Sit long enough, the tradition says, and things start happening. You know what someone is about to say. You stop needing much sleep. Distances behave oddly. Whatever the mechanism, the practice throws off effects, and the effects are more interesting to talk about than the practice.
Kapila's ruling on them is nine words long and it does not deny a single one:
O dear one! There are siddhis obtained through yoga, but these are maya.1
There are. He grants the whole catalogue in the first clause. The demotion happens in the second, and it demotes them by classification rather than by disproof.
Where it sits matters. This is the last thing said in 3(27), after a long stretch on how Prakṛti is separated from Puruṣa, on burning Prakṛti down day and night until it hides inside its source like fire in kindling, on the yogi who reaches Brahmā's world over many births.
Then: the yogi is separated from the liṅga śarīra. Then the siddhi clause. Then:
When a person is not attached to these and does not pursue any other objective, he obtains me as a destination. This is the infinite and death's laughter is not heard there.1
So the powers appear at the exact point where the account has run out of stages. Everything has been dissolved, the subtle body is gone, and the last remaining obstacle named is not a desire, a sin or an ignorance. It is a set of capacities the practice itself produced.
It is tempting to read these are maya as these are illusions — the powers do not really work, the yogi only thinks he flew.
The chapter will not carry that. Its own account of māyā, developed a few paragraphs earlier, is about a real thing seen wrongly: the sun is genuinely in the sky and its reflection is genuinely in the water, and the error is taking the reflection for the source.1 Nothing in the reflection is fake. What is false is the inference drawn from it.
So the siddhis are being placed on the reflection side. They occur, they are produced by the practice, and mistaking them for the thing the practice was for is the whole of the error.
Which makes this a claim about attention rather than about physics. The clause that follows says so directly — when a person is not attached to these — and the operative word is attachment, not disbelief. He is not asked to conclude the powers are unreal. He is asked to walk past them.
The volume names them, though not here. Debroy's note at 2(9) supplies the standard set: aṇimā (becoming as small as one wishes), mahimā (as large), laghimā (as light), garimā (as heavy), prāpti (obtaining what one wants), prākāmya (travelling where one wants), vaśitvam (control over creatures), īśitvam (divine powers).2
And then the note's own verdict: These are minor and temporary powers.
Worth being precise about who is speaking. That assessment is the translator's, in an endnote, not the text's — the text at that point is discussing the lord's own powers and does not rank the eight at all.2 The judgement happens to agree with Kapila four hundred notes later, but it is apparatus, and this vault has learned to keep the two layers separate in this translator's work.3
Read the rest of that same note and something sharper appears.
These are minor and temporary powers. His personal powers are his knowledge, power, strength, prosperity, valour and energy.2
Eight powers on one side, six on the other. The eight are things you can do — shrink, expand, travel, control. The six are things you are — knowledge, strength, prosperity, valour.
The eight are verbs and the six are attributes, and that is the whole distinction. A capacity is something exercised on an occasion, which is why it can be minor and temporary; the six are not exercised, they are had, and nothing in the list has an occasion attached to it.
Which explains why the practice can produce the eight and never approach the six. You can train a capacity. The volume's own account of the six treats them as constitutive — what the illustrious one is made of rather than what he can perform.4
And it explains Kapila's placement. The siddhis show up at the end of the dissolution sequence because they are the last thing the yogi can still do, and the destination he is described as obtaining is not a further capacity but a place: he obtains me as a destination.
The volume has already handled these powers once, two chapters earlier, and the handling is stranger than a prohibition:
They do not desire the blissful prosperity of the illustrious one or the powers of the lord of maya. Nor do they aspire for the eight kinds of siddhis. However, with me, the supreme one, they enjoy these in my world.5
So the devotees decline the eight and then have them anyway.
That is not a compromise or a reward for restraint — no causal link is offered, no because they declined. The two clauses simply sit next to each other: not aspired to, and enjoyed. The same shape the volume uses for the five liberations, where refusal and possession are described in one breath without the refusal being made into a technique for acquiring.6
The powers are not the problem. Wanting them is the problem, and the volume is entirely comfortable handing them to people who do not.
By this point in the ingest the pattern is familiar enough to name. The five liberations are offered and declined.6 The eight siddhis are available and walked past. Kuntī, offered relief, asks for the dangers to continue.7
Three refusals with the same architecture: the thing is real, the thing is obtainable, the thing is on the table, and the text's interest is entirely in the person who did not want it.
