78पञ्चदशी · Pañcadaśī

Vidyāraṇya, c. 1370 · M. Srinivasa Rau and K. A. Krishnaswamy Aiyar, translators, Sri Vani Vilas Press, Srirangam, 1912

Linked to 17 chapters: supports 6 · contradicts 5 · mechanism 3 · same claim 8 · pairing 4

Mādhava was a minister, a general and a viceroy before he was a philosopher. He helped Bukka and Harihara found the empire of Vijayanagara, commanded the army sent to relieve Goa, governed the western districts from Chandragutti, and had his gifts of villages to brahmins cut into rock: an inscription of 1368 from the Shikarpur taluk names his father and records a rite he performed while in office. Some time after that, at about fifty-four, he left the court, took initiation from a teacher named Śaṅkarānanda, and received with the order the name by which he is known, Vidyāraṇya, forest of learning. He was still alive in 1381. The Pañcadaśī opens by bowing to Śaṅkarānanda, and that salutation is how his translators date it: after the viceroyalty, after the renunciation, written by a man who had spent thirty years in royal courts and had written elsewhere that he was sorry for it.

The book is fifteen chapters in three groups of five, named for what they do. The first five are viveka, sorting out: they take experience apart until what cannot be taken apart is left. The second five are dīpa, the lamp: they hold up what the sorting produced and show it at work. The last five are ānanda, bliss. What his translators noticed in 1912 is a matter of form. Vidyāraṇya opens with no scriptural quotation and no assertion taken on authority; he opens with waking, dream and dreamless sleep, three states every reader has, and asks what is present in all three. Their phrase for that method is "the key which unlocks all the doors in the citadel of Vedanta", and the 1570 verses that follow are largely its consequences. Some have held that only the first five chapters are his and that court scholars finished the rest. The short Dṛg-Dṛśya-Viveka, given here as Drig-Drishya Viveka, is attributed to the same man or to his teacher and runs the same discrimination in forty-six verses instead of fifteen hundred.

Tattvaviveka: what is present in all three states

The argument of the first chapter is made in seven verses. In waking, things are known and they differ from one another: sound is not touch, colour is not taste. Set them aside and the knowing of them does not differ from itself. In dream, things are known too, and the only difference from waking is that they are taken as fleeting rather than as lasting. In dreamless sleep nothing is known — and yet a man who wakes says that he knew nothing, which is a memory, and a memory must be of something experienced. So even the blank was witnessed.

The reasoning behind verse 7 is stated plainly by the translators: destruction can be predicated only of what is perceived. Whatever is perceived begins and ends, and what is never perceived, but is instead that by which things are perceived, cannot be shown to begin or end by the only kind of evidence there is. This is not a proof that consciousness is everlasting in the sense a physicist would accept. It is a claim that the question cannot be put to it without first turning it into an object, which is the one thing it is not.

The eighth verse turns the argument from what exists to what is wanted. Everything else a man loves, he loves for his own sake; himself he loves for no further reason. He takes that asymmetry as evidence about the self's nature, not about human selfishness, and the last five chapters are spent cashing the inference. The objection appears at once in his own text: if the self is bliss and is always present, why is nobody continuously happy. The bliss is manifest, he answers, but not distinctly recognised, as one boy's voice is drowned when a class chants together.

Vidyāraṇya then gives the traditional cosmology, which his translators present as the least objectionable of the available accounts rather than as a demonstration; to a strict Advaitin it is as unreal as the world it explains.

Everything the device explains it explains by the state of the mirror. Where the clear strand is unmixed the reflection is the Lord, who has the power under him; where it is mixed with the active and dark strands the reflection is the individual, who is under the power instead. Nothing has happened to the original. The third chapter then takes the five sheaths of the Taittirīya Upaniṣad — which calls what is hidden inside them a cavern — and runs one test on each.

The test is the book's most transferable piece of method. Take two states. Whatever is in one and not the other is a variable and cannot be what is looking; whatever is in both is a candidate. Run it down the list and the list empties.

