II. Sādhana Pāda · Seer and seen (2.18–2.25)
2.20 · The Crystal and the Flower
The seer is seeing alone; though pure, it looks on through the mind's ideas.
Word by word
- draṣṭā
- the seer
- dṛśi-mātraḥ
- seeing alone, nothing but seeing
- śuddhaḥ
- pure
- api
- even though
- pratyaya
- the mind's ideas and contents
- anupaśyaḥ
- looks on through, follows
Where it fits
Vyāsa marks the turn: the seen has been explained, and now this sūtra is begun to fix the nature of the seer (Woods p. 154). The seer is pure seeing, yet it looks on through the mind's ideas. That "yet" is how the joining of 2.17 can happen at all, and it echoes 1.3–1.4.
Reading
The seer is seeing itself and nothing more: pure and unchanging. Yet it looks on through the mind's ideas, and so seems coloured by them. The classic image, from Vācaspati's gloss rather than Vyāsa, is a clear crystal set beside a red hibiscus. The crystal looks red, and it is not. Your anxiety, joy or confusion can seem to be what you are, when they are what is being seen.
Vyāsa
“The intellect's object, a cow or a pot, say, is sometimes known and sometimes not, and this shows that the intellect changes. But the self's object is always known, and this shows that the self does not change.”
Vyāsa's Yoga-bhāṣya, the oldest commentary. New translation from the Sanskrit, with reference to Woods (1914), p. 154.
Practice
Look at something for one minute. Then for another minute, attend to the looking itself rather than the thing seen. Notice what that is like.
A question to sit with
What colour has the mind lent to the seer today?
Where commentators disagree
How does a seer that never changes come to 'look on through' the mind's ideas?
- Vyāsa
- The self is neither of the same nature as the intellect nor wholly different from it. The intellect changes as objects are known or not known; the self always knows its object and does not change. Looking on the intellect's ideas, it seems to be the intellect, though it is not. (Woods 1914, pp. 154–155)
- Vācaspati Miśra
- He explains the self's awareness as its reflection falling on the mirror of the intellect, so that sounds and other objects come to the self through an intellect that has taken on its likeness. (Woods 1914, p. 155)
- Bhoja
- The seer looks on ideas directly, with nothing in between. It becomes a spectator simply by being near the intellect, which alone is coloured by objects. He also notes that some take seeing to be a property of the self, which he rejects. (Tatya 1885, pp. 66–67; Mitra 1883, wisdomlib on 2.20)
- Surendranath Dasgupta
- He calls the exact nature of this 'reflection' very hard to grasp, and notes that neither the sūtras nor Vyāsa's bhāṣya give physical illustrations of it, as Sāṃkhya writers did. (Dasgupta 1924, p. 18)