Sat-darshana Bhashya (translation)

Verse 19.

देहात्मभावे ज्ञजडौ समाना-
वेकस्य देहे हृदि दीप्त आत्मा।
आक्रम्य देहं च जगच्च पूर्णः
परस्य मेयं तनुमानमात्मा ॥

Body is Self to the wise and the ignorant alike. To the body is limited the ignorant one’s self. The self effulgent in the Heart of the wise, Possesses the body and the world around, And stands limitless and perfect.

The idea that the self is the body is common to the man that has realised the Truth and to him that has not. In the Heart of the man of realisation, in the centre of the Purusha and the seat of the Lord in man, the Supreme is effulgent as the Self, the supreme ’I’ ‘possessing the body and the world around, perfect and limitless’. But the ignorant, the undeveloped man has only the body itself for his self; for he feels and thinks that he is not separate from the body and that in fact he is the body. But the wise, the advanced man realises that he is a Self distinct from the body—and the Self itself is his body, the Self that is ever effulgent in the Heart as the incessant I-consciousness possessing the body and the world at large. This Self, the Infinite, the real and perfect ’l’ is experienced by the wise man, the man of realisation as his own body. Thus the difference between the wise and the ignorant lies in experience, which is dynamic in its character, and not in an intellectual conviction which is but the flower of philosophic reasoning.

To put it briefly: to the man that knows, Existence Real that is the All, is the Self and this includes his particular embodiment. To the ignorant, his body alone is the Self.

Because of the deficiency in understanding capacity of the unregenerate, his knowledge is imperfect and defective. To mistake his imperfect and, in this sense, faulty understanding for complete knowledge is false knowledge. It is not that the defective knowledge itself is false.

In other words, the undeveloped man experiences the Self in his own body, while the developed, the wise man realises his Self in the universal body, in the world, and his Self is not limited to his particular embodied existence. The grand idea of this verse has been fully discussed in the Introduction.

The difference between the wise and the ignorant as well as the element common to them has been thus discussed with reference to the individual body. The next verse takes up the world, the universal body; with reference to that it speaks of the difference between the wise and the ignorant.