67. Saraha: The Deathless Body Treasury Diamond Song
A Sourcebook in Global Philosophy - Mohammed Rustom
Lara Braitstein [+]
McGill University
Julia Stenzel [+]
Kathmandu University
Description
Saraha is among the best-known of the 84 Great Adepts (mahāsiddhas) of Indic Buddhism and is famed for his antinomian lifestyle and teaching through poetic utterances. His poems combine earthy imagery with esoteric meditation instructions, interspersed with biting critiques of hypocrisy and empty ritual in any number of religious traditions. His pithy verses may be most helpfully understood as instructions to be recalled while engaging in practice. The poem translated here as The Deathless Body Treasury Diamond Song circles back repeatedly to the theme of nonduality; the inseparability of samsara (cyclic existence) and nirvana (the state beyond suffering), appearance and emptiness, activity and stillness, thinking and non-thinking, and so forth. For Saraha, the aim of the practitioner is not to abandon the busyness of one for the peace of the other. Instead, he demonstrates in his words and with his life example that no phenomena are excluded from the experience of the ultimate. Inseparability, nonduality, and equanimity are words that point to the experience of all phenomena having the single taste of awakening. The details of various experiences differ wildly but not so the nature of experience itself. When the natural wakefulness of a moment of mind meets any stimulus, the resultant co-emergence is an opportunity to taste awakening.