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Pratyabhijñā-hṛdayam · Sūtra 5

चितिरेव चेतनपदादवरूढा चेत्यसंकोचिनी चित्तम्

citireva cetanapadād saṃkocinī

Consciousness (citi) itself, descended from the plane of the pure knower (cetana-pada), contracting in conformity with its objects (cetya), is the mind (citta).

Context

Sūtras 4 and 5 form a pair describing the descent of citi into individuality. Sūtra 4 described the individual structurally — as the contracted universe; sūtra 5 describes the process — how citi becomes citta. It is the most psychologically immediate of the early sūtras: the practitioner's own mind is being described, in the act of reading.

Primary reading

The movement runs through three stages: citi (universal consciousness), cetana (the conscious stage prior to mental contraction), and citta (the mind contracted around its objects). The word eva makes the identity explicit — it is citi itself, not something else, not a product or emanation, that becomes citta. The contraction is not a transformation into a different substance but a self-limitation: consciousness folding itself around objects of perception (cetya) until it takes their shape. This is why liberation in this system is recognition, not attainment — citta does not need to become citi; it needs to recognize that it already is citi.

Commentarial layer

Kṣemarāja's commentary turns on the distinction between cetana and citta: cetana is the conscious being before identification with its mental modifications; citta is the same being once it has contracted around objects of perception. The normal human condition is that of cittas — minds absorbed in their objects, having forgotten their citi-nature. The commentary thus sets up the reversal that sūtra 13 will name: by turning inward, citta ascends the same path by which citi descended, and sūtras 5 and 13 together form the bondage-liberation axis of the text.

Common misreadings

Treating citta as a lesser or degraded form of consciousness — in Trika it is not degraded but contracted; degradation implies a change of substance, which the system denies. Missing eva — translating 'consciousness becomes mind' without 'itself' loses the identity claim that is the whole point of the sūtra. Reading the mind as caused by its objects — citta is not produced by cetyas but contracts around them (cetyasaṃkocinī); the objects supply the shape of the contraction, not its power.

Two forks decide the doctrine here. First, cetyasaṃkocinī: is the mind 'contracted by' its objects (a passive construction in which objects act upon consciousness) or 'contracting in conformity with' them (consciousness's own free act of self-shaping)? Second, whether the emphatic eva survives — since the sūtra's soteriology rests entirely on the claim that it is citi itself, not some product of citi, that is the mind.

What the differences reveal

The deep fork is the passive: Singh alone renders cetyasaṃkocinī as consciousness's own act ('becomes contracted in conformity with'), while Shantananda and Wallis both write 'contracted by' — and the difference is the difference between a mind that is done to and a mind that is citi doing. In Trika the question is not stylistic: if objects can contract consciousness, then something other than consciousness has power over it, and non-dualism fails at the root. All three preserve eva ('itself' / 'herself'), which carries the sūtra's soteriological payload: because citta is citi itself, liberation is recognition rather than transformation — the mind does not need to become consciousness; it needs to notice that it never stopped being consciousness. The renderings also split quietly on cetana-pada, Singh and Wallis reading it as citi's uncontracted state, Shantananda paraphrasing it away — a small fork, but it determines whether the text teaches a two-stage or three-stage descent.

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