44दृग्दृश्यविवेक · Dṛg‑Dṛśya‑Viveka

Vidyāraṇya or Bhāratī Tīrtha, c. 1400 · lectures by Swami Sarvapriyananda, Vedanta Society of New York, 2016

Linked to 26 chapters: supports 11 · contradicts 7 · mechanism 9 · same claim 10 · pairing 5

Dṛg-Dṛśya-Viveka, दृग्दृश्यविवेक, means the discrimination between the seer and the seen, and the whole text is an exercise in one operating principle: whatever is seen is not the seer. Forms are seen by the eye, so the eye is not a form. The eye's defects are seen by the mind, so the mind is not the eye. The mind's moods are seen by something, so that something is not the mind. The text calls it the witness, and its first claim is that the witness is never itself seen. Everything after verse 1 is an unpacking of what follows if that is true: how a witness that never changes comes to feel like a person who is born, sleeps, suffers and dies; what power produces the appearance; how the appearance can be seen through in practice; and, in a postscript, who exactly gets free when the appearance goes. Sarvapriyananda's lectures follow the verses in order, one verse in the first evening and then about four an evening, and the chapter follows them, giving each verse in transliteration with a plain rendering before the commentary. It is a short text taught slowly, and its difficulty is not in the argument, which is simple, but in the claim that the argument describes what you already are.

The text names no author. Sarvapriyananda offers two candidates, Bhāratī Tīrtha and Vidyāraṇya, the author of the Pañcadaśī, and thinks Vidyāraṇya the likelier; the printed Sanskrit text used here ends with a colophon naming Bhāratī Tīrtha. Either way the text comes from South India, near what is now Mysore, six or seven hundred years ago. He has heard of versions that end at verse 31, and treats verses 32 to 46 as the author's own postscript, a revision of the same material from a different side.

Verses 1 to 5: the regress of seers

Sarvapriyananda skips the customary introductory lecture, for two reasons: nobody in the room is new to Vedanta, and the text is itself an introduction, a prakaraṇa grantha written to be studied before the Upanishads, the Gītā and the Brahma Sūtras with Śaṅkara's commentaries. He delivers the deferred introduction in the second evening, after verse 5. His method for every verse is in three stages: repeat what it says, understand it, then check whether it is so.

Verse 1 runs the regress in four quarters. Colours and shapes are seen; the eye sees them. The eye, with its sharpness or dullness or blindness, is seen; the mind sees it. The mind's contents, desire, doubt, faith, resolve, are seen; the witness sees them. The witness is seen by nothing. Sarvapriyananda draws three lessons from the first quarter and applies them at every step: the seer and the seen are different; the seer is one and the seen are many; the seer is relatively unchanging and the seen keep changing. He also reads the fourth quarter as a nesting rather than a ladder: the witness with the mind is the seer of the body and senses, and the witness with mind, body and senses is the seer of the world.

The last quarter, dṛg eva na tu dṛśyate, is the one he spends longest on. The witness is not an object of knowledge, but it is not therefore unknown. He quotes Vivekananda: the self cannot be known, but you must not go away thinking it is unknown; it is more than known, since in every knowledge the self reveals itself. The Kena Upaniṣad says the same in its own way, different from the known and different from the unknown, known in every act of knowing. Months later, in the tenth lecture, answering a question about consciousness and thought, he put the verse's claim in a sentence.

The witness never becomes the witnessed.¹

Verses 2 and 3 fill in the first two quarters with the same three lessons. One eye sees many forms, which change while it stays; that is how you know the eye is not a form. The mind knows when the eye fails; that is how you know the mind is not the eye. He glosses ekadhā in both verses as "by itself", the eye or the mind doing its work unaided, and draws the oneness from the second lesson. The rule is meant to be extended to every sense.

The list is the Bṛhadāraṇyaka Upaniṣad's (1.5.3) list of what the mind does, and he pauses on two items. Dhṛti, fortitude, the ability to hold to something, is among the qualities the Gītā's thirteenth chapter names as leading to self-knowledge. And doubt and faithlessness are on the list for a reason: they too are lit up by consciousness, so the one who denies the self is using the self to deny it. He gives Śaṅkara's line that the denier is himself what he denies, and his own comparison: it is like saying, out loud, that you have no tongue. Consciousness illumines these states directly, without introspection; you do not have to look at your fear to be aware of it, and the lecture's first memorable line is that what is aware of fear is not fearful. He adds a warning that recurs through the series. A swami in Uttarakhand told monks who felt they had become the witness that they had dug a hole and fallen into it: the moment they left and met a traffic jam, that witness would go. A witness held in place by effort is not the witness; the real one is there whether or not you attend to it.

