Context

After the liberation pivot of sūtra 13, sūtra 14 returns to describe the ordinary state — but now from a different angle. The bondage sūtras (9–12) described the covered condition as deficiency; sūtra 14 describes the same condition as concealed activity: even in the most covered, descended state, citi is at work. The fire has not gone out; it is burning under the ashes. The avarohapada, the plane of descent, is the terminus of the movement described in sūtra 5.

Primary reading

This is a teaching of encouragement in the strict sense: even the most ordinary, distracted, object-absorbed cognition is secretly the fire of citi consuming its objects. Nothing is profane. The practitioner need not construct a sacred state or kindle a fire that has gone cold — every moment of knowing is already citi burning, only mātrayā, in measure, without the full recognition that would let the burning complete itself. What separates the ordinary knower from the recognizer is not the presence of the fire but the measure of its acknowledged reach.

Commentarial layer

Kṣemarāja uses this sūtra to establish the continuity of grace (śaktipāta): consciousness's power is always working toward its own recognition, even in the most contracted states. The partial burning is not a static compromise but a live pressure — the fire's nature is to consume completely, and its partial operation in the descended state is the form grace takes there, preparing the access of full strength (bala) that sūtra 15 names.

Common misreadings

Taking the fire image as destruction — as if consciousness annihilated its objects — when the figure works the other way: fuel becomes fire, objects become consciousness; consumption here is assimilation, not loss. And reading mātrayā as a statement about citi itself — as if consciousness were diminished or weakened in the descended state. The fire is undiminished in nature; what is partial is the recognized scope of its burning, which is why sūtra 15 requires no new fire, only the attainment of strength.