Shloka 28
Jvarotpatti — The Origin and Distribution of Jvara
Fever
इन्द्रियाणि च भावाश्च गुणा: सप्तदश स्मृता: । तेषामष्टादशो देही यः शरीरे स शाश्वत:,पाँच कर्मेन्द्रियाँ, पाँच ज्ञानेन्द्रियाँ, चित्त, मन, बुद्धि, प्राण तथा सात््विक आदि तीन भाव--ये सत्रह गुण माने गये हैं। इनका अधिष्ठाता देहाभिमानी जीवात्मा अठारहवाँ है, जो इस शरीरके भीतर निवास करता है। उसे सनातन माना गया है। अथवा शरीरसहित वे सभी गुण देहधारियोंके आश्रित रहते हैं। जब जीवका वियोग हो जाता है, तब शरीर और उसमें रहनेवाले वे तत्त्व भी नहीं रह जाते
indriyāṇi ca bhāvāś ca guṇāḥ saptadaśa smṛtāḥ | teṣām aṣṭādaśo dehī yaḥ śarīre sa śāśvataḥ ||
Asita said: “The senses and the inner dispositions are remembered as seventeen ‘constituents’ (guṇas). Over them stands the eighteenth—the embodied self (dehī) who dwells within the body and is held to be everlasting. The teaching points to moral responsibility: the instruments of experience and action are many, but the enduring agent who presides over them is one; when that agent departs, the body and its functioning principles no longer remain as a living person.”
असित उवाच
Educational Q&A
Embodied life can be analyzed into multiple functional principles (senses and mental dispositions), but there is an enduring presiding self (dehī) that experiences and directs them. Ethical accountability and the possibility of liberation rest on recognizing the self as distinct from the changing instruments.
In the Śānti Parva’s instructional discourse, the sage Asita explains a philosophical enumeration of the constituents of embodied existence, culminating in the claim that the indwelling self is the eighteenth principle and is regarded as everlasting.