t h g i L e v o L I
Kadambari
Guru Purnima 2006
e-Magazine of Devipuram
Devipuram, A.P. India In dia
Editor’s Note With the grace and encouragement of Guruji, it is my pleasure to introduce this special “Guru Poornima 2006” edition of Kadambari.
quite long, we’ve also made an attempt to “mix them up,” and thereby avoid an overwhelming and monotonous reading experience.
As most readers will already be aware, this year’s observances mark an important transitional milestone in the history of Devipuram. For on this occasion our beloved Guruji will entrust his great work to a new generation, as Sri Kompella Subba Rao – himself a devoted Sri Vidya upasaka and disciple of Guruji for some 25 years, as well as longtime leader of the Soundarya Lahari satsangh in Boston – takes his place as Guruji’s hand-picked successor; the new “pontiff” of Devipuram.
The issue begins, of course, with a brand-new essay from Guruji himself, contemplating the true meaning of Infinity and coaxing new depths from the old axiom that the journey is ultimately more important than the destination. This powerful opening is followed by an exposition on the esoteric meanings of Sri Chakra, penned by no less a personage than Guruji’s “spiritual son,” Sri Chaitanyananda Natha Saraswathi (Aiya) of the Sri Rajarajeswari Temple in Rush, N.Y. A further essay concentrates even more closely on Sri Chakra, elaborating specifically on the Maha-Bindu at its center.
I know that we all join in enthusiastically welcoming Sri Subba Rao into this vital role, for which he is so qualified on so many levels; and in offering him our prayers and best wishes (as well as our personal and material support) as he works to consolidate Guruji’s extraordinary achievements – while simultaneously steering Devipuram onward to new heights. (On a personal note, I would add that it was in Sri Subba Rao’s welcoming home that I first received diksa from Guruji during another Guru Poornima season past.) And while we are all saddened by Guruji’s decision to step down from his active leadership position, let us also celebrate his liberation from everyday temple, administrative and organizational duties, so that he may now concentrate more fully on the writing and educational projects that are closest to his h eart. “Hopefully,” he told me a few months ago, “by August much of what is tying me down should be clear.” Indeed, we have reason to believe that great things are in store. On that note, I humbly present this new issue of Kadambari: Having been given the honor of editing and preparing its contents for publication, I must apologize at the outset for any and all imperfections and overlooked line-edits (for I am sure they exist in abundance). A particular area of concern for me is the irregularity of Sanskrit transliteration: This issue contains contributions by 18 distinct authors, each having their own transliteration style – and so, in most cases, we’ve simply let the variations stand. And while earnest attempts were made to standardize presentation and usage throughout the issue, we obviously lacked the time, resources, proofreaders and fact-checkers that large-circulation magazines employ to produce a totally polished final product. On the other hand, you may be assured that we made the very most of the resources we did have; it is our sincere hope that you will find the issue to be surprisingly tight and clean.
Some articles in these pages advise us on how to develop more attentive understandings of the prayers and mantras we recite; others instruct us in specific practices with a wealth of detail and explanation that generations of sadhakas would have spent lifetimes seeking in vain. Elsewhere you’ll explore the unimaginably ancient roots of the Shakta faith; sit at the feet of an accomplished Srividya master as he instructs; and learn from a Carnatic maestro of the ways in which music can enhance both our everyday lives and our sadhana. Not just Shakta viewpoints, but also Shaiva and Vaishnava Vaishnava perspectives may be found herein – and a Buddhist view as well: The Dalai Lama himself provides some simple guidelines to help you begin improving your life today! And of course – in keeping with the spirit of Guru Poornima – you will find at the heart of Kadambari several powerful meditations on the nature of the Guru; again, beginning with broader philosophical reflections, and then gradually focusing in on the specific – in this case, our own Guruji and Guruji Amma, at home at Devipuram. All of this and much, much more awaits you in the pages that follow. I think you will be amazed by the wealth of wisdom and erudition assembled here, and inspired by the devotional depth of the work. I have studied all of these articles very closely, and I respectfully encourage you to try and do the same. Spend some time with this issue; read it; reflect upon it; save it and pass copies along to others – I feel sure that you will come away a b etter sadhaka, and I daresay a better person, whatever your path may be. Thank you for your interest in our publication, and in Devipuram. MMB Editor
The articles are arranged roughly in order from philosophy to practice, and from “big picture” overviews to specific instructions. Since they range in length from very brief to
Kadambari
index
An Infinity of Infinities
04
The Meaning of Sri Chakra
09
Prayer With Full Understanding
13 15 19 22
Conversations Conversations About Devi
26
The Primordial Mother
29
Lotus Feet, Holy Dust
35
False Knowledge & True Knowledge Maha-Bindu The Seven Acaras
I Love Light
The Magic of Music
40 42 46
Hanuman & Srividya
48
The Living Shakti The Guru, Guruji, and Devipuram KADAMBARI The E-Magazine of Devipuram © 2006 Published by Sri Vidya Trust, Devipuram, Ammulapalem Post (via) Anakapalle - 531 001 Andhra Pradesh India. Phone : +91-8924-237742 +91-8924-237742 Email :
[email protected] [email protected] Web : http://www.devipuram.com http://www.devipuram.com EDITOR Michael M. Bowden DESIGNED BY
[email protected] CONTRIBUTING PHOTOGRAPHER INCHI Technologies, www.in-chi.com
Sandhya: Sandhya: A Brief Study Tripura Siddhanta Sri Mahaganapati Meditation Instructions For Life
50 53 56 59
A discourse by Guruji Sri Amritananda Natha May 2006, at Devipuram email :
[email protected] [email protected]
(70 million) mantras – sapta koti maha mantrah – are said to have emanated from the five faces of Shiva (i.e., sadyojata, vamadeva, aghora, tatpurusha, and ishana) – plus urdhvamnaya (meaning, “the one above”) and anuttaramnaya (meaning “there is no reply;” laa jawab in Hindi; i.e., it is so supreme that you can’t conceive of anything beyond it; it is past description, beyond question or argument). Seven crore
Obviously, it would be difficult to recite or do sadhana of all these mantras. So the great sages grouped them into several basic categories, corresponding to the seven chakras – and yes, there are some people who practice them all! But the Parashurama Kalpa Sutra does not refer to all of them; it simply picks up a few mantras from each chakra, and collectively they are called the Rashmi Mala Mantras – literally a “garland of rays” shining from the Mother Goddess. In the tradition of
Parashurama, the recitation of these mantras is enough. They cover all the amnayas. Amnaya means a chakra, a wheel, a parampara – that set of teachings and practices passed down through a given guru lineage. Dakshinamnaya, for example, is followed by the temples at Sringeri and Kanchi; Urdhwamnaya is followed by Badrikashramam; Poorvamnaya by Poori Jagannath, and Paschimamnaya at Sourashtra peetam. Although all of these peetams (holy sites) were established by Shankaracharya, they each follow different amnayas. And for each amnaya, a particular set of mantras is given. Fortunately, however, it is not necessary to practice all of them. Why complicate your life? Simplify it! How much can you achieve in a 100-year lifetime anyway? A hundred years isn’t
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Kadambari one seer with that of another; to say, “If they both reached the same spot, then they should both be seeing the same thing.” But that’s simply not correct. Different people see different things at the peak, just as they had different experiences in reaching the peak. You too would have a different set of experiences if you’d chosen another path. Because it’s the path that defines the experience, not the goal. Experience is a word we use to signify a flow in time – a set of pictures or feelings; things of that sort. These experiences are all subsumed in the goal, and at the same time they are not individually experienced. Different path, different experience. even a given yet; at best, you can probably start off at age 15 and keep going until you’re 60 or 70. So you have maybe 50 years to work with. And in those 50 years, how many mantras can you get the siddhis (results, fruits) of? Every one of them works; all of the Dasha Mahavidyas (the Ten Wisdom Goddesses and their respective sadhanas) work – so pick one path and stick to it. What’s the point in reaching the same destination from all different directions? directions? Each path offers its own own unique experiences along the way, yes; but the goal remains the same. It’s like this: There is a hill and there is a peak. And there are many ways to climb that hill and reach that peak. And once you’ve reached the peak, then you’ve got a 360-degree vista – you can see all around; you can see all of the paths that are there. Yet, this bird’s-eye view is different from the view of the person who is still traveling below. Or suppose you take a plane and travel from here to the U.S.A. – you can do it in 24 hours. But is that the same thing as walking to the U.S.A. over a period of 12 years – or is it different? In the same way, we’ve got to realize that the Infinite can be reached in any number of ways. And once we’ve reached it, we see the nature of all the paths. But that doesn’t mean you’ve got to experience every path, laboriously going through the whole sequence again and again. To put it differently, let’s say you want to generate a picture by raster scan (i.e., by displaying or capturing a video image line by line, as on a computer monitor or television screen). You can complete that scan horizontally – line after line after line – or vertically, vertically, or diagonally at any angle; there’s an infinite number of approaches. But if you record the value of each pixel – the sequence of which produces the picture – each type of scan will generate a completely different history and evolutionary process. They are all equally valid; in the end you see the totality of the picture, which is in a sense sum of all its parts. And yet the “music” generated by each of these raster scans is totally different. We’ve got to recognize that when we say “God is Infinite,” we mean that He-She-It is an Infinity of Infinities. Thus, the experience gained by any one person in reaching God need not tally with another person’s experience in reaching God – because they are each accessing a different region of these Infinities. It is a common mistake to try and compare the experience of
Different regions of Infinity can be totally different as well. There is just no comparison. You can’t say that one experience is greater or lesser than another – the question of comparison is just totally invalid in the domain of Infinity. You can compare finite domains using size or location or some other quantifiable factor as your basis. But on what basis could you ever compare Infinite domains? What possible criteria could you employ? And unless you draw such limitations, you have no basis for comparison. Therefore, since you cannot draw limits around Infinities, it follows that that you cannot compare them. them. Concepts of comparison – such as larger, better, best, supreme, etc. – apply only to finite domains. So if you follow, say, the path of Sufism, you’ll gain a particular sort of experience. But will it be identical to the experience one gained by Shankaracharya or by a Vamachari? No, they’ll be totally different. Just as the experience gained by a plant in meditating and in reaching God will be totally different from that of a human being, which is in turn totally different from that of a sage or a Deity. The Infinite Destination
What about once you’ve reached your goal of choice – ascended to the peak, reached God? Is it then a simple matter to go back down and experience the journey again via another path? That’s difficult to say. Experience, once again, is something that flows in Time. A Time-less state is something altogether different – a different set of rules applies. So you might reach full realization on that path a little faster; but, then again, you might not. Suppose you’ve spoken Telugu since childhood, done your graduate work in English, and now you’ve decided to learn another language. It may well take you a much shorter time than it did when you were starting afresh on a new language for the first time. Because once you’ve learned one language, it can become easier to learn additional languages. But I don’t see any similar shortcut whereby we can hope to speed up the process of “reaching Infinity.” The very concept of speed is predicated upon a domain of distances and Time – we divide distance by Time to get speed. But in a domain where Time itself is not moving, how can we talk of speed at all? How can we talk of any experience at all in a realm where there is no Time and no Space?
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Kadambari
An example I commonly give involves involves the experience of watching a movie on CD on your computer screen. What exactly is happening in this scenario? Are we seeing the movie in the CD? Not really. We’re looking at the computer, not at the CD directly. So are we looking at a program inside the computer? No, it’s not really that either – we know the programs inside there are total nonsense to us; just vast tracts of binary code, nothing readily recognizable at all. At yet, when all of that data is run through a particular sequence, the experience becomes totally different – and suddenly we are enjoying a movie.
Seriously, Seriously, though, I don’t think there is any end to the journey. If there is an end, then why does Shankaracharya say, “na bandhO na mOkshaH” – there is no bondage, and there is no release. Only if there is bondage to begin with can you have release. If there is no bondage, then what release can there be? If you’re in a prison cell, then you can be set free. But if there’s no prison, what is there to escape from? If something is not true, how can you make it true?
So the idea of “speeding up the learning process” on other spiritual paths by first reaching God via one of them isn’t really an applicable concept. Once again, the experience might help – because perhaps you’ve learned something. Learning is an associative process, and the more links you’ve forged to a particular concept, the easier it will be to establish additional links. So the learning process can be speeded up by creating an increasingly dense network of links.
So there’s no point at which we can say, “This is it. I’ve reached the destination.” There’s just no such thing. How could there be? What is the point, for example, at which the number Pi (π) ends? After you cut a circle into three parts, Pi times the diameter gives you the circumference of the circle. You’ve measured off the three units and what remains is Pi; 3.14159 … at what point does that number end? It never ends. That is why it’s called Sesha Naga (the Infinite Serpent, or Infinite Wave); it is the unending remainder. The three units are finite, but the reminder is infinite. Thus it’s called the Infinite Wave – unending waves of numbers. If you calculate Pi to 5 billion numbers, can you say you’ve reached the destination? What about the 5 billion and first number? You can always add another 1. You can always add another billion. There is no end. You never reach the destination.
But the basic issue remains: The laws that govern experience in Time and Space simply do not apply to the Time-less realm. After all, what does it mean to “reach your goal” when the destination you’re referring to is Infinity; when it’s completely beyond definition? How do you even know when you’ve reached such a destination? How far do you have to go before you reach the “end” of Infinity? When do you stop and where? The question of reaching a destination simply does not arise in Infinity; it’s a false assumption. When I called it “an Infinity of Infinities” just now, I only happened to stop at iteration number two. I could have said it’s an Infinity of Infinities of Infinities of Infinities of Infinities … why stop at all? You never never reach the destination. Suppose an ant is crawling on a ball. It can keep moving for an infinite amount of time and its journey will never end. It can travel on and on – for eons and eons and ages and ages – and the end will never come, even though the journey takes place entirely within the finite domain. Keep going around the Earth in an airplane and you’ll come to the same point over and over again, like a never-ending cycle – like a sine wave; where does it begin and where does it end? Even though Space and Time are finite, you’ll never reach the end as long as you keep going. And if this is true of what is finite, then what of the Infinite, when the destination is Brahma Jnana (experiential knowledge of the impersonal Supreme Divine)? Where is that? Can you say that if I follow a certain set of instructions, I’ll attain Brahma Jnana? I’m afraid not. What is Brahma Jnana, after all? It’s creativity; a way to manufacture, to create new things. And is there any end to creativity? Is it a reachable goal or destination? Of course it’s not. That’s why I say moksha (spiritual liberation) is like a carrot dangling in front of your eyes. It can enhance your creativity and that’s about it. Every religion is a carrot; the cult of Devi is also a carrot – but at least it’s a loveable carrot. If you are a hare, you’ll love it!
Truth is Experience
In this regard, I’ve been asked, “If there is an Infinity of Infinities, a journey without end, then why do the Vedas refer to the Sarvajnatvam (the Knower of Everything)? Just what is that Everything? And what about the states that Buddha and Mahavira reached? Is that only the beginning?” Well, who am I to know what states they have or haven’t reached? But it’s precisely the question I was addressing earlier, isn’t it? One sage tells us one thing about Infinity and then another turns around and tells us something completely different. Who’s right, the first seer or the second one? Both are right and both are speaking the Truth. Truth Truth is Experience. And different people can have different experiences – what’s wrong with that? Problems only arise when you start saying, “My Truth is the only Truth, and nobody else’s is true.” That’s where things go wrong. Infinity is a domain in which wh ich even opposites can be true. Thus we can have one fellow who comes away from his experience feeling, “Wow, now I know everything!” and another who feels, “Wow, “Wow, I don’t know k now anything.” Both views are true in the realm of Infinities, along with every shade in between. So when the Vedas refer to reaching that “by knowing which I know everything” – that’s fine; that’s correct. I’ve no argument with it. But what about those others who say, “I don’t know anything”? Are they not also correct? What I’m saying is that the first sage has – like all other realized souls – seen up to a point, has seen a certain region of Infinity – but only believed and declared that he saw everything. In actuality, it is not possible to reach any point like that.
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Kadambari || Yato vacha nivartante apraapya manasa saha ||
“Whence words return saying, ‘Oh, I’m not able to describe it anymore! All descriptions fall short of the experience!’” Indeed, how can you describe such an experience? We must keep in mind that the subject of Infinity is not amenable to our normal conceptions. Our everyday ideas and understandings don’t apply there at all. In general, when we attempt to translate the experience of Infinity into concepts that make sense in our finite domain, we fail miserably. They just don’t apply here. We’re struggling to find some order; trying to understand the unknowable in terms of the known. But I don’t think the Vedas – which were codified in a certain region of Time and Space – are telling me how to reconcile my bank accounts. There is much, much more beyond that. There is much, much more beyond all the religions in the world. Beyond Space and Time
Can we somehow remove these limitations on our ability to completely explore the Infinity of Infinities? Only by dying; only by Death – the process by which we lose our individuality and our egos. Unfortunately, that doesn’t help us much – because we cannot die. Look at your own body – it’s a river of life! Whose life are you living? There are billions of living cells within you. Millions are dying and millions more are being born with every passing second. But “you” are continuing through it all, right? The continuity of your life flows on through all of those deaths, can’t you see it? How can life die? It just is! It’s not possible to live and it’s not possible to die. We simply are.
|| AjA kshaya vinirmukta || Aja means “who is not born.” Kshaya vinirmukta means “She cannot die.” Kshaya suggests reduction; She cannot be diminished or reduced. You can not reduce Her, you cannot increase Her. Because increase and decrease are concepts applicable only to the finite realms. Infinity cannot be decreased or increased. The concept of measurement does not apply to Infinities. Time is not a parameter, parameter, nor is Space. Just as you cannot go beyond thought via thought, you also cannot go beyond Space via Space or beyond Time via Time. “Beyond,” in the sense we’re using here, means “overcoming limits.” Remember our ant, crawling endlessly over the finite surface of a ball? He will never get beyond that ball by means of crawling on it, no matter how long he crawls. He’s got to leave that plane of existence. In the same way, you and I will never reach Infinity using means that are limited by Space and Time. We have to leave the realms of Space and Time, and enter into strangeness. We must enter into the domain of constants, unbound by Space or Time.
Take the number 1, for example – where is it located? At what point in Space and Time is the number 1 to be found? Is the concept of numbers bound by Space and Time? Or Life itself – where is Life located in Space and Time? Is Life a constant determined in terms of Space and Time? Life as we know it – life as we experience it – is a concept. The Totality of Life being explored via a limited Time scan – that’s the experience we typically refer to as Life. That limited conception of Life is what we’re exploring in our present state via this scanning process. But it’s not the Totality Totality of Life; it’s a narrowly bounded peek at a tiny sliver of Life. To To get beyond that, you’ve got to get beyond Space and Time. They are the barriers. Into the Fourth Dimension || Yonistu Yonistu vaishnavi Shaktihi / Lingo Sadashivaha Sadashivaha ||
Space we can call Vishnu, or Yoni, or Shakti. Time we call Linga, or Shiva. The Shiva Linga governs at four levels: (1) Fear and Sex; (2) Power and Love; (3) Space and Time; and (4) Bindu, the point into which everything implodes. The explosion of Bindu is the Universe of Space and Time and Matter. But why should the Universe be limited to Space and Time? What about spin? What about strangeness? Our present understanding is that the Universe is made up of seven dimensions. We’re confined to three of them – and what we’re trying to do here is focus on a fourth. But what is this four th dimension? To get some idea of it, let’s do a thought experiment: Think of a cube – one centimeter deep, across and high. And now, let’s add a fourth dimension – the width, depth and height remains the same, but now we add “one second” of Time to the description. And imagine that in this one second, the cube becomes twice as big. Say that every corner is connected to its corresponding corner by a line – a total of eight corners and hence eight diagonals, all of them parallel. They appear to be non-parallel when projected into Space, but they are parallel in the direction of Time. Now suppose that, in the process of growing, this cube has also moved sideways. How does our four-dimensional object look now? It’s one second long and it’s growing and moving in space, pulling outward simultaneously in all directions. Or let’s say it’s not moving linearly, but in a curved trajectory, so that
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Kadambari the curves connecting the corresponding corners are curving parallel to one another – parallel, that is, to their direction in Time; but perpendicular to their direction in space! And now let’s add another layer of variables; let’s say that time does not move linearly but cyclically, from 0 to 1 second and back to 0 over and over, behaving like a sine wave … Okay? Do you see the complexity of the Space-Time description? There is a tremendous amount of complication in a fourdimensional structure. All of these configurations can be represented in three dimensions by some strange-looking pictures – a virtually infinite number of representations, all depending on how you scan them in Time. Life is like that, too. The Blade of Time
Try to imagine Universal Consciousness (or Universal Awareness, if you like) as a ball of thread – a single thread wound into a large ball. This Awareness – that is, the thread – both constitutes and permeates the entire ball. The thread knows itself at all points. It is all one Unified Consciousness. But now let’s say we bisect that ball across a given plane. What happens? Each of the individual points of thread we see in the cross-section becomes a unique awareness. How many awarenesses are there? A vast number of them – countless points of awareness. Looking at any single one of these tiny little awarenesses, you’re seeing only a part of the Totality of Awareness. Each point of partial awareness observes the others (since it is the nature of awareness to observe). Each awareness thinks that it is different from all the others. I’m one dot of awareness, you’re another. I think you’re different from me, and that you’re different from him. You think she’s different from me, and I’m different from you. What happened? The Unified Consciousness of the thread of Awareness has been shattered into a huge assembly of substructures, each looking around and observing its Self – while thinking that it is observing something different. These perceived differences were induced by the process of sectioning the ball. What is the blade that thus divides Total Total Awareness into separate individuals? That blade is called Time. And if Time is a blade, then so is Space. Inf inity is continually being sectioned in an infinite number of ways. The evolutionary history of the Cosmos consists of Unified Awareness splitting itself into various awarenesses and then seeing itself as all of those many different awarenesses. But Time and Space are both relative concepts; there is no absoluteness of Space or Time. And that is why the Infinity of Infinities and the experience of lives – though they appear different – can be unified by moving beyond, to a point that is beyond Space and Time. When the scanning effect of Time is removed, then all of these points of partial awareness become merged once again into a single Unified Awareness.
Unifying “the experiences of lives” – people are always quite interested in this concept. They ask me, “When you go beyond Space and Time, do others’ experiences become your own?” Well, yes, in a sense – the very concept of “other” disappears then. But all the same, that “experience” is not the same as or even similar to the idea of “experience” as we know it in the finite domain – that’s what I’m trying to say. You can’t really even call it experience because it is not flowing in time. Is there life in a constant? Does the number 3.14 have life? And what about a statue? Is there life in a statue? A statue is an unchanging constant, right? That’s why statues can represent God – better than movies or animations can, for example. With a statue, the scanning stops and the image before you becomes a constant. Just as when you take a photograph, its stops time and everything in that particular moment in Space and Time fills the film. Change is induced by the movement of Time – and if Time is
not flowing, there cannot be change. ch ange. “Happen” is a verb, verbs need action, and action needs Time in which to unfold. So in a realm beyond Time, there can be no action, no force, no speed, no acceleration. And when you are able to transcend your “scanning” view of this world – when you learn to stop f iltering it through Space and Time – your “world photograph” too becomes a constant. It becomes an invariant and does not change. Is this state of constancy itself a limitation? Not really, I’d say. When you overcome the limitation of Time, you arrive at a richer representation of Time. Suppose you project a picture of an object into two dimensions. If you then take each point within those two dimensions and project them outward to Infinity, Infinity, associating a different value with each, is that a richer or poorer representation? Now take the picture and collapse it vertically, vertically, so that the whole thing becomes a single line. Again: Is it a richer representation, or poorer? Now collapse the line into a point – so it becomes a Zero or a One. How is that, better or worse? Hindu philosophy tells us that it’s a richer representation; Buddhist philosophy tells us that it’s a Zero because nothing is there – no Time; no experience. We say it is not nothing, but everything – not empty, but full! They call it shoonyam – we call it poornam.
