Prabhavapyaya

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Prabhavapyaya (prabhavāpyaya) is a Sanskrit term formed by two words: prabhava (प्रभव) meaning "source" or "origin"; and apyaya (अप्यय) can be translated as "cessation" or "dissolution".[1] Thus, the compund term means "the orignal source and place of dissolution".

In Stanza I, verse 8, Mme. Blavatsky translates this term as "the One Form of Existence", that from which the cosmos originates and into which it dissolves back:

The tendency of modern thought is to recur to the archaic idea of a homogeneous basis for apparently widely different things—heterogeneity developed from homogeneity. . . . The Secret Doctrine carries this idea into the region of metaphysics and postulates a “One Form of Existence” as the basis and source of all things. But perhaps the phrase, the “One Form of Existence,” is not altogether correct. The Sanskrit word is Prabhavapyaya, “the place, or rather plane, whence emerges the origination, and into which is the resolution of all things,” says a commentator. . . . It is, in its secondary stage, the Svâbhâvat of the Buddhist philosopher, the eternal cause and effect, omnipresent yet abstract, the self-existent plastic Essence and the root of all things, viewed in the same dual light as the Vedantin views his Parabrahm and Mulaprakriti, the one under two aspects.[2]

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Notes

  1. “The One Form of Existence”: prabhavāpyaya in the Original Purāṇa-saṃhitā by David Reigle
  2. Helena Petrovna Blavatsky, The Secret Doctrine vol. I, (Wheaton, IL: Theosophical Publishing House, 1993), 46.