These two are spoken of, made into separate heaps, as Puruṣas, in the world, in transmigration: the perishing, that which perishes, the perishable, is one heap; and the other Puruṣa, the imperishable, its opposite, the power of māyā of the Blessed Lord, the seed of the arising of the Puruṣa named the perishing, the resort of the dispositions of desire, action and the rest of the many transmigrating creatures, is called the imperishable Puruṣa. Who are those two Puruṣas? The Blessed Lord Himself says: the perishing is all beings, the whole array of modification; the standing-on-the-summit (kūṭastha), 'kūṭa' meaning a heap, standing as if a heap. Or else 'kūṭa' has the synonyms māyā, deceit, crookedness, guile; standing in the manner of many kinds of māyā and deceit, it is 'kūṭastha'; and since, by the endlessness of the seeds of transmigration, it does not perish, it is called the imperishable. Other than these two, the perishing and the imperishable, distinct from them, untouched by the fault of the two adjuncts of the perishing and the imperishable, eternally pure, awake and free by its very being.

These two Persons, the perishable and the imperishable, are renowned in the world. There the Person indicated by the word 'perishable' is the one to be spoken of by the word 'soul', conjoined with the insentient and so of a perishing nature, from Brahma down to a clump of grass; all beings; here the indicating of them as one 'Person' is by the single limiting adjunct that is the conjunction with the insentient. The one indicated by the word 'imperishable' is the one fixed on the peak, freed of conjunction with the insentient, abiding in his own form, the liberated self. He, since by the absence of conjunction with the insentient he is not shared in common by the bodies of Brahma and the rest that are particular transformations of the insentient, is called 'fixed on the peak'. Here too the indicating as one is told by the single limiting adjunct that is the freedom from conjunction with the insentient. For it is not that, in the beginningless time before this, the liberated one was just one; as it was said, 'many, purified by the austerity of knowledge, have come to My state of being', and 'come to a likeness with Me, they are not born even at a creation, and are not pained at a dissolution'.

'The perishable' (kshara) is the beings, Brahma and the rest; 'the unchanging' (kutastha) is prakriti. So the Sharkaraksha scripture says, 'all the living beings, with Prajapati at their head, are the perishable; the imperishable person is the principal one, prakriti; and they tell of another, higher than that, the one who is the net and yet beyond the net, the wind-borne One'.