Boat of Three and Eight Maidens in Emptiness

The mystic poems of the Charyapada are a collection of esoteric verse by the Mahasiddhas of tantric Buddhism, dating to 8th-12th century eastern India. This series of poetry from the masters of yore is laden with insight on the interplay of the microcosm, the macrocosm, and the great void beyond. Poems of the genre are grasped and tasted in a heart of primal symbolic awareness; read not the surface tale, taste the flow underneath!

With the heart of the mystery in the mid-stream that reveals the nature of the opposites, the tantric tradition employs rich imagery of the male-female interplay to reveal the principles of the sun, the moon, and the central pillar of fire as energetic and ontological beacons in the ocean of existence. Here's a fresh translation of the 13th poem by Kanhapada, a beautiful gloss on the enlightened human situation.

It's not the eight maidens in this painting; yet the ocean and the means are the same.

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ti-śaraṇa nābī ki'a aṭha-kumārī | ni'a deha karuṇā-śūṇame herī || 1

tarittā bhava-jaladhi jima kari mā'a suinā | majha beṇī taraṅgama muni'ā || 2

pañca tathāgata ki'a keḏuāla | bāha'a kā'a kāhni la mā'ājāla || 3

gandha parasa rasa ja̮isoɱ ta̮isoɱ | niṁda bihune suinā ja̮iso || 4

ci'a-kaṇṇahāra śūṇata-māṅge | calila kāhna mahā-suha-sāṅge || 5

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"In a three-refuge boat I captured eight maidens;

In my body, I behold compassion and emptiness.

Crossing the ocean of being as a phantom dream;

The mid-stream led me to understand the waves...

Deploying the five Tathagatas as the oars;

Kanha rows the outer form in a wire-net of magic.

Smelling, touching, tasting, as they are;

Like a dream without sleeping!

Awareness as helmsman in the blessed void;

Kanha sojourns in union's highest bliss..."

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In Siddha Kanhapada's song, a three-refuge boat is the vehicle for the journey. We have three perennial refuges (in general and Buddhist terms): [-] Negative (Dharma: Unifying Awareness), [±] Middle (Sangha: Mirror Awareness) and [+] Positive (Buddha: Specifying Awareness). Compassion (Karuna) and Wisdom (Prajna), or Compassion (Karuna) and Emptiness (Sunya), create the two flanks of [±] transparent yoga-balance. Three refuges give shelter to eight phenomenal maidens: [---] Earth, [--+] Mountain, [-+-] Stream, [-++] Wind, [+--] Thunder, [+-+] Fire, [++-] Lake and [+++] Heaven — the fundamental building blocks of the luminous eightfold path of human resolution.

The bipolar waves of the phantom dream are only witnessed in the ☯ Middle-Golden-Stream. Five Tathagatas ("thus-gone-ones") are the oars for the five pure lights, the five faculties, the four cardinals with a center — the sacred pentad of primal awareness. Here are the five Dhyani-Buddhas: 1) Buddha Mahāvairocana ["super-luminous-sphere"]: Tathatā-jñāna, "Awareness of Suchness", 2) Buddha Akṣobhya ["non-disturbable"]: Ādarśa-jñāna, "Mirrorlike Awareness"; 3) Buddha Amitāyus ["immeasurable-lifecycle"]: Pratyavekṣaṇa-jñāna, "Investigative Awareness"; 4) Buddha Ratnasambhava ["jewel-potential"]: Samatā-jñāna, "Unifying Awareness"; and 5) Buddha Amoghasiddhi ["successful-accomplishment"]: Kṛty-anuṣṭhāna-jñāna = "Accomplishing Awareness".

The ocean of existence is likened to a wire-net of phantasmagoria. The objects of the senses and the sense-faculties are exactly what they are. When left in their own nature without craving or projection, the shackles of bondage unravel, severing the steel-ropes of the material anchor with the sword of transcombinatory awareness. For the remainder of the journey, now in a state of transparent seedlessness, the phenomenal world transforms into a waking dream that holds no sway over the conscious dreamer. In effect, the world is beheld from behind a primal mirror; touched, but not touched; smelled, but not smelled; and tasted, but not tasted.

Luminosity of primal awareness is the helmsman of the boat of the body in the blessed void; and the object-streams shape the countless waves of the ocean. A journey to the highest bliss of union is fulfilled when above and below are joined in the middle without friction, reconciling and uniting the inner with the outer, reaching the pinnacle of conscious equilibrium, and ultimately, unbinding the thread of patternation altogether. That is the fullness of the bliss of union in the blessed void.

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You can download a translation of Charyapada at the SySpir Central ArcHive in PDF format (98 KB) — archived from an expired website. Translator unknown. It's a fair rendering, albeit missing a good deal of nuance; as can only be expected in working through an archaic mixture of Bangla, Oriya and Assamese! Art base: "Jesus walks on water" by Ivan Aivazovsky (1888).

