Philosophy of the Mind in the Śāntiparva

Mind, the supreme power, has many properties to its credits. They are patience, reasoning, remembrance, and forgetfulness of error, imagination, endurance, inclination towards good and evil and restlessness. A searcher of spiritual science considers the five senses, faculty, mind and understanding as the organs of knowledge. Mind is so powerful that it is regarded as the lord of all the senses and these senses have assigned functions like guiding or controlling. Mind has a master control and it understands.^[1] Three stages are the tag of mind-wakefulness, dream and sleep. The peculiarities of these are always present in self and always conscious. One more addition to it is that it possesses sixteen attributes and thus the total is seventeen. The essence of mind is doubt. The lord of the mind understands and has the power to discriminate and certainty emenates. The consequences of acts when invested in the body are known as Jīva. The Jīva or individual soul is subjected to acts.^[2]

To make the idea clear the body can be compared to a city whose mistress understands. The mind is seated as the Minister of the Mistress understanding. The chief duty assigned to Minister Mind is to decide. The citizens of the city are the senses and these citizens are as per the Minister’s Mind. The decision-making mind is strongly inclined to various kinds of acts. The faulty acts, namely two in number, darkness and ignorance have their seat in the city. The citizens of the city and the chiefs of the city depend on the fruits of the acts. The fruits of the faulty acts are the result of forbidden means. The Mistress Understanding is strong, firm and unconquerable, joins the mind or rather bends her knees and equalizes herself with the mind. The firm and rigid senses lose their quality by this scarred mind. Mind fails totally to take righteous and useful decisions. This ultimately meets with destruction and grief. Mind has a dirty quality of remembering the destructed objects. These reminiscences affect the mind even after the loss. In turn understanding is affected. This is so because the mind and understanding stand different only when the chief function of getting impressions takes place. The impressions cannot be judged. The mind and understanding are identical only in sooth. Darkness sullies the understanding by overwhelming the soul. This can be seen as an image in a mirror, mind, the soft creature, is the one who surrenders to darkness first. Then it pulls the soul, understanding and the senses. The mind, after bringing all these together surrenders them to Rajas.^[3]

A person can be in a happy state both in this world and in the next, if he has the capability of self-control. Virtue which is qualified as great is gifted with self-control. A man who has acquired self-control is in the paradise of happiness, that is, all his activities will be in a happy state—sleeping, awakening and moving around. A self -controlled man’s mind is always bouncing in happiness and it dances like a peacock. A man who is void of self-control has to suffer a lot and will always be in misery. He will encounter with calamities and will always be in the path of faults and pathos. Their day and night is formed by three thousand kalpas. The nature of mind is to wander over the things under the control and guidance of senses. The senses are so dull that they are unable to interpret anything. The mighty Mind is the one which notices and observes everything. This can be explained in this manner, that is, the eyes are the gift of mind and not born by itself. The peculiarity is that when mind is distracted, the eyes loss their sense of sight and can have only a blurred sight. So it can be concluded that it is the Mind and not the senses which has the ability to perceive. In other words the mind perceives everything on behalf of the senses. This quality of mind makes one come to the conclusion that when mind’s activity stops, senses stop. So it leads to the assumption and proof that mind has the power to control the senses.^[4]

Mind helps a man to understand and see the seventeenth namely the soul along with the six and ten qualities, if the mind is under strict control. The wise man who controls his mind is able to see and understand his soul. The individual soul has to pass through infinite stages of existence. The stages of existence are approximately fourteen hundred thousand. The consequence of this is the one which makes the individual soul ascend, stay and fall down as per the situation.^[5] The mind is the one and only Lord of all the senses, which are in all twenty elements in the universe.

Footnotes and references:

[1]:

Śāntiparva , 275 -18.

[2]:

Mahābhārata XII, 252–11.

[3]:

Mahābhārata Śāntiparva , 254, 9-14.

[4]:

Mahābhārata Śāntiparva , 311, 15 -20.

[5]:

Śāntiparva , 280–36.