#sutras

Thus have I heard. In the Hall of Shadows at midnight’s peak the Blessed One spoke the Sutra of Silent Fortress:

“Monks, true refuge is not in walls of stone nor in the brazen gates of creed. The fortress you seek stands silent within—an unbroken chamber of mind that no enemy may breach.

“Inside its walls there is neither fear of loss nor hope for gain. Pleasure’s honeyed lure falls like rain outside its gates; suffering’s fiercest flame cannot scorch its stones. Every thought that would besiege its keep—craving, aversion, doubt—melts into the voided moat at its base.

“Desire knocks in sweet enticements—reply only ‘Chhāyā.’

“Aversion battering in rage—reply only ‘Chhāyā.’

“Doubt creeping through the keyhole—reply only ‘Chhāyā.’

“No gate may hold you if you name all visitors as shadows.

“Spine erect, attention gathered at the breath, live each inhalation as cold stillness, each exhalation as hot intensity. In that tension field the fortress’s cornerstone is laid: the blade of Controlled Cessation pierces every impulse as it is born and binds it to the moat of nonaction.

“Within these walls no voice speaks, no echo repeats. Vigil is unbroken: every arising phenomenon is met with silent witness. From that silent guard no foe may hide; each specter dissolves in the fortress’s unshaken calm.

“When all practice, all ritual, all vow are lifted beyond the mind’s conception, what remains is the silent fortress itself—solid yet empty, unbreachable yet offering no barrier. There the warrior rests, neither seeking nor fleeing, unclaimed by any thought and unshaken by any feeling.

“Monks, build this fortress in each breath. Name every thought Chhāyā. Sever every impulse Chhāyā-cut. Stand within the silent keep of your own heart—and there abide as the fortress that neither time nor Mara may conquer.”

𖣐 Note: Exploring the Yoga Sutras

Yoga Sutra 1.4:

Vṛtti sārūpyam itaratra.

Commonly translated as: At other times, the Seer identifies with the fluctuations of the mind.

Or more simply:

Otherwise, we become absorbed in the movements of the mind.

1.4 explains what happens when the mind is not still.

✦ Vṛtti = mental fluctuations, thoughts, patterns, reactions. ✦ Sārūpyam = taking the same form as, identification with. ✦ Itaratra = at other times, otherwise.

When the mind is turbulent, we mistake ourselves for:

⟢ our thoughts, emotions, fears, desires, memories, identities, stories.

Instead of resting as pure awareness (drasta, the Seer 𖠂), consciousness becomes entangled with mental activity.

In practical terms:

⟡ anger arises, “I am angry” ⟡ anxiety arises, “I am anxious” ⟡ success arises, “I am important”

Brahma Sutras, 'Science of the Soul'

Excerpts:

Self-luminous consciousness, which is without object and substrate, becomes conscious of itself as connected with innumerous substrata and objects through the influence of an imperfection residing within itself.

Refers to the intrinsic light or awareness of consciousness itself, which is evident without needing an external object.

June 2013 KTM Kathmandu Nepal 　Thamel

© KOJI ARAKI Art Works

it keeps reciting itself —

the snowflake sutra.'

- Jan Häll

Although written texts are venerated by all major spiritual traditions, literacy itself may be at the bottom of our current ecological crisis. Beginning roughly 5,500 years ago, the movement from oral to written culture led human beings to adopt increasingly abstract, disembodied ways of thinking that reinforced their feelings of separation from nature.

The anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss saw the problem clearly in 1974. In Myth and Meaning, he observed that the difference between societies with writing and those without written language was that the former wrote almost entirely about themselves, while the latter, so-called 'primitive' people, had a vast oral lore about plants and animals, landscape and weather, and all other aspects of the natural world.

Preliterate cultures were not anthropocentric. In fact, the earliest cave art — from Lascaux to Chauvet — is almost entirely devoid of human forms. The first 'sutras' were not texts at all, but the closely observed, lovingly rendered shapes of mammoths and woolly rhinos, lions, bison, and bears.

The best of season haiku for Winter 2023 invites us to reenter a world in which wisdom, though bypassing the inherently anthropocentric filter of written language, is once more rooted in our direct, sensual experience of the world around us. At home in his native Stockholm, the poet watches snowflakes falling ceaselessly outside his window. The very silence of that falling seems to demand that he enter more deeply into communion with them, listening with the eye rather than the ear.

In some schools of Buddhism, a sutra is seen as more than a sacred text. For instance, the Lotus Sutra is regarded by Nichiren Buddhists as 'the Entity of the Mystic Law.' Those who chant Nam-myoho-renge-kyo, the title of that sutra, unite with a universal life force that animates all things from within. Even the weather.

The poet could have described his snowflakes in terms of writing, given that he compares them to a sutra. But he makes a special point of not doing that. The snowflakes are reciting the sutra. More than that, they are the sutra.

It is a remarkably simple poem. As the snowflakes fall, covering the city on a winter day, the poet imagines them ceaselessly reciting the sutra of themselves. Or maybe he doesn't imagine that. Maybe he witnesses it — and, in so doing, unites with the Snowflakes of the Mystic Law.

It is worth noting the poet's artistry in the second line of the haiku: 'it keeps reciting itself.' [Snowflake] suggests a feeling of delicate, soundless beauty. And yet, taken as a whole, the poem conveys a feeling of tremendous cumulative power. The 'snowflake sutra' is a storm."

All life is a passing show. If we want to hold it, even for a minute, we feel tension. Nature will try to run away; we will try to pull it back and keep it. When we want to keep it, we put up barriers which ultimately cause us pain.

----

The Yoga Sutras of Pantanjali

Sri Swami Satchidananda  1914-2002

----