The soul, its bonds and its states

The soul takes the character of what it joins and knows through the help by which something is made known.

Siddhanta teaching gives the soul two closely related characteristics: saarndhathan vannamaai iruththal, taking the character of what it joins; and arivikka arithal, knowing when made to know. Neither makes the soul an unconscious object. Both distinguish its dependent awareness from the Lord's complete, independent knowing.

To take a colour is an image of association. A clear crystal beside a coloured object appears coloured. The image helps us understand how the soul's awareness can be occupied by the instruments and their objects, without making those objects its enduring identity. Through grace, its attention can turn towards Siva. The soul remains the one that knows.

✦Knowing and not-knowing

Arulnandi makes the difficulty personal in Irupa Irupathu, verse 3.

The answer cannot be that the soul is merely its mind or senses. Those are instruments. Nor is the soul already the Lord's limitless knowledge. Its experience includes obscuration, partial understanding and the need for help.

Siddhanta calls its nature sat-asat. The term concerns its relation to the Real and to the changing order; it does not mean half existence and half non-existence. A soul can know objects through its instruments and know Siva through grace, while remaining distinct from both.

Anavam obscures, Maya supplies the material instruments and karma connects deeds with experience; their effects must be distinguished from the soul's conscious nature.

Why the soul is bound introduces the three malas. Here the lists of their qualities show how bondage is expressed. They are associated with Irupa Irupathu 4, where the disciple asks how unconscious bonds can exert such a hold over him.

Anavam is the root obscuration. It is deeper than a moment of visible pride. Maya supplies the material order of bodies and instruments, making limited experience possible. Karma concerns the soul's good and bad deeds and the fruits it undergoes. The tables describe effects within bound life; they do not make every listed fault an essence of the soul.

✦Anavam: eight qualities

Here moham receives a particular example of deluded desire. Its appearance again in the Maya table does not require the two lists to have identical glosses. The lists turn our attention towards the ways obscuration affects thought and conduct.

✦Maya: seven qualities

Maya's material provision is a help as well as a bond. These seven name its effects in the obscured soul's life. They do not mean that a stone or a sense organ feels jealousy. The conscious soul is the one undergoing and acting within that condition.

✦Karma: six qualities

Good deeds belong in an account of karma as well as bad deeds. A favourable fruit is still a fruit within experience; it must be distinguished from release. This does not make kindness worthless. It asks us to understand both the act and the attachment through which the soul claims its result.

Kevala, Sakala and Suddha distinguish the soul's relation to obscuration, instruments and liberating grace.

Siddhanta teaching calls these the three causal avasthas, broad conditions underlying the five effect states considered next. The two lists answer different questions. One asks about the soul's bond and provision; the other about the instruments operating within a particular state.

Sivagnana Siddhiyar, Supakkam 227–230, sets out these three. Sakala provides an opportunity that Kevala lacks: the soul can know particular things and undergo experience. Suddha concerns the fulfilment of that provision through the guru's grace and liberating knowledge. It is not produced merely by shutting down the instruments.

1. 1

   Kevala

   Obscuration without the equipment for differentiated experience

2. 2

   Sakala

   Instruments, action and experience under bondage

3. 3

   Suddha

   Knowledge and release through grace

This flow gives the direction of the explanation, not a dated account of a first moment in the soul's existence. The soul and its root bond are beginningless. Siva supplies the means through which the bound soul's condition can change; He does not first create a conscious soul out of matter.

The downward sequence counts a progressive withdrawal of instruments: 35, 25, 3, 2 and 1, with the conditioned experiencer included in the reckoning.

The 36 Tattvas introduces sleep and the five states. Here we follow the more detailed count given in Sivagnana Siddhiyar, Supakkam 223. The seats name places in this traditional account of the soul's operation through its body.

✦How the thirty-five are counted

The last row needs attention. Purusha is not another unconscious tool or a soul made by Maya. The count includes the experiencer in the total. Thus “one” in Turiyatita means the soul remains while the other listed instruments have withdrawn. It does not mean that only a solitary material object is left.

The ten vayus are Prana, Apana, Udana, Vyana, Samana, Naga, Kurma, Krikara, Devadatta and Dhananjaya. These names distinguish functions in the traditional account; they are not ten more conscious agents. Of these, Prana remains in the threefold and twofold groupings above.

✦Dream and deeper withdrawal

In the dream state, the ten outward faculties withdraw, leaving the other twenty-five. Their objects and fields remain within the reckoning of inward experience; the table does not say that a sleeping body is walking or speaking outwardly whenever these appear in a dream.

In deep sleep, Chittam, the inner instrument of retention or attention, remains with Prana and the experiencer. Turiya has two; Turiyatita has one. These descriptions concern the contraction of operation under bondage. They do not by themselves establish the soul's knowledge of Siva.

The downward account describes bondage and withdrawal; the upward pure account concerns knowledge and freedom through grace.

Sivagnana Siddhiyar, Supakkam 224, distinguishes a downward sequence associated with birth from an upward one associated with its ending. It also distinguishes a yogic samadhi after which birth can recur. Verse 225 speaks of those established in knowledge undergoing the five states through grace towards release.

These statements prevent the word turiya from carrying the same meaning in every context without explanation. In the preceding table it belongs to a descending account of the bound soul's instruments. In an account of purification, the concern is the soul's knowing through grace. Ordinary dreamless sleep is not thereby the pure state, and loss of outward awareness is not a sufficient description of liberation.

The distinction also prevents a simple reversal of the diagram. The pure course cannot be reconstructed merely by reading root, navel, heart, throat and forehead upwards. The explanation of release must include grace, knowledge and the change in the bonds' hold. Siddhiyar 230 gives that direction through the guru and the receiving of knowledge.

Siva pervades, illumines and accompanies the soul; intimacy does not abolish the difference between the Lord, the knower and the material world.

Siddhanta teaching gathers the relation as onraathal, being one; veraathal, being different; and udanaathal, being together. These are three aspects of one relation, not three competing explanations from which we choose a favourite. They concern Siva's presence to souls and to the world through which souls experience.

Each comparison has a limit. Siva is not a soul housed in the world as we are housed in a body. Sunlight does not know the person whose seeing it enables. The comparison of eye and awareness does not make Siva a faculty owned by the soul. The images illuminate pervasion, distinction and companionship while leaving the Lord's nature intact.

✦The soul remains the receiver

Sivagnana Siddhiyar, Supakkam 91–93, keeps divine pervasion together with difference. Its later account of release in 320 distinguishes the Lord who knows and makes known from the soul that receives that knowing. Union does not turn giver and receiver into one independently knowing Lord.

This returns us to the two qualities with which we began. Under bondage, the soul's awareness takes the character of what it joins. Through grace, its dependent knowing is fulfilled. The soul is neither an isolated master nor an unconscious thing. Siva stands inseparably with it, and the real instruments and world serve the experience through which it is led.

Keep the account of instruments beside the texts on knowing, bondage and grace.

• Irupa Irupathu, Tamil text: verses 3–4 and 7–9, the disciple's questions about knowing, the malas and the five states.
• Sivagnana Siddhiyar, Tamil text: Supakkam 220–233 for instruments, states and dependence; 91–93 and 320 for the relation to Siva.
• Sivaprakasam, Tamil text: 33 and 37 for obscuration and provision; 52–62 for awareness and the states; 68 for the need for grace beyond the instruments.

Read Irupa Irupathu for the questions in a disciple's voice, Sivagnana Siddhiyar for the extended argument and The 36 Tattvas for the instruments. Tiruvarutpayan carries the inquiry towards the help that becomes recognised as grace.