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The Meaning of
By Chaitanyanandanatha Saraswaty, Sri Rajarajeswari Peetam, Rush, N.Y. email :
[email protected] [email protected] Aiya became one of the Guruji's disciples when they met in Zambia in the late 1970s. Since then, the Sri Lanka native has moved to Rochester, New York, where he constructed the Sri Rajarajeswari Peetam in 1998. The temple has since been noted by important figures in
verse. The mandala forms utilized in the Shakta movement – invoking certain aspects of the Supreme Consciousness – are pictorial representations of the process of the descent or devolution devolution of the One Supreme Consciousness – step by step, layer by layer – into this creation of the multitudinous forms.
Hinduism as "one of the most important temples in the world," and has since spawned more than 150 branch peetams.
The power of the form-pattern that manifests the embodied deity is called the Yantra. It is an instrument, a machine, a veritable storehouse of power. It limits the limitless by giving it form and its crisscrossing lines bind and channel the Deity – the vast Ocean of Consciousness – into a cognizable form. It also represents the wheel of constant movement in the uni-
According to the Tantraraja Tantra there are 960 yantras. Sri Yantra, the most celebrated one, projects a very important philosophical segment of Tantric thought. is known by various names – Sri Chakram, Chakrarajam, Siva Shaktiaikya Chakram; and its history is shrouded in antiquity. It is difficult to determine the exact date of its conception and construction, though it must have been conceived very early and has been transmitted through the centuries. Many Tantric Tantric texts, such as the Kamakalavilasa, have explained the nature, significance,
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Kadambari construction and application of Sri Yantra, and a description of its basic form can also be found in the Soundarya Lahari, traditionally ascribed to Sankara (8th century C.E.). Sri Yantra represents both the macro and microcosms, establishing the sadhaka’s identity with the All-Pervading Power and the self. Intense meditation on the Sri Ch akra thus becomes an equally intense self-analysis. Sri Ramana Maharishi’s “Who am I?” self-analysis and inquiry is the meditation on the Sri Yantra dehayantra – that is, internalized as one's own body, and consequently as Rajarajeswari. The Sri Chakra – a perfect mapping of the Cosmic Magnetic fields – is the Mother of all other chakras in existence. It is the concentrated power of the presiding deity distilled into geometric form. The Chakra represents the different planes of consciousness rising over a tier of awareness in serried sequence. The Sri Chakra, by its very presence, invokes the highest consciousness in man; it is a raksha or protection when worn by someone. Its presence in the home brings in all events auspicious and channels the minds living there toward the Supreme Deity. The Chakra leads one to experience directly the divine form of the Empress Supreme, Sri Rajarajeswari. Worship of the Chakra is therefore given much importance in Tantric lore. The Structure of Sri Yantra
The Sri Yantra is a configuration of nine interlacing triangles, centered on the bindu and drawn by the superimposition of five downward-pointing triangles, representing Shakti; and four upright triangles, representing Siva. Because it is a composition of nine (nava) triangles (yoni), it is often called Navayoni Chakra. The Sri Yantra is a symbolic pattern of Shakti’s own form (svarupa), Her powers and emanations, and the form of the Universe (visvarupa), symbolizing the various stages of Shakti’s descent in manifestation. It is a pictorial illustration of the cosmic field in creation. Like creation itself, the Sri Yantra came into being through the force of primordial desire. The impulse of desire (kamakala), born of the inherent nature of Prakriti, creates a throb (spanda) which vibrates as sound (nada). This manifestation is represented by a point, or bindu. In the first state of manifestation the bindu is called Para Bindu, which is the nucleus of the
condensed energy, the seed of the ultimate Sound, and the dynamic and static aspects of the Two (Siva-Shakti) in One. It contains all of the possibilities of becoming; it transforms into Apara Bindu when creation begins: The essential point in the middle of the Yantra is the Supreme Shakti; when it swells its evolves into the form of a triangle (kamakalavilasa). The point assumes a radius, the polarization of Siva-Shakti takes place, the dynamic and static energies interact, and two more points emerge to form a triad of points – the primary triangle or the Mula-trikona. The three points are represented by Sanskrit syllables and the three basic vibrations emanate from one primal sound substratum. The triangle with its apex down represents the first form pattern of primordial desire in the process of creation. It indicates the sign of evolution and represents the zone or kinetic principle of creation. The static principle predominates in the Para Bindu, so it represents the male principle. All of creation is the outcome of these two principles, the point and triangle, and the bliss of their union. Hence the Sri Yantra is the one body of the Siva couple (Yamala). a). The primary triangle stands for three aspects of Shakti: Trividhabala, the young one, Tripura-Sundari, the beautiful one, and Tripura-Bhairavi, the terrifying one. It also represents the threefold process of creation (sristi), preservation (sthiti) and dissolution (samhara). The expansion of space and time, sound and energy, continue in the process of creation, and the primary triangle is transformed into a series of lines, triangles, circles and squares to form the Sri Yantra. The various patterns are the modifications of an original primal vibration; and at each stage they contain the interplay of the static and kinetic energies in varying degrees of concentration. The Nine Circuits
The Sri Yantra is called ‘Nava Chakra’ since it is composed of nine circuits, counting from the outer plane to the bindu. Through contemplation on the Sri Yantra, the adept can rediscover his or her primordial sources. The nine circuits symbolically indicate the successive phases in the process of becoming. They begin from the earthly plane and rise slowly in rank, step by step, to the final point, the state of supreme joy. By entering into the élan vital of the yantra, the adept reintegrates with it. The nine circuits within Sri Yantra move from the gross and tangible to the sublime and subtle realms. The outermost periphery consists of a square, with four gates, colored white, red and yellow. This is the Bhupara, the
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Kadambari ground-plan of the Sri Yantra. Yantra. Inside the square are three concentric circles, girdles (mekhala). The space between the square and three girdles is the Trailokyamohana, or the Enchantress of the Triple World, chakra; at this stage the adept is infatuated by aspirations and desires.
bliss (yogini Hridaya). Bearing witness to the truth of Andre Malraux’s saying that “every masterpiece is a purification of the world,” the Sri Yantra, in its formal content, is a visual mas-
Next are two concentric rings of 16 and eight-petaled lotuses, respectively. They are called Sarva-saparipuraka Chakra and Sarvasankshobana Chakra, indicating fulfilment of desire. The fourth chakra, Sarva-soubhagyadayaka, or Giver of Auspiciousness, projects the realm of possibilities in spiritual ascent; it consists of the 14 triangles forming the outer rim of the complex interlocking of triangles. The next two chakras are each constructed of 10 triangles. Called Sarvartha-sadhaka and Sarvarakshakara, Accomplisher of All Purpose and Giver of Protection, they indicate a stage when inner realization begins to dawn. The seventh chakra, consisting of eight triangles, is called Sarvarogahara, Remover of All Desires and Ills, and represents the stage when the adept is free from earthly bonds and is at the threshold of the inner circle of realization. An inverted triangle is the eighth chakra, Giver of All Accomplishments, of Sarva-siddhiprada; it denotes a stage before the consummation of realization. All the triangular chakras are colored red, to represent radiant energy or the dynamic and fiery element of the cosmos. The last chakra, the Bindu, is known as Sarva-anandamaya, Sarva-anandamaya, Full of Bliss. It is the sanctum sanctorum, abounding in joy, joy, in which the adept participates in union. The point is light itself, beyond all colors, and is therefore represented as colorless. The nine circuits of the Sri Yantra are also associated with 43 presiding deities, nine classes of yoginis (female yogis), sound syllables or mantras, and gestures or mudras, each having a distinct characteristic and explicit symbolic function. During the performance of rituals, identity is sought between these various aspects in order to create a cosmic link through a visual equivalent, which project the whole existence. Most yantras, if not all, have a similar symbolic meaning, though some are specifically applied to a particular creative force portrayed in a particular deity or mantra. The Sri Yantra is distinguished from the rest since it projects “All.” Its diverse symbolism may be understood conceptually by careful analysis, and its kine-visual aesthetic of symmetry and proportion may be experienced at once – but its subtle meaning and the power it manifests cannot be grasped instantly. Instead, its understanding grows gradually, until one identifies and enters into its circumference to grasp the wholeness it enshrines. For this reason, perhaps, it has been accurately described as the vast, dense mass of consciousness leading to
terpiece of abstraction, and must have been created through revelation rather than by human ingenuity and craft. Worship of Sri Yan Yantra tra
Worship of the Sri Yantra – contemplation on the Sri Yantra itself – confers immense benefits on the sadhaka. It is said that the prescribed worship of the Sri Yantra, the Navavara Navavarana na Puja, once performed, is equivalent to conducting 1,000 Asvamedha yajnas or horse sacrifices (these used to be performed by emperors). The outer worship of the Sri Yantra is deemed by Tantra to be complete only by worship of the Devata’s material body – in this case the Sri Yantra. Inner worship leads one in the path of Yoga and knowledge; but for full development – for a mastery over material nature – outer worship is necessary. It is powerful and effective, intensifies devotion and stabilizes the inner realization in outer conditions. These days it is fashionable in many quarters to condemn outer worship as a waste of time and energy; as a method meant for novices. But it is better to walk on crutches than not to walk at all. No doubt outer worship done as just an empty, lifeless ritual is only a waste of time. But if it is done with the true consciousness it can bring the greatest possible completeness, by allowing the body and the most external consciousness to share in the spirit of the worship. Once the Chakra – the form-pattern of the Goddess, and the locus upon which all the rays of the great radiance are focused
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– is worshiped in the prescribed Navavarana ritual, the sadhaka soon begins to feel this emblem of Rajarajeswari as a part of him- or herself. He or she begins to look to the Chakra for everything and always gets the needed response guiding him or her through the labyrinths of the Sadhana. The puja is a systematic worship of the deities situated in the nine Chakras of Sri Chakra; the worship is described in Bhairava Yamala. The divine mother conjoined with Kameshwara is stationed in the Bindu in the form of great effulgence and from her body emanate thousands, lakhs, and crores and myriads of rays which are the various Gods, Goddesses, beings, human beings, animals, insects, trees, flowers, and plants that pervade the universe in all planes of existence, in all the dimensions of time known to man – as as well as those those not yet perceived by by the human intellect. Tantra is for all who aspire. Normally, the worship of the Sri Chakra and Navavarana Puja are solely for the initiated in the Sri Vidya mantra. But even if they are not initiated, some people earnestly seek the Mother – so there should be a way for them to approach her. One of the gems in the Carnatic music tradition, the great composer Sri Muthuswamy Dikshitar was moved by this truly High Tantric impulse of catholicity, and under its influence set to music the cardinal principles of Navavarana worship in “kritis,” or hymns, thus opening the treasures of the Navavarana Puja to all those who are moved to approach the Deity through devotional music. When tese compositions are sung with true devotion, the melodious music makes effective the presence of the Goddesses, who are the waves of vibrations of the infinite ocean of cosmic bliss. Apart from Navavarana Puja, there is the worship of the Sri Chakra by reciting the 1,00 1,0000 occult names of Lalitha – the Lalitha Sahasranama. It is said that the Royal Goddess is immediately pleased when archana is performed with kumkum or lotus, Bilva or Tulsi leaves. It is enough for the devotee to do worship of the Sri Chakra, to do japam of Sri Vidya, and to recite the 1,000 names. Tantra places great importance on the worship of the yantra on full-moon nights. The Brahmanda Purana says those who worship Her every full moon night with the 1000 names become one with Her form and She becomes one with theirs.
Outer Worship and Inner Worship In the worship of this Yantra, outer worship can only succeed where there is the duality between the worshiper and the worshiped. The culmination of the Tantra is to reach the stage of non-duality, non-duality, where the worshiper, worshiper, the worshiped, and the act of worship are one and the same. It is written in the various interpretations of the great Soundarya Lahari by various devotees that prayoga – or use of the Sri Chakra with certain stanzas of the Soundarya Lahari to achieve certain goals – is to be practiced. But to do this is to reduce the Great Empress to the level of mundane, day-to-day human activities and should not be the aim of the true seeker.
It is said in the Tantras that outer, ritualistic worship should be replaced by inner worship of the Devi. However However,, it is very difficult for the aspirant accustomed to external worship to suddenly abandon it and take to meditation. There has to be an intermediate stage where the aspirant follows a slow, sure path of imagining the details of external worship being done inside of him or her. Continued practice of this leads one to Dhyanam and to Samadhi. In mental worship of the Sri Chakra, one follows the great Krodha Bhattaraka, Durvasa, whose work, the Lalitha Stavaratna, describes the Chakra as a great walled city with gardens, lakes and avenues, through which one is gradually led to the center in which the Devi is seated with Her Lord. There are similar descriptions given in Rudra Yamala. The true Tantric proceeds to unravel the secret of traversing through mythology, transcending from the grossest to the subtlest; and from there to the causal, and the causal of all causals, Maha Karana. Thus in the process of inner worship ones realizes that the Sri Chakra – as described in the Bhavanopanishad – is one’s own body; that the Supreme Deity is one’s own unfettered, uncluttered, pure consciousness. And thus one comes to identify the Chakra with the subtle centers in the body and mentally perform the worship there. This is exactly what followers of the Samayachara do. They do not perform outer puja; they install the Sri Chakra in all the Adhara Chakras (or basic centers) and conduct the worship of the Devi there. This inner worship is an advancement over the mental worship of Sri Pura, as here mental activity constantly dwells in the subtle body’s centers of consciousness. These conscious centers are the sources of all the dynamic powers of our being, organizing their action through the plexuses and arranged in an ascending series from the lowest-physical to the highest-mind center, and culminating in the spiritual center called the Thousand-Petaled Lotus, where Ascending Nature – the serpent power of the Tantrics – meets the Brahman and is liberated into the Divine Being. These centers are closed or half-closed within us and have to be opened before their full potential can be manifested in our physical nature. But once they are open and active, no limit can be set to their development and total transformation becomes possible. *** This short essay was written with a view to introducing the Great Yantra of the Ages to those who are living in the West and/or who are interested in the worship of the Sri Devi. It would not be complete without offering a brief, specific example of a meditation on Sri Yantra: One meditates upon the Chakra, visualizing the blazing globe of the Earth inside it, with all its hills, dales, forests, and oceans. Continuous meditation upon this image by aspirants will lead the turbulent Earth E arth to everlasting peace at the lotus feet of the all-pervading Guru Moorthy, who is Rajarajeswari Rajarajeswari Devi in human form.
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False Knowledge and True Knowledge
By Jaldhar H. Vyas email :
[email protected] Jaldhar, a Software Consultant and a Perl Programmer, helps run the Advaita Vedanta mailing list and www.advaita-vedanta.org, a site covering one of the oldest and most philosophical religions of India. The site has won many awards and Encyclopedia Britannica refers to this site for Advaita Vedanta.
I was recently reading a book about the development of our religion through the ages, as written by a Western historian. In it he was talking about the history of Goddess worship and his opinion was that it was essentially a mass of superstition that arose after Vedic religion had become degenerate. Now it is true that there are varieties of Tantra which are to be shunned by Astikas as being
totally beyond the pale of Vedic Dharma, whose practices are indeed nothing more than superstition. But is this the whole picture? We who have studied the Shastras and done upasana under the guidance of enlightened Gurus know it is not. The problem is that the historian had no firsthand experience and was relying on what he had read in books written by other people – people
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who were often more interested in sensationalism than truth. Thus even though the research was scientific and the intent was sincere, the conclusion was wrong.
Yaksha Yaksha placed a straw in front of him – but try as he might, Vayu was unable to move it. And Vayu too returned to the Devas in defeat.
Even the Devas – who are powerful beyond human imagining – Finally Indra, the king of the Devas himself, went to see the can be misled by false false knowledge. An example of of how Mataji Mataji Yaksha. Indra is called Maghavan because he possesses great humbled the pride of the arrogant Devas and taught them the strength. As king of the Devas Devas he can compel any of his subtruth can be found in the Kenopanishad Kenopanishad 3-4. (A note to our his- jects, no matter how powerful, to appear before him. But the torian, this Upanishad is part of the Talavakara Shakha of the Yaksha disappeared without even talking to Indra, so that his Sama Veda.) arrogance and pride in his strength and kingship might be extinguished. Try as he might, Indra was unable to make the Yaksha In the ceaseless struggle between the Devas and Asuras, appear. Brahman had secured victory for the Devas –but the foolish Devas became drunk with power and assumed that the battle It was then that Indra realized this was all due to the Maya of had been won by by their own prowess. prowess. So Brahman decided to Brahman and humbled himself. Pleased, Brahman revealed daughter of Himalaya. Her teach them a lesson and appeared in the form of a Yaksha, Herself in Her true form as Uma, the daughter strange and wonderful to behold. form was bewitchingly beautiful, because to know Brahman is to know eternal bliss. Bhagavati Uma then taught Indra that all vicThe Devas could not understand where this strange Yaksha had tories, indeed all actions, have in truth only Brahman as their come from, or who it was, so they deputed Agni to find out. The cause Yaksha asked, “Who are you?” and Agni replied, “I am Agni called Jataveda.” Agni is called Jataveda because he knows (veda) all We too get puffed up with pride and ahamkara at times, thinkthat is born (jata) i.e. all living things as he is the life force in all ing, “I know this” and “I have done that” – when in fact all that we of them. The Yaksha asked, “What power do you have?” and Agni Agni know and all that we do happens only through the grace of replied, “I can burn up anything.” So the Yaksha Yaksha placed a straw in Parameshwari. Luckily for us, She has favored favored us with the gift of front of him – but, try as he might, Agni was unable to burn it. viveka, by which we can learn to move beyond falsehood and And Agni returned to the Devas in defeat. ascend to the truth; and She has provided us with guides along the path. On this occasion of Guru Purnima, let us remember our So next the Devas sent Vayu to investigate. Again the Yaksha own Gurus, the Guru parampara, and She who is the Adiguru of asked, “Who are you?” Vayu replied, “I am Vayu called the entire Universe. Matarishvan.” Vayu is called called Matarishvan because because he pervades (shvayati) all spaces (matari.) The Yaksha Yaksha asked, “What power do || Bhagavati Jagadambe Mata Ki Jaya || you have?” and Vayu Vayu replied, “I can blow away anything.” So the
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Maha-Bindu
By Sri Vimarshananda Vimarshananda email : vimarshananda@hotmail
[email protected] .com
Sri Vimarshananda manages the MSN Group, “SriVidya,” which has about 80 members, and where this article originally appeared in slightly different form. Vimarshananda is a “mathematician by education and a risk ana- lyst by profession,” and works for “one of the largest banks in India in a senior position.” He belongs to “the same Guru Mandalam of Sri Jayaraman – Hamsa Charnalaya,” and bases his writings on “talks I have had with many saints, Tantrics, scholars and, above all, the inspiration I received (and am still receiving!) from my late Guruji Sri Amruteshananda Bhattaraka and the Guru Mandalam! I, therefore, do not claim any originality to my writings.”
1. The Meaning of Bindu
Bindu in Sanskrit means a point or center center.. Bindu in Sanskrit also refers to a Drop. A Drop has forces, which emanate from a center and keep it in a spherical shape. Thus, the concept of Bindu not only encompasses the center but also the thing encompassed. Maha means Great or Eternal. Thus by Maha-Bindu is meant the Great or Eternal Point.
One can understand the adjective “Great,” but why Eternal? It is because this Great Point is in the Unmanifest. In Tantra, the Word ‘Maha’ is invariably used for referring to the states in the Unmanifest. Bindu and Maha-Bindu are Tantric concepts, which have to be understood carefully. Let us use Point as the closest meaning for Bindu.
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2
A Mathematical View
·
The Absolu Absolute te,, which ch isis beyo beyond nd Spac Spacee and and Time Time,, must must express itself through the Bindu (Point) in the realm of Space and the Kshana (Moment) in the realm of Time!
4
The Bindu, Space and Time
2.1 In an earlier article article on Bindu, I explored the well-known mathematical conception of the point, an entity which: ·Has no dimensions (neither length nor breadth nor height); ·Is the basis of Space (a moving point develops a line; a moving line develops a surface; and a moving surface develops a three-dimensional solid); ·Is a meeting ground for any number of points, lines or planes (any number of points, lines or planes can intersect one another in a given point). 2.2 Since a point has no dimension, any any number of points could coexist within one another. In other words, any single point can contain within itself an infinite number of points! 3.
The Role of Bindu
4.1 The word Bindu, Bindu, when used used as a Center Center of Consciousness of the Microcosm (Manifest), is known as simply Bindu; and, when used as a Center of Consciousness of the Macrocosm (Unmanifest), is known as Maha-Bindu. Similarly, the word Kala when used as a Center of Consciousness of the Microcosm (Manifest) is known as simply Kala; and, when used as a Center of Consciousness of the Macrocosm (Unmanifest), is known as Maha Kala. Since Space (Akasha) and Time (Kala) are related in the realm of the Manifest, Maha-Bindu, Maha-Akasha and Maha-Kala are related in the realm of the Unmanifest and share a unique relationship. 5
3.1 Since a point has neither length ength nor breadth breadth nor height, it has no dimension and hence occupies no Space! However, since a moving point develops a line; a moving line develops a surface; and a moving surface develops a three-dimensional solid, all of which require Space, the point is the basis of Space! Thus, if Space were to be shrunk or regressed, it would necessarily be reduced to a Point (Bindu)! 3.2 This means that a point is independent of Space Space and yet yet is the basis of Space! Thus, the point can be considered as existing on the border between Space (the Manifest) and Non-Space (the Unmanifest)! 3.3 Consciousness (Chit), being independent of Space and being subtle, can go through the point any number of times (ad infinitum)! 3.4 Space and Time Time must coexist! coexist! If there is no Space, there is no Time and vice versa. Thus, when Space is reduced to a Point (Bindu), Time also has to reduce to a Moment (Kshana)! Anything that is beyond Space and Time must pass through a point or a moment in order to enter the realm of Space and Time! 3.5 Thus we get a vague idea idea on the following following Tantric Tantric beliefs underlying the role of Bindu (Point) and Kshana (Moment): · · · ·
All Space Space is ultima ultimatel tely reduce reducedd to Bind Bindu, u, a Poin Pointt in the the realm of Space. Bindu Bindu is the the meet meeting ing ground ground betwee betweenn the the Unman Unmanife ifest st and the Manifest. Chit Chit (Consc (Consciou iousne sness ss),), becau because se of of its its subtl subtle natur nature, e, can can penetrate through Bindu ad infinitum. All Time Time is ultima ultimate tely ly redu reduced ced to Ksha Kshana na (Mom (Moment ent),), which is a Point in the realm of Time.
