Context

Sūtra 15 describes the first fruit of the recognition begun in sūtra 13: when the power of citi is accessed, the universe is made one's own. It opens the liberation sequence proper (sūtras 15–20), and it completes the fire image of sūtra 14 — what burned mātrayā, in measure, now consumes without remainder. The saṃsārin of sūtra 9, whose powers were contracted, here recovers them as bala.

Primary reading

The sūtra is brief and absolute: on attaining strength, one makes the universe one's own. The universe that was previously experienced as external, other, potentially threatening, is recognized as the display of one's own consciousness. This is not solipsism — the universe remains fully real, fully present, fully articulated; what dissolves is only its otherness. And the ātman into which the universe is assimilated is citi, not the limited self: the recognition of sūtra 13 is the precondition, since only a citta that has recognized itself as citi has a self capacious enough to own a universe.

Commentarial layer

Kṣemarāja specifies that the bala in question is cit-bala, the power of the Self, universal consciousness — not a yogic siddhi and not an augmentation of personal capacity. When this power is accessed, even the most apparently external thing — a mountain, a stranger, a difficult emotion — is seen as self-luminous citi. The scope of the assimilation is unrestricted precisely because nothing was ever outside consciousness to begin with; the attainment of strength changes what is recognized, not what is there.

Common misreadings

Reading ātmasātkaroti as ego-aggrandizement — 'I absorb everything' — as if the limited self annexed the world. The ātman here is citi, not the ego; the assimilation runs through the recognition of sūtra 13 and is impossible without it. The complementary misreading takes the sūtra as withdrawal or world-denial, as if making the universe one's own meant making it disappear — but the act is recognition, not renunciation: the universe stays, and only its otherness goes.