Dichotomy of Light and Darkness

Winter solstice, past by a mere moment now, marks the transition from darkness to light, from death to new life. Yet one more cycle in the grand order of nature has rolled its course and revolves anew, the time of renewal is at hand. While the Indians were also very aware of the peaks and transitions in the universal cycles, especially so in the ancient Vedic times, it was in the North where the extremes stated their presence.

Many of you may have been following Uma's series on the old pagan celebration of Yule, the rebirth of Mother Nature, later remodeled into a grand Christian celebration with an eerie abundance of pagan symbols and practices. While the celebration of these transitions of universal reach indeed has its place in the mesocosmic sphere, a natural turn in the human fabric of old, it is not those I write of today. I'm about to dig deeper into the superficiality of the good-evil duality often imposed on worlds of light and darkness.

The Ancient Aryan Divide

The division into good and evil is regrettably not as clear-cut as God versus Lucifer or Christ versus Antichrist, a lesson well learned from the ancient Indian evolution of religion. Vasistha was among the leading Vedic seers, while for the Zoroastrians he was among the villains. While asuras were the bad guys for the Vedic seers, Ahura-Mazda (or Asura-Maya in Sanskrit, a close relative of the Avestan language of the Parsis) was the lead monotheistic deity of the Zend-Avesta scripture.

These two polar religions came to plant the seeds of two very different religious traditions. Zoroaster was a grand-ancestor for the doctrines of a dual god and anti-god, the expectance of a messiah and a linear approach to the cosmic order. The Abrahamic tradition, or Judaism, Christianity and Islam, evolved in a mixture of Zoroastrian ideals and the ongoing evolutions in Egyptian and Middle-Eastern native polytheistic systems.

A whole different branch and orientation of religion, the greater part of which goes under the loose label of Hinduism in the contemporary world, evolved from the root of the ancestry of Vedic seers. Hinduism as we know it is a loose amalgamation of distinct traditions that evolved under shared cultural premises, a most heterogeneous compilation held together with unitarian texts such as the Bhagavad-gita.

The fact that the two religious divides forming the vast majority of the Earth's population is on a deep level divided almost as deep and fundamentally as the grand cosmic order of the ancient cultures is every bit as exciting as it is scaring. It is then little wonder that the Abrahamic dualist heritage has always sought to reform all known cultures and peoples into the faith of the one true savior, one supreme deity and one word of god, or a succession of subsequent revelations in the case of later traditions.

The Indic tradition, on the other hand, unsubscribed from an ontology that assigned them among the evil, in both its root movements. While the direct descendant of the brahmana-tradition, the heritage of the Vedic seers, maintained a sense of duality evident in the legends of the Puranas, it was against a canvas of higher, nondual ideas evolving from the old Upanishads, tense and often asystematic philosophical discourses that sought the deepest essence of the Vedic sacrifical religion. The Sramana tradition, to which the Buddhists and the Jains are the only surviving heirs, sought to eliminate the realm of duality altogether, and in doing that went so far as to do away with the supreme deity himself.

The roots of the ancient good-evil divide appear to lie in an ancient conflict tearing apart a single cultural heritage, a world where the devas and the asuras dwelled together. Mitra and Varuna, a dual deity of whom the latter is well known as an oceanic deity in the Puranic lore, are in fact among the asuras of the Rig-vedic tradition — asuras receiving oblations just as the devas did. The details of the evolution effectively reduce the concept of an absolute, primordial divide into a partition much more complicated and human, into the internal disagreements of an ancient sacrificial, fire-worshiping culture.

Powers of Light and Darkness

Neither light nor darkness possess inherent ethical value; they are neutral potentials reposed in their own nature. As darkness clouds, creates mystery and brings towards unity, light unveils, explains and exposes a vast arena of plurality prior to growing so bright as to grow all-engulfing, thereby becoming essentially one with darkness again, a field of a single, undivided nature containing all of reality in its ever-vibrant lap. (Udesidning: An ancient Nordic way of integration in darkness.)

Nothing is good or evil of its own nature; all depends on the application, and moreover the applier. Magic is neither good nor evil owing to its technical procedure of conjuration, whether born of light or darkness, white or black. The divider of good and evil is in the human choice between benevolence and malevolence, between sacrificing and feeding the egotic drive consuming its objects to grow stronger.

A transcender of duality wields light and darkness with equal might, regardless of his preference, a preference that in its fundamental essence is only a latent sensation of the past, a game or an amusement of sorts, unbinding to the player who has ascended from a participancy to entertained spectatorship. Having seen the pinnacles of light and darkness under the ancient egotic drive, one evolves into a seer of non-duality, experiencing the inherent voidness of reality as we know it.