The Bindu as Basis of the Manifest
5.1 The Bindu has Zero (0) Dimension. We know that a line has one dimension; a plane has two dimensions; and a solid has three dimensions. Each of these (line, plane and solid) has a Center (Bindu). A little bit of thinking would convince us that when a point develops into a line; a line into a plane; and a plane into a solid, the Center (Bindu) remains the same! Even if the developments were to go on ad infinitum, the Center (Bindu) would remain the same! Thus, from the Bindu, one should be in a position to see, energize and control all planes and dimensions! 5.2 Zero (0) is an intriguing entity entity in mathematics! Its behavior is mysterious and unpredictable! In mathematics, zero can represent anything from nothing to everything except except Infinity! Thus, Zero and Infinity are bipolar or are polar opposites! While Zero is potential and static (in equilibrium), Infinity is kinetic and dynamic! This Zero of mathematics is nothing but the Bindu of the Tantra. We have already explained that Space in the Manifest originates from the Bindu (0). So then what is Infinity? It is nothing but boundless Space! What happens when this boundless Space regresses? It regresses into Bindu (0)! During Pralaya (Dissolution), even boundless Space has to merge into Bindu (0). Hence, Tantra says that Zero subsumes Infinity! As may be seen from in the following number sequence, Zero balances Infinity on both sides: ∞ … -9, -8, -7, -6, -5, -4, -3, -2, -1 (0) +1, +2, +3, +4, +5, +6, +7, +8, +9 … ∞ 5.3 As many people think, Zero is not only void; it is also plenum! The state of being both void and plenum, the state of being in equilibrium, is also called Purna (Whole) in Sanskrit. Though this conception strictly applies only to the Absolute, it also applies to ‘Bindu,’ which is an
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extension or the primary differentiate of the Absolute. This ‘Bindu’ is known as Maha-Bindu in Tantric Literature. This conception is beautifully depicted by the Purna Ahuti Mantra:
form pattern which kick-starts Creation in the actual sense! This is the innermost innermost triangle of the Sri Chakra, with the unipolar Saguna Maha Bindu at the center. The Three Bindus are in the border between the Unmanifest and the Manifest. Whatever happens hereafter happens in the Manifest! In Srividya tradition, Lalita Tripurasundari (Pancha-Dashi) is worshiped as Saguna Maha Bindu and Maha Tripurasundari Parabhattarika (Maha Shodashi) is worshiped as Nirguna Maha Bindu.
Purnamadaha-Purnamidam-Purnat-Purnam-Udachyate Purnasya-Purnamadaya-Purnameva-Vashishyate Meaning thereby: “This is Purna! That is Purna! Purna has come out of Purna! If Purna is removed from Purna, what remains is Purna!” Or to put to mathematically, “This is Zero (or Infinity)! That is Zero! Zero has come out of Zero! If Zero is removed from Zero, what remains is Zero!”
6.5 Thus it can be conceptu conceptualiz alized ed that: that: · ·
6.
Emergence of the Manifest
6.1 As per Tantra, Tantra, Parama Shiva (the (the Absolute) is Prakasha Prakasha (Consciousness, in its subtlest state). It has Vimarsha (Will Power, in its subtlest state), but in a quiescent mode. When it (the Absolute) wants to manifest something out of itself, for itself, there is a self-moved will or deliberation or reflection acting upon itself, which is called Vimarsha. The Tantra calls Prakasha the Adi Shiva (or Original Shiva) and Vimarsha as the Adi Shakti (Original Shakti). This Will or Vimarsha creates a Stress (Spanda), which vibrates and concentrates itself into a point called Maha-Bindu (the Great Point). In Maha-Bindu, both Shiva and Shakti are in a unipolar state. The Maha-Bindu is Nirguna (without characteristics) and Samashti (combined). It combines, in its subtlest form, the seeds of Shrishti (Creation), Stithi (Preservation), and Samhara (Dissolution), Tirodhana (Concealment) and Anugraha (Grace). These are known as the Pancha Krityas (the Five Acts), as represented by Pancha Vaktra Shiva, or the Five-Faced Shiva. 6.2 The Maha-Bindu Nirguna (without characteristics) has a Saguna (with characteristics) orientation, which is also known as Maha-Bindu. Here again both Shiva and Shakti are in a unipolar state, but tending towards polarization. This differentiates into Karana Bindu (Causal Point) as it is still in Maha-Karana (the Great Causal). From this Karana Bindu emanates Nada, containing within itself the subtlest form of Sound (Shiva) and Light (Shakti). The Nada then concentrates itself into a Bindu known as the Karya Bindu (Action Point). Here Shiva and Shakti become polarized and are thenceforth in a bipolar b ipolar state. The Karya Bindu has predominance of Shakti characteristics (Rajas or Activity). Thereafter, the Karana-Karya Bindu Samarasya (congress) occurs – leading to the emergence of the Bija (Seed). The Three Bindus –Karana, Karya and Bija – are also referred to as the Sveta (White), Rakta (Red) and Mishra (Mixed) Bindu, respectively. 6.4 It is the interrelationship nterrelationship between between last Three Three Bindus – Karana, Karya and Bija – that causes the emergence of the Mula Trikona (Root, or Base Triangle, Inverted) – the
· · ·
Nirgun Nirgunaa Maha Maha Bind Binduu (Shiv (Shivaa and and Shakt Shaktii - Unip Unipola olar) r) are are positioned in the Shiva-Shakti Tattva; Saguna Saguna Maha Maha Bindu Bindu (Shiv (Shivaa and and Shakt Shaktii – Unipo Unipolar lar,, but tending towards Polarization) are positioned in the Sadashiva Tattva; Karan Karanaa Bindu Bindu (Shiv (Shivaa and Shakti Shakti - Bipo Bipolar lar)) are posi positioned tioned in the Ishwara Tattva; Karya Karya Bind Binduu (Shiv (Shivaa and Shak Shakti ti - Bipo Bipolar lar)) are posi positioned tioned in in the Shuddha Vidya Tattva; and Mishra Mishra Bind Binduu (Shiv (Shivaa and Shak Shakti ti - Bipol Bipolar) ar) are are posit position ioned ed in the Maya Tattva
6.6 We can now now vaguely understand understand the concept concept that as long as Shiva and Shakti are unipolar, the states are in the Unmanifest. We can also vaguely understand the concept that when Shiva and Shakti are bipolar, the states are in the Manifest. This would mean that any state below Saguna Maha Bindu should be in the Manifest! Is that true? Yes and no, because Manifestation happens at two levels – Shukshma (Subtle) and Sthula (Gross)!
7.
The Two Levels of Manifestation
7.1 Strictly speaking, speaking, only the Parama Shiva Shiva (Absolute), Shiva-Shakti Tattva and Sadashiva (or Sadakhya Tattva) are said to be in the Unmanifest. Because up to this stage Shiva and Shakti, though tending towards polar-
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ization still remain unipolar. However, during subsequent differentiation, the polarization of the Shiva-Shakti relationship actualizes and the Tattva becomes bipolar. Seen in this context, the Shiva- Shakti and Sadashiva Tattvas are in the Unmanifest and from Ishwara Tattva Tattva onwards all the Tattvas Tattvas are in the Manifest. 7.2 It is here that the Tantra Tantra draws a fine distinction: distinction: Again, according to Tantra, Manifestation happens at two levels – Shukshma (Subtle) and Sthula (Gross). The Manifestation at the Shukshma level begins from the Ishwara Tattva, Tattva, and the Manifestation at the Sthula level begins after Maya Maya Tattva. Tattva. Henceforth, whenever we we use the word “Manifestation” it must be qualified as either Shukshma or Sthula. 7.3 To get a clearer idea idea of the concept, we have have to tabutabulate the various stages or levels of Consciousness (Chit) vis-à-vis the Principles (Tattvas) and understand the movement from the Subtle (Shuksma) to Gross (Sthula). (see TABLE A: “Levels of Consciousness vis-à-vis Tattvas”). There It will be seen that Manifestation actually happens at two levels and in three stages – the Divine (emergence of Atma through the Divine Triad: Mahesh, Vishnu and Brahma), the Spiritual (emergence of Jivatma through the Individuality Triad) and the Temporal (emergence of Jiva through the Personality Triad). 7.4 In this regard regard we cannot fail to note note the corresponcorrespondence between the Personality Triad, the Individuality
Triad and the Atma with the Divine Triad. See “TABLE B: Individuality Triad and Divine Triad” to make this amply clear. 7.5 Thus, everything at the the lower or grosser level level is derived derived from the higher or subtler levels. This derivation is known as Manifestation. It is enabled by certain Facilitators, or Prisms, which differentiate the subtler tattvas into grosser tattvas. At the subtlest level, these Facilitators – being almost in the Unmanifest – carry the prefix Maha; i.e., Maha Kala (Great Time), Maha Akasha (Great Space), Maha Bindu (Great Point) and Maha Maya (Great Veil). The Maha Bindu referred to here is the Saguna Maha Bindu. At the grosser levels, the Facilitators – being almost in the Manifest – do not carry any prefix, and are simply known, e.g., as Kala (Time), Akasha (Space), Bindu (Point) and Maya (Veil). The Bindu (Point) referred to here is the Mishra Bindu (Mixed Point). 7.6 In the Shukshma Shukshma Shrishti (Subtle (Subtle Manifestation), Manifestation), all of the higher-level Facilitators enable differentiation through the Saguna (with characteristics) Maha Bindu. While, in the Sthula Shrishti (Gross Manifestation), all the lower-level Facilitators enable differentiation through the Mishra Bindu. This is how the Infinite finitizes itself; the Limitless limits itself; and the Unmanifest manifests itself!
May God Bless You in All Your Endeavors!
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The Seven Ācāras By Arjuna Tārānandanātha Kaulāvadhūta Kaulāvadhūta email :
[email protected] [email protected] Tantrism basically is the particular system of spirituality expressed in Tantras or Āgamas. Though there are many schools of Tantrism, all of them are essentially Śakta. Tantric doctrine encompasses all darśanas and it is the summit of all Hindu traditions. Tantrism is based upon divine revelation, Āgama, which complements Nigama (Veda). Both Āgama and Nigama are considered to be Śruti, Apaurueya-jñāna. But while Vedas represent ordinary knowledge (sāmānya-jñāna), Āgamas stand for specific knowledge (viśea-jñāna) and are the inner and most sacred part of Śruti. Historically the earliest Tantric sects were Vedic Vrātya and Somasiddhānta, a subdivision of Pāśupata-śaivism. But tradition current nowadays can be traced to 5th-6th century C.E., when the first Āgamas were written down.
Tantric tradition includes these main schools: Kula (Kaula), Trika, Krama, Tripurā (Śrīvidyā), Kubjikā. Geographically Śrīvidyā is currently spread in South India, Kālī-Kula (and Tārākula, its part) is prevalent mostly in Bengal and Assam, Kubjikā is extant in Nepa l only; Trika and Krama in their pure form didn’t survive, but few paramparās are still alive in Karāaka and some other places. Tantras (Kulārṇava, Yoni Yoni etc.) provide a complete scheme of spiritual progress of an individual — the sequence of seven stages (ācāra). These are:
· Vedācāra · Śaivācāra · Vāmācāra · Kaulācāra
· Vaiṣṇavācāra · Dakṣiṇācāra · Siddhāntācāra
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The first four ācāras come under a name of Dak ṣiṇācāra or Samayācāra, while last three are known as Vāmācāra or Kaulācāra. The Tantras Tantras recognize three levels (bhāva) of sādhakas: paśu, vīra and divya. Samayācāra, a path of regulations, is meant for paśu-sādhakas, i.e. those who are bound by conventional mind and social rules of conduct. Kaulācāra is a path of vīras (heroes) and it culminates in divya-bhāva, which is a level of Siddha. Here two important points should be noted: First, Vāmācāra is only possible for those whom a qualified Kula-guru has considered to be qualified (adhikārin) and who are thus initiated. That is, one cannot merely decide to be a Kaula and start practicing rituals taken from books. Without a Kula-guru and dīk ṣā there is no Kaulācāra. However, the preceding ācāras do not require specific initiations and can be followed by anyone who wills to do so. Second, Samaya is a necessary base for any kind of advanced practice, and cannot be ignored or jumped over. over. As Kālivilāsa-tantra puts it, “without siddhi in the great paśu-bhāva there is no siddhi in any bhāva.”
amounts to simply being a good human). This is karma-yoga. The keyword of this ācāra is viśvāsa, faith in God. As it is said in Yoni-tantra (VI.22), “it is only through faith that Siddhi and Mokṣa are acquired.” The second step of spiritual path is Vai ṣṇavācāra, which is a level of bhakti. Here bhakti stands for emotional devotion to God. While on the previous level God was simply Īśvara, the Lord, here He becomes both Father and Mother. The attitude toward Him-Her becomes more personal. Sādhana of this ācāra is Nāma-smaraṇa, bhajana and kīrtana. An example of this stage is the popular form of Gauīya-vai ṣṇavism. The third stage is Śaivācāra, a level of jñāna. At this stage the primary practice is meditation and svādhyāya. Here paśu-bhāva reaches its completion. It is well represented by such traditions like Pāśupata (Vedic Śaivism), Advaita-vedānta, Śivādvaita, Śaiva-siddhānta, Śaiva-siddhānta, Śrīvaiṣṇava. Next comes Dak ṣiṇācāra, which synthesizes all three preceding stages. Though jñāna remains predominant, bhakti and karma are important as well. It is also known as Samayācāra, from “samaya” which means “rule, prescription.” Followers of this path are known as sāmayins.
One must also keep in mind that all seven ācāras are spiritual stages and not sectarian denominations. Thus the meanings of terms such as “vai ṣṇava,” “śaiva,” etc., are technical and not strictly connected with the sects bearing these titles.
Samayācāra is a stage of yoga, but it isn’t a complete yoga (pūrṇa-yoga or rāja-yoga) of the higher three stages. The yoga of Samaya is predominantly mental, and certain external rituals may also be included. According to Śrī Am ṛtānanda (a commentator on the Yoginī-hṛdaya), Samayācāra means a Seven Stages, Three Levels worship of Guru-pādukā. In this sense, Samaya may be categorized with the previous three levels. Tantras condemn Let us examine this scheme of seven ācāras and three bhā- those “who are devoid of Samaya”; this stage is a turning vas. According to Rudra-yāmala, the aim of paśu-bhāva is point from Pravṛtti to Niv ṛtti-mārga, from paśu to vīra jñāna, right knowledge. But paśu-bhāva starts from bhāva. The higher part of Dakṣiṇācāra is described by Śrī Vedācāra, which stands for Yama-Niyama regulations and Sarvānanda: observance of Varṇāśrama-dharma. Traditionally Vedācāra was followed by everyone; however times have changed and svadharmanirato svadharmanirato bhūtvā pañcatattvai ḥ prapūjayet nowadays it isn’t strictly followed anymore. And while sa eva dak ṣiṇācāraḥ śivo bhūtvā yajetparām Varṇāśrama, in its traditional form, may indeed be rejected (Sarvollāsa, XVIII.10) as a mere social institution (and Tantra Tantra does reject the caste As examples of Dak ṣiṇācāra we may name the external trasystem and acknowledge only two āśrama, G ṛhastha and dition of Śrīvidyā and Vīra-śaivism. In its main features Avadhūta), the Yama-Niyama base is essential for any spiri- Dak ṣiṇācāra is synonymous to the Tantra-prakriyā of tual endeavor. Thus, the beginning is Yama-Niyama (which Kāshmīr Śaivism.
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After that we come to the Vāmācāra, which is subdivided into three levels. This stage is directly connected with Śakti jñāna. Knowledge here is not merely mental, but practical and direct (pratyakṣa). The word “vāmācāra” is formed by “vāmā” or “vāma” and “ācāra.” Vāmā means a “beautiful woman,” or shakti; vāma means “happiness,” “beautiful” and “left.” The essential principle of this stage is formulated in Vātūlanātha-sūtra ( №.5), siddha-yoginī-sa ṅgha ṭṭ ānmahāmelāpodayaḥ. “Saṅghaṭṭa” means sexual contact, and refers not only to physical contact with a woman, but to any contact and ultimately to any perceptive act (for the very process of cognition is essentially sexual; it is the interaction of Śiva and Śakti or Prakāśa and Vimarśa). This kind of sexual contact is the true knowledge, which is non-verbalized. It is to this knowledge that Śruti refers, saying “prajñānam brahma.” In Śrīvidyā, Vāmācāra comes under the name of Kāmakalā-dhyāna. Its ritual expression is Strīpūjā and Yonipūjā, the worship of women, who possess the divine nature of Devī. As stated in Vijñānabhairava-tantra (Vr. 69) and Jñānār ṇava (XXII.66-70), the sexual act itself is a pūjā and dhyāna, and about it Kulār ṇava says “there is no worship higher than the union.” Here it is necessary to note that sex in Tantra is based on pure love and is never merely a physical act. Thus, Meru-tantra (X.67) clearly states that only “the one whose bhakti is firm achieves Siddhi on the Vāma-path.” This path leads to the realization of Pūr ṇa-brahman, the perfect Unity of Sāmarasya, via so-called “5M’s,” which represent the order of Śākta-yoga. The essence of this Yoga is Bliss, Ānanda (which is identical with Vimarśa).
As the Devī-rahasya of Rudra-yāmala states: ānandarasapūjāyāṁ tuṣyate parameśvarī (Uttarakhaṇa, LVIII.11). Vāmācāra stands at the very heart of Śāktism as such, be it the Trika of Abhinavagupta or the Śrīvidyā of our time. In fact, the Tantras prohibit any kind of Śakti-worship without Vāmācāra (as examples see Śyāmā-rahasya V.85, Tārārahasya III.8-9 and Mahānirvā ṇa-tantra V.22-23). The two higher ācāras, Siddhānta and Kaula, are advanced levels of Vāmācāra. Siddhāntācāra is a stage of Avadhūta, and Kaula is a stage of perfection, or Siddhi: The Kaula is a Siddha-yogī and jīvanmukta. The three higher ācāras correspond to the Kula-prakriyā of Kāshmīr Śaivism. It can be said that Veda, Vai ṣṇava and Śaiva represent dvaita, viśiṣṭādvaita and advaita in theory; while Dak ṣiṇa, Vāmā and Siddhāntācāra represent the same three in actual experience. And Kaula is Samarasa, which is beyond everything and incorporates all doctrines as its parts. Thus Śiva says, “as I know, there is no religion higher than the religion of the Kula” (Mahānirvā ṇa-tantra IV.43). OM namaḥ paramadevatāyai śrī gurubhyo namaḥ
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Prayer With Full Understanding By Dr. K. Sadananda, email :
[email protected] [email protected] A retired material scientist and a disciple of H.H. Swami Chinmayanandaji, Chinmayanandaji, who is “teaching and writing on Vedanta as part of my nidhidhyAsana.”
AsatOmA sadgamaya| tamasOmA jyotirgamay jyotirgamaya| a| mRityOrmA amRitaM gamaya| Lead us from the unreal to the real. Lead us from ignorance to knowledge. Lead us from mortality to immortality.
These mantras, which we all chant at the end of our prayers, are from the Brihadarnyaka Upanishad. By the chanting of these mantras, we are requesting certain specific things
from the Lord. But we need to understand clearly (1) what exactly it is we are asking the Lord to do (that is, the goals we are seeking), and (2) how we expect Him to accomplish these tasks (that is, the means for accomplishing these goals). A good initial question is whether the Real, Knowledge and Immortality – the three things that we are requesting – are really separate goals (since we are making three separate petitions), or actually one and the same goal – and only appearing different when viewed from three different angles. If they are all the same, then why request them in three different ways – unless we are confused, not knowing exactly what we want? Or is it that we want to insure that the Lord hears our prayers, one way or the other?
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Another important question at the outset is we want these three particular goals – instead of, say, moksa (liberation) or freedom from samsaara (suffering)? What is the use of havhaving these three boons and still suffering due to samsaara? Why not pray directly for moksa? In other words, we need to have a clear understanding of what our prayer really means. So let us examine the Vedic mantras more closely. · The Real: AsatOmA sadgamaya|
The first prayer says, “Lead us from asat to sat – that is, from the unreal to the real.” In fact, the terms asat and sat are normally translated as nonexistence and existence, respectively. So we are asking the Lord to lead us from nonexistence to existence.
kasminno bhaghavo vijnaate sarvam idam vijnaatam bhavati “Hai! Bhagavan, please teach me that, by knowing which I will have knowledge knowledge of everything!” Now that is really really a pretty tall request. Is that what we are requesting in our our prayer, prayer, tamasOma jyotirgamaya? jyotirgamaya? When we say “I have knowledge,” or “He is a knowledgeable person,” we only mean “knowledge of x.” That is, “knowledge” always refers to a particular area or object – it is objective knowledge; it is qualified knowledge. Epistemologically, Epistemologically, knowledge without qualification is indefinable. So in asking the Lord to lead us from ignorance to knowledge, we are using two unqualified and therefore indefinable terms. We are requesting something that we ourselves are unable to properly define. · Immortality: mRityOrmA amRitaM gamaya|
Closer examination of this meaning reveals an inherent contradiction: If we are nonexistent to begin with, then our request for existence has some validity. However, since we must exist if we are reciting the prayer, does not the prayer itself presuppose our existence? And if that is so, doesn’t that make it a useless prayer – since we are asking Him to do that which is already an accomplished fact? It will be a waste of His time and ours unless asat has some other meaning than non-existence. non-existence. Some darshanikas argue argue that the terms are mutually exclusive; i.e., that which is not asat must be sat, and that which is not sat must be asat. If so, then we are asking the Lord to do something impossible. Lord Krishna declared thousands of years ago in the Bhagavad Gita that, “naasato vidyate bhaavo naabhaavo vidyate sataH” (2-16) – “nonexistence can never come into existence and existence can never never become nonexistent.” It is an absolute Law of Conservation that applies not only to matter and energy, but to subtler entities like jiivas (individual souls). Krishna says:
The third part of the prayer says, “Lead us from mortality to immortality.” And there is a problem here too. The very request assumes that we are mortal, since we were born at such and such a time and place. The whole Gitopadesham started because of Arjuna’s apprehension that he was going to kill his own teachers and grandsires, in whose lap he grew up: gurUnahatvA hi mahAnubhAvaan shreyobhOktum bhaixya mapIha loke| “It would be better to beg alms and live, rather than kill these great teachers and noble souls.” Hence, like us, Arjuna is aware of our mortality. Krishna confirms this by stating the Law of Eternal Recycle, which follows from the Law of Conservation: That which is born has to die, and that which dies has to be reborn: jAtasyahi dRivo mRituH, dRivam janma mRitasya ca|
natvevAhum jAtu nAsam, na tvam nEmE janAdhipAH| na caiva nabhavshAmaH sarvE yayaH mataH param|| “There was never a time when I was not; there was never a time you were not, nor all these kings arrayed before us. There will never be a time when they are absent. Hence, that which exists can never cease to exist.” Based on this, the first part of our prayer appears to be in vain. · Knowledge: tamasOmA jyotirgamaya| j yotirgamaya|
Now let us examine the second prayer, “Lead us from ignorance to knowledge.” We do not specify here exactly what ignorance we are referring to – is it ignorance of chemistry, physics, biology, the world; or ignorance of everything? In the Mundakopanishad the student approaches his teacher and asks:
Hence, if one considers himself as mortal, he can never be immortal. On the other other hand, if he knows knows he is immortal – because of the above statement of Krishana (na tve vaaham ...) – then the request to “lead us from mortality to immortality” is either impossible, since anything that is born has to die; or useless, since it is already an accomplished fact – existence can never cease to exist. Based on this analysis, the third part of the prayer, “mRityOrmA amRitaM gamaya,” also appears to be in vain. In the scriptures, a sage calls us shRinvantu vishve amRitasya putrAH – the sons of immortality. Immortality is our birthright. Thus, all three requests that we’ve made in our prayer appear to be in vain. If we just repeat the mantras without understanding, like a parrot, then we have no way of knowing even if the Lord grants us our request – because we have no idea what we asked for!
