Sankaradeva : Psychology

Sankaradeva ascribes all phenomenal existence to the activity of the mind (manas, antahkarana). The mind with its five organs migrates from sphere to sphere, that is body to body, and the self follows it. It is the mind that creates the body, qualities and karma (virtue and vice). The mind again is a creation of māyā. So long as the body, mind, karma and self are together, we call it jiva (individual).

It is therefore the mind that leads to unending births and rebirths (samsāra). Sankaradeva applies the analogy of a dancer (nata) to the soul in the garb of the mind. The samsāra is all an imaginative picture conjured up by the mind. The three functions of the mind are watchfulness, dream and dreamless sleep. It resides in the heart of everybody, with the reflection of Isvara's image on it. Just as fire enters into a piece of iron and gets inseparable, so also jiva becomes inseparable from the mind. The soul suffers affliction, goes from one place to another, does work and dies, as it were, with the mind. Just as the image of the sun trembles in a pool of water, that has been stirred, the soul is caught in the snare of karma through disturbances of the mind. The mind is behind every phenomenon before our eyes: the fourteen worlds, virtue and vice, heaven and hell, kinship and alienhood, day and night, birth and death, bondage and release.

Sankaradeva further holds that the worship of a variety of gods is a snare catching the soul in the knot of karma.

The individual self takes the manas (mind, sensorium commune) as the true spirit, goes to enjoy worldly desires, and gets tied up with the gunas.

Sankaradeva mentions the four presiding deities of manas, buddhi, ahankāra and citta, who are Candra (the moon), Brahmā, Rudra and Vāsudeva respectively. He adds that the one, whose mind takes absolute refuge in Vāsudeva (Krishna), secures easy release from samsāra.