With the diffusion of apparent essence and substance into ethereal streams, one transcends stereotypic moral assessments and dwells in a lasting perception of inherent and foundational unity, even while an adept conventionalist as needed in the common world. The art of life has now been mastered.

The Old Pagan Approach

While the philosophical sophistication of Indic traditions is often lacking in ancient native religions, they do an amicable job in the practical transcendence of duality in living in a seamless harmony with nature and gods in their own world of mythos. In fact, many ancient native traditions supersede the seclusion-seeking Indic mystics in their ability to interact with plurality in a state of active integration, perhaps with a flavor of the smooth and flowing natural Tao of the Chinese — a quality I've always been in tremendous awe of!

The action-in-knowledge tradition also found its exponents among the Buddhists with the gradual evolution of Buddhism first into Mahayana, and onwards into an admixture with the tantric tradition especially prominent in Tibet. In the Tibetan model, Hinayana and Mahayana, or the lesser and the greater vehicles, are stepping stones into the highest dimension of vajra-sattva, the lightning-strata, where one becomes a wielder of cosmic powers, conquering and subjugating the energetic release produced in the meeting of the fundamental dualities of nature, the energetic bases of archetypal male and female energy, personified as the man and the woman of the human world.

Transcending and mastering the fundamental fabric of existence, the conscious being evolves into a god-like state of integration with the flow of the cosmos, unveiling the infinite peace and inner ecstasy ever-present in the ultimate non-dual god-experience. Consciousness employs a third strata beyond light and darkness, the infinite halls of existence itself. Night turns into a day and day yet again into a night. Winter falls over the fertile summer fields, spring awakens Mother Nature to life anew. Light and darkness rise and fall time and again of their own accord; the wheel of existence revolves forevermore.

GeeVees - The Great Repercussion

The random audience has repeatedly sought my comments on diverse subjects related to the Gaudiya Vaishnava tradition, of which I was a part in its several forms for well over a decade. This six-part series should contain most of the themes on my mind at the time of this writing, the outcome of countless nights of reflection, creative contrasting, recontextualization, and selective discarding or re-adaptation of old mental constructs.

• 00: Roots — On my background, on Gaudiya Vaishnavism, on the purposes of this series.
  
• The Nectar Name — Reflections on my experiences with chanting the name, subsequent experiences contrasted with other traditions.
• Ritual Culture — Integating into a native Gaudiya Vaishnava environment, mastering a culture of ritual purity and superstitions.
  
• Gopi Girls Forever — A gloss on the method of living in the "love land", reflections on its applications, psychological dimensions.
• Agamas and Sahajiya Roots — The natural human and the fundamental divinity of duality, heterodox roots of the methods of worship.
• Divinities and Tantric Buddhism — Archetypal deities and classical tantric deity practice, Tibetan Buddhist methods and theologies.
• The Human God — Dimensions of divinity, graded perceptions of dualistic, antropomorphic god and the dimension of nondual existence.
• Doctrinal Picks — Fundamentally valuable aspects in the Gaudiya Vaishnava doctrine, their universal application.

None of the essays that are to follow should be considered final in terms of research. Think of them as previews, alpha-version renderings of elaborate themes. I have no timeline for the current production, I work on pure inspiration. Bear with me and enjoy the ride.

Diwali for Shiva-Shakti

Stories on the background of the Diwali, or Deepavali, festival are manifold, and the celebration spans even across religions. For some, it's about Rama's return to Ayodhya. For others, it's about the killing of Narakasura. Many Hindus, especially in northern India, celebrate the birth of goddess Lakshmi with pompous festivities. For the Jains it marks the parinirvana of Tirthankar Mahavir, the last of their prophets, and for the Sikhs — how entertainingly typical — it's about their struggles and conquests.

A less known story is told in the Skanda-purana, the story of how Ardha-Narishvara, or the half-Shiva, half-Shakti deity, came to be. To become Shiva's half, the legend tells, Shakti undertook a 21-day austerity called Kedar-vrata, concluding with success and union on the Diwali day. A beautiful ancient temple of Ardha-Narishvara is found at Kedar Ghat in Varanasi, impregnated with some of the most intense energies I have ever experienced in a shrine.

The Spacious Quality of Emptiness

People may wonder what drives a man to engage in diverse charitable, environmental and humanitarian activities, in hands on activism to help heal the world, after a decade of meditation and commitment to other-worldly attainments.

