Manas

Mind is the sense-organ that is the instrument for the apprehension of pleasure and the like.

But what is most astonishing of all is that while they would grant that the mind is superior to the body, nevertheless, in spite of this opinion, they look with greater favor upon training in gymnastics than upon the study of philosophy.

Since this is so, certain of our ancestors, long before our time, seeing that many arts had been devised for other things, while none had been prescribed for the body and for the mind, invented and bequeathed to us two disciplines, physical training for the body, of which gymnastics is a part, and, for the mind, philosophy, which I am going to explain.

It is acknowledged that the nature of man is compounded of two parts, the physical and the mental, and no one would deny that of these two the mind comes first and is of greater worth;

Since nature of mind is mortal evermore.

Where soul and mind can each exist and grow,

Thus nature of mind cannot arise alone

The fact, that the mind uses the physical organs in the production of material wealth, can make no distinction between such wealth, and ideas—for the mind also uses a material organ, (the brain,) in the production of ideas;

Another reason why tangibility and perceptibility by our physical organs, are no criteria of wealth, is, that it really is not our physical organs, but the mind, and only the mind, that takes cognizance even of material objects.

(It is the mind that owns every thing, that is property.

Now we call upon the mind — with the Nārāśaṁsa-Soma, and with the praises of the Pitṛs.

As this great Earth holds these forest trees in place — so has he held your mind fast, for living and not for dying, and for unbroken wholeness.

As they bind a yoke with a threefold tie for its support — so has he held your mind fast, for living and not for dying, and for unbroken wholeness.

Accordingly the mind also — or the intellect, which the Greeks call ‘nous’ — we understand to be nothing other than a faculty of the soul, inborn and implanted and proper to it from its birth, by which it acts, by which it knows, which, having it with itself, out of itself it moves itself within itself, and so seems to be moved by it as if by another substance;

We see, then, that against the corporeal senses another equipment is set forth, as far more suitable — namely the powers of the soul, working out the intellect of that truth whose objects are not present nor lie subject to the corporeal senses, but are far absent from common consciousness, in the secret and in the higher places and with God Himself.

‘How many souls do I feed,’ says the rich man — not minds;

When the mind, its clinging to objects cast off and [itself] restrained within the heart, reaches the unmanī(bhāva) (the mind-transcending state in which thought ceases) state, then that is the supreme abode.

The mind alone is the cause for human beings of [both] bondage and liberation.

[The mind] is to be restrained just until it has gone to dissolution within the heart.

*Ahaṅkāra* Vaikṛta creates the *manas* (the sensory mind) and the ten senses (*daśendriya*).