Pratyabhijñā-hṛdayam · Sūtra 9
चिद्वत्तच्छक्तिसंकोचात् मलावृतः संसारी
cidvat tacchaktisaṃkocāt malāvṛtaḥ
Full of consciousness (cidvat) though it is, through the contraction of its powers (śakti-saṃkoca) it becomes the transmigrating soul (saṃsārī), covered by impurity (mala).
Context
Sūtras 9 through 12 form the bondage cluster — describing the condition of the saṃsārī, the mechanism of bondage (the failure to recognize one's own authorship of the five acts), and its result, delusion. Sūtras 13 onward reverse the journey. Sūtra 9 is the diagnosis: the moment in the text where the cosmology of contraction becomes an account of suffering.
Primary reading
The word cidvat — full of cit — is the hidden key. Even in the description of bondage, consciousness is fully present. The saṃsārī is not less conscious than Śiva; it is Śiva operating in a mala-covered, power-contracted mode. Bondage is not the absence of consciousness but its self-concealment — and the sūtra's grammar enacts the doctrine, asserting fullness and covering of the same subject in a single breath. The causal ablative (saṃkocāt) states the mechanism plainly: the saṃsārī results from the contraction of the powers of consciousness, nothing more.
Commentarial layer
Kṣemarāja's commentary on the three malas is extensive. The āṇavamala is primordial — the contraction through which infinite consciousness first appears as a finite being, the bare sense of incompleteness at the root of individuality. The māyīyamala and kārmamala are secondary, arising upon it: the perception of difference between self and world, and bondage to action and its residues. The commentary derives the malas from the contraction of the specific powers (śakti) named in the sūtra — the unlimited will, knowledge, and agency of consciousness appearing, contracted, as felt limitation — so that bondage is analyzed throughout as śakti operating at reduced aperture, never as a second principle opposing consciousness.
Common misreadings
Missing cidvat — reading the saṃsārī as a diminished being rather than a full expression of consciousness in a contracted mode. The sūtra's first word forecloses this: whatever else the wanderer is, it is full of cit, and every account of bondage that forgets this turns the text into the dualism it was written against.
Two forks decide the doctrine. First, the subject: does the sūtra say that Awareness itself becomes the saṃsārī, or that some being, described as consciousness-full, gets covered? The non-dual reading requires the first. Second, the rendering of saṃkoca and mala — 'contraction' and 'veil' keep bondage structural; 'limitation' and 'impurity' let a note of deficiency or moral fault creep into what Trika insists is the free play of consciousness.
What the differences reveal
Remarkably, all three translators make consciousness itself the subject of the sūtra — none reads the saṃsārī as an independent entity that gets covered — so on the deepest question the tradition's translators are unanimous: bondage is Śiva's self-concealment, not a creature's misfortune. The divergences are divergences of emphasis: Singh names the metaphysical subject ('reality'), Wallis the theological one ('It,' Awareness), while Shantananda alone keeps the sūtra's own syntax, in which fullness (cidvat) and covering (malāvṛta) are asserted of the same subject in one sentence — the paradox that makes recognition possible. The remaining forks — contraction versus limitation, veil versus impurity, samsārin versus soul — all test the same boundary: whether bondage sounds structural and reversible, as Kṣemarāja teaches, or substantial and moral, as the English words keep threatening to make it.
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