Some would see that as a falling of grace of sorts, believe it or not! Let me quote an old favorite author, Swami A.C. Bhaktivedanta, founder of the International Society for Krishna Consciousness, biting into one of his favorite themes. That is, bashing the Mayavadis (Advaita-vadis, monists, the Shankara tradition):

"The Mayavadi philosophers, therefore, adhering to the slogan brahma satyam jagan mithya ("spirit is true, world is false"), want to refrain from false, materialistic activities. They want to stop all activities and merge in the Supreme Brahman. According to the Vaisnava philosophy, however, if one simply ceases from materialistic activity one cannot remain inactive for very long, and therefore everyone should engage himself in spiritual activities, which will solve the problem of suffering in this material world.

"It is said, therefore, that although the Mayavadi philosophers strive to refrain from materialistic activities and merge in Brahman, and although they may actually merge in the Brahman existence, for want of activity they fall down again into materialistic activity. Thus the so-called renouncer, unable to remain in meditation upon Brahman, returns to materialistic activities by opening hospitals and schools and so on." — Srimad Bhagavatam 7.13.27, commentary

There is, however, an alternative interpretation to this pattern of action. Perhaps some of the meditators weren't pulled back towards the world merely owing to an insufficient capacity for prolonged contemplative life, or over a profound and insuppressable ontological pull for action. Perhaps they in fact emerged from their cocoon of solitude after attaining profound realization on the nature of existence, on the substance present and discoverable in the world, just as a worm emerges from its cocoon to glide across the skies as a beautiful butterfly.

The fact is that emptiness is spacious. Where the stuffy ego-complex has resolved and no longer imposes itself, when the flow of nature is perceived without attachments and aversions, a sense of emptiness finds its natural self-expression. In that emptiness, there is infinite room for giving and sharing. In that emptiness, in absence of a possessive ego, unconditional giving and self-sacrifice are a natural consequence.

Where there is ego, there is competition. Where there is competition, there is no compassion. Competition, by its very definition, is all about a particular ego-entity emerging victorious in meeting his objectives and gaining fame appropriate to the achievement, whether as a benevolent or a heinous character. It is, in other words, ultimately self-serving.

"But if everything is empty of permanence", one might ask — and it's a very valid reservation! — "what difference does compassion make?". It wouldn't really make that much difference to you, given that you are into a life of desirelessness and natural liberation. There are, however, countless conflicted ego-formations, the populace of the world, who could use some ego dissolution to make the world just a tad bit more harmonious and beautiful.

The Vedanta-sutra cuts to the heart of the assimilated individual's modus operandi: lokavat tu lila-kaivalyam: "The apparent world is indeed but sole play.". With liberation, all necessities have ceased and all duties have been fulfilled. And when the work is done, one is free to act in any given manner without enmeshment in the infinite net of action and reaction.

Look at Krishna. A mukta-purusha of first water, a controversial character for many, and difficult to reconcile even for profound philosophers. Combined in a single being, we find the polar opposites of a playboy engaging in extensive amorous dalliances with other men's wives at the heart of the night in the forest groves of Vrindavan, and at the other end the sober philosopher, famous for his Bhagavad-gita.

When asked by king Parikshit, Sukadeva explained that Krishna's amorous adventures are exactly as those of a child playing with its reflections in the mirror. A classical Vaishnava interpretation following Sri Chaitanya's line of thought employs the tantric theory of shaktis in explaining the relationship between Krishna and the girls. This is, however, an explanation very much tied with specific theological formulations.

Let's assume Krishna was not an all-powerful primeval deity, or the Supreme Personality of Godhead to use a term coined by Bhaktivedanta. Suppose he was once upon a time just like one of us, but made his way across the eons, transforming into something extraordinary. Would we not have the same prospects, each one of us, then? If you looked at the matter from a Tantric Buddhist perspective, in fact this is exactly the case. Padmasambhava, for one, the great grandfather of Tibetan Buddhism, was an ardent tantric practitioner with numerous consorts, yet considered by many to be practically a second Buddha.

Tantric sadhana, the union of the polarity of the cosmos, is however aptly acted out only at levels of consciousness where an understanding of shunyata has evolved to a very substantial degree. Many long-time monks and practitioners consciously choose to leave consort practice to the later years of their lives, knowing the immense challenges it presents in containing one's mindfulness and retaining a sound platform of aloofness.

Then, having reached the grand stage of emptiness, it is quite natural for a person of profound spiritual background to engage in benevolent activities, in acts of goodwill that unfold on the egoless platform. It naturally follows. We need to be doing good things, us worldlings. And for the holy, doing good things no longer rises out of obligation — it rises spontaneously.

Ultimately nothing makes any difference. In the meantime, there is some time separating us from the maturation and resolution of our karmic track. Riding the waves into wherever the universe leads us, we engage in acts that are wholesome and beautiful, we learn the sublime art of life. In that there is supreme peace, supreme happiness, and supreme enjoyment as well.