Akasha is the first of the five great elements in the standard sequence and the subtlest. It is generally rendered as space or ether, and neither is quite right, because what the term names is not emptiness between objects but the principle of accommodation itself: that which allows things to be, and to be distinct from one another, by providing the condition of extension. Its associated sense is hearing, and its property is sound, which is why the element that comes first is also the one that carries vibration.
The characteristic emphasised in the texts is non-obstruction. Akasha permits everything and is modified by nothing. A pot placed in a room does not damage the space it occupies, and removing the pot does not repair it, and the space inside the pot was never actually separated from the space outside it. This last observation became one of Vedanta’s most used analogies, the ghatakasha, pot-space, which is deployed to explain how individual awareness can appear bounded while being nothing other than the whole.
That analogy is doing careful work. The pot creates an apparent enclosure without producing a second space, so the boundary is real as a boundary and produces nothing new in what it bounds. Break the pot and nothing merges, because nothing was ever divided. Applied to the individual, the enclosing shape is the body-mind complex and what appears enclosed is awareness, which is the position argued under Advaita, and it explains why liberation is described as recognition rather than as reunion.
Space that accommodates everything and is altered by nothing is the tradition’s favourite image for awareness. To see the position it supports, explore more of The Living Sanatan Timeline.
Part 33 of 100 — Series I: From the Beginning
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