SUTTAVIRU
37. What exists is the plenitude of object-free jnana, which shines as unconditioned reality. The world appears as an object that is grasped by your suttarivu. Like the erroneous perception of a person with jaundice who sees everything as yellow, this entire world is a deluded view consisting wholly of a mind that has defects such as ego, deceit, desire, and so on.
Suttarivu is a key word in Muruganar?s writings. Arivu means consciousness or true knowledge, and it is often used in Tamil as an equivalent of jnana. ?Suttu? means ?pointed at?. Arivu is the true consciousness, the true knowledge that is aware of nothing other than itself. However, when attention is externalized and ?pointed at? phenomena that are assumed to be external, the trinity of seer, seeking and seen arises. This creates the idea of an individual self who sees an external real world, and while this suttarivu process is functioning, the reality of the undivided Self is hidden.
The term suttarivu comes from Saiva Siddhanta philosophy, a subject Muruganar had a strong grounding in, but it does not appear in Vedanta. The word is generally translated as ?objectifying consciousness?, ?objectified consciousness?, ?objective knowledge? or ?relative knowledge?, but since these terms are a little abstract and do not fully convey this process whereby the externalizing of attention brings about duality, we have retained the Tamil word suttarivu in many of the verses.
[A note from the authors]
- GVK