ANNAPURNA SARADA, Friday, August 21, 2015 10:52 am

O Glistening Self

Recently, our sangha attended a retreat with Babaji that focused on special teachings of the Zen way and Advaita Vedanta.  In our particular lineage, we do not look upon the Buddhist teachings as different from Vedanta. They are another array of philosophical schools on the same bedrock of Indian Advaita, despite the fact that Buddha did not base his main teaching on the “authority” of the Vedas.

At the start of this retreat, Babaji gave each of us a Zen koan, specially selected for the recipient, to contemplate throughout the retreat.  These, and many of the teachings given instilled a sudden awareness of the immediacy of one’s True Nature, of Reality, whether called Prajnaparam or Brahman-Atman.  In the weeks following, I have reflected upon how effective this was, how fresh it seemed, when all along, as students of Vedanta, we have had the terse and equally potent Mahavakyas to ponder. Clearly, this has to do with qualification.

In these contemporary times, the Vedanta is readily available via translated scriptures, introductory texts, online teachers and teachings, etc.  From the most basic teachings to those requiring subtlety of understanding – we have access to them all.  But are we ready for them?  Even if we are blessed with a qualified teacher who is guiding us step by step according to our capacity, it is still likely that we will hear “Tat twam asi” (That thou art) or “Prajnanam Brahma” (Consciousness is Brahman) before we have attained the qualification to understand these nondual statements.  Some of us then put them aside and set ourselves to learning the science of discrimination (viveka) with more and more exactitude as we study and recognize the components of the gross, subtle, and causal bodies (or of the five sheaths) superimposed upon Atman/Brahman; or of the waking, dream, and deep sleep states of consciousness all witnessed in the unitive “state” of Turiya, Indivisible Consciousness.

By the time some of us finally become qualified to truly understand the import of the Mahavakyas, and experience the ignition of sudden insight as reported of the qualified students in the Upanisads, we may not even think of them. Many of the students at the Zen & Advaita retreat had a similar experience with regard to the power of the Zen teachings and their koans.  As a sangha we have been qualifying ourselves individually and collectively via the Vedantic teachings for 5 – 25 years.  A certain readiness had finally arrived.

I had the privilege of cooking for the sangha at this retreat.  Any duty opens the door to karmic accrual via the sense of agency, to expectations met or dashed, to egoic responses to praise or lack of it, to forgetfulness of the teachings and their application while under the press of activity and deadlines.  The koan I received was the perfect antidote to all of that, and a reminder to adhere to Sri Krishna’s teaching that “the gunas as objects merely abide with the gunas as senses” and not to get confused thereby.  The koan: glistening serpent never caught in its own coils.

Contemplation of a koan is a personal matter and one’s siddhanta (conclusion) should be shared only with the teacher.  Rather than share interpretation, here is a teaching from the Sankhya school that came to the fore while contemplating the koan.:

Six of the Ten Tenets of Sankhya

1 – There exists a conscious, sentient Self (Purusha/Atman/Tathagatagarbha)

2 – There is an insentient, unmanifest cause (Prakriti/Nature)

3 – The Purusha exists for no other entity.

4 – Matter exists to serve Purusha.

5 – Purusha is distinct from Prakriti and Its evolutes.

6 – The Purusha is not an agent of action.

And another:

In the tradition of Advaita-Shaktavada, the nondual path of the Divine Mother, are the many devotional wisdom songs of Her illumined devotees. Ramprasad Sen, Kamalakanta, and others wrote songs of advaitic import.  One such song, that also became part of my koan contemplation, sings of the need to transcend/detach/renounce the allures of the relative plane and one’s ego-identification that grasps after them:

“O small self, you are but a sparkling fish

         swimming in the boundless ocean and your life is swiftly coming to its end.

Death will skim above you and throw its net.

You will not be protected by your watery world.

Your selfish actions have kept you in the shallows.

The fisherman’s fatal net will surround you suddenly.

Why did you remain so near the surface of existence,

        where Death is granted its fishing grounds?

Yet there is still time.

Leave the pleasant shoreline of mundane existence

        and plunge into the silent deeps

Of Mother Kali’s oceanic Mystery!”

(from Mother of the Universe, by Lex Hixon)

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