A FIELD GUIDE TO INFINITIES
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ONE HUNDRED AND TWELVE MODES OF MEDITATION
From the Vijñāna Bhairava
Translated by the Kashmiri Saint Swami Lakshmanjoo
and Kashmiri Dina Nath Muju
Edited by Jim Powell
INTRODUCTION
by
Jim Powell
In the Land of Blue Forests, as Lord Buddha called Kashmir, dreams a chain of mountains called Himalaya, Abode of Snow: its elevated slopes white all year round.
These mountains have also preserved a field guide to finite infinities: a compendium of dozens of Modes of Meditation, 112 ways of courting unbounded consciousness.
These Modes have been carried down in an oral tradition and a scripture known as the Vijñāna Bhairava (The Scripture of Divine Awareness).
Traditionally each of the 112 ways is called a dharana or yukti, a technique or way of doing something. Herein, however, I use the term Mode (rather than "technique" or "way") because Mode designates both a way of doing something and a state of being.
So a mode can be a way of plucking a stringed instrument. It can also be, as in String Theory, a distinct state of a vibrating system: for instance, an electron being a state of vibration.
Each Mode of the Vijñāna Bhairava behaves according to a silent law inscribed within all of nature: the Principle of Minimal Action.
Consequently, for beginners each of the 112 Modes of Meditation can be prescriptive: an activity, a way of doing something, such as intoning a mantra. Yet, in any chosen Mode's simplest form, the Mode describes a condition or state of being, a state that escapes the semantic reach of the term "technique."
Over time, any Mode experienced at first as an Activity can next be experienced as an Energy, and finally as a State of Being.
Swami Lakshmanjoo, the last great master in the tradition of Kashmir Shaivism, and one of the two co-translators, explains that process here.
It is said that Shiva imparts each of these 112 Modes of Meditation to his better half, Shakti, in expressions breathed in breathless, starlit air, upon a star that marks a hidden pole . . . in an exchange that some have deemed a "dialog" . . .
Its monological character, however, is understandable from the outset if one recognizes that in this tradition Shiva is not the mischievous divinity of subcontinental myth desporting himself in pine forests, but merely a marker, a metaphor for one's own unbounded consciousness: one's own shoreless awareness in infinity mode, a soul admitted to itself . . . a feild of Being unvisited of shores . . . for Shiva and his better half form a wonderous One . . . a spaceless space wherein the duality of adoration melts into waves of union. . .
These mountains have also preserved a field guide to finite infinities: a compendium of dozens of Modes of Meditation, 112 ways of courting unbounded consciousness.
These Modes have been carried down in an oral tradition and a scripture known as the Vijñāna Bhairava (The Scripture of Divine Awareness).
Traditionally each of the 112 ways is called a dharana or yukti, a technique or way of doing something. Herein, however, I use the term Mode (rather than "technique" or "way") because Mode designates both a way of doing something and a state of being.
So a mode can be a way of plucking a stringed instrument. It can also be, as in String Theory, a distinct state of a vibrating system: for instance, an electron being a state of vibration.
Each Mode of the Vijñāna Bhairava behaves according to a silent law inscribed within all of nature: the Principle of Minimal Action.
Consequently, for beginners each of the 112 Modes of Meditation can be prescriptive: an activity, a way of doing something, such as intoning a mantra. Yet, in any chosen Mode's simplest form, the Mode describes a condition or state of being, a state that escapes the semantic reach of the term "technique."
Over time, any Mode experienced at first as an Activity can next be experienced as an Energy, and finally as a State of Being.
Swami Lakshmanjoo, the last great master in the tradition of Kashmir Shaivism, and one of the two co-translators, explains that process here.
It is said that Shiva imparts each of these 112 Modes of Meditation to his better half, Shakti, in expressions breathed in breathless, starlit air, upon a star that marks a hidden pole . . . in an exchange that some have deemed a "dialog" . . .
