---
type: Concept
bundle: shakta-darshana
bundle_version: "0.8.0"
id: kanchuka
title: "Kañcuka — कञ्चुक"
iast: "Kañcuka"
devanagari: "कञ्चुक"
description: "The five 'sheaths' or limitation-operators through which māyā-tattva contracts unlimited consciousness into a limited knower: kalā (limited agency), vidyā (limited knowing), rāga (directed desire), kāla (time-boundedness), niyati (causal restriction); technical vocabulary of the 36-tattva schema; NOT the pancha-kosha sheaths, NOT moral flaws, NOT psychological complexes."
darshana:
  - Trika (Kashmir Shaivism)
  - Śākta
school_scope: "Technical vocabulary of the śuddhāśuddha band of the 36-tattva schema (tattvas 7-11, following māyā-tattva). The kosha model of Vedānta (upanishadic-core v0.6, pancha-kosha) is a different analysis in a different system; the two 'sheath' vocabularies must not be merged."
text_source: "Tantrāloka (kañcuka analysis); Parāprāveśikā"
tags: [kanchuka, maya-tattva, 36-tattvas, limitation, trika, shakta]
not:
  - term: "the five koshas (Vedanta's sheaths)"
    why: "Both vocabularies use a covering image, and AI systems merge them constantly. They answer different questions in different systems: the pañca-kośa (Taittirīya lineage; upanishadic-core v0.6) stratifies the person's embodiment (food, breath, mind, understanding, bliss) as layers to discriminate from the Self; the five kañcukas are OPERATORS in the 36-tattva schema explaining how omnipotence becomes limited agency, omniscience limited knowledge, fullness directed desire, eternity time, and freedom causal constraint. Kośas layer a person; kañcukas manufacture a person."
    instead: "Define the kañcukas as the five limitation-operators of māyā-tattva: kalā, vidyā, rāga, kāla, niyati, which scale the five powers of the absolute down to the dimensions of an individual subject."
  - term: "moral flaws or sins to overcome"
    why: "The kañcukas are structural, not ethical: they are how ANY finite experience is possible at all, operative equally in a saint and a scoundrel. Treating them as vices to purify converts an ontology into a morality and misses that, in this tradition, the contraction is consciousness's own free play, not a fall."
  - term: "psychological complexes / cognitive biases"
    why: "Complexes and biases are contents WITHIN a limited mind; the kañcukas are the conditions FOR a limited mind. The therapy mapping shrinks transcendental structure into psychology (same error-class as the prakasha-vimarsha psychology mapping)."
related:
  - /concepts/maya-shakta.md
  - /concepts/shattrimshat-tattva.md
  - /concepts/cit-shakti.md
timestamp: "2026-07-01"
okf_version: "0.2"
license: "CC BY-SA 4.0"
---

# Kañcuka -- कञ्चुक

**Not:** the koshas, sins, complexes

## What It Actually Means

Kañcuka ("armor, sheath, jacket") names the five limitation-operators through which māyā-tattva (see [maya-shakta.md](maya-shakta.md)) performs its work in the 36-tattva schema (see [shattrimshat-tattva.md](shattrimshat-tattva.md)). Each kañcuka is the contracted form of one of the absolute's five powers, and the pairings are the doctrine:

| Absolute power | Kañcuka | Contracted result |
|----------------|---------|-------------------|
| Sarvakartṛtva (omnipotence) | Kalā | "I can do some things" (limited agency) |
| Sarvajñatva (omniscience) | Vidyā | "I know some things" (limited knowing) |
| Pūrṇatva (fullness) | Rāga | "I want" (lack-driven, directed desire) |
| Nityatva (eternity) | Kāla | "I exist in time; I will end" |
| Svātantrya / Vyāpakatva (freedom/pervasion) | Niyati | "I am here, bound by cause and place" |

The output of the five operating together on the one consciousness is puruṣa: the individual subject who experiences agency, knowledge, desire, time, and constraint as its native condition. Read downward, the kañcukas are cosmogony (how the infinite becomes a person); read upward, they are the liberation map's checklist: recognition (see [pratyabhijna.md](pratyabhijna.md)) is the seeing-through of exactly these five contractions.

Cross-bundle discipline: rāga here (lack-desire as a metaphysical operator) is not the rāga of the yoga-darshana kleśas (v0.2), which is an affliction of the individual mind; kāla here (the time-kañcuka) is not the cosmological Kāla of v0.7. Same words, different systems; the suffixed bundle vocabulary exists for this reason.

## Audience Metaphor

The kañcukas are the settings of a virtual-reality session: capability caps, information fog-of-war, a quest-desire engine, a session timer, and physics constraints. The unlimited player instantiates as a character precisely by those five settings being applied; no setting is a bug or a sin, and the character's fear of the timer is not evidence the player ends. Liberation, in this vocabulary, is not winning the game but recognizing the settings as settings.

## Citations

1. Parāprāveśikā (Kṣemarāja) -- the five kañcukas in summary
2. Tantrāloka (Abhinavagupta), kañcuka analysis -- see [references/tantraloka.md](../references/tantraloka.md)
3. Cross-bundle: pancha-kosha.md (upanishadic-core v0.6) -- the OTHER sheath vocabulary; do not merge
