The Two Lilas and the Endless Worlds

 

Your life and your dreams are both made of stories. You won't forget this if you immerse yourself in one of the greatest storybooks ever made. The earliest version of the Yogavasistha was probably compiled in the seventh century. Its original title was the Mokshapaya, or Way of Release. Authorship has been attributed to the sage Valmiki, also credited with producing the epic Ramayana. The voice we hear is that of another sage, Vasistha. He takes on the task of restoring the spirits and the will to action of the boy prince Rama of Ayodhya. Hence the full title of the text, The great story of Rama as told by the sage Vasistha in order to expound his philosophy of Yoga. Rama’s services are urgently required to defend gods and humans against an army of demons, but he has slumped into lethargy and despair. 
    Rama asks the sage, “What is the point and purpose of this useless existence?” The whole dialogue that follows - filling more than 27,000 verses and powered by sixty-four extraordinary stories - is a response to that question. Vasistha charts the path to release from vasanas, the habitual tendencies and karmic traces that hold the soul in bondage to the wheel of repetition. He describes the way of ascension through higher worlds to the realm of pure consciousness. But this is not only a guide to moksha, or liberation. It is a call to re-engagement with the world, to live the bigger story.
    Vasistha is my kind of teacher. He offers real philosophy, deep as Advaita Vedanta or the Upanishads, but he does not teach through admonishment or abstraction; he teaches by telling really good stories. 
    One of his core teachings is that "this universe is but a long dream...There is no real difference between the waking state of reality and the dream state. What is real in one is unreal in the other - hence, these states are essentially of the same nature." [1]
     Beyond other systems of yoga, the yoga of Vasistha hinges on seeing the world as a dream. [2] In order to be truly awake, one must fully understand sleep and dream. The world appears and disappears, realities come and go like dream states.
    Make that worlds. There are countless worlds, including universes concealed inside stones or subatomic particles. "In every atom there are worlds within worlds." The Sanskrit term is jagadanantya, which literally means "the endlessness of worlds".[3] Hugh Everett III might want to join the conversation at thsi point; he was the atheist proponent of the Many Worlds Interpretation in quantum mechanics which holds that the universe is constantly splitting into parallel versions.
    The sage continues: "No one can count the number of universes (and consequent creations) that are arising at this minute from the Supreme Being. The mind that humans possess is ever fluctuating and gives rise to all things in these visible worlds. This external appearance which exists as a reality is a creation of human desires. It is as unreal as a goblin shown to terrify children. This world is as unstable as a stool made of banana leaves.”
    The longest story in the Yogavasistha, and one of the most wildly entertaining, is the tale of Lila, or rather The Two Lilas. Queen Lila, fearing the death of her beloved husband, King Padma, prays to the goddess Sarasvati that they should not be separated. When the goddess appears after the death of the king, she shows Lila how to preserve his body while traveling to find his soul essence in different realms. Lila is excited though incredulous when the goddess tells her than among other life experiences she and her husband have shared is the partnership of Visastha - no less - and his wife in a universe within a tiny space. How can Lila know this for sure? The goddess explains that she can go there and see for herself. But for this kind of travel, Lila must affirm to herself, “I shall leave my body here and take a body of light. With that body, like the scent of incense, I shall go to the house of the holy man." 
    Once Lila learns to drop her physical body and travel in a subtle body, she embarks on a series of fantastic journeys, involving parallel lives, reincarnation, mind-created worlds and the ascent to pure consciousness beyond the illusions of form. Lila and Sarasvati "roamed freely in their wisdom bodies. Though it seemed that they had traveled millions of miles in space, they were still in the same 'room' but on another plane of consciousness." 
   They fly to the top of Mount Meru, they see spaceships ang gods and celestial dancers and the abode of the creator. In a marvelous skirl of humor, the narrator tells us "like a couple of mosquitoes they roamed all these planes."
    In a scene made for big-screen sci fantasy, Lila meets her double - also a queen, in another life story - in a palace where they watch a futuristic battle. Rockets burst into a thousand warheads and gunships like elephants rain fire from the sky. "What looked like elephants had been propelled into the air from the battlefield and they were raining fire on the city." It seems a ninth century author is able to foresee twenty-first century battles or Star Wars scenarios from the ancient future. In this world at war King Padma is embodied as another king, Viduratha, who will be slain in battle because he has set his mind on liberation, not victory. “Whatever vision arises within one’s self is immediately experienced." 
    Lila wants to know why there is an exact double of herself in this scene. They can see and interact with each other though others may see only one of therm. Sarasvati explains that it was the longing of her deceased husband, Padma, that generated Lila’s double in this world where Padma has been reborn as Viduratha. “Due to excessive love towards you your husband Padma thought, at the moment of death, of enjoying your company without being ever separated. Accordingly he was able to get you here. Whatever is thought of by one at the time of his agonizing death, that will be realized by him afterwards."
    We are given a fascinating description of soul transfer, or body swapping. After the death of Viduratha, Sarasvati puts his jiva - his soul - into the embalmed corpse of the first Lila’s dead husband, Padma.