Its monological character, however, is understandable from the outset if one recognizes that in this tradition Shiva is not the mischievous divinity of subcontinental myth desporting himself in pine forests, but merely a marker, a metaphor for one's own unbounded consciousness: one's own shoreless awareness in infinity mode, a soul admitted to itself . . . a feild of Being unvisited of shores . . . for Shiva and his better half form a wonderous One . . . a spaceless space wherein the duality of adoration melts into waves of union. . .
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When I was in my twenties and a Religious Studies major at UC Santa Barbara, with all the naïve and panoptic optimism of a child writing off to Santa — I sent off a letter addressed to Swami Lakshmanjoo, Kashmir, India.
Assuming that the saint, basking in infinite Being, had nothing much else to occupy his eternity, I expressed a yearning for him to translate the Vijñāna Bhairava.
My reasons for making that request to this Shaiva savant in particular were multiple. First, the saint was at that time the living embodiment of a long line of spiritually illumined masters teaching in this living tradition. Second, I trusted that he had himself realized the truth illumining the text. Third, I trusted that if anyone’s voice — like the sound of a clear bell sounding and then fading away through the mist — could penetrate the text’s veiled meanings, it would be his.
Those in his circle realized that he was the living essence of his tradition, living it through his every breath.
Assuming that the saint, basking in infinite Being, had nothing much else to occupy his eternity, I expressed a yearning for him to translate the Vijñāna Bhairava.
My reasons for making that request to this Shaiva savant in particular were multiple. First, the saint was at that time the living embodiment of a long line of spiritually illumined masters teaching in this living tradition. Second, I trusted that he had himself realized the truth illumining the text. Third, I trusted that if anyone’s voice — like the sound of a clear bell sounding and then fading away through the mist — could penetrate the text’s veiled meanings, it would be his.
Those in his circle realized that he was the living essence of his tradition, living it through his every breath.
Some months after sending my request, an envelope arrived. It was the year India issued a large, colorful postage stamp of Michelangelo’s Cistine Chapel painting of God reaching out, extending his animating touch to Adam.
As my fingers reached inside the envelope, onion-skin paper as translucent as monsoon-soaked silk met my touch.
The paper bore the inscriptions of a collaborative translation of the scripture. The collaboration had taken place between two Kashmiris: Swami Lakshmanjoo and his friend and devotee, a Kashmiri Pandit who frequented the saint's abode . . . Pandit Dina Nath Muju.
Both were steeped within the teachings of the scripture and the tradition's yogic depths. Their discussions had taken place within their most intimate and subtly nuanced language, their mother tongue, Kashmiri. Within Sanskrit. And within their local dialect of English. They assumed, four years before the publication of Edward Said's Orientalism, that Kashmiri yogis were capable of representing Kashmir Shaivism with fidelity.
I found their translations to be straightforward, though not staunchly philological, succinct to the point of abbreviation, ontologically anchored because grounded in their experience as yogis and teachers rather than in rote textuality, and tailored for transmission. Several years afterwards, Jaideva Singh's translation arrived, as did Lakshmanjoo's commentaries on the scripture.
Kashmir, straddling the ancient Silk Road, had long been a participant in that silk and cultural route's religious syncretism. Kashmiri thinkers were thus supremely positioned to notice the universal truths underlying the diverse waves of religious expression they saw floating by in the arrival of each new caravan. Furthermore, in the same way that in China a conventional garden-variety Confucian could also present, at the same time, as a bovinely placid Taoist and/or as a Buddhist -- the translators, while being Shaiva savants, were also steeped in Vedic culture.
During the 1970s, a grand shift was taking place in the religious sphere. In general, in the United States and elsewhere ultimate-meaning orientations were shifting orbit from the religious sphere to the spiritual sphere: from organized religion(s) to direct experience.
Thus, this translation leaves out the theology of the scripture found in the opening verses. Instead, it presents only the 112 Modes of Meditation, eliding every one of the first twenty-three verses.