Verse 5 gives the witness its character: self-luminous, neither rising nor setting, present in deep sleep as consciousness without an object. Sarvapriyananda qualifies the last phrase. To know the world you need the senses, and to know the body you need the mind; what consciousness lights without any instrument is the mind's own contents, and itself. His image for deep sleep is deep space, which looks dark not because there is no light but because there is nothing there to reflect it, and the image is chosen because reflection is where verse 6 goes next. He recalls a debate at a conference in which a neuroscientist said that on the usual definition there is no consciousness in deep sleep, and a philosopher of Indian thought answered that from that tradition's point of view deep sleep is the one state in which there is only consciousness. And he adds the caveat he makes in the first hour and repeats across the series: this is not anaesthesia. Awareness of pain shows you are not the pain; it does not remove the pain. He tells the story of a monk who quoted Vedanta before minor surgery and shouted like anyone else during it: the Vedanta had stayed in the books.

Verses 6 to 12: how the witness comes to feel like a person

If the witness is unchanging and the body is an object, why does the body feel conscious and why do we say "I" of it?

The text's answer is reflection. Consciousness is reflected in the mind as cit-chāyā, the shadow of consciousness, and Sarvapriyananda's term is reflected consciousness. His image is the sun reflected only in polished surfaces: a pool, a metal disc, a mirror, in each of which a little sun forms. The subtle body, the mind, is such a surface; a book is not. What the reflection produces, bhānam, he glosses as knowledge: every seeing, hearing, thinking, wanting and hating is possible because of it. He also flags that the verse divides the mind on purpose in a non-standard way. Vedanta usually counts four inner faculties, mind, intellect, ego and memory; here the author sets the I-sense on one side and everything else on the other, because the I-sense is what the argument needs to isolate.

He assigns the parts of the mirror image first: the face is the witness, the reflection is reflected consciousness, and the mirror is the I-sense. Then the iron ball: fire and iron look like one thing, and you cannot say where one stops.

From the I-sense the reflection is passed on, in that order: the I-sense catches it, transmits it to the rest of the mind, the mind to the senses, the senses to the body, as the moon lends the sun's light to the night, or as heat passes from fire to pan to water to vegetables. At every stage except the witness, consciousness is borrowed.

The last row is the one the text is about. The face is in no way related to the mirror; the mirror can break and the face is untouched; yet we feel "I am that". That felt relation is not natural and not earned; it is ignorance, and, in his phrase, it can be cut only by the sword of knowledge. He adds a point the chapter would otherwise lose: the "I" is not simply false but a mixture. "I exist", "I shine", "I am bliss" are knowledge; "I am this body", "I am so-and-so", "I am happy" are error. What knowledge removes is the identifications, not the I that exists.

And he draws the consequence bluntly, in the third lecture: it is not the ego that gets liberated. Liberation is from the ego. Asked what remains afterwards, he says the mind, the ego and the body go on doing what they did before; and in answer to a question on this verse he first introduces the threefold division of karma that verse 31 will need.

Verses 10 to 12 use the same apparatus on the three states. Consciousness does not brighten in waking and dim in sleep; the mind does. With the I-sense fully unfolded and joined to the reflection, the senses bring in objects and that is waking; with it half unfolded, the mind makes a film out of the impressions stored from waking, and that is dream; when it dissolves, there is no surface to reflect, and that is deep sleep, in which even the body is unconscious while consciousness is exactly what it was. He borrows a senior monk's story of the stationmaster who watches the express arrive and depart without moving. Birth and death, likewise, are undergone by the subtle body, the bundle of vital force, mind and intellect, and never by consciousness; he is careful that the subtle body experiences death, with the death of the physical body, but does not itself die. The individual, the jīva, is consciousness limited by one subtle body, as one sun is reflected in many buckets. The lecture on these verses also fields the objection about blindness, with Śaṅkara's reply that the blind man is not blind but mistaken about who he is.