             Through the nose

Saraswati, removed the grip she had on the jiva of Viduratha which therefore entered into the nasal orifice of Padma's body in the form of prana and permeated the whole parched up body. Whereupon blood began to circulate freely throughout and the deceased king woke up, rubbing his eyes. Padma woke up and asked who they were.

     Lila is eventually able to remember eight hundred of her past lives and step in and out of lives that her parallel selves are living beyond the wheel of time.
     We are given hints as to the nature of the true life teacher. Sarasvati tells Lila she is more than a goddess; she is higher consciousness. Beyond the play of reality and illusion, waking and dreaming, there is the limitless nondual field of pure consciousness. This is the only reality. Both liberation and enlightened reengagement with the world require the jiva to understand this fully.
     Which brings us to Vasistha's most important teaching You must transcend the world but then return and embrace it. The aim is to become the jivanmukta, the living liberated being, who can engage with the world without being entangled with it. Lila means play. Beyond the gloom of the world, seek the divine play. If life is a dream, grow your ability to change the dream or create a new one.
     Vasistha’s purpose in telling stories to Rama is not only to awaken him to the fluid interplay of reality and illusion, and the conditions for moksha (liberation) but to help him acquire the non-attachment that will enable him to act in the world without succumbing to its entrapments “doing yet not doing what has to be done” The stories show that our lives are shaped by the mind’s capacity to create and sustain reality. Existence is a dreamlike projection of consciousness. Boundaries between waking life, dreams, past and future lives, and parallel realities are fluid.
     So, reality is not as fixed as we tend to tell ourselves. When we recognize that much of what we accept as real is a mental construct, we can change the construct.
     If we see life and death as illusions, perhaps we can bring more clarity and courage to our actions. Why fear death? And why get stuck in the conditions of a single life experience? We are many. Lila identified eight hundred incarnations before she stopped counting. How many doubles and counterparts does any one of us have, whether as aspects of our present personality or transpersonal counterparts in different times or dimensions?
    We are led to assume that all of this will bring Rama into the field to fight the demons. Be in the world not of it. Knowing that the world is an illusion does not mean withdrawing from it. We want to navigate with awareness and to live with awareness and non-attachment, lucid in the dream of life, taking part in life’s play while remembering that it is a playground. 
     Vasistha teaches us that will (paurusa) can overcome fate (daiva) when exerted by a mind that has awakened. “Those who have removed the veil from reality can imagine things so precisely that those mental perceptions are actually experienced.” Certain people, of whom Vasishtha is one, have the power of making their dreams, become physical objects- objects that did not existed until a powerful dreamer dreamed them into reality. [4] Don't forget

Your real life is a dream and the dream is real

Your real life is an illusion and the illusion is real

 

CODA: A Crown Prince Recommends a Book of Stories to Take You Beyond This World

In the Chester Beatty Library in Dublin is a Persian translation of the Yogavasistha with 41 miniature paintings, probably commissioned by the first Mughal emperor Akbar and completed under the patronage of his son and successor Jahangir. There is a fascinating note in Jahangir's own hand in the margin of folio 1b. A recent translator gives us this version:

