Vibhuti Pada 3.13 — Change in All Things (Dharma, Lakṣaṇa, Avasthā)

By this, the transformations of property, time-character, and condition in the elements and the senses are likewise explained.

Unpacking the compound

The sūtra is built to generalize, and its grammar shows it. It opens with etena, the instrumental of etad, “by this” — by the foregoing account of the mind's three transformations. The field of application is given by bhūtendriyeṣu, the locative plural of the compound bhūta-indriya: bhūta (“that which has become, the element,” from √bhū, to be or become) names the elements that compose the material world, and indriya (“power, faculty, sense organ,” related to indra, the lord, hence “the powers belonging to the lord of the body”) names the senses through which that world is known.

The core compound is dharma-lakṣaṇa-avasthā-pariṇāmāḥ, the three transformations. Dharma here means “property, essential character, that which a thing holds” (from √dhṛ, “to hold, sustain”). Lakṣaṇa means “mark, characteristic, the sign that distinguishes” (from √lakṣ, “to mark”) and is used technically for the time-character, the temporal marking of a thing as past, present, or future. Avasthā means “condition, state, situation” (from ava-√sthā, “to stand down, to settle into a state”). The sūtra closes with vyākhyātāḥ, “explained, expounded” (from vi-ā-√khyā, “to declare fully”): these three are “likewise explained” by the foregoing.

What the sutra asserts

The claim is one of breathtaking scope. By the account already given of how the mind transforms, Patanjali says, the transformations of everything else are also explained. The same logic of change runs through all of prakṛti, manifest nature — through the elements that build the world and the senses that perceive it, no less than through the mind. The psychology of the preceding sūtras is thereby revealed to have been a special case of a universal law of transformation.

Three kinds of change are named, and the standard illustration is the clay and the pot. Dharma pariṇāma is change of property: the clay takes on the form of a pot, the underlying substance assuming a new essential character. Lakṣaṇa pariṇāma is change of time-character: the pot moves from future possibility, into present existence, into the past — the same thing successively wearing the marks of the three times. Avasthā pariṇāma is change of condition: the present pot, once new, grows old, the fresh pot and the worn pot being one pot in different states.

Three faces of one change

The three transformations are not separate events but three aspects of every change, three angles on a single transformation. When clay becomes a pot, its property changes (clay-form to pot-form); the pot enters present time out of the future (a change of time-character); and from its first moment it begins to age (a change of condition). Form, time, and condition are three windows onto the one process by which anything becomes other than it was while remaining, at the deepest level, the same underlying substance. To watch any transformation closely is to find all three present at once.

It is worth noting that the three are nested in a kind of logical order. A change of property is the most fundamental — a new dharma arises. That new property necessarily has a time-character, moving from future to present to past. And while present, it passes through conditions, new to old. Property grounds time-character, which carries condition; yet in any actual moment of change all three are given together, inseparable faces of the single ripening. This nesting is not a sequence of separate steps but a layering of descriptions: one can describe any given transformation by the form it takes, by its place among the times, or by its degree of wear, and all three descriptions are true of it at once.

The place in the pada's argument

This sūtra is the hinge on which the Vibhūti Pāda swings from psychology to metaphysics. The preceding verses analyzed the mind's transformations — toward stillness, toward absorption, toward one-pointedness — with great subtlety. Now Patanjali shows that this analysis was never merely about the mind: it is the structure of change as such, applying to a clay pot or a sense organ as much as to a moment of stillness. The move is deliberate, for the powers that the rest of the pāda will describe rest on the meditative reading of transformation, and that reading requires transformation to be a universal, lawful structure. The very next sūtra will name what underlies all three changes — the abiding substance (dharmī) that persists while its properties come and go.

The commentary tradition

Vyāsa, in the Yoga-Bhāṣya, supplies the clay-and-pot illustration that became canonical, and insists that the three transformations are aspects of one process rather than three successive happenings — a single ripening viewed under three descriptions. He uses the example to forestall the error of imagining that the substance is destroyed and a new one created; rather, one dharmī wears successive dharmas. Vācaspati Miśra, in the Tattva-vaiśāradī, works out the relations among the three with technical care, clarifying how time-character (lakṣaṇa) is distinct from condition (avasthā): the former concerns a thing's position among past, present, and future, the latter its aging within the present.

Vijñānabhikṣu, reading the Yoga in concert with Sāṃkhya, stresses that all three transformations presuppose the enduring property-bearer, and thus reads 3.13 as setting up the explicit teaching of 3.14. The doctrine of satkāryavāda — the Sāṃkhya tenet that the effect pre-exists, latent, in its cause — lies beneath the whole analysis: the pot was already implicit in the clay, the future property already present as potential. Across these commentators, the shared reading is that change in the Yoga is genuine transformation of an enduring substance, never the creation of something from nothing.