Furthermore, and tellingly, the translation also elides all the scripture's vocatives addressing the Goddess: such as "O gazelle-eyed one," and "O Goddess." This in effect helps to de-mythologize and humanize the translation so that it reads as though it were written for and to a general human reader of either gender and of any or no particular religious persuasion, perhaps to present the teachings in a more universal mode.
Contributing to the general de-mythological drift of the times was Pandit Dina Nath Muju's long and dedicated association with Jiddu Krishnamurti, who was some fifteen years the pandit's senior and, as many will remember, a man of unique clarity.
Krishnamurti had been groomed from childhood to play the role of Messiah. At a certain age, though, an age at which most young people find their independence from the nucleus of their immediate family, he was no longer able to stomach the messianic role nor the attendant adulation it brought to him. So, while generalizing his statements to address serious people of all faiths, he set about divesting his followers of their illusions. He was quite serious about this and articulated it in words that anyone who watches the news might feel tempted to agree with. To wit:
As my fingers reached inside the envelope, onion-skin paper as translucent as monsoon-soaked silk met my touch.
The paper bore the inscriptions of a collaborative translation of the scripture. The collaboration had taken place between two Kashmiris: Swami Lakshmanjoo and his friend and devotee, a Kashmiri Pandit who frequented the saint's abode . . . Pandit Dina Nath Muju.
Both were steeped within the teachings of the scripture and the tradition's yogic depths. Their discussions had taken place within their most intimate and subtly nuanced language, their mother tongue, Kashmiri. Within Sanskrit. And within their local dialect of English. They assumed, four years before the publication of Edward Said's Orientalism, that Kashmiri yogis were capable of representing Kashmir Shaivism with fidelity.
I found their translations to be straightforward, though not staunchly philological, succinct to the point of abbreviation, ontologically anchored because grounded in their experience as yogis and teachers rather than in rote textuality, and tailored for transmission. Several years afterwards, Jaideva Singh's translation arrived, as did Lakshmanjoo's commentaries on the scripture.
Kashmir, straddling the ancient Silk Road, had long been a participant in that silk and cultural route's religious syncretism. Kashmiri thinkers were thus supremely positioned to notice the universal truths underlying the diverse waves of religious expression they saw floating by in the arrival of each new caravan. Furthermore, in the same way that in China a conventional garden-variety Confucian could also present, at the same time, as a bovinely placid Taoist and/or as a Buddhist -- the translators, while being Shaiva savants, were also steeped in Vedic culture.
During the 1970s, a grand shift was taking place in the religious sphere. In general, in the United States and elsewhere ultimate-meaning orientations were shifting orbit from the religious sphere to the spiritual sphere: from organized religion(s) to direct experience.
Thus, this translation leaves out the theology of the scripture found in the opening verses. Instead, it presents only the 112 Modes of Meditation, eliding every one of the first twenty-three verses.
Furthermore, and tellingly, the translation also elides all the scripture's vocatives addressing the Goddess: such as "O gazelle-eyed one," and "O Goddess." This in effect helps to de-mythologize and humanize the translation so that it reads as though it were written for and to a general human reader of either gender and of any or no particular religious persuasion, perhaps to present the teachings in a more universal mode.
Contributing to the general de-mythological drift of the times was Pandit Dina Nath Muju's long and dedicated association with Jiddu Krishnamurti, who was some fifteen years the pandit's senior and, as many will remember, a man of unique clarity.