The muñja is a coarse grass with a fine inner fibre, and a patient hand gets the fibre out whole. Reasoning does not produce the self; it separates the self from what it has been confused with. The chapter closes with the four stages of practice, tersely defined — hearing out what the sentences mean, reflecting on whether the thing can be so, dwelling on it unbroken once it is beyond doubt — and for the fourth it borrows the Gītā's lamp in a windless place, which Śaṅkara glosses at length in the Gita with Shankara's commentary.

The elements, and the two creations

The second chapter does to the world what the first did to the person, with a single question asked five times.

Vidyāraṇya lists the elements not by what they are made of but by which sense reaches them: space has sound only, air adds touch, fire adds colour, water adds taste, earth adds smell. His translators, writing with an eye on the physics of 1912, point out that a classification made by the senses affected cannot be upset by any discovery about matter, and that it commits its author to neither realism nor idealism. Then the question. Take space, say that space exists, and separate in thought the existing from the space. What is left?

The answer he wants is that nothing is left except a name and a shape, and that names and shapes are what creation consists of. The operation then runs on air, fire, water and earth in turn, each time granting the element everything it inherits and asking what it has of its own. The procedure is tedious by design; it is meant to be done, not read.

Much of the chapter argues against an opponent who says that before creation there was nothing. What is nothing can neither be united with existence nor be of the nature of existence, any more than the sun can be united with darkness or be made of it; and the awareness by which the opponent knows there is nothing is the thing he is denying. Beside the argument Vidyāraṇya records that the doctrine frightens people. He quotes Gauḍapāda — author of the verses given here as Mandukya Karika — on yogins who meditate on a personal God and are afraid of the meditation in which subject and object disappear, seeing fear where there is none; and he cites Śaṅkara calling the Mādhyamikas deluded by the dry verbiage of logic. The fear is treated as a fact about students, not as an objection.

The fourth chapter makes the distinction the whole book turns on. There are two creations, not one.

The Lord's creation is the elements, the bodies, the worlds. The individual's creation is what he adds to them: the value, the wanting, the aversion.

Dear, hateful and not worth a glance are three shapes the men supply, and the claim is that they are a second creation and that the second one is what binds. The next verse extends it to persons: one woman is wife, daughter-in-law, sister-in-law, cousin and mother to five different people without herself altering. Every woman, Vidyāraṇya answers an objector, has a body of flesh and a body made of mental conception, and the second does change; he supports it with Śaṅkara's image of melted copper taking the shape of the crucible it is poured into.

This is the cleanest argument in the book, and it is empirical. Two men, identical in everything except what they have been told, behave in opposite ways; the difference cannot lie in the world. Vidyāraṇya then blocks the two obvious misreadings. Against the charge that this is idealism, he answers that the mental world needs the outer one as its basis. Against the suggestion that mental control alone should then suffice and knowledge of Brahman is superfluous, he answers that suppressing the mind stops the duality for the time being and no longer, and that dreamless sleep, in which all duality is absent, makes nobody wise, because the teacher and the books have gone with everything else.

That verse settles the book's ethics. The world is not the enemy, and world-hatred is a category error. What the individual must give up is his own second creation, which the chapter divides into what scripture sanctions — enquiry into Brahman itself — and what it forbids, split further into the sharp kind, desire and anger, and the dull kind, daydreaming. Both go before the enquiry starts. And the sanctioned kind goes too, in the end.

Chitradīpa: the painted canvas

The sixth chapter is the longest in the book, two hundred and ninety verses, and it opens with the image that names it.

A painter begins with plain cloth, stiffens it with paste, draws the outlines in black, then fills in the colours. Four terms line up with the four stages — consciousness of itself, the inner ruler that is consciousness with māyā, the thread-self that runs through all the subtle bodies, and the vast one that is the gross world entire — and the alignment carries much of the chapter: painted hills wear no painted clothes, which is why unconscious things get no reflection of consciousness, and the picture appears and disappears as the canvas is unrolled and rolled, which is what creation and dissolution amount to.

The error the chapter is about is stated in the eighth verse: as the ignorant lay the colours of the painted clothes to the account of the cloth beneath, so they take the individual's round of birth and death to belong to consciousness. The chapter then swaps images, and the second one carries the technical work: the ether enclosed in a pot, the whole unbounded ether, the sky reflected in water, and the sky reflected in the water-particles of a cloud.