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Kadambari In addition, we are making these requests without even knowing whether we are qualified to receive that which we are asking for. for. It’s as if a child were to go to a university professor and asking him for knowledge of quantum mechanics, without knowing even what the term means, and without knowing whether he is qualified to receive that knowledge or not. But since these are Upanishadic mantras, there must be a deeper meaning involved. involved. The Nature of Knowledge
Knowledge, prama, can be known through pramaaNa (a means of knowledge) when there is a pramaata (knower) and prameya (object of knowledge). Normally, I can only have objective knowledge. edge. The means of knowledge knowledge are basically basically three: (1) pratyaxa (perceptual); (2) anumaana (inferential); and shabda (scriptural). The first two are related to loukika prameyas (worldly objective knowledge), while the third is shruti praamaana (revelato(revelatory knowledge) – that is, it is for aloukika prameyas (the knowledge of dharma, swarga, naraka, etc.). Any prameya, or object of knowledge, can be known only through its attributes or qualities. In fact, the definition of an object is based on its attributes, which differ from those of other objects in the Universe. The senses can only measure these attributes and feed that data to to the mind. The mind, in turn, integrates the inputs from the senses and provides an image – superimposing on that image the gathered attributes. The result is expressed as a thought in the mind. Thus, a chair “out there” is recognized by its form, color, color, and other properties as perceived by the senses; and the image of that chair is formed in the mind with these attributes. So the cognitive process involves perception, volition and cognition. The cognized image with the perceived attributes is next compared with the images stored in our memory. When there is a reasonable match, we “recognize” that this thing out there is a chair. In reality, however – from the mind’s point of view – the chair out there is only a “chair-thought” in the mind’. So if there is no mind (i.e., if we are asleep or lost in our dreams, etc.), there is no chair out there. Out of mind is out of sight! In fact, very existence of a chair – or any object for that matter; even the entire world “out there” – cannot be established without the mind, supported by the conscious entity present. The existence of the world has to be proved or established by a conscious entity, since it is jadam, or inert;
whereas a conscious entity exists independently of the world. The world “out there” is a dependent, whereas “I,” i.e., the conscious entity, entity, is an independent entity. entity. In fact, the self-conscious entity alone is a self-existent self-existent entity, while the inert entity must always depend on a self-conscious entity for its existence. The most important point to note here is that the senses can grasp only the attributes of an object, but not its substantive essence. Hence, knowledge of all objects “out there” is only attributive knowledge; never substantive knowledge. The reason is that the substantive for all objects is nothing but Brahman, since according to our scriptures Brahman is the material cause for the Universe. Universe. The Taittireya Taittireya Upanishad says “yatova imaani bhuutani jaayante …” – “That from which the whole Universe arose, by which it is sustained and into which it returns is Brahman.” Brahman cannot be known by the senses. From the above analysis too, we cannot independently establish that there is a chair materially “out there.” For if we look at, say, say, a wooden chair closely, we find that there is no such essentially substantive thing as a “chair” – it is only a name given to a certain form of wood. What is actually “there” is only wood. Moreover, if we then examine the wood closely, we find that there is really no wood there. It is just an assemblage of organic fibers, which are in turn are made up of molecular chains, which are in turn but assemblages of various atoms. And we can keep going: Atoms are themselves an assemblage of electrons, protons and neutrons, which are in turn an assemblage of more fundamental matter. We soon come to a quantum level where we cannot precisely analyze the system, since the very act of examining the fundamental matter affects the system observed. So we cannot say with certainty what is “out there” at the fundamental level. We can only say that, at each relative level (vyavahaara), (vyavahaara), that “a chair is out there,” or “wood is out there” or organic fibers, or molecules or atoms, and so on. The knowledge changes as we shift our reference. The Real and the Apparent
In short, the knowledge of any object is only relative knowledge and not absolute absolute knowledge. The scriptures correctly correctly point out that what is there is only Brahman, with different names and forms. Bhagavan Shankara says in Drikdrisya Viveka: asti bhaati priyam ruupam naamam chaityanca pancakam| adhyatrayam adhyatra yam brahma ruupam, jagat ruupam tathaa dvayam
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Kadambari Every object has as its five aspects Existence, illumination, desirability, desirability, form and name. Of these five, the first three belong to Brahman while the other two, name and form, belong to the world. This means that the manifest world we live in is nothing but an assemblage of objects with names and forms (all are attributive), which are superficial since they do not have any substantiality of their own. – the underlying substance of everything is Brahman alone. Hence the Upanishads Upanishads declare, sarvam khalvidam brahma; neha naanaasti kincana All of ‘this’ is nothing but Brahman; there is nothing other than Brahman. What there is, is only Brahman – and we cannot gain substantive experience experience of Brahman by any means of knowledge alone. It is like a ring, a bangle, a bracelet, and a necklace made of gold. Each one is different, with their own attributes (guna) and purpose, each differing from that of others. Yet those attributes (such as i.d. or o.d., or thickness, size, shape, etc.) do not belong to the gold, the substance of all these ornaments. Although we say, from the point of vyavahaara, that the ring, or the bangle, etc., arises from gold, is sustained by gold and returns into gold – the truth is they are all just gold in different forms and names. The process of gold becoming jewelry or ornamentation is a “transformation-less transformation,” since the gold remains gold throughout the transformation. In the same vein, the the Ch. Upanishad declares: vaachaarambhanam vikaaro naama dheyam “Creation is nothing but an apparent transformation” – just like gold becoming ornaments. Is the ring, bangle, bracelet, etc., real or unreal? They appear to be real, but in reality they are nothing but gold and gold alone. What must I do to see the gold in the ring? I don’t have to destroy the ring. Rather, Rather, like a goldsmith, I must learn to see gold in and through the ring – by paying more attention, not to the object’s superficial name and form but to its substance. That which appears to be real, but can be negated, is called mithya, which Shankara defines as sat asat vilaxanam. One cannot say that the ring does not exist, since one can obviously decorate oneself with it. But at the same time one cannot say the ring really exists either, either, since what actually exists “out there” is only gold. Hence, it is called mithya. Accessing the Deeper Meaning Scripture sometimes uses the word “asat” for mithya. Hence the first prayer – “Lead me from the unreal to the real” – is essentially a request for the discriminative power to see Brahman, the substantive of the world. Here “seeing” means understanding, since Brahman cannot be an object by any any pramaana (aprameyam). (aprameyam). The Mandukya Upanishad starts with the declaration that “Om” is nothing but all “this”; that all “this” is nothing but Brahman; and that
Brahman is nothing nothing but the Self that I am. Hence, in the prayer “astOma sadgamaya,” we are asking the Lord to lead us to the realization that “I am that Brahman” – the real entity. That is liberation, or moksha, since the realization realization that “I am Brahman” means becoming that Brahman – the limitless “That I am.” Brahma vit brahmaiva bhavati – the knower of Brahman becomes Brahman, say the scriptures. A finite “I” cannot become the infinite Brahman; that would be mathematically illogical. illogical . However, However, if I am already infinite and only think that I am finite – and thus suffer the consequences of that thinking – then I am simply ignorant of my true Self. All I need is a convincing teaching that I am not what I think I am; that, rather, rather, I am the totality, the substantive essence and and being of the entire Universe. Universe. Hence, in the prayer “tamasoma jyotirgamaya,” I am asking the Lord to help me to know myself. This self-knowledge is not the kind of objective or attributive knowledge that we discussed above; the knowledge of one’s own self cannot be objectified and therefore cannot be defined. It is recognition of one’s self, with Vedanta Vedanta as pramaana, as expounded by the teacher. Here Vedanta acts like a mirror, a darashana, in the hands of a teacher – reflecting my true nature in contrast to what I think I am. Hence, the prayer, “Oh Lord, lead me from ignorance to knowledge.” Here, the process is one of knowing the identity of the self with Brahman (ayam aatma brahma); and that is moksa, or liberation, too. Bondage is only notional; it is not real – and therefore it can be removed by knowledge. Finally, once I recognize that I am that eternal, all-pervading Brahman – which is of the nature of sat, existence that never ceases to exist – I recognize myself as eternal and immortal. Death is only notional, since there is neither birth nor death; as when a ring is destroyed to form a bangle, the gold itself itself remains remains unaffected. unaffected. Hence, in the prayer prayer “mRityormaa amRitam gamaya,” I am only praying for the knowledge to recognize myself as the immortal entity that I already am. So now we can understand that all three of these prayers are for the realization of our own true nature – a realization that can happen only when we drop the notions that “I am this body-mind-intellect complex.” complex.” By identifying with the body, I consider myself to be mortal – hence the prayer, “Lead me from mortality to immortality.” By identifying with limited intellect, I consider myself to be ignorant – hence the prayer, prayer, “Lead me from ignorance to knowledge.” By identifying myself as this jiiva with its limited body-mind complex, I consider the unreal world to be real, and I suffer the consequences of this misunderstanding. And so I pray, “Lead me from unreality to reality.” reality.” All three prayers involve seeking the knowledge that “I am that Satyam-Jnaanam-Anantam;” that I am Brahman, from which the whole world arises, by which it is sustained, and into which it is finally reabsorbed. So let us now pray with full understanding:
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Conversations About Devi By Sri Bhasuranandanatha Bhasuranandanatha email : bhasuranandanatha@shak
[email protected] tisadhana.50megs.com megs.com Following are some brief excerpts from a longer series of conversations between Sri Bhasuranandanatha, an experienced Srividya adept based in Kerala (and author of “Shakta Tantra: an Introduction” in the last issue of Kadambari), and a less experienced aspirant on that path (in this transcript, the questioner).
AsatOmA sadgamaya| tamasOmA jyotirgamay jyotirgamaya| a| mRityOrmA amRitaM gamaya| On Shakti and Shiva Aspirant: Is Shiva always the end goal of sadhana, even when Devi is the focus of one’s worship? Bhasurananda: No. At the end Shiva and Shakti are One, with the Shakti principle predominating. That’s why at Guru Paduka [the chakra above Sahasrara], it’s Ardhanareshwara [the deity who is half Shiva and half Devi].
Q: If they are One, then why do you say “with the Shakti principle predominating”? A: Because that’s the way it is. That’s why it is said, shakti vinaa shiva shava: “Without Shakti, Shiva is a corpse.” If you’ve noticed, in all the depictions Devi is on top. Even in coitus with Shiva. That is what it means: The Shakti principle predominates. Q: So what is Shakti without Shiva? A: She is Energy, satchidananda. She can create another Shiva at Her will.
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Q: She can?! A: She can. At Guru Paduka level, She is Ardhanareshwara; then at the Mahaa-Bindu level She is formless, attributeless, pure Bliss; in permanent orgasm – that’s the only way that level of bliss can be explained in mundane terms.
Q: What is the role of Mathangi, or Meenakshi, in Srividya upasana? A: Mathangi, or Meenakshi, is the Supreme Advisor to Lalitha, just as Vaaraahi is her Supreme Commander. Commander. Q: The military parallel is interesting, don’t you think?
Q: But so much of what one hears and reads ends with Shiva. Devi is conceived as something like a taxicab, and Shiva is where She drops you off. A: Okay, then I will have to explain in detail. The Urdhwamnaya Dhyana will solve a lot of problems for you. Tell me, how many faces has Shiva? Q: Normally, Sadashiva is said to have five faces. A: Yes, but really it is six. Each face has a name, and from each of the faces a group of mantras emanated, numbering in the millions. The mantras of the four groups are the mantras of East, West, North, South. They are normally called the Amnaya Mantras. So the six faces are the four facing the four cardinal points, and a fifth looking up – that is Urdhwamnaya, the “upper” one; and a sixth that is ever hidden – that one is called Anuttaramnaaya; or that which is above the upper one! They are accessible only by upasakas of the Mahaa Shodashakshari. But for now, let’s concentrate on the Urdhwamnaya Dhyana, which says: “On the most enchanting golden island, in the middle of the Ocean of Nectar, in a grove of kalpavriksha trees, in a ninepillared ruby hall, on a throne studded with precious gems and having the effulgence of an infinite number of Suns and Moons, the Urdhwamnaya aspect of Shiva sits, half being Ambika [Devi], appropriately ornamented. She is ever 16 years old, with a smiling face, three eyes and the crescent, wearing otherworldly, divine ornaments and clothes. With Her four hands, She holds a drinking vessel (perhaps filled with brandy!); a trishoola; a book; and displays the chin mudra. She is attended to by all the Devas, including Mahaashoda. So shall one meditate upon the Shiva who is Ardhanareshwara.” Okay, have you got it? But here is the important part. Look back at the last line: “So shall one meditate upon the Shiva who is Ardhanareshwara.” Okay? So that dhyana was of Shiva as Ardhanareshwara! But the next line continues: pum roopam vaa smareddevI strIroopam vaa vicintayet – “Devi can be meditated upon as a man or woman.” And then: adhava nishkalam dhyaayetsachidaananda lakshanam -- “or She can be meditated upon as attributeless; as a sign of Absolute Bliss.” And finally: sarwa tejomayam dhyAyet sa caraacara vigraham: “She shall be meditated upon as the quintessence of all Energy and of all Living and Non-Living Beings” …
On the Army of Lalita
A: I would say it’s a political rather than a military structure. The political leader governs. Likewise, we have to rule ourselves with discipline and fight our enemies – both within us, and at times outside us. And so part of what She sends Her devotees is the discipline we need to move closer to Her. Q: But the military implication is still there, wouldn’t you agree? To have a “Supreme Commander” implies that you have a large army. A: Yes. Her army consists of the innumerable shaktis. Q: And if you need a “Supreme Advisor,” that assumes you are a leader with certain tasks to carry out and interests to satisfy – some of which may conflict with the tasks and interests of other leaders? A: She is a leader with interests of humanity as Her goal, for which She may require advice – for example, on how to make humanity progress faster and better. Q: I am sorry if I am asking the wrong sorts of questions. But I find them intriguing: Leader of whom? Or of what? Advisor on what? Commander of whom? To do what? And why? A: No, they are the right sorts of questions. They make you think. Indeed, a person should know all of these things to be a sadhaka …
On the Lalita Sahasranama Stotram Q: Why was the Sri Lalita Sahasranama composed – simply as a glorification hymn? A: What do you think? Q: I assume it reflects various attributes the sages discovered upon contemplating Her? A: No. Think again. Start looking at the structure. Go further. What is the first name? Q: shrI mAtA. The Mother. A: But why the Mother? Whose Mother? For that you must refer back to Lalitopakhyana [i.e., The Story of the Goddess Lalita], which tells us of how Lalita manifested Herself. When the Devas were running away from the asura Bhanda, they reached a hopeless situation, and they decided to do the mahaa yaga, which is sacrificing oneself part by part and, at last, completely. And they did it. And thus were all the
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Devas consumed by the sacrificial fire. And from that fire arose a power – formless; attributeless – that coalesced into Lalita, the Ever-Playful One. And what did she do first? She recreated the Devas, thus becoming the Mother of all Gods. Hence the name shrI mAtA. Q: I see ... A: So now lets take the second name, shrI mahArAjnI, the Great Empress. How did She become that? Well, upon being recreated the Devas decided that, in the coming battle, they needed a leader composed of all their powers – and that was manifest as Lalita in front of them. So they crowned Her as the Great Empress.
A: No need for thanks. Just read the Lalitopakhyana if you haven’t already. And the Tripura Rahasya, too. Those are the primary texts you should know: Lalita Sahasranama, Lalitopakhyana and Tripura Rahasya. Q: Between the three of those texts, there is an ocean of knowledge. A: Yes, and we are still just standing by the shore of that ocean and barely dipping our hands in – and even for that, we are the lucky few in the world! And there are still greater treasures out there to discover. discover. Unimaginable treasures!
Now as the Empress, Lalita needed a consort; so Shiva became a male Lalita – like a twin to Her in every respect, except that He was a male. He was called Kameshwara, and He was married to Her. And they ascended the throne, and She became the third name – srImatsimhAsaneshwarI – on being seated on the throne. Thus the early part of Lalitopakhyana is compressed into the first three names of the Sri Lalita Sahasranama. Q: And so it goes from there? A: Yes, and so on from there. Lalitopakhyana is the story of Lalita and her acts, and the entire Lalita Sahasrama refers only to Lalitopakhyana. Because that is the summum bonum of Lalita’s story. And it goes on, answering in turn all of our questions about Her. We wonder, “Where did She manifest from?” – and the fourth name reminds us, chidagnikunda sambhootA, She was born out of the chidagni, the fire of the mind. Why was She born? The fifth name tells us, Devakaarya samudbhavaa; for the benefit of the devas. What does She look like? See the sixth name: udyat bhaanu sahasraabhaa; like the light of a thousand rising suns. What are Her physical attributes? The seventh name, caturbAhu samanwitaa; with four arms. Do you see? Q: Yes; so it is correct to say that these are descriptives rather than actual names? A: Yes, that is what I am saying. When you understand the Lalitopakhyana, and then stop at each name in Lalita Sahasranama and reflect on the relevant part of Lalitopakhyana, it becomes a meditation. You visualize the birth and acts of Lalita – She comes alive! She manifests Herself. She appears before you. The descriptive descriptive names help you to visualize and relive Her acts. It becomes a powerful meditation. It makes you one with Her! And that’s the whole purpose of upasana. Understanding and doing it is an upasana by itself. Hence it is called the greatest sahasranama. Well, there is another rahasya sahasranama, but I do not know that one. I just know it is there. Q: Wow, what an explanation! Thank you.
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The Primordial Mother
By Devi Bhakta email :
[email protected] [email protected] “Devi Bhakta” is the nom de plume of a New England-based England-based attorney, editor/publisher, and freelance contributor to many popular periodicals. A disciple of Sri Amritananda Natha Saraswati, he is also a founder of the website ShaktiSadhana.org as well as the “Shakti Sadhana” online discussion forum. With more than 2,100 members and nearing its 25,000th post, SS is among the top three Yahoo Groups in the Hinduism category.
Most of the world’s great religious systems can be assigned a “start date” – at least approximately. For example, Islam was founded circa 600 CE by Mohammed; Christianity circa 30 CE by Jesus of Nazareth; and Buddhism stretches back to the historical Buddha of circa 500 BCE. Judaism is much older than these others – its “founding” can be traced to between 1,800 and 1,500 BCE, based on the patriarch Abraham’s birth.
Hinduism too could be said to date back to that time; that is, around 1,800 to 1,500 BCE – but only if the starting point for what we’re calling “Hinduism” is that moment wh en scholars say the rishis first orally formulated the earliest revelations of the Rig Veda. And that’s a pretty big if, is it not? For starters, such a reckoning fails to take into account the mysterious Saraswati River or Harappan culture of c. 3,300-
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1,600 BCE. Current evidence suggests that this civilization was recognizably “Hindu” in flavor and motif, whatever its religious system might have been called at the time. And although theories vary widely, modern scholarship has essentially reached a consensus that that there was never any “Aryan invasion” per se – that so-called Vedic culture was pretty much an organically Indian development, fed by Saraswati culture at least as much as any Indo-European, tribal or other influences.
That is to say, the conceptions that eventually evolved into Tantra had essentially emerged and evolved together with the earliest reflections and inner explorations of the modern human mind itself. Certainly, in these earliest incarnations, the basics of “proto-Tantric physiology” had not yet fully formed into the precise and intricate system described by Plato, much less the dazzlingly complex, elegantly refined sophistication of the Hindu Tantric system that has come down to us today as Srividya.
Needless to say, one of the most pervasive of these “other influences” is the amorphous, nearly indefinable body of rituals and practices collectively known as “Tantra” – which in turn is believed to have evolved largely out of the Goddess cults of early prehistory. Thus, as Srividya upasakas – that is, as the present stewards of the world’s most sophisticated living religious tradition centered on the Divine Mother – we can truly consider ourselves the direct heirs of the oldest living religion of humankind; a tradition that, more palpably than any other, “directs our gaze into the darkest depths of human prehistory,” as historian Thomas McEvilley wrote in 2002.
But the base concepts were there, and they spread – along with prehistoric human migrations; seemingly as ingrained as our very DNA; through millennia and cultures, throughout the ancient world, the concepts spread and evolved. And then, over time, they faded and, in culture after culture, were eventually lost (though the primordial power of these concepts caused them to persist even where their original meanings are long forgotten: Take, for example, the caduceus, symbol of the medical profession – still stylized as part of the American Medical Association’s registered trademark – two serpents, intertwined up a central staff; the ida, the pingala and the susumna).
By way of context, McEvilley was attempting to trace the history of the concepts of chakras, kundalini, and other early “Tantric” concepts of the subtle anatomy. His search began when he found a fascinating passage in Plato’s Timaeus (c. 360 BCE), in which the Greek philosopher described a mystical system of human physiology that was virtually identical to the earliest Hindu formulations – kundalini, chakras, susumna, ida and pingala, and so on; it was all there! The terminology was Greek, of course, but the ideas described were almost exactly the same. The obvious initial conclusion was that early contacts between ancient Greece and ancient India had facilitated this transfer of knowledge – except that, in the course of his dialogue, Plato cites another Greek source (now lost) from some 1,500 years earlier; i.e., long before any known contact between Greek and Indian culture.
But the full import of these primal symbols and concepts were not lost everywhere; they were not forgotten by all. One civilization continued to preserve and expand upon the ancient precepts. Among the world’s great religions, Hinduism alone maintained – primarily in its Shakta branches and particularly in its Srividya schools – a living and apparently uninterrupted (dare we say umbilical?) connection back to the dawn of human history; to some of the very first spiritual revelations and expressions of our earliest ancestors.
So, McEvilley reasoned, there must have been a common ancestor – but who was it? Bronze Age Sumer, Sumer, perhaps? The archeological evidence does suggest significant cultural exchanges between the Harappan civilization and ancient Mesopotamia. But as he dug deeper and deeper, McEvilley realized that Sumer, too, had inherited these concepts from some earlier source. Tracing tantalizing leads through ancient China, ancient Eurasia, eventually even as far afield as ancient Africa and aboriginal Australia – he finally concluded that “Tantric physiology is not exclusively an Asian element;” that it seemed, in fact, to be “extremely ancient and [to] have been diffused widely at an early level of human culture – perhaps even by that hypothetical wave of migration that brought the ancestors of the proto-Australoid proto-Australoid people out of Africa.”
And so it has come to pass that we – here in the high-tech, Web-connected, satellite-linked, instant-communication world of the 21st Century – find ourselves at the feet of a great soul such as Guruji. A no-nonsense nuclear physicist, a scientist and educator of the highest caliber, and a fully realized spiritual master on this most ancient of paths – he is truly a worthy inheritor of this unimaginably vast body of ancient wisdom. Like those who came before him, Guruji today explains to us those same primordial concepts of the Devi, of kundalini and Tantric physiology – but nowadays it’s in terms of current technologies, the latest book and movies, cutting-edge discoveries of quantum physics. But amazingly, it still makes perfect sense! And even more importantly, it still works! Can you imagine the sheer honor of being part of such a history? Since we are already speaking of ancient connections, let us inquire a bit further into our “roots.” For just as the essential concepts of the subtle body retain their vital role in Srividya practice to this day, so does the central role of our Divine Mother.