Krishnamurti had been groomed from childhood to play the role of Messiah. At a certain age, though, an age at which most young people find their independence from the nucleus of their immediate family, he was no longer able to stomach the messianic role nor the attendant adulation it brought to him. So, while generalizing his statements to address serious people of all faiths, he set about divesting his followers of their illusions. He was quite serious about this and articulated it in words that anyone who watches the news might feel tempted to agree with. To wit:
When you call yourself an Indian or a Muslim or a Christian or a European, or anything else, you are being violent. Do you see why it is violent? Because you are separating yourself from the rest of mankind. When you separate yourself by belief, by nationality, by tradition, it breeds violence. So a man who is seeking to understand violence does not belong to any country, to any religion, to any political party, or to a partial system; he is concerned with the total understanding of mankind.
Krishnamurti, coming from an awareness beyond boundaries, especially those of thought, observed that the world was suffering from a chronic war of mentally impelled -isms. Yet he was certain that anyone was capable, through one's own simple awareness, to observe any thought, and thus any
-ism, and thus capable of ceasing to identify with and clinging to it.
Sitting under an oak in Ojai, California, generally in the spring, he would simply suggest that by observing one's own mind and behavior, anyone could become free of one's slavery to systems. Free from the blindness of tribal thinking. And for Krishnamurti, this demanded, especially, not indulging in any form of Krishnamurti-ism. This, of course, left his followers holding onto a koan, a red-hot riddle like the liar's paradox of Bhartrihari: This sentence is a lie.
Krishnamurti wanted people to become aware of the -ism games they are enculturated into, relentlessly identify with, and thus impart to or inflict upon others. He wanted us to become free from the tyranny of thought, and therefore free of the past and better able to live in the moment.
Many of those who met with Krishnamurti were inspired by his clarity, which was crystalline. Yet many would nevertheless continue grooming their pet -ism(s).
Krishnamurti's point is compelling. After all, as humans, we do not want anything at all interposing itself between ourselves and our beloved. So why should we allow religious authorities to interject themselves between our souls and our Spirit?
Rather than endlessly parroting sophistries from scripture X or Y or Z, how much better to simply orient ourselves in the way of San Juan de La Cruz, who in one of his more independent moments wrote, "I had no other light, nor guide but the fire, the fire inside!"
Inspired by Krishnamurti's clarity about how blind acceptance of any -ism helps perpetuate a world of suffering and conflict, Pandiji, if he was called upon to help translate a scripture, wanted to do so in a way that was as non-theistic, as non-authoritarian, as meta-religious as possible.
Both he and Swamiji wanted to paraphrase and frame the scripture's techniques as universal truths that serious general reader of any faith or -ism could benefit from, like 112 doors to step through into ultimate reality.
Influencing the translators' orientation towards universality was the fact that a few years before Lakshmanjoo and Dina Nath collaborated on this translation, Lakshmanjoo had befriended Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, who, trained as a physicist, encouraged scientific research on the effects of meditation. Maharishi did not want to present the dignity of the transcendental state as something "shrouded in the garb of mysticism" but as something universal and objectively verifiable.
This resulted in the first findings on Transcendental Meditation, conducted by Robert Keith Wallace at UCLA and published in the February, 1972 issue of Scientific American.
Hundreds of other studies followed, one of the most impressive being Wallace's compilation of various effects of brainwave coherence: The Neurophysiology of Enlightenment.
Maharishi Mahesh enjoyed keeping company with illumined souls. One of these was Tat Wale Baba, of Rishikesh. I've not known of anyone who met him who was not uniquely impressed by him. For instance, the maker of this 1950s Italian film made in Rishikesh, India, who introduces Tat Wale Baba with the words, "Finally, a real yogi."
Similarly, Maharishi Mahesh was close with Swami Lakshmanjoo.
It is important to mention that Lakshmanjoo advised those transcending through Transcendental Meditation to continue on that path, explaining that "Kashmir Shaivism is exactly the truth explained by Mahesh Yogi, nothing else. It is why we [Maharishi and myself] have come very near [have become very close], both of us." By this, he meant that anyone opening one's awareness to the transcendental field abides in the home of all knowledge.
