5 minutes

What Siva gives the soul

Siva gives the bound soul the means to know, act and experience; these real gifts prepare it for the freedom that comes through grace.

How Siva helps showed why His acts serve souls. Now look more closely at what He provides. We wake in a body, hear a voice, recognise someone and answer. Such ordinary moments bring together four things that Siddhanta names: tanu, karanam, bhuvanam and bhogam.

✦Four gifts working together

The four words name the body, its instruments, its world and the experience the soul undergoes.

• Tanu: a body. Through it the soul takes part in embodied life. Hands can offer water; feet can carry us to someone who needs help. The body serves the soul; it is not the soul itself.
• Karanam: instruments. These include the senses and the mind. Through them the soul hears, sees, thinks and acts. The mind belongs among the instruments: it is not the one who uses them.
• Bhuvanam: a world. The soul needs somewhere to live and act, with things to encounter. A body does not live apart from a world.
• Bhogam: experience. This includes both pleasure and pain as the soul undergoes the fruits of its karma. It means more than enjoyment or comfort.

✦Why instruments are needed

Anavam obscures the soul's knowing; Siva supplies instruments through which limited knowing becomes possible.

The soul is a knower, but Anavam obscures its knowledge. It needs help to know and act. Siva joins it to a body and instruments drawn from Maya, the material source of this provision. Maya does not manufacture the conscious soul, and Siva does not become the material of its body.

The instruments are not independent knowers. An ear does not understand a song on its own; the soul knows through its instruments, with Siva's help. They make experience possible while the root obscuration remains. Receiving a body is therefore a beginning of opportunity, not liberation already accomplished.

For the instruments in detail, turn later to The 36 Tattvas. Here, keep their purpose in view: they give the bound soul a way to participate in life.

✦Real means, used with care

The body and world are real and useful; their purpose reaches beyond possession and pleasure.

Calling them products of Maya does not mean they are imaginary. Bodies need food and rest. Other people can be helped or hurt by what we do. A changing world is still a real field of action and responsibility.

The gift is the opportunity for experience and ripening; calling it a gift does not require us to welcome another person's pain. The practical response is care. Feed someone who is hungry, attend to illness, and use speech thoughtfully. These are ways of using what has been given.

✦Where the texts teach this

The Sastras explain both the help these gifts provide and the limits of knowing through them.

Sivagnana Bodham, sutra 2, places the soul's coming and going under Siva's power according to its deeds. Sutra 4 distinguishes the soul from its inner instruments despite their close association; sutra 5 teaches its dependence on Siva in knowing. Sutra 6 distinguishes changing objects of ordinary knowledge from Siva: knowing Him is not simply another act of sense perception.

Sivagnana Siddhiar, Supakkam 168, names the four together; verses 32–34 explain Maya's material role. Sivaprakasam 32 also names body, instruments, worlds and experience. Verse 18 connects creation with ripening, and verse 37 explains how Maya's provision helps the obscured soul to know.

These means prepare the soul; their use does not make grace unnecessary. How that preparation opens into instruction and release is the next teaching: The guru and grace.

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