From the first Sūtra, Kṣemarāja unfolds the basic structure of the entire teaching: free Awareness (citi) is the cause by which the world appears, endures, and comes to rest again in its source.

Awareness as the sole cause

By “world” Kṣemarāja means everything from Sadāśiva down to the earth element. When Awareness expands, this world opens and persists as experience. When that expansion recedes, the world closes again. For this claim, he appeals to direct experience.

He rejects any cause separate from Awareness, such as māyā or prakṛti conceived as an independent primordial matter. What does not appear at all cannot cause anything. As soon as something appears, it is already joined to the light of Awareness. Space, time, and form are likewise produced and animated by Awareness. They therefore cannot limit it. In Kṣemarāja’s account, Awareness is all-pervasive, always already present, and complete.

Cause and effect are not two things

An objection readily arises: if the world is not different from Awareness, how can Awareness be its cause? Kṣemarāja replies that free and lucid Awareness itself shines forth as the countless forms of the world. This very self-display as the world is the relation between cause and effect intended here. There is no second substance alongside Awareness.

Nor does self-luminous Awareness require an external means of knowledge to establish it. Every means of knowledge can operate only within its light. Kṣemarāja illustrates the impossibility of such an external proof with the image of someone attempting to step beyond the shadow of his own head with his own foot.

Further meanings of the “manifestation of the world”

Kṣemarāja deliberately reads the concise expression viśva-siddhi-hetu in several ways. Awareness is not merely the cause of the world’s appearance. In withdrawal, it also leads multiplicity back into the harmony of supreme non-duality. When its freedom is recognised, it becomes the ground both of experience and enjoyment (bhoga) and of liberation (mokṣa).

At the same time, the complete experience of any phenomenon—the colour blue, a feeling of happiness, the body, or the breath—can become a means of recognising Awareness. What matters is not only that an object and a perceiver appear. What matters is attending to their connection. Kṣemarāja cites the Vijñānabhairava: all embodied beings possess awareness of object and subject; what distinguishes the yogin is attention to the relation between them.

The individual words as a summary

• For Kṣemarāja, the singular citiḥ shows that Awareness is not divided by place, time, or any other distinction into several separate awarenesses. The Sūtra thereby rejects every ultimately dualist teaching.
• Svatantrā, “completely independent”, distinguishes this teaching from the notion of an absolute without effective sovereignty. Freedom here means the capacity actually to bring forth appearance.
• Viśva-siddhi-hetu condenses four claims: Awareness possesses all powers, is the cause of everything, can be recognised through an accessible means, and grants a great fruit.

Kṣemarāja specifies the freedom affirmed in the first Sūtra: Awareness unfolds the world by her own will. She neither follows the will of another—Brahmā, for example—nor requires a substance separate from herself. Otherwise her freedom would be annulled.

Her “own wall” or “canvas” is likewise Awareness. Kṣemarāja compares the world to a city appearing in a mirror: image and mirror appear distinguishable, yet here they are not separate from one another. Unmīlana, opening or unfolding, therefore does not mean producing something that was previously wholly unreal. It makes visible what was already present, undivided, in the light of Awareness.