What the siddhi clause adds is the sharpest version of the mechanism, because here the unwanted thing is manufactured by the wanting-machine itself. The liberations are offered by someone else. The siddhis are a by-product of the practice, which means the practitioner cannot avoid producing them and can only decline to be interested.
You are deep in a long practice — a craft, a discipline, a business — and it has started throwing off capabilities you did not set out to acquire. You read a room fast now. You can produce the deliverable in a third of the time. People notice.
Treat the by-products as evidence of position, not as the position. They are real, they were produced by the work, and they are diagnostic in the way a temperature is diagnostic — informative and not the thing itself. Kapila does not tell the yogi they are worthless. He classifies them, which is a different act: he tells him what kind of object they are, so that they can be seen without being pursued.
Watch for the point where the by-product becomes the deliverable. This is the failure the placement warns about. The siddhis show up at the end of the sequence, when everything else has dissolved and they are the last available thing to do. That is exactly when a practitioner is most likely to reach for them — not early, when the work is obviously unfinished, but late, when there is nothing left to accomplish and a demonstrable capability is the only remaining way to feel like a practitioner.
And do not try to prevent them. The 3(25) passage is the useful note here: the powers arrive whether or not you wanted them, and refusing to develop them is not on offer. What is on offer is not being attached, which is a stance rather than an abstention, and a stance you can hold while the capability keeps accumulating.
The strongest evidence that this is a claim about attachment rather than about validity is the clause structure. There are siddhis obtained through yoga concedes them entirely; the demotion arrives as a classification, and the operative instruction is not attached to these.
Tension — the eight are declined at 3(25) and enjoyed in his world in the same sentence. No mechanism connects the two, and the volume does not remark on it. Preserved unresolved.
Tension — the demotion of the eight to minor and temporary is the translator's, at 2(9), not the text's.2 Kapila's own verdict agrees but is differently framed — these are maya, which locates the error in the practitioner rather than in the powers' magnitude. Preserved; the layers are kept apart.
Open question. The siddhis are named nowhere in the Kapila discourse itself — the list comes from an endnote four hundred notes earlier. Does the text of Volume 1 ever enumerate the eight in its own voice?8
The vault's Gauḍīya layer treats the siddhis the way it treats the liberations: as a category of temptation with a settled ranking, subordinate to prema and generally handled through the logic of anyābhilāṣitā-śūnyam — devotion emptied of other desires, with mystic powers listed among the other desires.
Kapila does not run that argument, and the difference is in the framing rather than the verdict. His term is māyā, not anartha — a classification of what kind of thing the powers are, not a warning about what they will do to you. The later tradition's version tells the practitioner the siddhis are a hazard. The primary text tells him they are a reflection, and lets the practical conclusion follow on its own.
The convergence is real and the register is not the same, which is the pattern this build keeps finding at the junction between the source and its systematisation.
With Spiritual Bypass and Pitfalls. That page holds the clinical version: contemplative practice reliably produces states, insights and capacities that get recruited to avoid the developmental work the practice was supposed to support — equanimity used to skip grief, insight used to skip repair, and the practitioner's genuine attainments functioning as the material of the evasion.
Kapila's clause is the same structural observation without the pathology. The practice produces real capacities; the capacities are where the practitioner gets stuck; the sticking is not caused by anything going wrong.
What the pairing produces: the clinical framing treats bypass as a misuse — something has been diverted, and the remedy is to notice the diversion and return to the neglected work. Kapila's placement suggests the diversion is not optional and not a symptom. The siddhis arrive at the terminus of the sequence, after the subtle body has gone, when there is nothing left to accomplish. On that reading, the by-product problem is not a failure of the practitioner's honesty but a structural feature of any practice that outlives its own goals: the discipline keeps producing capability after it has stopped producing progress, and the capability is the only thing still visible.
Which is testable outside contemplative settings, and it predicts something the clinical frame does not — that the highest-risk moment for a long practice is not early enthusiasm but late competence, and that the practitioners most likely to substitute their powers for their purpose are the ones with the most powers and the least remaining to do.
Sharpest implication. There are siddhis concedes the powers completely and these are maya reclassifies them, which makes the ruling an instruction about attention rather than a claim about efficacy — the yogi is not asked to disbelieve what his practice produced, only to walk past it. And the placement is the argument: the powers surface at the end of the dissolution sequence, when they are the last thing a practitioner can still do, which is exactly when doing something is most tempting.
Generative questions.