Verses 13 to 19: the power that produces the appearance

Where do mind, body and world come from? Verse 13 names Māyā, the power of Brahman, neither different from it nor the same, as fire is to its power to burn. Māyā has two functions and the text's central diagnostic turns on keeping them apart. Vikṣepa projects: it puts a snake where there is a rope. Āvaraṇa veils. Sarvapriyananda is careful about what is veiled. Not the rope: the rope is what you are looking at. What is hidden is that it is a rope, the difference between what is there and what appears. In the same way Brahman is not hidden, and the witness is not hidden; the difference between Brahman and world, and between witness and mind, is. On this school's reading, he says, projection by itself is no problem at all; a world appearing is no more a fault than a film playing. Combined with the veil it becomes one, and the dream turns into a nightmare. Verse 14 has the line the series keeps returning to: Māyā spreads a net of name and form over Brahman. Wood becomes a table by acquiring a name and a shape and nothing else; gold becomes a ring; water becomes a wave. Two cautions go with the images. Ramakrishna's example of sand mixed with sugar, which an ant can separate, does not fit here, because there are not two things to separate. And the foam on the sea, which the text itself uses, is not to be stretched; it is a physical picture of layering, while the rope and the snake are a picture of error, and the verse means the second.

It was at this verse, not in answer to a student, that he raised modern physics himself: he had heard Lawrence Krauss describe the universe as quantum foam on an ocean of dark matter, and found the language uncanny, while insisting that nobody eight hundred years ago knew quantum mechanics. He then relayed Swami Smaranananda's warning against the parallel, on two grounds: the theories change, and the comparison needs a deep understanding of both sides, which almost nobody who draws it has.

Verse 15 says in the text's own words what he had been insisting on: the veil covers a difference, not a thing. Outside, it hides the difference between Brahman and the world. Inside, it hides the difference between the witness and the knower, the sākṣī and the pramātā, which is the witness taken together with the mind. This inner confusion, and not the world's appearing, is what the text means by bondage.

Verses 16 and 17 describe the result: a mind shining by the witness's proximity, joined to a body, producing the transactional individual, and that individual superimposed on the witness by the same error as the snake on the rope. Sarvapriyananda pauses here on the word adhyāsa, superimposition, and on the sentence in which Śaṅkara opens his commentary on the Brahma Sūtras with it, which a philosopher he knows calls the deepest sentence in the philosophical literature of East or West.

Verses 18 and 19 grade reality, and he gives the argument for grading rather than denying. Everything in the world undergoes six changes, birth, existence, growth, alteration, decay, death; Brahman undergoes none and only appears to. Two things can be in the same place at the same time only if one of them is false: a mirage can lie on a dry desert, a snake on a rope, but real water and dry sand cannot share the ground. So the changing world is not denied but graded. It is real in the transactional sense, vyāvahārika, because its existence is borrowed, as a table's is borrowed from wood; Brahman is real in the absolute sense, pāramārthika, because its existence is its own. The world, in the word he reaches for, supervenes on Brahman.

Verses 20 and 21: the five factors

Verse 20 is one Sarvapriyananda calls among the most beautiful and most quoted in the text. Every experience has five factors. It exists: asti. It appears, or shines: bhāti. It is dear: priyam, which he glosses through joy, since a thing is dear only in so far as it gives some pleasure, and that pleasure is the ānanda aspect showing through. It has a name: nāma. It has a form: rūpa. The first three belong to Brahman; the last two belong to the world and are what differ.

The obvious objection comes under this verse: we do not find joy everywhere, or consciousness in a stone. He gives two ways the verse has been read, and a third of his own. The traditional reading is that all three are present everywhere but manifest unequally: existence in everything, consciousness only in minds, bliss only in calm, sāttvika minds. He commends this reading twice because it follows experience. The second reading keeps all three manifest everywhere and rethinks what consciousness is, so that even so-called matter has it in some sense. The third is that the enlightened find all three in every experience.

Verse 21 extends the split to everything made of the elements, from gods to bacteria, with the difference between them entirely in name and form.

Verses 22 to 31: six meditations and what they end in

The text now turns from analysis to practice, and Sarvapriyananda distinguishes this practice, nididhyāsana, from two neighbours it is often confused with. It is not yogic concentration, which fixes attention on one object; and it is not mindfulness, which watches phenomena arise and pass. It is a third thing: using experience to notice what is having the experience. Verses 22 and 23 announce six exercises, three inward and three outward, each set in three steps.

The lamp that does not flicker is the Gītā's image for the settled mind, and he says so. The three inward steps are not alternatives but stages: a thought is used as a mirror to notice the awareness in which it appears; the thought is dropped and a sentence, the text's own line in verse 25, is used as the mirror instead; then the sentence is dropped too.

