Commentary on the Panchadasi

by Swami Krishnananda

The building exists in the mind of a man, as the land exists in the mind of a person. Somebody says, “This is my land. I purchased the land yesterday.” What do we mean by “purchased the land”? The land was there even before we purchased it. How did it become ours now? What is that consciousness of ‘myness’ that we have suddenly developed? Did it become ours yesterday? Now it has become ours and we are happy that so much land is there, as if it was not there yesterday. It was there yesterday also. Why did we say it was not there? It is because we felt in our mind that the land belonged to another.

The whole process is the question of belonging. The very land that was not ours has become ours. How did it become ours? Does that land stick to our skin? Are we carrying it on our head? The land is there as it was. What is the difference now? We have signed before some person whom we call an authority, on a paper on which some words are written, and suddenly he says, “This land is yours.” The whole thing is a psychological process: someone saying, “It is not mine from today,” and another saying, “It is mine from today,” and a third person confirming, “Yes, it is yours.” The third person is the registrar; the other person who says “It is not mine” is the seller, and the third person who says “It is mine” is the purchaser.

So, what is this? Nothing has happened. Three people are speak three words, and those words have created a world of difference; and we sleep well today with a large body of land in our mind, while the land does not know that any registration has taken place, that somebody has sold it or somebody has purchased it. This is how the world goes on.

There are two kinds of objects, physical and psychological, as the pot is physically made of clay but is mentally made of the mental reaction of the owner of that pot. Mṛnnmayo mānameyaḥ syāt sākṣi bhāsyas tu dhīmayaḥ: By actual sensory perception, we can know the physical object; but the mental aspect behind the activity of the sense organs is what makes it a psychological object, in spite of it being a physical object as known by these senses.

Anvaya vyatirekā bhyāṁ dhīmayo jīva bandhakṛt, satya smin sukha duḥkhestaḥ tasmin nasati na dvayaṁ (32). By anvaya and vyatireka, positive and negative analysis, we can know that our mind is the cause of our troubles. The land has not caused us any trouble. Our mind has caused the trouble because when we feel that something is ours, or when we feel that something is not ours, we have a disturbance in the mind. Our feeling is the cause of the disturbance. Either it is ours, or it is not ours. In any case, it is a disturbance to our mind. If it is ours, it becomes a problem to maintain it and see that it is not taken away from us. If it is not ours, the problem is that it is not ours. So either way it is a problem, whether it is ours or it is not ours.

Satya smin sukha duḥkhe: When this mind persists, we have joy and sorrow; otherwise, we have neither joy nor sorrow, if things are not connected with us either sensorially or through the mind.

Asaṭ-yapi ca bāhyārthe svapn-ādau baddhyate naraḥ, samādhi-supti-mūrcchāsu satyapya smin-na baddhyate (33). The objects do not bind us. This is something very clearly observable by certain illustrations like dream, etc. In dream, objects do not exist. These non-existent objects in dream can cause sorrow and joy to us. We can jump in fright if a tiger pounces on us. We can yell out if a burglar enters our mental world. We can feel happy if we are crowned a king in dream. We have joy and sorrow in dream even if the dream objects do not exist. So our joys and sorrows can be there, even if the objects do not exist. But in the state of deep sleep, in the state of samadhi, or even in the state of swoon, the objects may be existing but they will not trouble us and we will not have any sense of joy or sorrow.

In deep sleep, for instance, the world does exist in the same way as it existed in waking. But we neither feel happiness nor unhappiness in sleep. Why does the object not harass us in the state of deep sleep if it caused joy and sorrow in waking? If it was really the source of joy and sorrow, it must be perpetually causing this state in all conditions of ours. But in one condition (deep sleep) it does not affect us either in the sense of joy or in the sense of sorrow.

So objects may not exist, as in the dream state, and yet they may be sources of joy and sorrow. But objects may exist and yet they may not cause us any trouble, as in the case of samadhi, God-realisation, sleep, swoon, etc. So objects are not the cause of joy and sorrow. They may be existent or not; it is immaterial. Our mental reaction is the cause.

Dūra deśaṁ gate putre jīvatye vātra tat pita, vipra laṁ bhaka vākyena mṛtaṁ matvā praroditi (34). Suppose there is a father whose son has gone to a foreign country. He receives false news that the son had died in a plane crash. The father will have a heart attack. Actually, nothing has happened; the news was false. The son is getting on well. So, even if nothing has happened to the son, the father can have such sorrow that he may break down. The breaking down of the father’s mind is not caused by anything that is happening to the object (son), because nothing has happened. On the other hand, if the son has really died but for ten years the father has not received the news, he will be happy. How is it that the death of the son does not cause sorrow to the father? And why did sorrow come to the father while the son did not really die?

So do we say that the object is the cause of joy and sorrow? It is not. Merely because our mind has reacted in a particular manner, it looks like either this or that condition. If the son is alive but the father receives the wrong information that he is dead, the father’s doom is near. But even if the son is really dead and the news has not reached, the father will not weep; he will be as happy as he was.

