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Merging the Five Sense-Spaces (Verse 32)

1. Exercise Title & Verse

Merging the Five Sense-Spaces (Verse 32, Dhāraṇā 9)

2. Sanskrit (IAST)

śikhipakṣaiś citrarūpair maṇḍalaiḥ śūnyapañcakam | dhyāyato 'nuttare śūnye praveśo hṛdaye bhavet || 32 ||

3. English (Literal)

Meditating on the five spaces as the colorful circles of a peacock's feathers, entry into the Heart occurs in the unsurpassed space.

4. Main Commentary (Bhāṣya)

Padārtha. Śūnya-pañcakam means the five spaces or five voids. In the local tradition these are linked to the five senses and their objects, and Singh also hears an echo of the subtle sensory essences, the tanmātras. Śikhi-pakṣaiḥ citra-rūpair maṇḍalaiḥ gives the image: the variegated circular markings in a peacock feather. The important point is not peacock symbolism for its own sake, but the structure of nested circles. Dhyāyataḥ means contemplating, holding in meditative awareness. Anuttare śūnye is the unsurpassed space, the supreme openness beyond contracted sensory fixation. Hṛdaye praveśaḥ means entry into the Heart, not the physical organ but the deepest center of awareness.

Anvaya. The sentence means: "Meditating on the five spaces as the colorful circular markings of a peacock feather, one enters the Heart in the unsurpassed space."

Tatparya. The verse's new turn is decisive. Verse 31 sent awareness above the bodily limit through a brow-bridge. Verse 32 does not climb upward at all. It works with the sensory manifold itself. Lakshmanjoo makes the practical core brutally simple: what is seen, heard, touched, smelled, and tasted is to be known as void, and one must stop at the raw event rather than rushing into analysis. Wallis helps clarify why the peacock feather matters. The circles are nested; therefore the senses are not to remain five separate traffic lanes. They are to be merged into one field and allowed to dissolve inward. This is not a doctrine of negating the world into dead nothingness. It is a practice of seeing every sensory event as arising in openness and returning into the Heart without becoming a chain of commentary. The "void" here is therefore not absence of experience but freedom from fixation within experience.

Sādhana. Begin with the whole field of perception instead of any one favored object. Let seeing be present, hearing be present, touch be present, smell be present, taste be present. Then do not run after what each sense is reporting. Know each sense-object as a space-opening rather than as a solid thing. Lakshmanjoo's correction is the hinge: seeing should end in seeing, hearing in hearing, smell in smell. No extra story. If it helps, let the senses soften into one undivided field, as though all five circles were nested in one another. Then allow that whole field to relax inward into the Heart, the supreme spaciousness that contains it all without disturbance.

5. Jaideva Singh — The Logical

Singh reads the verse with layered precision. The five voids are the five ultimate sensory sources or tanmātras, each lacking concrete form in itself. At the same time, śūnya-pañcakam also evokes the five openings seen in the peacock feather pattern. Likewise maṇḍala carries a double force: in the peacock it means the circular markings, while in the practitioner it can refer to the sense-organs that carry the quintessence of their objects. The culminating "Absolute void" is not nihilistic emptiness. From the mind's contracted standpoint Bhairava is void because beyond sensory and mental categories; from the standpoint of reality He is fullness, the source of all manifestation.

6. Swami Lakshmanjoo — The Lineage

The practical hinge is exact and severe. When the senses function on their objects, know those objects as nothing but śūnya. Not "nothing" in the sense of denial, but nothing to elaborate. "I see" should end in seeing. "I hear" should end in hearing. Do not continue into naming, interpretation, fascination, or aversion. Lakshmanjoo goes further: the concentration is simultaneous. One is not meant to privilege one sense and forget the rest; all five are to be held as void, and by that the practitioner enters the supreme Heart, which is Lord Śiva Himself. He explicitly classifies the verse as pure śāktopāya.

7. Mark Dyczkowski & Christopher Wallis — Context & Philology

Wallis gives direct verse-specific guidance in his official article and makes a persuasive philological point: the verse does not merely mention the circles on a peacock feather; it instructs the practitioner to regard the five spaces as those nested circles. That makes sensory merging and dissolution the most compelling reading, a form of laya-yoga rather than a decorative metaphor. He is also honest about what remains unresolved, especially the difficulty of mapping touch onto a literal sensory aperture and the possibility of a five-cakra reading. Dyczkowski's official PDF translation confirms the core structure: meditation on the fivefold void through the circles or spheres of the senses leads to entry into the unsurpassed void of the Heart. No fuller official Dyczkowski commentary was located for this verse in this pass.

8. Daniel Odier — The Somatic Grounding

The verse asks for a sensual field, not a concept of sensory emptiness. Let color, sound, taste, smell, and touch become one shimmering mandala instead of five rival streams. Feel how each sensation appears in openness and dissolves there. Odier's rendering keeps this bodily enough to be useful: the five circles become the five senses in unlimited space, and the practice resolves into the spatiality of one's own heart.

9. Paul Reps — The "Sudden Hit"

Or, imagine the five-colored circles of the peacock tail to be your five senses in illimitable space. Now let their beauty melt within.

10. Upāya Type

Śāktopāya. Lakshmanjoo explicitly says so, and the operative method confirms it: the practice hinges on subtle cognitive seeing-through, the arrest of conceptual elaboration, and entry into the Heart through refined awareness rather than gross bodily manipulation.

11. Resonance Check (Adhikāra)

This practice suits someone who is sensorially alive yet willing to stop short of interpretive habit. It is especially good for a practitioner whose mind is constantly entangled by sights, sounds, and impressions, but who can learn to let experience remain experience without immediately turning it into narrative.

12. The "What Else?" — The Pitfall

The trap is turning "all is void" into a slogan while continuing to chase or resist every sensation. Then the practice becomes philosophical anesthesia. This verse only works when seeing ends in seeing and the senses are allowed to melt inward before commentary hardens around them.

13. Verse-Specific Glossary

  • śūnya-pañcakam: the five spaces or voids; here the five sensory openings or fields contemplated as empty of separative solidity.
  • maṇḍala: circle or sensory sphere; in this verse the nested circles of the peacock feather illuminate the structure of the sense-fields.
  • tanmātra: the subtle essence underlying sensory experience; Singh invokes this level to clarify the verse's fivefold void.
  • anuttara: the unsurpassed; here the supreme space into which the sensory manifold resolves.
  • hṛdaya: the Heart as the deepest center of awareness, not merely the physical chest organ.