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The Primordial Mother
Anatomically modern humans – that is, people with essentially the same physical appearance and intelligence as our own – first appeared on Earth between 40,000 and 35,000 years ago. As “pre-human” levels of sentience and selfawareness brightened into full-blown, abstract human consciousness, the expression of this consciousness almost immediately blossomed forth in a myriad of tangible expressions – a phenomenon that is technically known as the Early Upper Paleolithic Explosion. Why “explosion”? Well, at first the archaeological record shows nothing; then perhaps a few crude tools; and then – suddenly; as if out of nowhere – the most wonderful proliferation of human art and artifacts. (For those who may be interested, the South African anthropologist and archaeologist David Lewis Williams explores this development in depth in his brilliant 2002 study entitled, The Mind in the Cave: Consciousness and the Origins of Art.) These early human artists were not the grunting, heavybrowed, club-wielding troglodytes of the popular imagination; on the contrary, their work shows astonishing delicacy and sophistication. For example, the ancient cave paintings at Lascaux and Chauvet are not primitive, cartoonish stick figures. In fact, they are magnificent in their execution, nuance and attention to detail; the cave walls were painstakingly prepared, sized and primed prior to painting (which is largely why the paintings have survived so vividly to this day); rock contours were incorporated into the imagery; the paints were carefully blended and tempered over heat; motion, shadowing and three-dimensional effects were rendered through multiple overlays of images, for an effect that is almost modern in its impact. The great Spanish painter Pablo Picasso – awestruck upon examining the Lascaux paintings shortly after their discovery in 1940 – quietly remarked: “We have invented nothing.” And so it is with the worship of Devi. Archaeological excavations of prehistoric sites yield, at the earliest strata, “hundreds of human [figures], almost always pregnant women with only rare examples of males.” The frequent arrangement of these figures in astronomically oriented firepits and so on strongly suggests a religious function. Most of the figurines are faceless, or extremely stylized. “Only essential qualities are defined, and what appears to be deliberate ambiguity and implied geometry leave much to the imagination: nudes without arms and feet, breasts without nipples, pubic triangles without sexual details,” according to Randall White in his survey, Prehistoric Art: The Symbolic Journey of Humankind. “Curves and swellings evoke female reproductive states and anatomical qualities, but are not constrained by any degree of specific detail.”
Across the Eurasian landmass, these female figures are numerous and ubiquitous: “Ivory and soft stone sculptures representing women were excavated from the Atlantic coast of France to the Bering Straits of Siberia, with the largest numbers being found on the Russian plain,” White explains. “While it may be true that dead men don’t talk, these women who had been in the ground for 20,000 years spoke volumes to archaeologists. Like the cave paintings, these evocative artifacts immediately stirred debate among scholars and raised questions as to their meanings.” (To (To learn more about the details and implications of these discoveries, N. N. Bhattacharyya’s The Indian Mother Goddess is a great place to start.) For purposes of this essay, we need not linger over the modern Near and Middle East, where the ancient Goddess cults have been abundantly studied and documented. Instead, let us proceed directly into India, where we find a similar historical record – but also an utterly unique circumstance in that this ancient inheritance remains a living tradition. “Shakta Tantrism has its roots in prehistoric concepts of a fertile Mother Goddess and ancient systems for Her worship,” explains M.C. Joshi, former Director General of the Archaeological Survey of India in New Delhi. Joshi notes that the earliest example so far of an Indian mother goddess figurine was found near modern-day Allahabad; She belongs to the Upper Paleolithic era, as we might expect – carbon 14 determinations date Her to somewhere between b etween 24,000 BCE and 18,000 BCE. Also found in that stratum, this time near Mirzapur in Uttar Pradesh, are “colorful stones marked with natural triangles” – nearly identical to similar stones still under worship in the area “as Argarimai or Mother Fire.” G.R. Sharma, the late archaeologist who discovered all of these pieces, related them to “a primitive Mother Goddess” cult, even suggesting that the stones with triangles (demonstrating once again what White referred to as a “geometry leaving much to the imagination”) “may demonstrate connections to the later Tantric use of yantras, in which triangles manifest a vital symbolism connected with fertility.” If, as this data suggests, the roots of Shaktism stretch back some 40,000 years, to the very dawn of human consciousness, it follows that approximately 99 percent of the history of the human consciousness and mind belongs to the Devi. By comparison, the Christian era occupies a mere .05 percent of that span; Islam barely half that. And using even the earliest estimations – let’s say 4,000 years ago – the period since the composition of the Vedas, “modern” Vedic Hinduism spans a mere 10 percent of humanity’s spiritual development. The remaining 90 percent belongs, once again, to Devi – a fact of which the seers of the Vedas were very much aware.
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The Mysterious Aditi
There is an iconographically striking form of the Devi whose images can be found distributed almost evenly throughout India. This mysterious, lotus-headed Goddess – who is almost always portrayed with Her legs open and raised in a manner suggesting either birthing, self-display, or sexual receptivity – is most frequently referred to today as Lajja Gauri, though She is also known as Adya Shakti, Matangi, Renuka, and many other names. “The abundance of names may be due to regional replacements of a lost original name,” suggests Carol Radcliffe Bolon, assistant curator of South and Southeast Asian Art at the Sackler and Freer Galleries in Washington, D.C. I have asked a few experienced upasakas whether they knew of any mantric or yantric representations of Lajja Gauri – they did not. “You see,” one of them told me, “Lajja is Aditi, the primordial mother. She is unimaginably ancient.” Aditi! Now we are getting somewhere! Monier-Williams’ SanskritEnglish Dictionary assigns to the name Aditi the concepts of “boundlessness, immensity, inexhaustible abundance, unimpaired condition, perfection, creative power”; as a proper noun, it defines Her as “one of the most ancient of the Indian goddesses ([her name implying] ‘Infinity’ or the ‘Eternal and Infinite Expanse’).” This same Aditi is referenced in the Rig Veda in terms that perfectly express Lajja Gauri’s iconography – and since the Vedas are said to be entirely composed of mantras, perhaps we have found a suitable one for Her in the following passage: devAnAm yuge prathame.asataH s adajAy adajAyata ata | tadAśA anvajAyanta anvajAyanta taduttAnapadas pari || bhUrjajNa uttAnapado bhuva AśA ajAy ajAyanta anta | aditerdakSHoajAyata aditerdakSHoajAy ata dakSHAd vaditiH pari ||
In the first age of the gods, existence was born from nonexistence. The quarters of the sky were born from Her who crouched with legs spread. The Earth was born from Her who crouched with legs spread, And from the Earth the quarters of the sky were born. (Rg Veda, X.72.3-4) The Sanskrit scholar Wendy Doniger O’Flaherty identifies Aditi as “the female principle of creation or infinity,” whose designation uttAnapad refers to “a position associated both with yoga and with a woman giving birth, as the Mother Goddess is often depicted in early sculpture: literally, with feet stretched forward, more particularly with knees drawn up and legs spread wide.”
Bolon agrees that the “form of the Goddess most widely known today as Lajja Gauri fits the Vedic descriptions of the Mother of the Gods, Aditi,” adding that Her images were worshiped by medieval royalty and aristocracy – but that the unlettered artisans who carved Her images and many of the humbler devotees who worshiped Her were probably unaware of this formidable pedigree. In this case, however, ignorance of elite interpretations was probably not much of a handicap: Lajja’s visual connotations are abundantly clear. Her frequent juxtaposition with the Shiva linga, as well as Her recurrent association with both lion vahanas and Ganapati, suggest beyond a doubt that She was considered a manifestation of the Supreme Devi, specifically in Her form as Parvati, or Gauri. Her size (always equal to Shiva’s), and the prominent display of Her full breasts (suggesting life-giving nurture and sustenance) and yoni (suggesting generative, creative power) indicate that She probably served as the Feminine counterpart to the Masculine linga. Bhattacharyya, in his History of the Sakta Religion, refers to “a seal unearthed at Harappa [a Saraswati Culture site], showing a nude female figure, head downwards and legs stretched upwards, with a plant issuing out of Her womb,” which may be a proto-Aditi/Lajja proto-Aditi/Lajja Gauri figure. Similar images, some sculpted as recently as the 19th century, can still be found in Rajasthan, part of the region where the Saraswati Civilization once flourished. In discussing the Harappan seal, Bhattacharyya posits that “in the pre-Vedic religion of India, a great Mother Goddess, the personification of all the reproductive energies of nature, was worshiped. ... The Harappan Magna Mater [Great Mother] was probably reflected in the [later, Vedic] conception of Aditi, the mother of the gods, thought to be a goddess of yore even in the Rig Veda itself.” And here is where we find the Vedic rishis’ understanding of this Goddess, who was apparently as old as human consciousness itself: aditirdyaur aditirantarikSHam aditirantarikSHam aditirmAtA sa pitA sa putraH | viśve devA aditiH paNca janA aditirjAtam aditirjAtam aditirjanitvam || Aditi is the sky Aditi is the air Aditi is all the gods... Aditi is the Mother, the Father, and Son Aditi is whatever shall be born.
(Rg Veda, I.89.10) “Aditi,” Bhattacharyya concludes, “was the most ancient Mother of the Gods, whose original features [had become] obscure even in the Vedic age.” Despite Her extreme antiquity, Lajja Gauri is still actively worshiped even today as a “fer-
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tility goddess” in some remote, rural locales. But we mustn’t let that obscure the totality of Her original (and eternal) significance. During the 6th to 12th centuries CE – a period in which “Tantric kingdoms” flourished across India (as detailed by David Gordon White in his 2003 study, The Kiss of the Yogini) – the cult of Aditi/Lajja Gauri grew prodigiously. Her images proliferated, especially in central India – both in small terra cotta figures for use in home shrines, and in large (even lifesize) stone sculptures for richly endowed temples. By the 13th century, however, She had begun a long slide into obscurity. Scholars partially attribute the decline to India’s Muslim and later British Christian rulers and their intolerance toward portrayals of human (and particularly female) nudity and sexuality. Another possible factor was the continued evolution on of the Tantric systems, which developed ever more subtle and abstract ways of depicting the primal, creative force of the Divine Feminine. Lajja Gauri and Her Symbolism
Several myths exist concerning Lajja Gauri, but most scholars consider them to be inauthentic, late attempts to replace the Goddess’s original, forgotten lore. Many of these tales involve a dominant Lord Shiva testing his wife’s modesty by publicly disrobing Her, Her, whereupon Her head either falls off or sinks into Her body from shame, thereby proving Her purity – and providing a more Shiva-centric explanation of how such a boldly self-displaying Goddess got a name like Lajja Gauri; literally, literally, “Modest Parvati” or “Ashamed Parvati.” More useful clues to Lajja’s actual meaning may be found in the oral folktales that still circulate about Her in rural India. For example, as noted above, She is sometimes referred to as Matangi, the “outcaste” form of Parvati, who is known for ignoring and flaunting society’s rules, hierarchies and conventions. Elsewhere, She is called Renuka – another outcaste woman, beheaded by a high-caste man. Rather than dying, Renuka grew a lotus in place of Her head and became a Goddess. These stories – both involving the deification of an outcaste woman – seem, among many other implications of course, to suggest the irrepressibility of the Feminine Principle. And lest we underestimate the primal persistence and importance of this archetype to the human psyche, recall (in keeping with our discussion above) that the oldest known sculpture made by a human being – the so-called Willendorf Goddess or “Venus,” created some 30,000 to 40,000 years ago – also depicts a nude female deity with a flower for a head. Whatever Lajja Gauri’s ultimate origins, She is clearly a very auspicious Goddess. Everything about Her suggests life, cre-
ativity, ativity, and abundance. Her images are almost always associated with springs, waterfalls and other sources of running water – vivid symbols of life-giving sustenance. Her belly usually protrudes, suggesting fullness and/or pregnancy; in earlier renderings, Her torso was often portrayed as an actual pUrna kumbha (brimming pot), another ancient symbol of wealth and abundance. Lajja Gauri’s head is usually a lotus flower, an extremely powerful, elemental symbol of both material and spiritual well-being. (Interestingly, today’s images of Lakshmi – patroness of wealth and material fulfillment – are also rife with water, pots and lotuses.) The often vine-like portrayal of Lajja Gauri’s limbs suggests a further creative association – the life-giving sap of the plant world; She is vegetative as well as human abundance. Her images are virtually always prone, laying at or below floor level in Her characteristic uttAnapad posture, as though rising from the Earth itself, a manifestation of the primordial Yoni from which all life springs. Indeed, Her birthing/sexual posture unambiguously denotes fertility and reproductive power. This is Devi as the Creator, as Mother of the Universe, as the Life-Giving Force of Nature. The late scholar David Kinsley, author of several respected studies of the Goddess in India, noted: “Some very ancient examples have been discovered in India of nude goddesses squatting or with their thighs spread ... The arresting iconographic feature of these images is their sexual organs, which are openly displayed. These figures often have their arms raised above their bodies and are headless or faceless. Most likely, the headlessness of the figures [is intended to] focus attention on their physiology, [placing the] emphasis on sexual vigor, life, and nourishment [rather than an individual persona].” Joshi has even drawn some tentative lines of association with the later Tantric Mahavidya (Wisdom Goddess) known as Chinnamasta, the self-decapitating Goddess. Bolon, for her part, judges that the artistically finest Lajja Gauri sculpture still in existence is a life-sized c. 650-700 CE murthi, originally worshiped at the Naganatha Temple in Naganathakolla, Bijapur District, Karnataka. That sculpture (see accompanying illustration) is now housed at the Badami Museum. Of Her image, Bolon writes: “The modeling of the female figure is supple and sensitive. The suggestion of soft, sagging stomach flesh, like the slackening of a woman’s abdomen after childbirth, is masterly. The breasts are firm with folds of flesh beneath them. The arms and shoulders are delicate and feminine. The legs, in uttanapad, are spread more naturally than in other [Lajja Gauri] images; with the knees up, the feet are flexed with soles up, and the toes are tensed. The nude body is ornamented with necklace, channavira [body-encompassing jew-
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elry that hangs from the neck, crosses between the breasts, passes around the waist and up the back], girdle, bracelets, and armlets that are like a vine tendril wrapping around the arms and actually ending in a leaf. Tassels of the anklets also seem plantlike. There is a cloth woven through the thighs.” In place of a head, a “half-open lotus flower, flower, sits like a ruff on [Her] shoulders, … turned three-quarters toward the viewer. The goddess holds, to either side of Her lotus head, a halfopen, smaller lotus flower, the stalk of which winds around Her hand. The fingers themselves have a tentril-like quality. The fingers of the right hand seem to form a svastika, symbol of fortune and well-being. No doubt, the suggestion of Her relation to vegetation is intended. ... This image is a masterpiece of fluid modeling and conscious symbol-making.” As with the first artistic expressions of human consciousness in the Upper Paleolithic era, the primordial antiquity of the image does nothing to diminish the subtle elegance and refinement of Her beauty – both in the conception and in the physical representation. For those of us on the path of Srividya, She is a reminder of both the ultimate simplicity and the overwhelming antiquity of the teachings that we follow.
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Lotus Feet, Holy Dust, Divine Sandals...
Padma-pAda-dhUli-pAdukA By Prof. V. Krishnamurthy, Krishnamurthy, email :
[email protected] [email protected] Retired Professor of Mathematics, BITS, Pilani, India. Educated from boyhood on scriptural literature by his own father, Professor Krishnamurthy Krishnamurthy is the author of several books on Hinduism, and a regular contributor of articles to the Yahoo Group, “Advaitin.”
There are four words in the title of this article: Padma is Lotus. PAda stands for the (Divine) Feet. DhUli means dust; that is, dust from the Divine Feet. PAdukA is sandal. Accordingly, in this article we shall talk about the Lotus Feet of God, the Dust of the Divine Feet and Sandals of Divinity. And in talking about them we shall go through a vast spectrum of Hindu religious thought. Mystics, Saints and Acharyas all through the centuries have gone into raptures over precisely these concepts: The Divine
Feet constitute the ultimate solace for all sorrows. Nammalwar, the soul of the twelve great Vaishnava Alwars, right in the very first line of his immortal work, glorifies the Divine Feet, saying tuyarvaru chuDar aDi; that is, “the glowing feet of the Lord, which blast away all gloom and grief.” He adds uyarvaRa uyarnalam uDayavan: “The Lord’s glories and qualities are of a superlative kind; there is nothing greater than this.” According to Vaishnava tradition, it is the Lord’s feet that have incarnated incarnated as Nammalwar. Nammalwar. The vertical line or lines worn by orthodox or thodox devotees devotees of Vishnu on their forehead
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is the symbol of the Lord’s Divine Foot. The lotus feet of the Divine are ageless and faultless; they eradicate all our misdeeds – so goes one Vedic mantra: caraNaM pavitraM vitataM purANaM yena pUtas-tarati dushhkRtAni. This is the mantra customarily used when we ritually wash the feet of elders, mystics and Acharyas.
hand sign proclaiming “Have no fear”] with their right hand, and the vara-mudrA [the hand sign granting desired boons] with their left hand. But You are holding four different objects in your hands, and thus they do not show the mudras. Does it not mean that not only these but more will all be granted by your divine feet themselves?”
Divine Feet & Their Dust
The Vedas themselves prostrate at the feet of the Divine Mother of the Universe. The Lalita Sahasranama contains a name describing this in a poetically enjoyable way. The word ‘Shruti,’ which stands for the Vedas, is grammatically feminine. When Shruti falls at the feet of the Mother, her head touches the Divine Feet. The dust of the Divine Feet is crimson in colour because the Feet of the Mother are always painted that way – and also to remind us of the fact that millions of devotees devotees have constantly constantly been doing archanA to Her feet with Kumkum. The crimson dust sticks to the head of Lady Shruti exactly at the parting of the hair. And thus arises the name: Shruti-sImanta-sindhUrI-kRta-pAdAbja-dhUlikA, meaning, “the dust of whose lotus feet has crimson-coloured the parting of the hair on the head of Shruti.” The dust of the divine feet on the head of Shruti is also an indication that even though Shruti may be of vast content and knowledge, Her knowledge of the Divine Mother is only a speck!
Whenever we refer to the Divine Feet, it is customary to refer to them as Lotus Feet. The lotus flower is an ancient divine symbol, its unfolding petals suggesting the expansion of the soul. The growth of its pure beauty from the mud of its origin holds a benign spiritual promise. Despite the fact that though it grows amidst mud and slime, it does not carry even an iota of its unclean surroundings – an indication of how pure the Lord’s feet are in spite of the fact that they are ever being touched by all and sundry in the entire world. Recall that the Creator Brahma and the Goddess Lakshmi – divinities of potency and wealth – are both associated excluexclusively with the lotus symbol. The steps that the Lord’s Divine Feet take are so great that He is known as “the Great One who measured or spanned the entire Universe;” ulagalanda-perumAL in Tamil. He is amitavikramaH, the One who has an unlimited span of stride. He is also tri-vikramaH, “the One Who spanned the three worlds by His strides”; trivikrama also meaning that He pervades the three Vedas by His Power – a hint, incidentally, incidentally, that His Power to shower Grace resides in His Feet! The Vishnu-Sahasranama gives eka-pAd eka-pAd as one of His names, and and this glorifies the Divine Feet even further, for it means that the entire Universe is part of his one foot. This idea resonates again with the statement in the Purushha-sUkta (which recurs in both the Rig Veda and the Yajur Veda), pado’sya vishvA bhUtAni, meaning, “All these beings emanated from His Divine Foot.” This concept that He pervades, permeates and generates the whole Universe is one of the fountainhead concepts of Hinduism. It actually distinguishes the Hindu religion from every other. other. In the Gita also this thought is reproduced in the same language by the Lord – vishhTabhyAham-idam kRtsnaM ekAmshena sthito jagat: “This whole Universe is supported by just one infinitesimal part of Me.” The Divine Mother’s Divine Feet are similarly glorified in the Lalita Sahasranama. nakha-dIdhiti-samchinna-namaj-janatamo-guNA – “the bright rays emanating from Her toenails dispel the darkness of Her devotees.” In other words, meditation on Her feet dispels ignorance – the ignorance that causes our bondage to the transmigratory cycle of births and deaths. In a similar vein, Shankara, in the fourth verse of his Soundarya Lahari, praises the Divine Feet in superlative terms: “Oh Mother of the Universe, Deities other than You reveal their divine form by showing the abhaya-mudrA [the
In the second verse of Soundarya Lahari, Shankara glorifies this dust of the Mother’s Divine Feet, saying, “Oh Mother of the Cosmos! I don’t need even Your Feet themselves; just a speck of dust from Your Divine Feet is enough. Even Brahma creates the Fourteen Worlds using only the strength of the Divine Dust that He collects from under Your Feet. Mahavishnu likewise likewise sustains the whole world only due of the strength of the Dust of Your Divine Feet; and Lord Shiva wears it on His forehead as as sacred vibhUti.” When this is the case with the Lords of the Trinity, where are we poor mortals?! The great DurgA Saptashati prescribes the worshiping of young girls as manifestations of the Divine Mother, Mother, and wearing the dust under their feet after worship. In the Shri Vaishnava tradition, to purify oneself with the dust of the devotees’ feet, by washing their feet with water and sprinkling that holy water on one’s head, is considered such a sacred act that one of the twelve Alwars got his name, toNDar-aDip-poDi-Alwar, precisely from this act of his, which became a habit and routine with him once he transformed his earlier sinful life into one of supreme devotion to the Lord and His devotees. The Power of the Sudarshana Chakra
Shankara himself is but a manifestation of Lord Shiva. The great Cosmic Dance of Shiva, in the holy place of Chidambaram, includes in its esoteric interpretations interpretations distinct meanings for the “raised foot of the Divine” – tUkkiya tiruvaDi in Tamil; and “held foot of the Divine,” or UnRiya
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tiruvaDi. The former grants the ultimate boon, namely Moksha; while the latter performs what is called obliteration or tirodhAna; that is, disappearance, or vanishing – one of the five divine functions of creation, sustenance, dissolution, grace, and obliteration. Without this fifth function of obliteration, our sins can never be exhausted. Only by exhausting our karma can we hope to cross the ocean of the bir th-death cycle. And to exhaust our karma, we need God’s Grace, through his fifth function, to operate. The dissolution function of God does extinguish the created world and the entire Universe; but the VasanAs – which we have accumulated through our sins of past lives, by ourselves and for ourselves – can never be extinguished by the dissolution function. Even after the deluge they all remain in latent form, waiting for the next Day of Brahma to sprout again in our new lives. Only by God’s willing exercise of his obliteration function will the latent VasanAs in us be overcome. The only way therefore to obliterate all of our sins of the past is to surrender to His ‘held foot’ unconditionally. We must be able to surrender not only ourselves but also our ego at that foot of His. Then He will certainly release us from all obligations and bondage – or thus we are assured by the Lord in the charma shloka (Ch.18 – Verse 66) of the Gita. The famous divine disc called Sudarshana chakra emanated
from the feet of Lord Shiva, says the Shiva Purana. It is Lord Shiva who gave the Sudarshana chakra to Lord Vishnu. Let us note a disclaimer here imbedded in our shastras, particularly the advaitic tradition: The above statement implies no hierarchy between Lord Shiva and Lord Vishnu. It is simply a confirmation, if one be needed, that between the various manifestations of Divinity no distinction in status is meant or intended just because one hand of the Godhead gives to another hand of the same Godhead. The power and fame of the Sudarshana Disc are well-known: It saved the elephant-devotee Gajendra from extinction by the giant crocodile who grabbed him from under the water, and thus arose the famous Gajendra-mokshha chapter of the Bhagavatam. And it is this same Sudarshana disc that disposed of Sishupala, archenemy of the Lord in His manifestation as Krishna. Again, at a crucial moment near the end of the Mahabharata War, when the consecrated arrow of Ashwattama – the sole survivor among the heroes of the Kaurava army – was aimed at all the progenies of the Pandavas, with the aim of totally annihilating the entire Pandava dynasty – including even children in the wombs of Pandava wives – it was the Sudarshana Disc that entered the womb of the mother to protect the yet-unborn Parikshit, who later survived the Pandavas as their only successor.
