The intellect sheath
What is the sheath made of knowing? The intellect joined with the five organs of knowing. What they become together is the sheath made of knowing.
What is the intellect sheath (vijñānamaya-kośa)? It is the intellect (buddhi) joined with the five organs of knowledge. Together they form the intellect sheath.
- vijñānamaya-kośa
The mind sheath and the intellect sheath both gather the same five organs of knowing. So where does the line between them actually fall?
- In the inner faculty they join: the mind that deliberates and doubts, or the intellect that settles and decides
- In the organs themselves, since the intellect draws on a different set of five
- In the body each belongs to, the intellect being subtler and finer matter
- In the number of organs, the intellect adding a sixth to the five
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The one who decides
The sheaths are being counted from the outside in, and with this one the count reaches the faculty that feels most surely like yourself. The same five organs of knowing that were just gathered under the mind are gathered again here. What changes is the inner instrument they serve. The mind takes in what the senses bring and turns it over, deliberating, doubting, swinging between shall I and shall I not. The intellect ends that swinging. It settles the matter, determines this is so, and decides this I will do.
Because it decides, this is where the sense of being someone takes hold. Lit by consciousness, the deciding faculty becomes the knower who understands, the doer who acts, the one who weighs a thing and then calls the deed his own. This is the refined 'I' that survives after the cruder ones are seen through. You can grant that you are not the body, not the breath, not even the restless mind, and still feel certain that you are the one who just granted it, the thinker doing the thinking. That thinker is this sheath.
It is set out here, plainly, as one sheath among five, and the placing is the teaching. To name the knower as a sheath is to say that it too is wrapped around something, that it too can be set aside. The turn waits a little further on, where even this one who decides is found to be something known, lit up like the others, and so cannot be the light in which all of it appears. For now it is enough to see it clearly and to give it its own name: the intellect joined with the organs of knowing, the seat of the one who decides.
When you set aside the body and the mind, who is the one you feel is doing the setting aside?
In the commentaries
The same five organs of knowing that served the mind serve here too; what changes is the inner instrument they join. The mind deliberates and doubts, swinging between 'shall I' and 'shall I not'; the intellect settles the matter and decides, 'this is so, this I will do.' That deciding faculty, lit by consciousness, is where the sense of being the knower and the doer takes its seat: the one who weighs, resolves, and calls the deed his own. So this sheath is named for vijñāna, determinate knowing, and it carries the whole feeling of 'I am the one who understands and acts.' There is a reason it is set out plainly as its own sheath. The student who has already let the body, the breath, and the restless mind fall away still clings to this last refined 'I,' the thinker who seems most surely himself. Naming it as one more sheath prepares the turn ahead, where even this knower is seen to be known, and so cannot be the knowing in whose light it appears.