Passage 2

Here, to begin with, insentient things shine only as sunk in the sentient; for the parāmarśa of the insentient, “this”, rests only in the parāmarśa of saṃvid, “I”. And so the insentient have no self, and only creatures, living beings, have a self; and the Great Lord alone is their very self, that Great Lord and no other. For His own nature is saṃvid, and saṃvid has no difference at all, neither by place, nor by time, nor by form. Let the body, prāṇa and the rest differ, if they will; they are on the side of the insentient, and are sunk in the sentient. So the ātman that is cit is one alone. Since by svātantrya He makes being all forms shine in Himself, He is the Great Lord; and having drawn this-ness within, He is filled full with the vimarśa “I”, whose form is resting in Himself, not facing another. For this very reason knowing all and doing all are not things He has to bring about with effort. For as being the knower and being the doer, over the varied objects of the organs of knowing and of action, belong to one ātman alone, so the knowing and the making of the mass of things that are the objects of thousands of Rudras and kṣetrajñas, who stand in the place of His senses, are in one, the ātman that is cit.

But surely, if this ātman, in the form of the Great Lord, is one alone, then what is bondage, for whose loosing this effort is made? With this doubt in view, he says:

There, in the part “this” that He has created, buddhi and the rest have been brought by Him, as grasper, to the place of the parāmarśa of ahaṅkāra.

“There”: the Great Lord being in this way one’s own self, in that very mirror of His own self, whose form is prakāśa, that same Supreme Lord, out of svātantrya, has first created the part “this”, with contraction going before it. Within that, what is known as “this”, in the form of buddhi, prāṇa and body, being fit to be the grasper of the known that is other than buddhi and the rest, and having no power to overcome its being “this”, shines, appearing through a parāmarśa of I-ness that is made and not full: “I am Devadatta”, “I am Caitra”.

But surely, let it be so; even so, whose is the bondage? For who else is there apart from the Lord? To set this aside he says:

He, made of not knowing his own svarūpa, is held to be the puruṣa, many; there, in creation, action and bliss are his experience, made of pain and pleasure.

True: in the highest truth there is no bondage at all. Only, when He Himself, out of His own svātantrya, beyond which there is nothing, makes Himself appear contracted, then there is the not knowing of His own full form, which, even while that form shines, is a not holding it in awareness. He for whom that alone is put forward as the cause is called the puruṣa, whose whole truth is the mere not shining forth of fullness. For this very reason he is “many”, since he takes on contraction through this and that particular body, prāṇa and buddhi. And that puruṣa, as the one who experiences, undergoes a binding marked by experience. And his experience is the action and the bliss that are constructed. Constructed action is pain; for rajas, whose form is a flickering between prakāśa and not-prakāśa, is called pain; and sattva, whose form is prakāśa, is pleasure; but tamas, whose form is not-prakāśa, is a resting in between, standing in the place of dissolution.

But what does “in creation” shut out, and what does it take in? He says:

The knowledge and action of the pati, in things that are as His own limbs, those two, with māyā as the third, are for the paśu sattva, rajas and tamas.