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This was the same Disc given to King Ambarisha by the Lord in appreciation of his devotion. King Ambarisha was the great-grandson of Vaivasvata Vaivasvata Manu, the seventh Lord of the entire Earth in the present Cosmic Day of Brahma. Neither his kingship nor the wealth that goes with it could enchant him away from his constant and intense devotion to the Lord. It was Sage Durvasa (known for his short temper, fierce anger and renowned spirituality) who came to test his devotion. Ambarisha once performed a year-long year-long dvAdashi-vrata, which enjoined on him a complete fast on every ekAdashi day (the 11th 11th day of the lunar fortnight), to be broken exactly at a specific time on the next day (dvAdashi = the 12th day). On one such occasion, on the morning of dvAdashi day, the sage Durvasa came as guest, along with his disciples, at the doors of King Ambarisha. The latter was about to break his fast but, seeing the esteemed guest, was ready to play host to the sage. But Durvasa wanted time to go to the river and perform his morning rituals before he partook of Ambarisha’s hospitality. Ambarisha agreed to wait, hoping that Durvasa would respect his Vrata and come back before the time of his breaking the fast, which, again, was to be broken not later than a specific time. But he waited and waited; Durvasa did not turn up before the specific time. When it was no more possible to wait, the king’s advisors advised him to sip a little water in the form of an Acamanam by chanting the names of God. That, they said, would be equivalent to breaking one’s fast, and would satisfy the rules of the Vrata as well as the protocol by which he would not have eaten before his notable guest. But Durvasa, when he appeared, would not agree to this. He felt that protocol had been broken and that he had been insulted; and in no time he created a demon from one of his hairs to attack and kill the King. The King did not move an inch – but the Lord’s Disc, which was protecting him, not only burnt the demon by its fiery power but afterward, in its turn, attacked Durvasa himself! The sage, in sheer fright, ran for his life! The Disc of the Lord pursued Durvasa wherever he went, through all the Three Worlds, until finally Durvasa went to the Creator Brahma for help. But even Brahma pleaded inability to defend him against the Disc. Durvasa then went to Lord Shiva, who said, “The whole world is engulfed in VishNu-mAyA. None of us can help you in this matter. You may try going to Lord VishNu Himself.” So Durvasa came to Lord VishNu’s abode and fell at His feet. And Vishnu said: “My devotee devotee is greater than Myself, so you have have to go back to him and apologize.” And finally that is what was done. Ambarisha prayed to the Disc to stop attacking Durvasa, the prayer was heard and thus was the great sage saved from ignominy and extinction. Such is the power of Sudarshana Chakra. And the fact that such a chakra emanated from the Divine Feet of Lord Shiva only adds glory to His already glorified Divine Feet.
The Sandals of Divine Feet
Great indeed are the Divine Feet; greater still is the dust under the Divine Feet – but greatest of all is the pair of sandals worn by the Divine Feet – known as PAdukA. That is why, in the Ramayana, Bharata asks for Rama’s Divine Sandals from he fails to convince Rama Himself him to return to Ayodhya Ayodhya and resume his kingship. The sandals take the place of the Lord for fourteen years as the symbolic King, under whose banner Bharata serves and discharges the royal duties. When he reluctantly takes leave of Rama in the forest where he has gone to plead for his return – coming away with only the Sandals of the Divine, instead of the Divine Himself – Bharata puts the sandals on his head and carries them back to the capital with all reverence. The joining together of these two extremities – the Feet of the Divine with the head of the devotee – is what is symbolized in the joining of the palms when one worships or bows in reverence. The right palm denotes the feet of the Divine and the left palm denotes the head of the devotee. This is the esoteric principle behind the joining of the palms. The greatness of the Divine Sandals has been sung by a long succession of poets over the centuries. But the heights of such rapturous ecstasy can be seen in the work called PAdukA SahasraM (One Thousand Verses on the Divine Sandals), composed by Vedanta Desika in the 14th century. He wrote it in fulfillment of a competition, a challenge that his disciples committed to when they were provoked by members of another school. Full of beautiful poetry, superb devotion, conceptually dense philosophy and mythology, poetic gymnastics, lilting rhyme and majestic language, these thousand verses were all composed by Desika in a single night – as he put it, by the grace of the Divine PadukA. The Sandals of the Purushhottama (the Supreme Person; the Supreme Divine) are known as the ShaThAri. The ShaThAri is like a crown placed reverentially on the heads of devotees (for instance, in a Vaishnava temple), who receive it with great humility. As discussed above, the classic instance of this act was first performed by Bharata when he received the sandals of Rama. Before he received them, he requested the Lord to wear the sandals once and remove them – that is, to step on the sandals and step down (this is described in the Valmiki Ramayana) – and Rama obliged accordingly. accordingly. Now imagine this scene in your mind. What esoteric significance does it suggest to you? The obvious guess is that Rama is asked to step on the sandals and step down so that the PAdukA may receive the Lord’s spiritual vibrations and thereby become so sacred as to be venerated and be able to receive the honor of Bharata’s worship from for the entire period of Rama’s exile. This is what the great Acharya, Vedanta Desika, also thinks and weaves into his verse No. 113. But three verses later he eulogizes the PAdukA to such July 2006
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heights that this dramatic scene gains an enormous significance, such as could be revealed only by the great intuition of a superdevotee like Vedanta Desika. The argument goes like this: The PAdukAs of the Divine are more powerful than the Divine itself. So when the Lord was on the point of embarking on a commitment to wander the forests of the country for the next fourteen years, he was relying on the power of the PAdukA to protect him and his feet. But once Bharata asks for the PAdukAs, that means Rama will be separated from them. Thus, Rama steps onto and off the sandals not to give them spiritual vibrations, but to receive these vibrations – and thereby obtain the energy that will sustain him through the challenge of walking barefoot through the entire forest. So the poet concludes, “If Rama had not performed this act, how could he have walked barefoot through the rough ground and dense shrubbery of the Dandaka forest for so long?” Is that not the height of devotion toward the Divine PadukA on the part of Desika? The Upanishads say, tad-vishhNoH paramaM padaM, punning on the word padaM to yield the meaning, “The Divine Feet are the Supreme.” Desika’s work continues in that strain, saying Lord Vishnu’s Divine Feet are the origin of the sacred Ganga (the river Ganges). And since Divine PadukAs are under the Divine Feet of the Lord, the Ganga has this constant communion with the Divine Feet. That is perhaps why, the poet muses, the Lord Shiva has always Ganga on His head – because He feels that, in this way, way, He is actually keeping the Divine Sacred Feet of Lord Vishnu there. The Grace of the Guru
The inner meaning of every verse in the PAdukA-Sahasram has something to do with the glory of the Guru. In fact, the Divine PAdukA PAdukA is actually equated to the Guru or Acharya. The Grace of the Guru is considered to be even more powerful than the Grace of the Lord Himself. Because we realize that, even if we surrender to God, we are not automatically able to ingratiate ourselves into the Lord’s favor. favor. A Guru actually pleads with the Lord on our behalf. In fact, there is a saying – Shive rushte gurus-trAtA, gurau rushte na kaScana, meaning, “When the Lord is angered, the Guru becomes our savior; but when the Guru is angered, nobody can save us.” We need the Guru for this role. Indeed the Guru’s Grace can bestow a double benefit. It can fulfill our desires as well as taking us toward the Lord. The scriptures draw an analogy of the dream state to our real, waking state. Just as all dream-experience is only a passing show from the point of view of one’s waking state, so is the waking state itself, according to the scriptures, a passing show from the standpoint of the Absolute. But this declaration does not carry conviction with us, because most of us have never had the experience of that Absolute standpoint. On the other hand, we do understand that the dream-state is not absolutely real, because we do have the experience of the waking state of awareness. Nobody is able to tell us
– or needs to tell us – from within the dream that the dream experience is unreal. But the beauty of the Guru-concept and the greatness of the Guru stem from the fact that a Guru does exactly this for us in respect of our waking state. From the Absolute standpoint, this waking state itself is dream-like. The Guru, being a jIvan-mukta (i.e., liberated even while living), knows this as a fact of experience. He is not only a jIvan-mukta who is in that absolute state of awareness all the time, but he can also descend to the level of our ordinary, mundane, worldly “waking state” and tell us – from within our “world-dream” – that this world is indeed a dream and that we must wake up to Reality from this “dream” of ours. It is the Guru who thus destroys the ignorance of the disciple. He may do it by actual teaching; he may do it by a mere blessing; or he may do it by a spiritual fiat. That is why, in the thirty verses of the Bhaja-Govindam, Shankara ends by referring us to the power of the Lotus Feet of the Guru to take us upward on the ladder of evolution. Guru-charaNAmbuja-nirbhara-bhaktaH, the verse goes. Remember, the Guru is himself the Divine Feet of God, and it is his Divine Feet that are praised now, in strict conformity with tradition (as we saw earlier in the story of Ambarisha – namely, that the devotee of the Lord is more significant than the Lord Himself). The Guru stands for certain principles of behavior as well as of wisdom. In fact, he not only stands for them but on them – in the sense that the Guru’s greatness goes back to the values that he lived and preached all his life. So both his sandals and the feet on which he stands represent the values for which he stood! And therefore devotion to those feet and to those sandals of the Divine Guru will certainly confer upon one the strength to respect and reverberate with the same values. The Lord’s “held foot” is the ideal for us – to cling close to his ideals and values. The stories and complex mythology all go to show that it is the Ultimate Divine that we are speaking of – albeit in terms of its manifestations, names and forms. When we worship the Sun as Sun-God, we are worshiping the Absolute Supreme. A Shiva purana may extol Shiva as the highest Transcendental Transcendental Supreme; and a Vishnu purana may say the same thing about Vishnu. The Rama Sahasranama says that Rama is worshiped by Shiva and all other deities. The Shiva Sahasranama says that Rama is Shiva’s devotee. There is no contradiction meant, implied or slurred over. When Hinduism says that all names and forms are those of God, it means it. It is this catholicity catholicity of the culture and tradition of Hinduism that welcomes other religions as so many varied paths to God and consequently does not find anything contradictory or harmful in the coexistence of several Faiths. The external multiplicity is only an expression of the underlying truth of advaitic (non-dualistic) unity. Multiplicity Multiplicity and plurality are secondary; Oneness is primary.
Om ShAntiH ShantiH Shanti.
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The Living
S H A K T I
By Kiran Mishra, diksha nama Parvati Devi email :
[email protected] [email protected] Parvati Devi, a Spiritual Adept, whose Gurus were direct lineage holders of Bhairavi Maha Yoga, is teaching Saraswathy River Yoga in the USA - an ancient and timeless Tradition that is intrinsically in harmony with Nature.
known only by its effect. And yet, when she cut through my Om shree gurubhyo namaha mind swiftly like an expert swordswoman and unknotted my Ya devi sarva bhuteshu matre rupena samsthitha Namastasyay namastasyay namastasyay namastasyay namo namaha tangled body of hope, expectation and memories – at that She was like the wind. Her visage was luminous, her eyes transparent and vast with the unsettling gaze that conveyed conveyed her intrinsic ability to see right through us – not only the mind and its play but even the body, as if form had no hold on her. She was formless, like the wind, whose presence is
moment, there was clear form and a master’s attention to matter, substance, and detail.
My guru was a yogini from an unbroken lineage of female masters. She was one of those obscure beings who, though perhaps unknown to the world, possessed a harmony and
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resonance that was reflective of and embodied in the world’s beauty and wisdom. This is the world of the Goddess’ consciousness. She had many names, as no one name could express the fullness of the matrix of her awareness. She was Lalita Devi to the few disciples she took in the hills of Northern India. To me, she was mother, mother, teacher and Goddess. She was every materiality of form, every element – but mostly the wind. She lived the path of the yoginis – and it therefore unfolded from her effortlessly in her teaching. Mysterious, broad, unclassifiable, frustrating the mind’s craving for certainty – a path of absolute beauty. She taught the true sensorial nature of being alive; the simple tattvas of a life in relationship to others – not in consuming and objectifying others. For me, she adapted her teaching of non-duality to mantras, as she sensed my love and affinity for them.
you there.” And 23 years later I met that living Shakti in Sri Amritananda Saraswati. Some love does not die. It is not worn out through repetition of its freshness; it is not cemented in expectations, nor covered in a mantle of manipulation. Some love reverberates eternally in space – and this is too much for our mind. Looking for an anchor it seeks the known, familiar ground of anxiety, fear and loss. But it need not be like that. It is possible to find a place closer to the space, not the ground – more like the wind, like movement in space; a tremoring ground of vibration – Her body as mantra, Her mind as beauty, Her love as a space that is eternal, unadorned and forever free. Om hreem tat sat.
But she would not impose them on me. I was to gain this knowledge as a reflection of the intrinsic wisdom of sonic space – not as something to be codified, memorized and then replayed. I went into nature and heard the sounds of a living stream of water, the pulsations of the night sky; even the planets and stars. Slowly, I felt how the whole world was alive – not merely an object, an appendage to my thinking mind. And that Consciousness did not exist in things, but rather things existed in Consciousness, and were therefore never devoid of Consciousness – the Goddess’ Shakti. And then she did teach me formally some mantras. The Sanskrit language is not technically a language in the usual sense. It’s a living matrix of Consciousness, where sound becomes form. The intelligence and beauty of Shiva and Shakti uniting to form – and from this matrix, we arise. We are always appearing and disappearing in this living pulsation of sound and energy. Human language, ordinary words reflect the human made world, which is increasingly mechanical, and our vernacular tongues change to reflect this. Mantras, however, however, cannot be decoded as regular words, because they signify something vaster and cannot be reduced to the constrictions of the linear mind. They give reference to a world beyond mere human thought, which flattens the spherical nature of the Consciousness of Space into a linearity of thoughts, in the process both robbing them of power and falsely adorning them with concepts. Words talk to each other, like sound bouncing in a chamber; mantras speak to the spatiality of Consciousness, a sonic pulsation resonating through the universe. Mantras are in sensuous communication with the Goddess’ body. They are her incarnated resonance; sonic pulsations of her knowledge, will and action. What grace She has for us! The Srividya upsaka has this in a living relationship – the mantra of Tripura Sundari, in which our life is held, not the other way around. When Lalita left me – because, truly, I would never have left her – she said, “There is one more realm, one more place of the Goddess’ Consciousness in which she desires you to travel – and that is Srividya. Though I have shown you some things about this realm, there is a living master who will take
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THE GURU, GURUJI and DEVIP DEVIPURAM URAM : SAAKSHAAT PARA BRAHMA By a Disciple of Guruji
Shankara Bhagavatpada in Vivekachudamani once inspired a mumukshu, a seeker, seeker, by saying that discipleship under a Maha Purusha (Great Personage) is the rarest thing; so if you’ve been blessed with that, you must realize that it is the highest blessing one can receive on Earth. This Maha Purusha – the Guru – gives you a spiritual birth, nourishes you with the knowledge of Self, and completes your spiritual practice by bestowing the realization that there was never a single moment when you were unrealized. A realized saint does this for His every disciple without fail. This is the most inspiring aspect of taking refuge in Guru. He incessantly makes us progress, every single minute, ruthlessly hunting down our beastly limitations and making us evolve to become nobody; a big Zero – at which w hich point Brahma Jnana blooms.
This is the reason why Guru comes into our life – to help us become that Zero. Only when you, the limited being, become Zero; only when your small mind dies and the Super-Mind takes over, only then you realize that you have always been that Supreme Intelligence, which is – as Guruji writes in this issue of Kadambari – not just Infinity, but an Infinity of Infinities. The Guru’s Work
Guru makes you that Infinity. After initiation, he helps you learn at a rapid pace and, more importantly, helps you unlearn simultaneously. You don’t unlearn the whole gamut of impressions that have been imprinted in your little brain in this birth; but, rather, whatever subtle impressions have been piling up over your past eight-million-plus births through different Yonis. This process of unlearning helps you become that Super-Zero. Super-Zero. July 2006
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It is a long process, spanning across births. But Guru does it It is a blessing indeed if your Guru is a realized saint, a seer silently, as Lord Dakshina Murthy. You’ll have no clue as to who has already experienced and become that Infinity of whether any such unlearning is happening within you. Having Infinities. If your time is ripe, this life at the feet of such a come to the feet of Guru, you don’t have to be bothered if Guru becomes the last leg of that longest, most timeless you find no trace or tangible milestones of spiritual progress. journey as a being – the journey back to the source; the Don’t be worried if you have no divine experience. If you’ve source of no-return and no-limitations; the nameless, formlonged for Devi’s darshan, and if it has never happened to less Para-Brahma. This seer, your Guru, is the pushpaka you, it does not matter. Your Guru silently takes you there all vimana, the celestial chariot of the highest order, order, descended the way; all the way to the top, where he gives you that all- on this Earth to fly you back to Kaivalya, the state from time big experience – the direct knowledge that You and He which you came before Maya’s imposed ignorance of your were never any different from Shiva or from each other – original identity – that of ever being that all-pervading neither now nor before nor later nor ever. ever. Not just from the Narayana. Surrendering to this Seer, Seer, the Brahma Jnani, hence h ence latest Big Bang that occurred a few billion years ago, but means to have a struggle-free cakewalk, a single big jump to from the billions of Big Bangs in the past and all of those to regaining our original identity. This is what the Upanishads come in the future as well. And this makes you realize that herald. This is what the Guru Gita professes. This is Krishna’s your Guru is very much Lord Shiva, who has descended to message in Bhagavad Gita, sloka 18.66: make you realize that you’re no different from Him, the Supreme Intelligence, the entity who dwells beyond time and sarva dharmaan parityajya..... space and name and form. You don’t have to visit Kashi, Madurai or Kamakhya; it’s all Guru is a trickster too, a supreme trickster – often taking you there at your Guru’s feet. You don’t have to do day-long off roller-coaster rides until you almost want to run away pujas, crores of mantra japa, or practice difficult pranayama. from him; rides of freefall and unprecedented ups and Just be there at His feet and serve Him. That is enough. This downs, to slowly wash away the even thickest layers of dirty service beats the power of anything else in this world. He’ll ignorance that has accumulated upon from ages of yore. He make you perfect, perfect to the core. If He makes you work, never warns that the ride will to be rough; he seems to enjoy He’ll make sure that you perform like a lion. The highest qualpushing you into “washing machines” of various kinds. What ities of all kinds, the sharpest intellectual powers, will burcomes out the other end is a newer you, crystal clear with no geon out of nowhere to bloom and spread their fragrance in adjuncts; untarnished by any dirt. all directions. What you’ve tried for decades to accomplish will suddenly come to you in a jiffy. The thing that never When that happens, you’ll silently admit that those roller worked will start working instantaneously. instantaneously. coaster rides were worthwhile; you’ll realize that unless those rides were there the dirt of ignorance would not have fallen Being the maintainer of passion and feeder of confidence in off of your back. So never forget that the tricks your Guru you, Guru acts as your backbone, taking care of you even plays on you cannot be for anything but your highest good; more so than he would his own child. And He does all these to help you merge you with Himself. by just silently sitting under a tree; or probably nowadays in front of a computer, as if he had not a care in the wood. He If you have no Guru and the weather in your life has been is an Avadhoota; he makes you an Avadhoota. As he has seen way too stormy, stormy, it’s probably nearing the time for your Guru and experienced that nameless, formless entity, he takes you to reveal Himself to you. Unless you’ve been mentally beaten and lets you sit on his shoulder – so you can see even farther up to the extreme, your attention will not turn toward God. than he saw, experience even more than he experienced. He Getting pushed to the maximum is the surest sign that always is interested in expanding your awareness to the size you’re about to be reborn spiritually. And if you do have a of this whole Universe. So if you are blessed with this realized Guru, and you’re still having stormy weather, have no doubt: saint as your Guru, just hold onto his feet. The place where It is that nonstop trickster in action, silently working on you, such a seer resides is Mathura or Ayodhya. silently crushing your ego mercilessly. Silently enjoy those storms, even if they happen again and again. Don’t complain. Guruji at Devipuram Just go through them. It will all be perfect in the end. These stormy rides are His secret ways of elevating your awareness. awareness. What about spending a day at Devipuram, a small village housing the world’s largest Srichakra, built under the guidAt Guru’s Feet ance of the Divine Mother by a Seer – Sri Annapoornamba Sameta Sri Amritananda Natha Saraswathy. People call him There are different kinds of Gurus, of course. There are even “Guruji.” Gurus who have not yet transcended their own limitations, who have not realized that they are that Existence, Who is Guruji? He is a scientist, a perfectionist of the first Consciousness and Bliss. They are only on the path to that order, a walking encyclopedia, an authority on Srividya and spiritual peak. Such Gurus cannot take you “there.” After tak- Tantra and, above all, a brahma nishta, carrying those who ing you to the farthest that they too have visited, you’ll take refuge at his feet to that great source, the Sarva Yoni. know that they are not established in, but still on, their path If you ask him how a aircraft’s landing gear works, and you’ll to nirvikalpa. get an answer detailed down to the last nut and bolt. If you ask him about the practical application of the Fourier
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Transform in mathematics, he’ll explain it to you. If you ask him about the deepest significance of Maha Shodashi Mantra, he’ll draw a few diagrams and explain it to you, as if you were kid in first grade and he h e was your mother teaching you addition and subtraction – only now the subject concerns the Universes and Galaxies. Guruji is silent. He speaks hardly at all. His face reflects that silence within – an unfathomable depth. When he speaks, it is for a purpose – the words slowly and gently flow out, and soon the silence reigns supreme again. Disciples find him answering their questions with more silence than words. The very pauses he makes between sentences and words often suffice to convey what you sought him for. But he claims nothing – not for the spiritual progress of his disciples; not for his being an extremely knowledgeable Guru. He simply says it is Universal Mother who is doing everything, and requests that we not unnecessarily bring his name into picture. His spiritual discourses are quite scientific, mixing both science and spirituality to give everyone a good grasp of various aspects of how God’s rules work scientifically in the world. Goddess Lalita is “anEka kOti brahmAnda jananI”, and since Guru is no one else but Her, you’ll learn to create Universes and destroy them, thus becoming a Godly disciple; even a super-Einstein. super-Einstein. No one would ever come to know that somewhere in space, Universes are being created. If you’re able to create Universes having become Him, then what is He? Though Guruji’s discourses deeply involve Sastra and many unrevealed aspects of Mantra Sastra, they always end in making us contemplate the Maha Vakyas and realize our true self. He has a decent HP computer with the latest Intel processor and he works on it for at least eight hours a day. He himself designs animation presentations – from jotting down the storyboard, to splitting it into different scenes, and all the way up to coding them in MX-Director software. His productions have the strength of a rich aesthetic sense. It is not uncommon that, over time, people who work with w ith him gradually get the same aesthetic sense themselves and start developing a richer taste in every aspect of life. If you drive a stick-shift car for h im, he’ll make you a better driver, driver, teaching you how a good driver effectively utilizes gears compared to brakes. If he hands over a job to you, he expects you to work on it with 200 percent effort and blesses you with the strength and passion to perform. What about Guruji the man? How does he look? He wears the simplest white clothes – white dhoti with half sleeves; an unpressed cotton kurta; no pomp whatsoever. Guruji does not care about his dress. Amma makes sure that he dresses comfortably and decently. After his bath, he puts on whatever clothes are placed on the table near the bathroom by Amma. For the many functions that he must preside over, he’ll simply get up from the bed in the evening after his two hours nap, wash his face, have a small cup of sugarless tea and get into the car with the same simple clothes – sometimes a crumpled kurta speckled with a few drops of dried sambar spilt while taking lunch.