Two of the four are the thing itself, bounded or unbounded; two are reflections, one clear and one dim. The unchanging one — kūṭastha, named from the anvil, which takes every blow without altering — is consciousness as it stands under one body. The Lord is the clear reflection, in māyā; the individual the dim one, in the clouded medium of a single intellect.

Fill the pot with water and the ether in the pot is swallowed by the ether in the water: not removed, only unnoticed. That is the account of what has gone wrong, and it is reciprocal. The chapter defines the two halves of ignorance accordingly — a projecting side that produces the appearance, and a veiling side whose one effect is to make a man say that the unchanging one does not exist and is not evident. The long middle is a survey of what every school has said about the self and about God, from materialists who identify the self with the body to Sāṅkhyas who make it plural, none of which Vidyāraṇya arbitrates.

Two claims in the closing hundred verses do more work. The first is that the difference between the enlightened and the ignorant is one of conviction and not of behaviour: a man just invested with the sacred thread differs from one who has not in that he now recites the Veda, and in nothing whatever about eating or sleeping. The second warns against reading enlightenment off conduct in the other direction. The Gītā describes the free man as sitting "like one indifferent", and Vidyāraṇya makes the word like carry the weight: indifference is not being prescribed, or the word would be idle, and Jaḍabharata, the standard case of the holy man who would not act, was never a stick or a stone but a man afraid of forming attachments.

Tṛptidīpa: the man with nothing left to want

The seventh chapter takes its text from a single line of the Bṛhadāraṇyaka.

The whole chapter answers that question, and it is built around a story already old when he used it. Ten men ford a river. On the far bank their leader counts to see that nobody has drowned, and counts nine; each of them counts and gets nine. They conclude that the tenth is lost and mourn him, until a traveller counts them again and lays his hand on the last man: you are the tenth.

Vidyāraṇya then does the thing that makes the chapter worth reading. He turns the story into a scale and maps his psychology onto it.

Not knowing is the state before any enquiry. Veiling makes a man say that the unchanging one does not exist and is not evident — the equivalent of "there is no tenth man". Projection is the positive error that follows, taking himself to be the doer and the enjoyer, and it is the one that produces the grief; the tenth man does not merely fail to count himself, he weeps for a drowned companion who is standing in his shoes. The fourth is knowledge by report, defended at length as real knowledge and not error. The fifth is knowing it directly, the sixth the going of the grief, the seventh a satisfaction unlike any other.

The most useful verse is the one that limits the claim, and it is made in the story rather than in doctrine.

The grief was made of the mistake and goes with it, in the instant. The wound was made by the grief and heals at the speed wounds heal, with a salve and a month. Knowledge cancels the error and cancels nothing else, and the nearest thing to a consolation is that the joy of knowing makes the man forget his sore head. The free man is not asked to become inert; what he does with his remaining years is set by what was already running, and men who differ greatly in behaviour may be identical in knowledge. The chapter ends with the one passage where Vidyāraṇya's voice rises: six verses of dhanyo'ham, I am fortunate.

Nāṭakadīpa: the lamp in the theatre

The tenth chapter is twenty-six verses, the shortest in the book, and gets a complete account of the witness out of one scene.

Verse 14 assigns the parts: the I-sense is the master of the hall, the objects the audience, the mind the dancer, the senses the players who keep time, and the lamp that shows them all is the witness.

Everything the chapter wants is in the arrangement. The lamp is not one of the performers, so the witness is not one of the contents of experience. It shows them all equally, so it has no preferences. It is fixed, so any motion attributed to it is borrowed from what moves in front of it. And it goes on shining in an empty hall, which is how the chapter gets deep sleep: consciousness with nothing to illuminate is consciousness still.

The second image is a shaft of sunlight through a hole in the roof. The beam does not move; wave a hand through it and the light appears to dance. Asked where the witness is, Vidyāraṇya answers that no place can be assigned to it, and that being called all-pervading follows from that rather than from any claim about space being real. The chapter then meets the natural objection head on.

The last verse offers the impatient a practical instruction instead: if you cannot give up grasping at everything, go to the intellect, watch it, and notice the intervals in which it is quiet.