Mṛte’pi tasmin vārtāyam aśrutāyāṁ na roditi, ataḥ sarvasya jīvasya bandha kṛn mānasaṁ jigat (35). What is the conclusion, therefore? All bondage of every kind in this world is caused by the mind only. The mind is bound when it is attached to an object; the mind is free when it is not attached to the object. The dirty mind is that which has attachment to things; the pure mind is that which has no attachment to things. The world is mental in a very, very important sense indeed.

Mṛte’pi tasmin vārtāyam aśrutāyāṁ na roditi, ataḥ sarvasya jīvasya bandha kṛn mānasaṁ jigat: For everyone in this world, the source of sorrow is the internal mental modification. Do we mean to say that the world is inside our mind?

Vijñāna vādo bāhyā rthavaiyarthyāt-syād iheti-cet, na hṛdyā-kāra-mādhātuṁ bāhyasy-āpekṣit-tvataḥ (36). When we see a snake in the rope, do we really see the snake or do we see the rope? What are we seeing there? We cannot see two things. Either we are seeing the rope or we are seeing the snake. Now, what is it that we are actually seeing? We cannot easily give an answer offhand. We cannot say, “I am seeing the rope.” If that were the case, we would not have cried in fear and jumped over it. But if we had really seen the snake, it would have been there even after the light was brought and the clear perception was there.

In this sense, this answer is given to the question whether the objective world is conditioned by the mind in a specific manner or entirely. The doctrine is very clear: Ishvara srishti is independent of the mind. The world of perception, which consists of solid objects – the five elements earth, water, fire, air, ether – is not created by the mind of any individual. But the meaning or the value that we attach to the objects is the creation of the individual mind. There cannot be appearance without reality. There cannot be a snake without a rope. There cannot be perception unless there is something outside. Though we may not perceive that something in a proper manner because of a peculiar defect in our mental process, it does not follow that nothing is outside.

Vijnanavada is a subjectivist position maintained in certain schools of Buddhism which holds that the world does not exist even physically. They do not believe in Ishvara srishti, or God’s creation. What they say is that even the brick that we see is not really a solid brick. It is only a conditioned concretised form of the mental operation in connection with a larger mental operation called alayavijnana. Alayavijnana is a word in Buddhist psychology which corresponds to what we call Cosmic Mind.

The world is ultimately mental. Even in the sense of it being there objectively, it is to be considered as mental. It is not physical. But in the sense of actual perception by the individual, it is secondarily mental. Primarily also it is mental. Now here the subject has been dealt with in a different way. The author of the Panchadasi says that while it is established that the world of perception is basically a creation of God’s mind, we cannot consider it as a product of individual psychology. The world exists independent of the mental operations of the individual, but we can say that the whole world is mental in the sense that it is God’s mind appearing as the universe.

So, finally it is mental. But as the philosophers say, it is metaphysically mental, not psychologically mental. If God’s mind can be regarded as a mind at all, then we may say that the whole world is mental because it is the will of God. But it is not mental in the sense of our thinking. We cannot produce a tree by merely thinking that there is a tree. So there is a distinction between the pure subjectivism of the Vijnanavada of the Buddhists and the metaphysical idealism of the Vedanta philosophy, which accepts that the world exists as a creation of Ishvara (the Cosmic Mind), yet it is conditioned by the perception of the individual mind.

Vaiyarthya mastu vā bāhyaṁ na vārayitu mīśmahe, prayojana mapekṣante na mānānīti hi sthitiḥ (37). We cannot do the world, or undo the world. There is a common perception of all people in respect of certain things. A general perception of the world in a uniform manner by all people shows that the world is there independently of individual perception. The world is not there merely because of our whim and fancy. We cannot say, “Let it be there,” and it would be there; and if we say, “It should not be there,” it is not there. It cannot be like that. So a very careful distinction has to be drawn between what is called the psychological world and the physical world.

The Vedanta doctrine is not subjectivism. It is not Mayavada in the sense of a silly understanding of the nature of the world as total non-existence. Acharya Sankara does not say that, and no Vedanta doctrine says that. But they accept that this is finally the will of God that appears as this cosmos. In that sense, it is Pure Consciousness. The Vedanta is a peculiar doctrine which accepts the existence of the objective world in one way, as the product of the will of God, and on the other hand it also accepts that it is only the nature of consciousness.

In spite of its existence as an outside something, it does not cease to be consciousness. From our point of view, from the individual point of view, it is a solid, physical thing. We can hit our head against a wall, and say that it is not mental. But from the point of view of the substance out of which the whole world is made, it is Universal Consciousness. Therefore, it is not physical. The physicality vanishes in the eye of Ishvara. It manifests itself only when there is space and time and externality from the point of view of the perceiver or the subjective mind.

This is a very difficult subject. We are likely to mix up two issues and either say the world does not exist, or like a materialist say only the world exists. Both arguments are not correct. Neither is it true that the world exists independent of the mind, nor is it true that it is created by the mind. There is a relativity of action and reaction between the mind which is cognising and the object that is perceived. A very important distinction is drawn between God’s creation (Ishvara srishti) and individual creation (jiva srishti), which is the subject of this chapter.