Vedanta describes a person as constituted by three distinct bodies rather than one, layered inside each other and each with its own composition and fate. The sthula sharira, gross body, is the physical body, composed of the five elements and the only one of the three that ordinary usage of the word ‘body’ actually refers to. The sukshma sharira, subtle body, encompasses the mind, the sense faculties, and the vital energies, everything responsible for thought, perception, and emotion, none of which is physical matter yet all of which is still, on this account, a body rather than the true self. The karana sharira, causal body, is the subtlest of the three, essentially the seed form of ignorance itself, the accumulated latent impressions from which the other two bodies are said to unfold.
The three-body model does explanatory work the single-body model of the person cannot. It accounts, for instance, for what continues at death: the gross body is discarded, but the tradition holds that the subtle and causal bodies persist, carrying the accumulated samskaras and unresolved karma forward into a subsequent embodiment, a claim examined at length later in this series through what exactly is reborn. It also explains deep, dreamless sleep, in which the gross body lies inert and the subtle body’s usual activity, thought and sensory processing, has also ceased, yet a person still exists and can later report having slept well, a state the tradition attributes to the causal body alone remaining active.
Liberation, on this model, is described as a progressive seeing-through of all three layers rather than the destruction of any of them: recognising, in turn, that the gross body is not the self, that the subtle body’s thoughts and perceptions are not the self, and finally that even the causal body’s latent, seed-form ignorance is not the self, until what remains is the witnessing awareness discussed throughout this series that none of the three bodies constitutes.
This same three-body structure gets cross-referenced against a second, independently developed classification, the five sheaths or koshas, and reconciling how the two maps relate to each other is the subject this series takes up next.
Part 15 of 100 — Series II: To the Eternal
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