Just as the knowledge of the waves does not manifest apart from water

The analogy of the ocean and its waves is exhaustive in Vedāntic literature, but Vasiṣṭha employs it with epistemological precision. This is not about an abstract metaphysical identity—“everything is water”—but about how knowledge operates. The knowledge of a wave is not a secondary act added to the water; it is the water itself, in its undulating mode, knowing itself. There is no “pure water” waiting to be discovered after eliminating waves, nor are there “waves” that disappear to reveal water. The practice does not consist of reducing multiplicity to unity, but in seeing that multiplicity was never separate from unity. The Yoga Sūtra (III.17) describes the yogī’s prajñā as a knowledge in which object, knowledge, and knower are in sāmarasya—equanimous, without differentiation. It is not that the yogī “sees” this after years of meditation; rather, meditation is the gradual undoing of the assumption that knowledge is always mediated, always an act of a subject upon an object.