the mark of tamas is weight without awareness, the post that stands and knows nothing of standing.

115 · Covering and projection, tormenting together

116 · The remaining forms of tamas

Sattva, the third guna, is treated in verse 117 with a comparison and a qualification. Sattva is pure like water, and the word clear in Madhavananda’s rendering is his own supplement; yet even so, the verse says, joined with the other two it makes for samsara, since a guna it remains, a strand of maya, and in mixture with rajas and tamas it keeps a man in the round of births. Its special office is in the second half of the verse. In sattva the reflection of the Self is reflected, and so reflected it lights up the whole inert world like the sun; Madhavananda has a glimpse of the Atman where the Sanskrit has the Self’s image or reflection. The water explains the office. Muddy water shows nothing; clear water gives back the sun, and the sun’s image on it is what lights the things around. The verse’s only luminary is the sun, and the reflection is the Self’s, the same borrowed light by which verse 103 said the inner organ appears conscious. Sattva is the clearest medium that light has, and still a medium, and the verse keeps both facts in one sentence.

117 · Sattva, clear water, and not on its own

Verses 118 and 119 divide sattva into two grades by its traits. Mixed sattva, sattva with some rajas and tamas still in it, has for its properties the absence of pride and the virtues listed with it, which Madhavananda’s note refers to the thirteenth chapter of the Gita; the niyamas and the yamas, the observances and the restraints of Patanjali’s yoga; faith; devotion; mumukshuta, the longing for liberation; the divine wealth of qualities that opens the sixteenth chapter of the Gita; and turning away from the unreal. The longing for liberation is itself listed here, a trait of a guna, so that the wish to walk the path is counted as the fruit of a mind growing clear, and so is everything a seeker would call his goodness. Verse 119 gives the properties of pure sattva, with no admixture: cheerfulness, serenity of mind; the experience of one’s own Self; supreme peace; contentment; delight; and steadiness in the Supreme Self, by which a man attains the essence of everlasting bliss. The two lists differ in kind. Mixed sattva yields the qualities a seeker brings to the road; pure sattva yields the experience of the Self and the lasting bliss that comes with it, and the verse says so without reservation. Pure sattva is still a guna, as verse 117 said of sattva as such, and verse 120 will count it into the causal body; what verse 119 claims for it is the experience of one’s own Self and the bliss that does not end.

118 · The qualities of mixed sattva

119 · The qualities of pure sattva

The third body is named in verse 120. This unmanifest, described through the three gunas, is what is called the causal body of the Self, and its distinct state is deep sleep, sushupti, in which all the functions of the senses and of the intellect are dissolved. It is causal because the other two bodies issue from it: it is the balanced state of the gunas that Madhavananda’s note on verse 108 called the unmanifest, out of which, once the balance stirs, the subtle and the gross unfold. His note on verse 120 adds a guard that matters. The functions are suspended in deep sleep in ignorance, and in samadhi in knowledge, and that is the whole difference between two states that look alike from outside. Verse 121 defines the state. Deep sleep is the cessation of every kind of knowing, with the intellect remaining in the form of a seed; the evidence for it is the saying known the world over, I knew nothing. Madhavananda’s note draws the inference the verse intends: this negative remembrance proves that the mind continued through sleep in its seed form, since what remembers having known nothing was there to have known. The verse’s own point is the seed. In sleep the intellect withdrew into a state from which it opens again in the morning, carrying the record of a blank. Who it was that knew the blank, and could report it, is the question the next verses hand on, and it belongs to the account of the Self that begins at verse 124.

120 · The causal body and deep sleep

121 · I knew nothing

Verse 122 sweeps everything since verse 72 into one heap. The body, the senses, the pranas, the mind, the ego and the rest; all the modifications; the objects of sense, pleasures and the rest; the elements beginning with space; and the whole universe, up to the unmanifest: all this, the verse says, is the not-Self, anatma. The disciple’s fifth question in verse 49 was what the non-Self is, and this is the answer in full, with its range marked at both ends, from the body a man can touch to the unmanifest that verse 120 made the causal body, the balance of the gunas before anything appears. The ground of the sweep is the one the verses have used throughout: each item is something known, perceived, experienced, and the Self is the knower of verse 101 and the witness of verse 99, which no list of the known contains. Verse 123 adds maya herself and gives the heap its comparison. Maya, and all of maya’s effects from mahat down to the body, mahat being cosmic intelligence, the first thing to issue from maya, as Madhavananda’s note explains, with the hierarchy of the Katha Upanishad behind it: know all of this, the verse says, to be the not-Self, and asat, unreal, like a mirage in the desert. The mirage gives asat its sense. The water is seen, the shimmer is there on the sand, a man walks toward it, and at the place there is nothing to drink; every bit of the water’s being belonged to the sand and the heat that showed it. Maya and her effects are unreal in that way, appearing, lived in, resting wholly on Brahman as the mirage rests on the sand, with no being of their own, and verse 110 has already said what ends the appearance, the knowledge of Brahman, as knowledge of the rope ends the snake. The verse closes with viddhi tvam, know this, you: after fifty-one verses of inventory the guru hands the conclusion to the disciple to hold, and verse 124 begins to say what the knower is.

122 · All of this, the not-self

123 · A mirage