The mind sheath
What is the sheath made of mind? The mind joined with the five organs of knowing. What they become together is the sheath made of mind.
What is the mind sheath (manomaya-kośa)? It is the mind joined with the five organs of knowledge. Together they form the mind sheath.
- manomaya-kośa
The mind sheath and the next sheath, the intellect sheath, both take in the same five organs of knowing. So what marks the mind sheath as its own layer?
- The mind here is the faculty that wills and wavers, that frames a thing and then doubts it, while the next sheath is the faculty that decides
- The mind sheath uses the five organs of action, and the intellect sheath uses the five organs of knowing
- The mind sheath belongs to the gross body, and the intellect sheath belongs to the causal body
- The mind sheath is the Self itself, while the intellect sheath is only its reflection
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The sheath that wavers
After the body built of food and the breath that moves it, a finer covering is named: the mind joined with the five organs of knowing. This is the layer where the world arrives and is turned over. The ear, skin, eye, tongue, and nose carry in sound and touch and form and taste and smell, and the mind takes what they bring and works it, wanting it, refusing it, framing a thing one moment and unframing it the next. What the mind and these five become together is the mind sheath.
The mind meant here is the restless faculty, the one that wills and doubts. That is why it is set apart from the breath sheath just before it. Breath keeps the body alive without ever asking a question; the mind does almost nothing but ask, reaching toward what it likes and away from what it fears. This sheath is subtler than the ones below it and closer in than they are, pressed up against the sense of 'I,' and for that reason it is the harder one to recognize as merely a covering. We feel the body as ours readily enough. We are slower to feel the wavering mind as ours, because it seems to be us.
And that is the work the counting does. To name the mind a sheath is to say it is one more thing that is known. You watch it stir; you notice it settle and stir again. What is watched in this way, however near, however intimate, stands on the side of the seen, and the seen is not the seer. The doubting mind is held within awareness the way an object is held in light. So this layer too is owned and not the owner, worn and not the wearer.
It is placed here on purpose, between the breath that animates and the intellect that decides, so the seeker climbing inward does not stop at the mind and mistake its nearness for the Self. The mind is genuinely closer than the body. That is granted, and still it is set down as one more covering to be seen through. What remains when even the wavering is watched is left for the layers ahead.
When the mind reaches for one thing and pulls back from another, can you find the still place from which the reaching and the pulling back are both simply seen?
In the commentaries
The manomaya sheath is the mind taken together with the five organs of knowing, and the mind meant here is the faculty that wills and wavers, that frames a thing one moment and unframes it the next. It is named a separate sheath from the food sheath and the breath sheath because doubt, desire, and resolve are a finer covering than flesh or breath, nearer the sense of 'I,' and so harder to set down. Yet it too is counted, named, and known: it is the very mind you watch as it stirs, and what is watched is not the watcher. It is seated here, between the breath that animates the body and the intellect that decides, so the seeker can see the doubting mind for one more layer that is owned and not for the Self that owns it.