The Samkhya frame and an interpretive crux

The wider Sāṃkhya cosmology gives the sūtra its sweep. All of manifest existence — the elements (bhūta), the senses (indriya), the mind itself — is a modification of one primordial nature, prakṛti, whose endless self-transformation is the world. When Patanjali says that by the mind's transformations all others are explained, he is invoking this unity: the same substance underlies all manifestation, and so the same logic of change governs every part of it. The threefold transformation is, at bottom, the grammar by which the single nature articulates itself into the manifold world and carries it through time.

A subtle interpretive question concerns the relation between lakṣaṇa (time-character) and avasthā (condition), which can seem to overlap, since both involve a thing's passage through time. The careful distinction, drawn out by the commentators, is this: lakṣaṇa concerns a property's position among the three times — whether it is future, present, or past — while avasthā concerns the degrees of intensity or wear within the present existence itself, the new pot becoming the old pot. The first asks when a property is; the second asks how far along it is within its being. Holding the two apart prevents the threefold analysis from collapsing into two, and shows the precision with which the tradition mapped the anatomy of a single change.

Aristotle on change

The threefold analysis of change — in substance, in temporal position, and in condition — is one of the most philosophically developed accounts of transformation in the ancient world, and it invites comparison with Aristotle's treatment of change in the Physics, where every change involves an underlying substratum (hupokeimenon) that persists while a form is lost and another gained. Both thinkers refuse to let change be sheer replacement; both insist on something that endures through it, and both reach for nearly the same homely examples of matter taking on successive forms.

Buddhist impermanence

The Buddhist doctrine of impermanence (anicca) approaches the same field from the opposite emphasis, dwelling on the relentlessness of lakṣaṇa-like change — the ceaseless arising, abiding, and passing of all conditioned things. Where Patanjali stresses the abiding substance beneath the changing marks, the Buddhist analysis stresses the marks themselves and denies the abiding bearer; read together, they map the same terrain of momentary becoming from opposite shores.

Heraclitus and the Tao

Heraclitus, with his river into which one cannot step twice and his vision of all things in flux (panta rhei), names the same universal mutability in the Greek way, while the Tao Te Ching contemplates the endless turning of things into their opposites, the ten thousand things rising and returning to their root. Across these traditions runs the shared recognition that change is not an exception befalling otherwise stable things, but the very fabric of the manifest world.

What distinguishes Patanjali's account is its analytic precision: where Heraclitus gives an image and the Daoist a contemplation, the sūtra gives a structure — property, time-character, and condition, three nameable faces of every change. The Indian tradition's gift, here as so often, is to take the universal intuition that all is in flux and render it into a workable anatomy, a set of joints along which any transformation can be examined. The intuition is shared across the ancient world; the dissection is the Yoga's own contribution to it.

The sūtra offers a quietly comprehensive way of seeing any change at all. Watch anything become other than it was — a child growing, a friendship shifting, a body aging — and three aspects are always present: a change in what it essentially is, a movement through time from what-will-be to what-is to what-was, and a change in its passing condition. These are not three changes but three faces of one, and learning to see all three steadies the mind that meets change.

To hold this triple lens is to understand transformation more completely. We tend to fixate on one face and miss the others — noticing that someone has aged (a change of condition) without seeing the deeper continuity of who they are (the abiding substance), or mourning what has become past (a change of time-character) as though it were annihilated rather than transformed. Seeing all three together, against the enduring substance that carries them, yields a steadier and more truthful relationship to the constant changing of everything we love.

A framework, not a technique

This sūtra's relevance is less practical than orienting: it offers a framework for relating to change itself, which is among the things people struggle with most. Its gift is not a method to apply but a way of seeing — a more complete picture of what is happening whenever anything is transformed.

The single face we fixate on

Distress in the face of change often comes from seeing only one of its faces — fixating on altered condition (the aging body, the worn relationship) while losing sight of the abiding substance beneath, or treating the movement of something into the past as its destruction rather than its transformation.

Holding the three together

Holding the three transformations together steadies that relationship. To see that property, time-character, and condition all shift while an underlying continuity persists is to grieve change more accurately and cling to it less. Nothing the manifest world contains is exempt from this triple transformation, the elements and the senses no less than the mind. Making peace with that universality — rather than experiencing each particular change as an affront — is much of what the contemplative life, here and across traditions, is quietly training.