Lakshmanjoo also elaborated on the effortlessness of Transcendental Meditation, saying that because Maharishi's teaching begins from the crowning energy center, those who do Transcendental Meditation "have nothing to [do] . . . . You are there, established there." He added that when your Teacher is there, you are spontaneously, effortlessly established in that reality and that blessing is the greatness of having Maharishi as one's teacher."
Effortlessness in meditation is also a feature of Lakshmanjoo's tradition. He states in his introduction to this translation that these practices, these Modes, are really meant for advanced seekers who have reached that state where the need for laying down any formal discipline or technique ceases.
It is important to keep in mind that each of the Modes is not merely some epiphanic window to peer through like stained-glass windows in a church but a door to walk through.
A door to be left behind.
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Or each of these modes is like a magic trick.
As one of the few meta-Modes in the scripture suggests: Realize firmly that all (that the mind constructs) is evanescent like a magic show. You go to the eternal.
The verse, of course, applies also to all the Modes in the scripture, including itself.
The verse is, however, one of the more effortless, mode-less Modes, belonging to Sham-bhava, the Way or Phase of Shiva.
Both Swami Lakshmanjoo and Pandit Dina Nath Muju, then, took seriously a truth about these practices that Lakshmanjoo emphasizes in his introduction to the scripture:
▶▶ Any method, however subtle, can be only a result of a thought process—a product of mind. Hence it cannot touch that which is beyond thought, beyond mind. The mind can penetrate, at best, up to its own frontiers. Do what it will, it cannot go beyond its limits of time and space.
A method implies duality—a seeker and an object of search, a devotee and an object of
devotion. The ever-present, all-pervading, all-knowing Totality needs not to be beseeched or coaxed. It arrives unsought, like a fresh breeze from the mountaintop, when the mind is free from thought and seeking.
When an aspirant comes to the clear realization of this fact, the Shambhav-upaya (Way of Shiva) becomes An-upaya (No-Way, No-Method), or what may be translated as Beyond-Method.
In this state of non-dependence and effortless awareness, there is neither acceptance nor rejection, neither justification for nor identification with any feeling or thought.
In this void, the worshiper is the worshiped. This state is not beyond action and wisdom only, but beyond will, as well.
It simply is. ◀◀
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Krishnamurti, quite simply, had encouraged Pandiji as he had encouraged the young students attending his schools: to observe their own minds the way they might observe anything in nature.
That passion for rapt observation of the behavior of one's own mind, that choiceless awareness, even of one's own lizard-mind, constitutes, according to Krishnamurti, meditation.
Swamiji and especially Pandiji thought to frame the scripture in a similar, universally applicable light.
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Readers may sense that their collaborative attempt was not to march in philological lockstep with some assumed Golden Age text, but to distill the Sanskrit expressions down to practical and practicable phrases useful even to “barbarians” in distant, English-speaking lands.
I, being a Santa Barbarian, was invited to perform the final editing: to wrest the manuscript into that mythical beast sometimes called American Standard English while seeking to maintain the text’s yogic uniformity and diversity.
It was, after all, 1975. The West at that time was not yet overflowing with postural yoga practitioners flexing into various neo-Hindu, neo-Tantric forms. The fact that the Goddess feminism movement was gaining a following in 1970s America, was unknown to the translators.
They did know, however, that the United States was overflowing with those practicing meditation overflowingly.
And so it was that I sat down with these ancient nuggets of yogic wisdom as I would with a freshly opened box of chocolates.
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One does not, however, edit chocolates.
I recognized that any one of the 112 Modes of the scripture opens to a luminous pool of awareness wherein waves of form fold into and pulse forth from formlessness.
I began to perceive that the scripture's Modes of knowing arise resonantly and luminously from this pool, so that when one of the waves rests lightly upon the mind and begins to resonate and ripple across the space of the Heart, one suddenly and unexpectedly passes beyond wave into a state where no technique is even possible.
