Pratyabhijñā-hṛdayam · Sūtra 13
तत्परिज्ञाने चित्तमेव अन्तर्मुखीभावेन चेतनपदाध्यारोहात् चितिः
tatparijñāne cittameva cetanapad citiḥ
When that is fully recognized (parijñāna), the mind (citta) itself — through inward-facing (antarmukhībhāva), by ascent to the plane of the conscious knower (cetana) — is consciousness (citi).
Context
Sūtra 13 is the pivot of the entire text — the watershed between the bondage sūtras (9–12) and the liberation sūtras (13–20). Its opening word answers sūtra 12 exactly: tatparijñāne ('when that is fully recognized') against tadaparijñāne ('when that is not fully recognized'). And it is the precise reversal of sūtra 5: citta becomes citi through recognition and inward turning, just as citi became citta through descent and object-contraction.
Primary reading
The parallel with sūtra 5 is architecturally precise. Sūtra 5: citi → cetana → citta, the descent, consciousness contracting in conformity with objects. Sūtra 13: citta → cetana → citi, the ascent, mind turning inward and rising through the plane of the conscious knower. The word eva ('itself') appears in both: it was citi itself that descended; it is citta itself that ascends. No change in substance occurs at either end — only a change in the direction of attention's movement. What descends and what ascends are one consciousness, and the sūtra's grammar refuses any reading in which liberation manufactures something new.
Commentarial layer
Kṣemarāja's commentary on this sūtra is among the richest in the text. He elaborates the multiple ways inward turning (antarmukhībhāva) can occur — sudden recognition, gradual deepening, the role of the guru's transmission — and connects the ascent to the means (upāyas) that sūtras 17 and 18 will set out. The ascent through cetana to citi is not preparatory to the pratyabhijñā; it is the pratyabhijñā itself, recognition enacted as movement.
Common misreadings
Reading 'inward turning' as withdrawal from the world or suppression of the senses — antarmukhībhāva is a reorientation of attention toward its source, not a shutting-down of experience; perception continues, re-grounded. And reading 'becomes citi' as a future event, a liberation that will someday happen: the recognition is now. The citta does not wait to become citi; through the recognition it is discovered as citi, and always to have been.
This is the liberation sūtra, the exact reversal of sūtra 5, and the deepest fork in translating it is a single verb: does citta 'become' citi, or is it 'revealed as' citi? Becoming implies transformation of one thing into another; revelation implies recognition of what was never otherwise. A second fork is quieter but real: whether the intermediate term cetana survives into the English at all.
What the differences reveal
The 'becomes' versus 'is revealed as' fork is the whole question of what liberation is, posed inside a verb. Both readings have footing in Kṣemarāja: phenomenologically there is a real movement — citta genuinely turns, genuinely ascends through cetana — and yet ontologically nothing new comes into being, because the citta was citi all along (the eva of sūtra 5 answered by the eva of sūtra 13). Singh and Shantananda translate the phenomenology; Wallis translates the ontology; the sūtra, holding both in one sentence, is stricter than any of its translations. The second divergence — Singh alone preserving the citta–cetana–citi ladder — shows what is at stake in vocabulary discipline: the architectural symmetry with sūtra 5, which Kṣemarāja built deliberately, is invisible in any rendering that translates the rungs away.
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