Verse 5.108

Sanskrit text, Unicode transliteration and English translation by Ganganath Jha:

अद्भिर्गात्राणि शुध्यन्ति मनः सत्येन शुध्यति ।
विद्यातपोभ्यां भूतात्मा बुद्धिर्ज्ञानेन शुध्यति ॥ १०८ ॥

adbhirgātrāṇi śudhyanti manaḥ satyena śudhyati |
vidyātapobhyāṃ bhūtātmā buddhirjñānena śudhyati || 108 ||

The limbs are purified by water; the mind is purified by truthfulness; the soul proper by learning and austerity; and cognition is purified by knowledge.—(108).

 

Medhātithi’s commentary (manubhāṣya):

The ‘personality’ entitled to the performance of acts consists of the following factors—

1. The person himself, i.e., the Inner Soul,
2. the Internal Organ, i.e., the mind,
3. the Intellect
4. and the Body, the receptacle of experiences.

The Sense-Organs being material, do not constitute a separate factor. Of these factors some are purified by one thing, and some by other; the statement that ‘Time purifies everything’ being purely valedic tory.

‘Limbs,’ standing for the parts, indicate the whole, the body; the sense being that ‘by water’—i.e., by bathing—‘the body becomes purified.’

The ‘mind’—described (in Discourse I) as consisting of ‘the existent and the non-existent’—becomes contaminated by evil intentions; and it becomes pure by ‘truthfulness’—i.e., by good intentions. In a previous verse (104) the mind has been spoken of as a ‘means of purification’; but that has to be taken in an indirect sense; and the present text can not mean that ‘words’ (truthful) are the means of purifying the mind; and the Śruti also speaks of ‘the word being prompted by the Mind, whence the word uttered by one who is absent-minded becomes fit for demons and not for the gods.’

‘Learning’—produced by the proper study of the Sāṅkhya and the Vedānta;—and ‘austerity’— in the form of the Kṛcchra and the rest;—when endowed by these the ‘soul proper’ becomes purified. The term—‘bhūta’ (in the compound ‘bhūtātma’) means proper, real; i.e., that which is really the soul, the object of the notion of the ‘ego’ as free from the notion of ‘I’, and not the material entity consisting of the body.

‘Buddhi’ is ‘cognition’—which is regarded as contaminated when it appears in the form of a thing that is non-existent, or when it does not take any account of the distinction between the real form of the thing cognised and the apparent form in which it is cognised when, during dreams and such conditions, it is obsessed by wrong notions of things;—or ‘Buddhi’ may stand for that faculty of the personality which is the product of the unexpiated portions of his past misdeeds, and which may, by virtue of each single sin committed in the past, beset that personality in the form of Ignorance, appearing in the shape of the notion of diversity, or in the shape of the non-discrimination between the Soul and the material attributes, which operates in the form of attachment to children, wealth and such things, and becomes the source of extreme longings.—This ‘Buddhi’ becomes pure by ‘know ledge;’—i.e., proper understanding of the means of cognition as indicating the self-luminous character of all cognitions. Cognition is distinct from the Object cognised, by reason of the latter having a shape, and it being impossible for the former to become modified, into that shape; and hence it becomes purified by the conviction that it is, by its very nature, unmodifiable.

The term ‘learning’ in the previous clause stands for the knowledge of what is taught by the Veda; and its capacity for purification is of the same kind as described under 11.246—‘as the fire, in one moment, etc.’

Being purified in the above manner, the person reaches the regions of Brahman. Such is the four-fold purification. And what is intended to be expressed is eulogy of such purification as leading to the fulfilment of the highest ends of man in the matter of his births and other ciruumstances.—(108).

 

Explanatory notes by Ganganath Jha

(Verse 109 of others.)

This verse is quoted in Smṛtisāroddhāra (p. 249);—and in Nṛsiṃhaprasāda (Śrāddha, p. 13b).

 

Comparative notes by various authors

Baudhāyana (1.8.2. and 31, 27).—(Same as Manu.)

Vaśiṣṭha (3.60).—(Same as Manu.)

Viṣṇu (22.92).—(Same as Manu.)

Yājñavalkya (3.33).—(See above, under 104.)