The outward set runs the same three steps with the eyes open. Take any object and separate its existence from its name and form, as wood from table; Śaṅkara, commenting on Gītā 2.16, says every experience is really two, "pot" and "exists", and this step is attending to the second. The point Sarvapriyananda presses, and the reason for running the outward set at all, is that the existence you separate out cannot be held as an object. It remains as your own existence, and turns out to be one with the witness reached by the inward set; a novice who said "but that pure existence is me" was told he was right. The second step drops the object and holds a sentence, the text's line in verse 28, or the Gītā's line (4.24) in which offering, fire, offerer and act are all Brahman, the sama-darśana or same-sightedness of the Gītā. The third drops the words; he quotes Swami Ashokananda's description of it, as if someone were erasing the names and forms in front of you. Rasa in verse 29 he reads as bliss, and stabdhī-bhāva as absorption, not stillness.

Within each set the three are steps, not options; the thought and the sentence are upāya, means, and the lectures return several times to the warning that a means held onto becomes an obstacle. Among the six, one may take up whichever one likes, move to another when bored and come back, but, as verse 29 says, without break.

Verse 30 states the aim: that the knowledge "I am the witness, one with the existence in everything" should become a living fact rather than a conclusion. Sarvapriyananda compares the need for continued practice after a first insight to a transplant patient's medicines; the insight fades otherwise. As it stabilises, identification with body and mind thins, but body and mind do not stop. They go on functioning while Brahman, in his phrase, shines forth in every act, and this, not a trance, is what the text means by samādhi.

Verse 31 is not the author's own. It is Muṇḍaka Upaniṣad 2.2.8, quoted, Sarvapriyananda says, as śruti-pramāṇa: instead of composing a verse on the result, the author shows that the Upaniṣad already says it. He takes the verse phrase by phrase. The heart, on Śaṅkara's reading, is the buddhi, and the knot is ignorance, which sits in the mind and is destroyed there when knowledge dawns, as darkness is by light; this is not a change of heart but a change of understanding. Doubts end because the knowledge is not a thought held in place by effort. An actor playing a beggar does not keep reminding himself that he is an actor; he plays the beggar with his whole effort, because being the actor is knowledge and being the beggar is imagination. One who has drunk milk cannot be talked into believing that black cows give black milk. And karmas waste away because they are products of ignorance; destroy the root and the fruit goes with it.

That raises the question the lecture spends longest on. If all karma is destroyed, why does the body of the liberated person not fall at once? The traditional answer divides karma in three: āgāmi, still to come; sañcita, stored; and prārabdha, the portion that has already begun to bear fruit as this life and this body. The first two are destroyed; the third runs until it is exhausted, which is why the liberated go on living, and, he adds, why there are teachers.

What continues affects the body and not the person. Enlightenment is not anaesthesia; there is pain, and there is also the clear knowledge of being the witness of the body in pain. His examples are from the end of Ramakrishna's life, with throat cancer: told by a disciple that he seemed to be in great bliss, Ramakrishna laughed and said the rascal had found him out; and when the attendant who cleaned the wound with neem leaves offered to stop because it hurt, he asked for a moment to lift his mind from the body, and then lay smiling while it was done.

The last word of the verse, parāvare, he singles out. It means the higher and the lower, the transcendent and the immanent: Brahman without attributes and Brahman with them, the absolute of Advaita and the God of religion, named in one word to show they are one reality.

With verse 31 the text is complete in the traditional shape, practice then result then close, and he has heard of versions that stop there. What follows he treats as the author's own postscript, fourteen verses that go over the same material from a different side. He kept them because they answer a question that had reached him repeatedly by letter from the lectures' online audience, and that was raised again from the floor: if I am already Brahman, who is bound, and who is seeking?

Verses 32 to 41: three selves

He opens the postscript with two answers older than the text. Asked what an enlightened person sees, since we see one walking about like anyone else, Swami Bhūteśānanda replied, "that is what you see", and then, "who sees?". And Śaṅkara, in his commentary on the Gītā's thirteenth chapter, meets the question "who is the one in ignorance?" with "why do you ask?"; "because I do not know"; "then you are the one".

The text's answer is to distinguish three selves. The pāramārthika self is the witness, the real one. The vyāvahārika self is the waking individual who transacts with the world. The prātibhāsika self is the individual in a dream, made nightly out of waking impressions. The witness is said to be avacchinna, delimited by a mind, and the lecture insists this means associated, not limited: space inside a glass of water is not shortened by the glass or moved when the glass is carried. Verse 33 says why the limiter cannot limit: it is itself imagined, and, in the commentator's phrase, the water of a mirage cannot wet a single grain of the desert, nor does the snake make the rope poisonous. Individuality is superimposed; Brahman-nature is intrinsic.

