The 5 Kancukas: the armours of manifestation
If God is all power, omnipresent, omniscient, omnipotent, with light and bliss as attributes, here is how this light could crystallise into matter by passing through stages of constriction, the Kancukas, the armours of manifestation!
First armour (Kancuka): Kâla
Light is beyond time and space in its infinite, unchanging, eternal present moment; it becomes subject to an idea of moment, and time appears with dynamism.
Second armour: Niyati
Necessity, the established, limited order.
Total, omnipotent freedom is limited, in time and dynamism, to an established and limited order, and the notion of necessity appears…
Freedom has fallen into necessity…
Third armour: Kalâ
Succession, or power determined in time.
The effect of causality: a thing appears because of a cause, which in turn becomes a cause with an effect, and so everything is manifested.
Fourth armour: Vidyâ
Existential knowledge.
So here is the individual soul, which now has only a narrow view of reality because of its feeling of existence and the “illusory” bond that ties this individual soul to the character, the body and the memory of its story, cutting it off from true knowledge through ignorance and identification.
Fifth armour: Râga:
attraction or dependence, desire.
All this one day allows us, in the depths of our limited ignorance, to declare with force and pride:
“This now is something I know entirely”
THE PARAMARTHASARA
by Abhinavagupta
translated and commented by Lilian Silburn
17 "This now is something I know entirely".
Combined with illusion, this makes up the six armours and is called the inner part of the atomic (soul).
Commentary
When, despite its fundamental freedom, Intelligence becomes atomic (anu) and takes on the form of an individual soul, its energies of knowledge and activity contract into limited knowledge (vidya) and determining activity (kala).
The five categories (time, limited activity, causal restriction, partial knowledge and desire) united with illusion form the six armours.
(Analysing the phrase 'this now is something I know entirely', the commentator specifies.) The expression "now I know" implies knowledge tainted with temporality, and this limitation in the fulfilment of the modalities (of being) is what accounts for the time (kala) of the soul. This "something" which makes the object a jar and not a cloth, this limitation of its power which constitutes the finiteness or atomicity of the soul, is the category of determining activity (kala).
The word "this" presupposes an invariable effect arising from an invariable cause, like smoke from fire, for the Self is necessarily conditioned by the merit and demerit of the works it has freely performed. This is the category of causal restriction (niyati).
"Entirely" gives the impression that everything should belong to me, as well as the desire for a long life, in a word the lack of fullness, which is the very category of desire (raga).
"I know": I know something, like knowledge applied to a nearby object; this expresses the category of limited knowledge (vidya).
The inner part is the intimate, innate portion of the soul; it is the innermost of the sheaths that cover Siva.
On Samkhya:
- What the tattvas of tantrism add to Samkhya
- Table of the Samkhya tattvas
- Study of the Samkhya text on my forum
- A translation of the Samkhya text that I recommend