That is to say: the scripture is prismactic. With any one of the Modes, one progresses from the Mode in the sense of a Way of Doing Something, to the Mode as Form of Energy. And that Form of Energy transforms into the Mode as a State of Being indwelling the waves of wonder, bliss, light, awe, rapture. .
Often, this sweet spot reposes between any two impulses of action: such as the vertiginous gap between rising and falling . . .
I learned, in this way, that any one of the scripture's many Modes of Meditation is a finite infinity. Any Mode familiarizes one with the most tender, nascent, infant impulses of pure consciousness between any two points of awareness.
Any one Mode then, fully realized, yields the infinite fruit of all the others.
Thus, it is not necessary to pursue every mode. Plumbing the depths of any one Mode is sufficient. This is the Truth behind Swamiji's statement that "Maharishi is teaching Kashmir Shaivism, nothing else."
I offer here my thanks to Swami Lakshmanjoo, to Pandit Dina Nath Muju, to all the Kashmiri Pandits, and to all of Swamiji's closest circle who are part and parcel of all those who have transmitted this wisdom down through the ages.
Chief among these now are John and Denise Hughes and family, who long ago uprooted themselves from their activities at MIU and UCSB in Santa Barbara and replanted themselves in Kashmir, where for decades they studied under the able aegis of their Swamiji.
Swamiji and Dina Nath wanted this translation to be available to as many as possible. Therefore he asked John Hughes to record his comments on each verse.
Swami Lakshmanjoo and Pandit Muju's translation appears on the REPOSE web site. I offer it not as a representative of the Kashmiri tradition but as a meditator and Religious Studies scholar fascinated by the scripture's prismatic, almost peacock-like display of formless, shoreless awareness.
No translation, however, will ever be entirely finished. This is because every translation is an act of faith, an act of writing dependent on an act of reading. For every translation involves authors, texts, and readers: all evolving within an ever-changing linguistic universe.
The flow of meaning from the original author to the reader who is the translator depends on the knowledge and level of consciousness of each. After all, each supplies half the meaning. Each particular reader reads differently, bringing a different storehouse of impressions and thus different pre-understandings and misunderstandings.
As poet Jose Emelio Pacheco reminds us, reading is a meeting.
This meeting between writer and reader involves intimacies exchanged in a private place, and usually between two strangers.
In this meeting on the page, the writer sketches a few lines. The reader fills in the sketch -- even if the "writer" is assumed to be Shiva.
If the author is Shiva speaking to his better half, Shakti, she listens patiently, politely, and without much comment. Then, at long last, she simply throws her arms around Shiva's neck to receive and offer meanings in a more unitive mode.
On more mundane levels of understanding, each reader reads herself into what she is reading. And that defines the miracle of reading: that by reading the words of an author the reader has never met, she can sometimes see her very own most intimate self mirrored in the writer's words.
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No translation, however, will ever be entirely finished. This is because every translation is an act of faith, an act of writing dependent on an act of reading. For every translation involves authors, texts, and readers: all evolving within an ever-changing linguistic universe.
The flow of meaning from the original author to the reader who is the translator depends on the knowledge and level of consciousness of each. After all, each supplies half the meaning. Each particular reader reads differently, bringing a different storehouse of impressions and thus different pre-understandings and misunderstandings.
As poet Jose Emelio Pacheco reminds us, reading is a meeting.
This meeting between writer and reader involves intimacies exchanged in a private place, and usually between two strangers.
In this meeting on the page, the writer sketches a few lines. The reader fills in the sketch -- even if the "writer" is assumed to be Shiva.
If the author is Shiva speaking to his better half, Shakti, she listens patiently, politely, and without much comment. Then, at long last, she simply throws her arms around Shiva's neck to receive and offer meanings in a more unitive mode.
On more mundane levels of understanding, each reader reads herself into what she is reading. And that defines the miracle of reading: that by reading the words of an author the reader has never met, she can sometimes see her very own most intimate self mirrored in the writer's words.
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