Sat-darshana Bhashya (translation)

Verse 6.

सरूपबुद्धिर्जगतीश्वरे च
सरूपधीरात्मनि यावदस्ति ।
अरूप आत्मा यदि कः प्रपश्येत्
सा दृष्टिरेकाऽनवधिहि पूर्णा ॥

To him who holds the self as having form God has form and so has the world. But who is there to see in the formless Self? Itself is the Eye-limitless, one and full.

If the seer is an embodied being, the world and the Lord that are the seen, have also an embodied existence; and embodiment is not necessarily physical, nor is it used to denote only what is visible to the eye. It is any or all of the five sheaths of which mention is made in the next verse. Thus having stated that God, world and soul have form presented to the seeing soul that is embodied, the verse proceeds to state that they are formless in the formless Infinite Self.

The question is asked, “Who is there to see in the formless Self?’ If the seeing self is formless who is there to see? The infinite Self is itself the Eye, one, limitless and full. Here one is reminded of the Upanishad that refers to Brahman as that in which the Self has become all beings (existences).

The Self is the all; it is that which has become all this; and there is nothing for the Self to see outside of itself or apart from it, as it includes (lit. devours), all forms and transcends them (lit. shines forth). Here, there is no knowledge of distinction between seer and seen; hence the Upanishad describes the character of the One, the Infinite, advaita, akhanda by putting the question ’whom to see and by what?’ tatkena kam pasyet. Here also the same question is put, ’Who is there to see? “The answer is obvious, there is none. "Why’? ’Itself is the Eye’. The Supreme Brahman is denoted by the third person ’Itself’. It is mentioned as the Eye to denote that it is Consciousness. It is ’One’, without a second, Infinite. It is ’limitless’ or endless, the full’, the all-pervasive. If it is mentioned as ’seer’, then the question may arise that there is the seen’ apart from the seer. To avoid it, the word ’Eye’ drsti is used in the sense of sight or awareness (consciousness) and not in the sense that there is a seer apart from the sight.

When like incessant waves of the shoreless ocean, myriads of worlds are born of the Supreme Brahman and endure and are dissolved, the eternal Infinite Self, called here ’the Eye’, remains full and perfect and is not lost in the incessant change taking place in it, in its self-becomings, in the creative movement of its consciousness that brings into existence and supports the distinctions of God and world, individual and universal, seer and seen, supporter and supported. In the first half of the verse it was stated that the form of God and the world depends upon the seeing soul jiva that has form; in the latter half we find it stated in unmistakable terms that if the seeing self is realised to be formless then the truth can be understood that there is nothing that is really other than the Self which is Infinite, Eternal, the limitless Eye, the Full and Perfect. Thus though the formlessness of the Self is clearly stated to be the Supreme Truth, yet the seeing self that has form sees the Creator and His creation in form.

How the self takes on this form, which impermanent as it is still clings to it for the time being, is elsewhere discussed.

The Discourse upon the seeing selfs form or embodied existence raises the question of the nature of the embodiment itself. The next verse proceeds to state that five-fold is this embodied existence, and that consciousness of the world of forms is due to the self identifying itself with any of the five bodily sheaths.