Śivasaṃhitā 1.42

The verse closes the series of analogies with jaundice (doṣa): the diseased eye sees white (śukla) as yellow (pīta). The operative phrase is doṣavaśāt — «under the dominion of doṣa», «by reason of humoral imbalance.» In Āyurveda, doṣa designates the body’s deranged humors; here the term migrates to the epistemological plane, framing ignorance as a disease of the cognitive organ rather than a metaphysical defect in the world itself.

Doṣa derives from the root duṣ, meaning to corrupt or deteriorate. In Āyurvedic medicine, jaundice (kāmalā) arises from excess pitta (bile), which tinges vision yellow. The Śivasaṃhitā draws on this shared medical knowledge to make the analogy immediately accessible: just as jaundice does not change the actual color of objects but only the subject’s perception, avidyā does not alter the Spirit but only the manner in which it is perceived.

The closing nānyathā («and not otherwise») applies logical finality: the perceived yellow has no cause other than the observer’s doṣa. Applied cosmically, this means the apparent diversity of the world has no cause external to the Spirit; it is entirely a function of the observer’s condition. For the yogin, this reframes practice as a healing of the perceptual organ rather than a transformation of what is perceived.