If a spiritual leader visits Devipuram, he will make them sit on the chair while he sits on the ground and listens to them. If Devipuram staff members try to hold that huge, traditional umbrella over him during any function, he’ll chase them away with a few blasts, silently explaining that “the whole akasa (Space) is my umbrella”. If any disciple showers him with undue extra respect, he’ll ignore them totally. totally. He won’t even look at them. He never appeals to anyone’s ego nor complains about anything. He eats a simple diet without complaining for salt and spice. He attends calls on the Devipuram phone himself. He never avoids a call from one of his disciples or anyone who wants to talk to him. He sometimes fields close to 50 calls a day without any expression on his face. He is simple. On the other hand, he encourages people to live the life they want without any second thoughts. He assures them that they don’t have to forego anything to gain liberation. He says that the whole of Devipuram stands for that: Creativity, Adoration and Beauty. He suggests the latest tattoos that replace mehndi to women who visit Devipuram. He advises people to decorate Devi to their fullest satisfaction, however they want. He is a mix of traditional values and modernism. He has a passion for creativity and inventiveness. He approaches his work like a scientist, meticulously attending to details, whether it’s writing down the title on a freshly burnt CD or constructing of a complex, 54-foot-high Sri Chakra temple. Guruji Amma at Devipuram
If Guruji is the life-force of Devipuram, then Guruji Amma – Guruji’s wife – is the spinal cord. The whole of Devipuram functions effectively because of her – Srimati Annapoornamba. She is the most loveable, friendly of mothers and a highly disciplined taskmaster. If Guruji takes things easy, Amma makes sure that everything is spic-and-span, and attended to by all with the utmost care. She often gives every staff member a bag ffull ull of guavas or mangoes to carry home for their kids – but she also makes sure they discharge their duties without fail. She is a project manager and administrator of high caliber, and efficiently handles both jobs and people of all different kinds. She attends to the needs of Guruji throughout the day. Whatever she may be doing, if Guruji calls her she comes running to him. Let Guruji ask for whatever documents or records – even if they are ten years old – and Amma will go into the storage room and be back with the requested materials within 10 minutes. She maintains accounts of the daily sales of different photos, CDs, books and maintenance tickets. She needs no calculators or fancy organizers – for her, her brain is enough. Amma decides the daily menu in the canteen, measures the ingredients and gives them to the cook. Things are very systematic and streamlined; if there is a surprise delicacy each day, it is due to Amma. She is an expert in making different Pachadis, the ones that need careful preparation to last for a year. year. She decides when the harvest of Mangoes will be. She directs “Ammatalli” to shake the gooseberries and tamarinds
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in Devipuram only after they’ve been there in the tree for at least two months. She knows the techniques of preserving the invaluable resources of Devipuram throughout the year. Whereas Guruji distributes his seven hours of sleep into three short naps at periodic gaps, Amma sleeps for a solid six hours during one stretch in the night. She never sleeps in the daytime – she works for 16 to 18 hours a day without ever getting bored or upset. Even today, at age 67, she is there in the canteen at 5.30 a.m. sharp, boiling milk for everyone’s tea. You have to see it to believe it! Even while watching TV occasionally, she’ll also be silently making small wicks from cotton wool. And if she makes a trip to the Vizag house, she’ll carry a ball of cotton wool to continue this wick-making there. Once she has made enough wicks, she’ll switch to making broomsticks from dry coconut leaves herself, taking hundreds of sticks patiently off the leafs. One day, the wireless phone in Devipuram started ringing with its distinctive musical ring tone. Amma quickly told a disciple in Telugu, mocking that ringing tone in her own funny way, way, “Occhindi, Babu! Vellu! Ngoyyong ... Ngoyyong (Go friend! It has come! Ngoyyong ... Ngoyyong)!” The disciple, surprised at her spot-on imitation of the ring, had to laugh out loud before picking up the call. If she opens a squeaky door, she’ll also mock that sound immediately, making everyone around giggle silently. When a senior seeker came to Devipuram to discuss a depressive disorder he was suffering from, Amma told him, “What is the use of sadhana? You should be able to see your depressions as if they were happening to a third person. Because you are that observing Atma always.” Even today, she never misses her daily pujas. She has been chanting Durga Saptasathi for the last 20-plus years – every single day, without fail. Amma divides the flowers everyday for different shrines, sends kumkum to the temple as it is required, prepares the samagri required for homas on Tuesdays, and makes sure Guruji has his food and medicines on time. She assigns eight hours of work to staff members. She attends to Guruji whenever he calls. She attends to phone calls patiently. She makes those delicious long-asting Avakaais and other pachadis. She maintains the accounts. She knows where everything is. It’s plain to see that the whole of Devipuram depends upon her for so much of its everyday, everyday, normal functioning. She is usually awake until 10.30 or 11:00 p.m. every night. She works and works and works, without a break, without wasting a minute.
But Guruji is difficult to understand. There is way of defining him into any particular category. Even longtime disciples struggle to cope with the enigma, to thoroughly understand him. It appears as though it is the Super-Mind itself that is working through him; a mind that is difficult if not impossible to comprehend. Patanjali’s Yoga Sutra speaks of realized souls being able to momentarily create minds for themselves on an as-needed basis and destroy them soon after – well, we can experience that here at Devipuram. For it appears as if the mind Guruji creates for himself in one situation does not bear any relation to the mind he creates for himself in another. Every mind seems freshly minted. Still, you will never fail to perceive his unconditional love and the assurance that you’re progressing steadfastly in your spiritual sadhana. No one knows whether Guruji abides in some other world, quickly descending to ours to talk with us and then returning whence he came, somewhere else in Universe. Devi revealed one more of his names:
| nirvikalpAnanda sAgara sAgara hamsAya hamsAya namah | “The swan that ever swims in the ocean of nirvikalpa.”
One early morning in Devipuram, Guruji silently allowed a disciple to place a few vilva patras (bilva leaves) on his head instead of directing him to go to Shivalaya and pay homage to Shiva. Anakapalle Gurugaru, Guruji’s Guru – an avadhoota, avadhoota, an adept in 42 of 64 tantras – said of Guruji in one of his speeches that for his tapas on brahma jnana, he should h ave been in samadhi forever – but because of Devi’s will, He came to build this temple at Devipuram. If you have always entertained thoughts of visiting Devipuram, but have never made it, don’t delay. Time is ticking. The mere darshan of such a seer destroys sins committed in thousands of previous births – and elevates you to Liberation. If you’ve never made it to Devipuram, come. You’ll meet these two souls who have incessantly served society for decades together. If you think you should come and serve them, do not delay. It is the rarest blessing you can get. If you’re in search of your Guru, come to Devipuram. However tight your schedule may be, however however big a business magnate you may be, however knowledgeable an upasaka you are – come! Come to Devipuram! This is a place that will help you expand your consciousness to the entire Universe!
Come to Devipuram
There is an aStottara Sata nAmavali (Hymn of One Hundred and Eight Names) of Guruji, revealed by Devi to Sri Haran Aiya of the Rajarajeshwari Peetam in Rush, New York, which includes a shloka for meditating on his form. The sloka has a line “sakala vidyAlankAriNIm” – the one who is decorated with varieties of knowledge. You can experience this line if you spend a few days in Devipuram.
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THE
MAGIC of MUSIC in Everyday Life
By Dr. Dwaram Thiagaraju, Thiagaraju, Ph.D.
Music is mathematics made audible.
emaill :
[email protected] [email protected]
If music be the food of love, play on.
Dr. Thiagaraju holds a Ph.D in Carnatic Music and has performed in various esteemed venues. He works for Kendriya Vidyalaya as a music teacher.
– George Santayana – William Shakespeare
Music is a beautiful expression that transports people to a different world of total bliss. Music – and especially Carnatic music – is a medium through which both the performer’s and the listener’s minds are deeply engrossed in the nadham that soothes the mind and fills the heart. Carnatic Music has bhakti as its prime bhavam, so it is the equivalent to having darshan in a temple or a holy dip in the Ganga to wash away our sins. Music is capable of taking people to a world of ecstasy and divinity.
– Nithyasree Mahadevan, Carnatic vocalist Music washes away the dust of everyday life.
– Sanskrit Proverb
In its original Sanskrit, that last proverb above goes like this: “sisureveethi “sisureveethi pasurveethi – veethi gaanarasam phanih.” It is a famous saying which means that toddlers, animals and even serpents are captivated by the magic of music. Music casts its magical spell over the daily routine of everyone’s life. From time immemorial music has influenced people from different crosssections of life with telling effect. Music has been viewed by the Indian people just not only as an art form but also as a branch of science. It is studied with reverence and passed down through the generations.
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A 24-hour day is broadly divided into six parts by the Carnatic system of Indian classical music, and into four parts by the Hindustani system. Human psychological and physiological states at different times of a day were carefully studied and, accordingly, accordingly, certain suitable sets sets of ragas with meaningful frequencies were suggested by our ancestors, who believed that exposure to such music would enable them to bring about their best performance at these various times.
folklore surrounding the same. We are told of the supernatural miracles that occurred with the help of appropriate compositions being rendered by various saints, court musicians and composers of India. Also well known are more recent reports of higher crop yields when the plants are exposed to the symphonies and certain other compositions of all-time great composers such as Bach, Beethoven and Mozart. These events are testimonies to the fact that music
Music in India is also viewed as a way to attain salvation. Hence it must be understood that these divisions of the day and fixations of ragas therein are part of an attempt to minimize the negative effects of life and enhance the positive circles of energy.
is indeed divine and can influence the human (and vegetable!) body and mind.
In the early hours of the day, for example, people tend to have a half-sleepy mood and drowsy feeling, which is why early morning ragas in both systems of Indian classical music are those which shake off laziness and urge the human mind to awaken and forge ahead with w ith a definite purpose. Later, in the heat of the midday, we find another set of ragas, which encourage us to relax a bit and pace ourselves. Evening and night ragas, in their turn, are exactly what we need after a hard day’s work.
The spiritual aspects of music are immense. The very purpose of music is to attain salvation or moksa, according to Hindu philosophy. The musicians of yore were looked upon with great reverence and people thronged to listen to their music filling the air with melody. Composer-saints led their life by high ideals and remained as idols for the generations who followed. Their birth and death anniversaries are celebrated and observed with reverence around the world.
The impact of music was recognized by the intellectuals of yesteryears, who scaled great heights in developing ng a “music therapy” designed to be subtly imbibed into the daily routine of Indian life. It is with regret, however, however, that we must observe how very few of these principles are practiced with the degree of dedication and discipline originally intended.
Indeed, the magic of music is spread all around the Universe. The very existence of the Universe is based upon those same vital fundamentals of physics that also form the basis of music; that is, vibrations. This universal language of music is best understood, however, however, when it is produced in its required form with devotion, dedication and discipline. Parama-Siva is the Adi-Guru of Srividya. Hanuman is the Eleventh Rudramsa, and so He is Siva Himself. When Vishnu came forth in the Avatara of Sri Rama, Siva assumed the form of Hanuman to assist him in his purpose of the Avatara.
Music therapy, as it is popularly known today, was practiced much earlier in India, and there is a considerable amount of
In one peculiar context, Sri Rama once asked Hanuman, “Who are you?”
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HANUMAN AND SRIVIDYA By Prof. P. A. Seshan, A postgraduate in English literature, Prof. Seshan is an All India First in IAS, etc., examination and a University orator gold medalist. He has held prestigious assignments at the Accountant General and Director level in both the public and private sector. The world-renowned Prof. K. Swaminathan described Seshan as a great devotee of Sri Hanuman, and Seshan has been traditionally initiated into Hanuman worship by the Venerable Janakirama Sastry of Nagarjunasagar. In Srividya, Seshan was given the deeksha name Amrithapadanada by Devipuram Guruji Sri Amritananda Natha Saraswati. Seshan is currently teaching Sri.Hanuman worship and Srividya to aspirants.
Hanuman replied, “From the point of view of this body, I am your servant. From the point of view of life energy within me, I am infinitesimal particle of you. But realistically speaking, You and I are one and the same.”
Hanuman’s reply, Sri Rama embraced Hanuman with affection and respect. Hanuman and Sri Rama are indeed one and the same. We have have the dictum, “Sri Ramo Lalithambika, Lalithambika, Sri Krishna Syamalatmika.”
This same high philosophy is echoed in Adi Shankaracharya’s Advaita epiphany, Manisha Panchakam. Upon hearing
There is an interesting anecdote in the form of a dialogue between Siva and Parvathy. When Siva proposed to incarnate
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as Hanuman, Parvathy asked Him, “What is my role?” Siva smilingly replied that Parvathy would be his tail. Therefore, Hanuman’s tail is Parvathy and Hanuman is Siva. Hanuman is thus the combination of Siva and Shakti. He is the embodiment of Sivashakthiaikyam. Sivashakthiaikyam. Once, by tearing open his chest, Hanuman demonstrated the presence of Sri Rama and Sri Sita is his Daharakasa. Hanuman is the rarest of that rare combination of FAITH, DEVOTION, and SURRENDER.
Realize that you, the Self, your Guru, the entire Universe, the Divine Feet, and Sri Chakra are all one and indivisible. This “abheda bhavanam” is Sri Chakra Poojanam; and it is also the greatest meditation. May All be blessed by Sri Amrita Anandanatha Saraswathy – who is the Divine Mother Herself – with good health, long life, enough wealth, prosperity, and wisdom.
JAI HANUMAN!
There is a beautiful prayer of Hanuman, addressing the Divine Mother Para Bhatarika Lalitha Maha Tripurasundari. Hanuman prays thus: “Amba, be pleased with me. I am a small child lying in your lap. I don’t know how to speak. And even if I did know how to speak, I could not now because my mouth is busy drinking milk from your breast.” Can any surrender be greater than this? Meditate on Hanuman in your Chidakasa. Let Hanuman be slowly transformed into Sri Rama and Sri Sita, who after some time get transfigured as Siva and Shakti. One can start this meditation with one’s Guru in the Chidakasa; and then Hanuman. In due course, Siva and Sakti change into two Divine Feet which, in turn, become SRI CHAKRA.
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SANDHYA - A Brief Study By Advaitananda, a Disciple of Guruji email : advaitAnandanAtha@gma
[email protected] il.com
tvameva sandhya sAvitrI tvaM vedajananI parA O Devi! You are the one termed as sandhya, You are Savitri , the mother of Vedas and Para. (Devimahatmya Stuti) The 422nd name of the Lalita Sahasranama gives Devi’s name as “Sandhya.” The term sandhya – denoting the three passing phases of the Sun in a day – has been given its own spiritual significance at each such phase, along with separate shaktikendras (energy centers) and places to be meditated upon. Sandhya-vandanas and sadhanas related to the day’s three sandhyas can play an important role in the day-to-day life of a sadhaka. Most visualizations connected to Devi can be seen as tied with the Sun, perhaps because the Sun is the most brilliant object in the human being’s experience. Generally sandhya-vandanas are related to Gayatri upasana – which again is nothing but Sridevi Herself:
yA sandhya saiva gAyatrI dvidhAbhUtA vyavasthitA gAyatrI nAma pUrvAhne sAvitrI maddhyame dine sarasvatI ca sAyAhne saiva sandhya trishhu smr^itA|
That which is sandhya is verily Gayatri Herself. The sandhya in morning is Gayatri, in afternoon Savitri and in the evening Saraswati. Saraswati. (Yajnavalkya Smriti) Chapters 16-19 of the 11th skanda of Devi Bhagavata give details of Gayatri upasana as the three sandhyas. Apart from the connection to the phases of the Sun, we can discern further inferences to the meaning of the term, e.g.: July 2006
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AtmaparamAtmanorekatvaGYAnena tayorbheda eva vibhagnaH sA sandhya |
Thus Your form is like that of the day – with creation, protection and destruction corresponding with the karma, bhakti and jnana of the Vedas.
The perception that they are two is broken by the realisation that atma and paramatma are one; and this is sandhya.
(Samba Panchashika)
(Paramahamsopanishad) This is the dharana that the sadhaka should have while doing sandhyopasana. sandhyopasana. And again: bhrUvor ghrANasya ca yassandhiH sa eshha dyolokasya paralokasya ca sandhiH bhavatIti etadvai sandhIM sandhyAM brahmavida upAsata iti |
The point where the nose meets the eyebrow center Is where the dhyoloka and paraloka meet. This place of joining (sandhi) is that, which the wise worship as ‘sandhya’ – This is the center in which to meditate.
The three different meditations of Gayatri used in the three sandhyas can be seen as parallel to those of the Sun here. If Gayatri Devi needs a form or symbol, the closest we can come to is that of the Sun. Thus the three sandhyas symbolize the universal power represented by the Vedas with satva, rajas and tamo gunas. All meditations of Gayatri are done in the eyebrow center. The same is taught in the yoga schools as the meditation point. It is by the sadhana done at this chakra that we release the unity of jiva and ishvara, athma and paramathma, brahman and parabrahman, shiva and shakti, naada and bindu. Here they all join (sandhi) and become sandhya. This is where advaita is experienced. “Time resides at the Ajna Chakra: Without crossing it, you cannot reach the Timeless domain.”
(Ramotharatapini Upanishad)
(Guruji Amritananda Natha Saraswati)
This is the manastana of Ajna Chakra:
Sandhya, or that eyebrow center, essentially denotes the transition point. The morning sandhya denotes the starting of dhyana as Gayatri, in the afternoon the completion of dhyana as Savitri and the evening sandhya, the fulfillment of dhyana as Saraswati.
nAdarUpaM bhruvormaddhy bhruvormaddhye e manaso maNDalaM viduH, sa vai nAdaH bindustadvai cittaM prakIrttitaM |
The mandala of the mind, located at the eyebrow center, is nadarupa. And this nAdam is verily ‘Bindu,’ which again is nothing but Consciousness.
In Srividya tradition, the meditation of each deity is done in the respective chakras of the human body: MahaGanapati in Muladhara, Lalitha Mahatripurasundari in Swadishtana, Raja Shyamala in Anahata, MahaVarahi in Ajna and Para in Sahasrara Chakra.
(Yogashika Upanishad) The meaning of the term sandhya is “samyak dhyAyati sarvAn” – the one in which everything is meditated is sandhya! The only point in which we meditate entirely is the eyebrow center. That point, which combines vyaShTi (singleness and individuality) and samaShTi (wholeness and totality), is sandhya. prAtassandhyAruNakiraNabhAgR^i~NmayaM rAjasa M yanmaddhye cApi jvaladiva yajUH shukLabhAH sAtvikaM vA sAyaM sAma stimitakiraNaM yattamollAsirUpaM sAhnaH sargasthitilayavidhAvAkR^itiste trayIva ||
In the morning Your (the Sun’s) form is that of sandhya with red rays, rajasa guna and Rigveda svarupa. In the afternoon it is like that of the brilliant Yajurveda, Yajurveda, white and satvika. In the evening, the form is that of Samaveda, Samaveda, like stagnant rays and dark-formed. dark-formed.
This completes a cycle. If the position of the chakras is compared to the movement of Sun with respect to the sadhaka, it will yield the approximate time in which each sadhana is to be done: MahaGanapati in the dawn, Lalita in the morning, Shyama in the afternoon. Sandhya points to the center where the Sun is setting and the meditations on chakras after this are done after the Sun has set. Maybe it is because of this that Parashurama explicitly puts “na diva smareth varthalim.” Meditation and sadhana of Mahavarahi comes after the sandhya position, the eyebrow centre, and so should only be done after sunset, i.e. at the night. Para sadhana, which is done on the Sahasrara, denotes the time after this; so all upasana of Para is and should be done around or after midnight. After sandhya there is no feeling of duality in the sadhaka. Mahavarahi Herself symbolizes the conquering of pride and ego – the “I” feeling in the sadhaka. And while doing ParA sadhana, the sadhaka IS Devi. Like the tireless Sun, which never fails to rise or set, so the sadhaka repeats the cycle over and over, till he or she no longer has a sandhya.
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hR^idayAkAshe cidAdityaH sadA bhAsati bhAsati nAstameti na codeti kathaM sandhyAmupAsmahe.
When the Sun of Consciousness is shining all the time in the sky of heart, there is no more rising or setting. Then where is sandhya – and how can we do upasana of sandhya?
should remember and meditate on all the above – and that, by itself, will lead to the shining of the cidaaditya in the cidaakaasha. Thus doing manana on this name alone will lead to siddhi and liberation. We become swatantras, which is the very aim of sadhana.
(Maitreyi Upanishad) Thus once we have attained that unity, even for a moment, then there are no sandhyas; there is no rise or fall. If we are lucky enough to be able to maintain this state, then we shall indeed become Devi, who is the Universe – and so the three kalas – the past, the present and the future; and the three gunas – sattva, rajas and tamas – fuse into unity and one lives in Sat-chid-ananda. All this is implied in the name sandhya; and when we reach this naama in the Sahasranama, we
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TRIPURA SIDDHANTHA By Dr. Goda Venkateswara Sastry email :
[email protected] [email protected] Dr. Goda Venkateswara Sastry is a traditional scholar in the Vedas and Sastras, with an equal proficiency in Western philosophy. He has taught the Sastras to many students at advanced levels, and has also authored many books and articles. He is a great Srividya Upasaka, guiding many disciples by giving diksha.
The Vedas are the primal source of all spiritual knowledge in India. They are four in number – Rig Veda, Yajur Veda, Sama Veda and Atharva Veda. The last Veda is viewed by many as the precursor of the Tantras, because of its magical elements and its widespread popularity for serving the pressing needs of everyday life. But Tantra really means knowledge, or a kind of teaching that was widespread: Tantrya te Vistartate gnanam anena.
The term “Tantra” has a wide range of connotations. Originally it signified any sastra or text relating to a particular system. Later it came to signify a particular body of religious texts belonging to the different theistic systems such as Saiva, Sakta and Vaishnava. Vaishnava. Thus the term Tantra connotes a system, which elaborates something of great import connected with mantras and tattwas, which in their turn lead to emancipation or liberation.