Verse 34 fixes the reference of the great sayings, tat tvam asi and the rest: they are said of the witness-self only, never of the waking or dream self. He stresses the word pūrṇena, "with the whole". It rules out the two softer readings people reach for, that "I am Brahman" means I belong to Brahman, or that I am a spark or part of God. The identity is complete, and it runs in both directions: there is no God apart from the real you.

Verses 35 to 37 retell the mechanism with the two powers: the veiled witness becomes the transactional self, becomes the experiencer and the doer, and so is bound by karma into a round that has no beginning but has an end. Asked when it began, he answers that before and after are questions that need time, and time is one of Māyā's projections.

Sleep does at the level of the individual what Māyā does at the level of Brahman: it veils the waking self and world and projects a dream self and world, which last only as long as they are perceived. The point of verse 39 is that the dream self is not carried over; each night makes a new one.

Verses 40 and 41 are the text's own account of how the three selves stand to one another. Each self takes its own world as real and the world below it as false, and the relation is the same at both steps. Sarvapriyananda corrects a common misreading here: Advaita does not say the world is true until you are enlightened and false afterwards. The rope was never a snake; the mistake was only ever ours. What "takes it as false" means in practice he gives in a sādhu's image: sometimes the sun and the moon are in the sky together by day; the awareness of Brahman blazes like the sun, and the world of name and form is there like the faint moon. What was jagat-dṛṣṭi, seeing the world, becomes brahma-dṛṣṭi, seeing Brahman.

Verses 42 to 46: the water they are made of

The lecture offers two readings of verse 42: the literal one, of absorption in which nothing else is seen, and the one it prefers, of a person with open eyes who sees the world and recognises it as not other than the self.

Foam, wave and water are one substance under three names; the properties of water run unbroken through all three; and foam is not destroyed when it is known to be water. The dream self merges into the waking self, the waking self into the witness, and nothing has happened except a correction of knowledge. Sarvapriyananda's warning here is against picturing enlightenment as an event, the person melting into a puddle or the body vanishing in a flash of light or smoke. The person continues exactly as before. What changes is that the world, which was seen as world, is seen as Brahman appearing.

Freedom, mokṣa, is not for the person. Freedom, or mokṣa, is from the person.²

Method, not conclusion

The lectures make three admissions that a reader should carry.

The first is the text's own status. Sarvapriyananda says, in the sixth lecture, that the whole apparatus of seer and seen, witness and knower, veiling and projecting, is prakriyā, a method of teaching, and not siddhānta, the conclusion, which is only that Brahman, existence-consciousness-bliss without a second, alone exists. The distinctions are ladders. A reader who takes the three selves or the two powers as an inventory of what there is has mistaken the pedagogy for the doctrine, which is the same mistake the text warns against in the meditations.

The second is a question the method cannot answer from inside. Asked in the same lecture why Māyā exists, he replies that "why" asks for a cause, and causation is itself a product of Māyā; asked later when it began, that before and after need time, which Māyā projects; and to a young monk who wanted ignorance proved before he would try to remove it, that you cannot see darkness by any light. Readers from outside the tradition will notice that these moves can be made against any objection, and the lectures do not pretend otherwise. What they offer instead is the deep-sleep argument of verse 5 and the five-factors analysis of verse 20, both of which are claims about experience that can be checked in experience, and a practice for checking them.

The third is the gap between assent and realisation, which the first lecture illustrates before the text has properly begun: the monk who shouted under the knife, the scholar distressed at losing his learning after a stroke, the businessman told that he is not peaceful but the knower of his peace. The text asks for the third of Sarvapriyananda's three stages, checking whether the argument is so, and in the eleventh lecture he says plainly that most of us, having read Vedanta and said "I am Brahman", go on behaving as if the world were true until it becomes a reality. The postscript exists for that.

The renderings of the verses above are made from the Sanskrit and are meant to be plain rather than elegant; Nikhilananda's translation, with his notes, remains the one to read with the lectures. The chapter says little about the text's relation to modern accounts of consciousness, because the lectures say little. Apart from the Krauss remark under verse 14 and its warning, the one other mention is Sean Carroll's The Big Picture, which Sarvapriyananda cites as the best a physicalist can do about meaning, that we must manufacture it for ourselves, and as the exact opposite of what this text claims.