The measure of happiness

The third group argues that the self is not merely what exists but what is wanted, and it begins with a classification: bliss is of three kinds, the bliss of Brahman, the happiness of knowing and the pleasure of things, and the eleventh chapter takes up the first. The case rests on states in which the triad of knower, knowing and known breaks down: samādhi, dreamless sleep, fainting. Its authority is the conversation in the Chāndogya in which Sanatkumāra tells Nārada — a man who has learned the Vedas, the epics and every science and is still miserable — that happiness is in what is unbounded and there is none in the small thing.

An objector says that if there is no happiness in duality there is none in non-duality either, since happiness would have to show itself and showing requires two. The reply is that non-duality is not a thing in which happiness is found; it is the happiness. The chapter then argues from ordinary sleep. A tired man lies down and enjoys the bed; turns inward and enjoys a reflection of his own bliss; tires of that too, because it still has an enjoyer, an enjoyment and a thing enjoyed in it; and runs the rest of the way into sleep.

Scripture supplies five comparisons for the happiness of sleep. The bird tied by a string flies about, finds nowhere to rest and returns to the perch; that is the mind, running through waking and dream after the fruits of its deeds and settling where it came from. The hawk makes straight for its nest. Then three that are not about tiredness but about standards: a fed infant on a soft bed, smiling, with nothing it likes or dislikes; an emperor who has had every pleasure a man can have; a learned brahmin who has done what there was to do. Everyone concedes these three to be happy; what they have in common is that nothing is wanted; and the state is available nightly to anyone at all.

That sentence is the evidence the chapter rests on, and the same sentence carried the first chapter's argument about the persistence of consciousness. It is asked to do double duty: to show that something was present, and that what was present was not neutral. The Bṛhadāraṇyaka's remark that in sleep a father is no longer a father is taken the same way — what goes in sleep is the identification that generates the whole run of pleasure and pain, and with it the pleasure and pain.

Since the fourteenth century

Two things kept the Pañcadaśī in use for six hundred years, and neither is originality; its doctrine is Śaṅkara's and it claims nothing else. What it added was a shape and a set of pictures. The shape is the three-by-five division, which makes the book usable as a course: discriminate, then exhibit, then value. The pictures are the ones later teachers reach for without always naming the source — the painted canvas, the four ethers, the tenth man, the lamp in the dancing hall, the father weeping over a living son. Each isolates one step of the argument and can be checked against something a reader already knows.

The book is also unusually careful about what it is not claiming, and the care has worn better than the cosmology.

The sixth chapter says that the destruction of the world and the individual does not mean they stop being perceived, and that if it did, dreamless sleep would be liberation and nobody would need to do anything. It concedes that a man who knows still feels hunger and thirst, and that those belong to the very "I" whose reality it denies. The fourth says the Lord's creation cannot be removed, need not be, and helps; the seventh, that the wound heals at its own speed; the second, that the rival schools' accounts of the world are acceptable in ordinary affairs. Together these amount to a narrow claim: one identification goes, and nothing else does.

What has aged is the physical machinery — the descent of the elements by tenths, the quintuplication by which each element is half itself and an eighth of each of the others, the fourteen worlds inside the cosmic egg. The translators of 1912 already marked the numerical parts as fanciful, while defending the classification by the senses as untouchable by any discovery about matter. Their whole reason for translating this book rather than another was that its author starts with no dogma, and their preface argues that Vedānta is a science because it is established by reasoning from universal experience. Not every reader has agreed. The stretch of the sixth chapter that catalogues and dismisses the schools is doxography rather than argument, and the answers to the question why māyā exists at all — that "why" asks for a cause, and cause is itself produced by māyā — are the tradition's standard move and will persuade only those already inside it.

What has held up is the method of the first chapter and the example that tests it. Look for what is present in every state and absent in none, and watch the candidates fall away one at a time. Notice that the man who weeps for a living son and the man who does not weep for a dead one differ in nothing except what they believe. Neither requires the cosmology, and both can be run tonight.

The renderings above are made from the Sanskrit and are meant to be plain rather than elegant; the verse numbering follows the Sanskrit recension, which differs by a few verses from the 1912 edition's own count. Swami Swahananda's translation for the Sri Ramakrishna Math gives all fifteen chapters with notes and is the fullest English version of the whole.