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The Sakta system is based on various Tantras. There are 64 main tantras but the Swatantra Tantra or Tantra raja tantra is the main tantra of the system. The Parasurama Kalpa Sutra is essentially the manual of the Sakta system; accompanied by Rameswara Suri’s commentary on these sutras. There is another manual, written by Umananda Natha, called the Nityotsava. Nityotsava. These works are authoritative authoritative and are are scrupulously followed by Saktas, who accordingly are benefited by the same. As one enters the arena of Srividya or Sakta worship, Diksha is the first Samskara. At the time of Diksha, The Guru cleanses the subtle body of the disciple and kindles the kundalani dormant within that disciple. disciple. Then, by the various various sadhanas given by the Guru and followed by the disciple with sincerity, improvement occurs and finally liberation results. Thus Diksha is the first step in the Sadhana. Diksha is important, as this knowledge is very secret and is imparted only to qualified persons. It is not available to all, like the Vedas. Three kinds of Dikshas were given in these manuals: They are (1) Sambhavi Sambhavi Diksha, (2) Sakthi Diksha Diksha and (3) Mantri Diksha. The first, Sambhavi Diksha, consists of mentally performing the Raktha Sukla nyasa of Kameswari and Kameswara on the head of the Disciple. All the impurities of the Disciple, both internal and external, are thereby removed. This is called the Sambhavi Diksha in the form of Charana Vinyasa. The next Diksha is Sakthi Diksha, in which the Guru, by his yogic powers, forms a light of consciousness extending from the Muladhara up to the Brahmarandhra in the body of the disciple; and, by the rays of that Consciousness, all impurities in the body of disciple are burnt away. This is called the Sakthi Diksha in the form of the Entry of Sakthi. Mantri Diksha is the third Diksha. Diksha. In this stage, 13 13 herbs as enumerated in the Nithyostava are first powdered, and then seven kinds of earth are collected, i.e., 1. earth from a place where an elephant was tied, 2. earth from a place where horses were tied, 3. earth from a place where four roads meet, 4. earth from a bush 5. earth from a place where a river meets the Sea, 6. earth from the tank; and 7. earth from the place where cows are tied are brought. Over these a kumbha, a pot, is set; scented water is poured into it, and then all of the 13 herbs are placed inside. A new cloth is wrapped around the pot and on all sides of the pot puja is performed with Bala Bala shadanga mantras. Then the chakras of Lalitha, Syama and Varahi are placed in the anointed water. Avarana Pujas of the above three deities are performed to the kumbha, then it is once again purified with the Astra mantra. Next the Dhenu and Yoni mudras are shown to it. Then, in a pure place, the Matruka yantra is drawn with sandal paste and the Disciple is asked to sit over it. Uttering the Mula Mantras of Lalitha, Syama and Varahi, the disciple is then bathed by the holy waters in the pot.
After this, the disciple dons new clothes and, adorned with flower garlands, is instructed to sit near while the Matruka Nyasa with 51 51 letters is performed on his body. Then a cloth is tied over his eyes, and holy water is sprinkled over him as the Pancha-panchika Mantra is uttered. An d then the Tripura Siddhanta is taught to him. After this three ginger bits soaked in Vishesha Arghya and sandal paste are placed in the hands of the disciple, along with some flowers. The disciple is instrructed to consume the same, uttering the tattwa mantras. Guru then recites the Gurupaduka Gurupaduka mantra into the the right ear of the disciple. Only at this time are the Mula mantras of Bala and other deities initiated. Thus, Tripura Siddhanta forms an important part of the Diksha. Although this is taught to everyone at the time of Diksha, it is not remembered by all. Hence it is given here so that upasakas may benefit by it. Tripura Siddhanta
The basic elements are five; namely, (1) the Ear th, (2) water, water, (3) fire, (4) air and (5) space. The subtle forms of these five five elements are smell, taste, color, touch and sound. The five action-oriented sense organs are the mouth, hands, feet, organs of excreta excreta and urination. The five knowledge-oriented sense organs are the skin, eyes, ears, tongue and nose. Ahankara, Intellect, and mind – made up of the three gunas; Rajas, Satwa and Tamas – are the three forms of the inner instrument. Prakruti is the form produced when all of the gunas stated above are in equal proportion. propor tion. Chitta is the person called Purusha Purusha or Jiva. The various properties existing in the Lord Iswara – such as independence, eternality, eternality, ever-satisfied, ever-satisfied, total “doer”-ship, and omniscience – are reduced in Jivas, becoming known as Niyathi, Kaala, Raga, Kalaa and Avidya. Maya is knowledge of the difference between Jiva and and Paratman. Suddhavidya Suddhavidya is knowledge of the identity between them. Iswara is the same Paratman Paratman when he sees the world as “that.” When the world is cognized as “I,” He is known as Sadasiva. Sakti is the wish of the Paratman to create the worlds. He who possesses this Sakthi is the first tattwa, namely Siva. These are the 36 tattwas, which are the subject of this Sastra. The world, comprising these 36 36 tattwas, is the the body of the Paramasiva. The Jiva is nothing but Iswara covered, by His own free will, with the “jacket” of the five tattwas, starting from Niyathi. When this jacket is removed, He becomes Iswara. Liberation is attained by the knowledge of His own Swarupa. Mantra Upasana
All sounds in the form of the alphabet are eternal. The mantras have a potency which cannot be expressed. All siddhis will result – by strong belief in the Guru, Deity and sastra – in the form of sampradaya, as upadesa from his Guru, Paramaguru, etc. The pramanya of this Sastra is achieved only placing one’s full trust and confidence in Guru, Deity and Sastra. The knowledge of the Pratyagatman, Pratyagatman, the sole cause cause
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of liberation, is obtained by meditation upon the identity of the Guru, Mantra, Deity and one’s own Self, as shown by one’s Guru, and by controlling the mind and pranas by singular effort. If one is in privacy, one may perform worship with the Five M’s. One will go to hell if one advertises it. One will achieve the capability of vanquishing and helping by one’s own Will Power. Some Guidelines for Upasakas
-- One should not abuse other Darsanas or forms of worship; -- Barring the Deity one worships, one should not possess utmost trust on other deities; -- One should teach all the secrets of the upasana to the qualified disciple; -- One should constantly remember, or meditate upon, the Deity one has taken for Upasana. -- One should always think as, “I am Siva.” -- One should be devoid of six doshas – the emotions such as desire, anger, miserliness, delusion, arrogance and jealousy. One should also avoid hurting others unless it is ordained in the Vedas. One should not entertain hating women in general. -- One should worship and do service to one Guru, who is Omniscient. -- One should not entertain any doubt on the words of one’s Sastra or Guru. -- One should not earn money for one’s own enjoyment; -- One should always do one’s duties without seeking the fruits of the same; -- One’s duties – as ordained to on account of one’s birth or position – should not be avoided. -- One should perform daily worship even if one does not have all the ingredients. -- One should cultivate fearlessness from everything, in performing the duties ordained.
Essential Points to Remember
-- Everything known is an offering to the Deity; -- The sensory organs are the ladles by which the offerings are given to the Deity; -- All properties residing in the upasaka in minute form – such as the Omniscience of Lord, etc. – are the flames of holy fires; -- One’s own Consciousness is the holy fire; -- He Himself is the person offering; -- The fruit of worship is the immediate perception of Paramatman, devoid of any gunas; · There is nothing nothing greate greaterr than the the attainme attainment nt of one’s one’s original, permanent nature. This in short is the summum bonum of this Sastra. The knowledge of this Tripura Siddantha is secret and should be divulged only to the qualified disciple. May all the disciples obtain the grace of Gurumandala and the Lalita Parameswari and be blessed with liberation. -- OM --
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SRI MAHAGANAPATI MEDITATION A N
I N - D E P T H
G U I D E
By Sri Atmananda email :
[email protected] [email protected] .in Let us pray to the lineage of Gurus from Lord Dakshinamurti to (one’s own Guru), to dispel the clouds of darkness by the winds of grace.
In the usual procedure of imparting mantras during initiation, it is typically the Mahaganapathy mantra that is first given to the seeker by the Guru, along with the Gurupaduka and Bala mantras. The process of meditation begins with imagining the form of the deity as described in the meditation verse, called the dhyana sloka. The dhyana sloka of Mahaganapathy describes His ten-armed form (eleven including His trunk), with His Shakti (wife), Siddhalakshmi, seated on His left lap. She wears lustrous ornaments, and embraces Him with one hand while
holding a lotus in the other. The weapons in the Lord’s arms are (sequentially clockwise, from the right lowermost arm to the left) the pomegranate, mace, sugarcane, trident, and discus; and (descending now from the left uppermost arm) lotus, noose, blue lily, paddy and a broken tusk. In His trunk is a jewel-studded ornamental pot filled with nectar. What follows is a method to help us to visualize Mahaganapathy’s form while chanting His mantra, which consists of 28 letters in the Sanskrit alphabet:
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Om SrIm HrIm KlIm glaum gam
ganapataye varavarada sarvajanam me vasamAnaya svAhA 1. First, while repeating Om, mentally mentally imagine the beautiful elephant face of the Lord. 2. SrIm indicates the divine couple, Lakshmi Lakshmi and Narayana. Narayana. Imagine in Mahaganapathy’s right uppermost arm the discus of Narayana and in the left uppermost arm the lotus of Laksmi. They represent Time and the Earth (in its gross aspect), respectively. This appears to us as the Time-Space continuum (the sthiti), which prevents an individual from experiencing the eternal. We can here interpret this as relating to an individual in the world and his seeking of a Guru to him experience the unlimited. 3. HrIm indicates the divine couple, Gauri and Sankara. Imagine in the second-from-the-top right arm the trident of Sankara, and in the corresponding left arm the noose of Gauri. They represent the removal of triputi (the three stages of experience- the seen, the seer and the act of seeing) and of desires respectively. This is the annihilation ( samhara), which is the removal of the individual ego by the grace of a compassionate Guru. 4. KlIm indicates the divine couple, Rati and Manmatha. Imagine in the third-from-top right arm the sugarcane bow of Manmatha, and in the corresponding left arm the blue lily of Rati. They represent pure mind and secret spiritual knowledge, respectively. respectively. This may be b e likened to creation (srusti) of a new field of experience for the blessed aspirant by the Guru, in directing him to follow a given path (sadhana) to attain a constant experience of the eternal.
7. Ganapataye Ganapataye is the form for invoking invoking the Lord. Imagine your head resting upon His feet. This implies a continuance of the above-noted state of Samadhi. 8. varavarada varavarada is a prayer prayer to the the Lord to bestow bestow upon us the the best boons and blessings. Meditate here upon the ornamental pot of nectar held by His trunk. Imagine that He is showering it over you and you are drenched. The best of boons is the experience of the Unlimited Bliss that leads to immortality; amruta. This may represent the sahaja state, wherein the realized one goes about his daily chores but remains aware of his blissful state always. (The dhyana sloka ends with a prayer to the Lord – who is the creator, creator, sustainer and annihilator of the world – to bestow our cherished boons.) 9. sarvajanam sarvajanam me vasamAnaya vasamAnaya means “let “let all people be sub jugated to me.” We find the clue for our meditation in the word “people,” which indicates the Universe. The embrace of Siddalakshmi can be interpreted as the creative urge and the lotus in the other hand as the manifest (gross) Earth (the last subtle element; the result by default of mixing the other four previous subtle elements). Hence we meditate on Siddhalakshmi – the Creatrix of the Universe, seated on the left lap of the Lord – with a firm conviction that the world, the divine couple and the self are One. 10. Finally, y, svAhA indicates an offering into the fire (here we are also reminded of the fire sacrifice, ganapathy homam). Since whatever is offered into the fire becomes one with it, meditate upon the above truth and try to be in that experience for a moment. Sri Ganesa Aids Sri Lalita Devi in Battle
5. Glaum indicates the divine couple, Bhumi (Earth) and Varaha (the boar-faced avatar of Vishnu). Imagine in the fourth-from-top right arm the mace of Varaha, and in the corresponding left arm the paddy, indicative of Earth’s fertility. They represent action and cycle of life (cyclic in the sense of sowing, reaping, and again sowing), respectively. Though this may be likened to veiling of the universal experience (tirodhana), for an aspirant it is more akin to being led by the Guru to complete detachment, in renouncing all fruits of his actions.
Bhandasura, overcome with grief at the slaying of his 30 sons by Sri Balambika, commanded his Prime Minister, Vishanga, to destroy the enemy by any means. So Vishanga threw a vigna yantra (a mystical diagram that causes obstacles to arise) into the fire-walled fortress; and this caused the entire army of Sri Devi Lalita to grow lazy and tired. You see, this vigna yantra had eight powers installed in it – Alsa (laziness), krpaNa (miserliness), dIna (fear), nidrA (sleep), tandrA (tiredness), pramIlikA (inability to rest; persistent wakefulness), klIbA (impotency) and nirahamkAra (feigned humility; lack of self-confidence).
6. Gam indicates the divine couple, Siddhalaksmi and Mahganapathy. Imagine in the right-lowermost arm the pomegranate, representing different universes stacked like pomegranate seeds; and in the corresponding left arm the tusk which represents the fruit of all sadhana, Ekam sat, the One Truth, which is the experience of unqualified, undivided Brahman as Bliss. This verily is the grace (anugraha) whereby the seeker dives into a deep state of samadhi upon constant practice and the grace of the Guru, who merges into him.
Only Sri Lalita Devi-Kameswari, Her Prime Minister Sri Matangi, and Her Commander-in-Chief Sri Varahi were unaffected by the yantra’s power. On request of Matangi and Varahi, Sri Lalita Devi glanced lovingly at Her Lord Kamesvara. The mighty Ganesa, with ten arms and his Sakti on His left lap, emerged from the union of the divine couple’s glance. He searched inside the fort, found the vighna yantra buried deep in the soil, wrenched it out and destroyed it.
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He then created six couples like Himself – named rddhiAmoda, samruddhi-pramoda, kAnti-sumukha , madanAvatidurmukha, madadravA-avighna, and draviNI-vighnakart – and seven lakh (700,000) troops in His form to engage in the battle. Viewing the mighty forces arrayed before him, Vishanga sent Gajaasura, an elephant-faced asura, along with seven akshauhini armies, but they were completely vanquished by Mahaganapathy. Highly pleased with these heroic deeds, Sri Lalita conferred upon Ganesa (Mahaganapathy) the boon of the right to be worshiped before all other deities.
represent the ego) was caused by the actions of the ten indiryas in the three states of waking, sleep and deep sleep (i.e., 10 x 3 = 30) by Balambika (who represents the constant awareness of the identity of self with Divine), creating doubt of the jivabhava (individual ego). The word jiva means the individual self possessed of the idea that he commands the above puryastaka. When these ideas are destroyed by the True Knowledge of the Lord of puryastaka (which is the knowledge created by ascertaining the true nature of the self), then there are no qualities left to be qualified.
The Philosophical Meaning of the Battle
Let us offer our most humble salutations to the feet of the Guru, who has guided us in this meditation.
The Lalita Sahasranama describes the emergence and valor of Ganesa in two names (77 & 78). In his commentary, Bhaskararaya identifies Ganesa as Lord of the Gana, which are the puryastaka: (1) five karmendriyas; (2) five gnanendriyas; (3) mana with bhuddi, ahamkara; (4) five pranas; (5) five bhutas; (6) kaama (desire); (7) karma (action); and (8) avidya (ignorance). The destruction of Bhanda’s 30 sons (who
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GOOD KARMA
By His Holiness the 14th Dalai Lama of Tibet This was the Dalai Lama’s advice at the dawn of this new millennium. It is nice reading, and short. All it takes is a few seconds to read and think over. So enjoy! But do not keep this message to yourself; share it! You will get a very pleasant surprise. This is true for all, of whatever religious belief, and even if you are not superstitious. Faith!
Instructions For Life
4. Remember that not getting what you want is sometimes a wonderful stroke of luck.
1. Take into account that great love and great achievements involve great risk.
5. Learn the rules so you know how to break them properly.
2. When you lose, don't lose the lesson.
6. Don't let a little dispute injure a great friendship.
3. Follow the three R's: Respect for self, Respect for others, and Responsibility for all your actions.
7. When you realize you've made a mistake, take immediate steps to correct it.
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8. Spend some time alone every day. 9. Open your arms to change, but don't let go of your values. 10. Remember that silence is sometimes the best answer. answer. 11. Live a good, honorable life. Then when you get older and think back, you'll be able to enjoy it a second time. 12 12.. A loving atmosphere in your home is the foundation for your life. 13. In disagreements with loved ones, deal only with the current situation. Don't bring up the past. 14. Share your knowledge. It's a way to achieve immortality. 15. Be gentle with the Earth. 16. Once a year, go someplace you've never been before. 17. Remember that the best relationship is one in which your love for each other exceeds your need for each other. 18. Judge your success by what you had to give up in order to get it. 19. Approach love and cooking with reckless abandon.
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Something to Cherish and Own
MAHAMERUS OF DEVIPURAM Mahameru, also called the Sri Chakra, is said to be the mother of all Mandalas. It is said to have originated from the Himalayan masters who practice Mandala meditations. Its sacred geometrical form is revered in all Eastern traditions. It integrates the essence of Chinese Feng Shui, Indian Mother worship, Egyptian Pyramids and the Christian Eleusian Mysteries. The Mahameru radiates an aura of Love and Orderliness, and creates a sacred space around it. Its mere presence is said to cleanse the home of Vaastu and Feng Shui defects, ward off the evil eye, protect against unfavorable planetary influences and bring about healing, prosperity and peace of mind. The Mahameru does not require any formal prayers or worship, or vegetarianism, to keep in the home; only a reverential attitude. Its effects are enhanced by the playing of soft music in the home. People of all beliefs, religions and sects may reap the benefits of peace, healing and prosperity, by installing the Mandala of Mahameru in their homes, offices, shrines and places of worship, hospitals, healing centers, prayer halls and wedding centers. It is a great corporate gift to employees, empowering them in every possible way. This Mahameru comes to you from Devipuram, India
the Global Resource for Goddess Worship and the site of the largest and most unique Mahameru in the world. Exquisitely crafted out of pure bronze with great and loving attention to detail, the Mahameru comes in two sizes: 10” x 10” x 5” and 5" x 5" x 2.5". Each Mahameru comes with a Certificate of Authenticity from Devipuram. Only a limited number of these Merus will be created. To place an advance order for a Meru for your own home or office, kindly log on to our website and send us the order form, quoting your requirements.
Dear Friend,
Blessings from Sahasrakshi ! Devipuram is fast becoming a Global Resource for Goddess worship. You may have heard about our ambitious project Manideepam. My vision and dream is that, when complete, Manidweepam will be a place where all of Mother’s children can experience beauty, peace, love and the power to transform their own and others lives around them, for the better. better. Let me tell you a story. In 1984, before the Sri Meru temple was built at Devipuram, there was a small hillock where I would often spend time in meditation. On the slopes of the hillock, I noticed a formation very similar to that of the Kamakhya Peetam in Assam. One day, while in meditation, I had the experience of lying on the peetam, while four others performed a Homam with flames emanating from my body. And during purnahuthi, I felt a heavy object being placed on my heart. Awakening from my meditative state, I was prompted to dig at that site, and unearthed from that very spot, a Yantra resembling a Mahameru of a unique design like no other that I had seen. I later discovered through meditations and circumstances that a magnificent yagna had been performed at that very location more than 250 years ago. This Mahameru was the inspiration for building the Sri Meru temple, which at 108’ wide, 54’ high, remains the largest Mahameru in the world. Today, I am very happy to announce that a unique new Mahameru has been recently designed and created, inspired by the design of the original. The Meru has been precisely crafted with the greatest attention to detail, and embellished with the symbols of the Chaturayatana deities Ganesha, Surya, Vishnu and Shiva. I pray that the Mahameru will bring lasting peace and prosperity to your home. With love, Amritananda
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Function hall for 150 Dining hall for 150
Ammulapalem BPO(Via) Anakapalle - 531 001
3 dorms for 72 6 suits (a/c) 30 double rooms Garden Car Parking
www.devipuram.com
[email protected] +91 08924-237742
Sri Villa at Devipuram Devipuram is fast becoming a Global Resource for Goddess Worship. Now, Now, a villa named Sri to fulfill your dreams is coming up with an affordable timeshare concept which allows you or your nominees to stay free for 37 days every year.
Anakapally
1km
Sabbavaram
I have traveled the length and breadth of India, but nowhere have I seen such a geometric design for a temple- the whole temple is a magnificent Sri Yantra – Maha Kali, Maha Lakshmi, Maha Saraswati, All the Khadgamala deities are here – An inspiring Pyramid structure exhibiting the adorable passions of Nature – Any facilities for over night stay in this Maha Shakti Kshetra?
towards Anakapally
Airport
Pendurthi Rly Station NH-5
RTC Complex
towards Culcutta
What people are saying about Devipuram today:
I would like to do workshops here - Arrange cultural events – Conduct group rituals – Nice if some dorms are here – Can we get delicious food and rest in a cool place in hot afternoons? - Find true soul mates – Get healed – Get Reiki, Sauna - Well maintained Gardens and parking will make this place a heaven – Like to stay here all time, but what about my job? – Can I spend a few days here every year? - Any affordable suites for people who like to serve Goddess here and spend time in peace? - Like to give my near and dear a lasting gift of staying here……… Sri villa will have: h ave: a function hall for 150, a dining area for 150, dorms for 72, 6 a/c suites and 30 rooms for couples. The rooms are on offer as timeshares at Rs 1,0 1,08,000, 8,000, entitling 7 days free stay in season-October to January, and 30 days off season. Adequate parking, toilets are provided. If you want relatives to stay in an old age home, they can use the facilities here by paying for 5 timeshares.
Location Plan
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Walkable distance from famous SRICHAKRA temple of Devipuram, the first of its kind in the world.
Frequently asked questions about timeshares:
Can two or more people buy jointly? Sure. They share the cost and time allotted. Can we accumulate unused time? Sure. An e-card will track records. Any club arrangement? We are working on Kondakarla Lotus pond, Buddhist monuments of Bojjanna Konda, Simhachalam, Annavaram, Araku valley valley,, Borra caves, and Vizag beach resorts.
Function and Dining Halls
Located amidst serene and picturesque Devipuram hills.
Function hall and dining area are 1700 sqft. adequate for 150 people. Adequate car and scooter parking and rest rooms provided.
Timeshare cottages Each time share costs Rs. 10,8,000 payable two installments; Rs. 54,000 on booking and another 54,000 within four months of booking. Each time share holder in entitled to free accommodation every year one week in season (Oct to Jan) and one month in off season. Block booking by phone or email to
[email protected];
[email protected]; it is not confirmed till the first payment is made. Each time share holder gets a card. Anyone who shows the card gets accommodation
Volunteer opportunities? Yes, many. Rural schools. Medical outreach. Temple services and much, much more How can I help? Please make copies, circulate to friends, give a lasting, loving gift to near and dear. How do I buy a time share? Please fill in the enclosed form with a cheque or DD favouring N Annapurna @ Rs 54,000 / share and mail it to Guruji, 18-74-38, Kothasalipeta, 530001, India. Phone 0891 3294371 or email to
[email protected] I am requesting you to make Devipuram a "Global Resource for Goddess Worship. How? 1. Gift yourself a time share in Sri villa at Devipuram. It redefines every year a purpose and zeal, and relaxes you into peace. It is a small price you pay for helping yourself and helping Devipuram: by creating a beautiful facility for all seekers. 2. Circulate the attached information, phone, forward this email to your mailing list of friends. The attachments give details about Sri villa. Let me know if any one is interested. I will follow up. 3. Think of this as an old age home, seminar hall, marriage hall, a place for enterprising young minds to work and play. Gift a timeshare or a permanent stay to your aged relatives. Give a holiday to your younger family back at home. Put your thinking cap, magnifying glass, and compass ready for exploration! Love, Guruji
July 2006
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