Pratyabhijñā-hṛdayam · Sūtra 6
तन्मयो मायाप्रमाता
tanmayo
The māyā-perceiver (māyāpramātā) consists of that [contracted mind, citta].
Context
Sūtras 5 and 6 together describe the condition of ordinary experience: sūtra 5 named the mechanism — citta as contracted citi — and sūtra 6 names the experiencer who operates in this mode, the māyāpramātā. This is the human condition prior to recognition, stated without lament: a structural description, not an indictment.
Primary reading
The sūtra is brief and diagnostic: the māyā-perceiver consists of (tanmayaḥ) citta — is entirely made of the contracted mind described in the previous sūtra. This perceiver experiences the world through the māyā-lens: subject separate from object, self separate from world, moment separate from moment. Nothing here says the perceiver is mistaken about the contents of its experience; the limitation is structural — a built-in assumption of separateness through which all its cognitions pass.
Commentarial layer
Kṣemarāja's commentary situates the māyāpramātā within the Pratyabhijñā hierarchy of perceivers (pramātṛs) — the graded series running from the Śiva-pramātā through Mantramaheśvara, Mantreśvara, Mantra, Vijñānākala, and Pralayākala down to the Sakala, the most contracted level. The māyāpramātā of this sūtra corresponds to the Sakala: the fully embodied perceiver operating within the fivefold limitation (pañcakañcuka) that māyā generates. The hierarchy matters doctrinally because it shows perceiverhood as continuous — the ordinary knower differs from Śiva in degree of contraction, never in kind.
Common misreadings
Reading māyā as 'illusion' in the popular sense — as if the sūtra said the world isn't real. In Trika, māyā-experience is real experience, genuinely undergone; what limits it is a structural assumption of separateness that does not match ultimate reality, not a failure of the experience to exist.
The sūtra is three words, and everything hangs on two of them: whether tanmaya keeps its full constitutional force — the perceiver consists of the contracted mind, rather than merely having one — and what to do with māyāpramātā, which can be left standing as a technical rank in the hierarchy of perceivers, or unpacked into what such a perceiver does.
What the differences reveal
The three renderings split precisely on what māyā is doing in the compound: for Singh it is part of a technical name, a domain the perceiver operates through; for Shantananda it is an experience undergone; for Wallis it is a mode of perception exercised. All three are defensible in Trika, where māyā is simultaneously a tattva, a śakti, and a way of knowing — the divergence maps the term's real polysemy rather than any translator's error. What none of them surrenders is tanmaya's constitutional claim, and that is the sūtra's diagnostic point: the bound perceiver is not a soul that carries a mind but a perceiver made entirely of contracted mind — which is why the recognition taught later in the text dissolves the condition rather than improving it.
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