"God is great! - This book Ğög Bäsistha [sic] which belongs to the stories of the ancients, (and) which I translated in the time when I was crown-prince ...is a very good book. Whenever somebody hears it with the ear of understanding, and if he considers only one percent of it, it is surely to be hoped that he will make the bațin ['what is beyond this world'] his destination by the instrument of the zahir ['what belongs to the apparent world']" [5]

From his time as crown prince, Jahangiir not only claims full credit for the translation but pierces to the main intent of this astonishing Hindu text, where philosophy is animated by amazing tales of doubles, parallel worlds and oneiric adventures. The yoga of Vasistha leads to awakening to ultimate reality "beyond this world" through the magic of story - and then guides the hearer to act in the world with the clarity and courage of non-attachment. To hear or read just one of Vasistha's stories, it's been said, is to become enlightened.

 

References: 

1. Swami Venkatesananda. Vasistha’s Yoga. (Albany NY: SUNY Press 1993) p. 71. Unless otherwise mentioned, all quotations from the Yogavasistha in this essay are from this 800-page abridgment.

2. Christopher Key Chapple gives an elegant summary of the seven states in Vasistha’s yoga: “Vasiṣṭha’s sevenfold Yoga begins with restraint from activity (nivṛtti) leading to deep thinking (vicāraṇa) and non-attachment (asaṃsaṅga). After these three preliminaries Vasiṣṭha proclaims that in the fourth state one sees the entire world as if it were a dream. For Vasiṣṭha, this process of dissolution holds great lessons. Is the world real? According to Vasiṣṭha, the answer is a resounding no. Once one sees through the fixity of any given circumstance. In the fifth Yoga, one can descend (or ascend) into the realm of an experience of non-duality, wherein one operates as if in a state of deep sleep, translucent and transparent (advaita suṣupta). This catapults the individual into a state of true freedom (jīvan mukta), preparing one for the seventh Yoga, one’s final release from the body (videha mukta) at the time of death. Unlike any of the other Yoga systems, the Yogavāsiṣṭha process hinges on seeing the world as a dream.” Christopher Key Chapple.  “Worlds of Dream in the Yogavāsiṣṭha: Virtual and Virtuous Realities” Embodied Philosophy 2020 

3. Garth Bregman. “The Existence of an Endless Number of Worlds Jagadānantya in Mokṣopāya and the Many-Worlds Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics” in  Christopher Key Chapple and Arindam Chakrabarti (eds) Engaged Emancipation: Mind, Morals, and Make-Believe in the Moksopāya (Yogavāsistha) (Albany: SUNY Press, 2015) p.97.

4. Wendy Doniger O’Flaherty.“The Dream Narrative and the Indian Doctrine of Illusion in Daedalus  vol. 111, no. 3 (Summer, 1982),p.102

5. Heike Franke. “Akbar's Yogavāsiştha in the Chester Beatty Library” Zeitschrift der Deutschen Morgenländischen Gesellschaft 161(2) (January 2011) 359-375

 

Illustration: Two Lilas with the Goddess. RM + AI

 

To Find the Face We Had Before the World Was Made

 

I'm looking for the face I had
Before the world was made.

So W.B. Yeats declared, in his poem, "Before the World Was Made". What could he mean?

The couplet is with me as I read about the life of Yeshe Tsogyel, the Guru Dakini sometimes described as the Mother of Tibetan Buddhism. The first pages of her biography, channeled by an ecstatic 18th century yogin named Taksham Nuden Dorje, put us right  there: looking at a face that existed before the world. 

When we first meet Tsogyel she is in the form of the goddess Sarasvati, revered by Hindus and Buddhists alike for her learning, her devotion to sadhana or religious practice, and her lovely singing voice. As Sarasvati, she says to  Padmasambhava, known as Guru Rinpoche, and celebrated in Tibet as the Second Buddha, "It is time to project an emanation into the savage world." This confirms the Guru's desire to bring a female partner to Tibet to complete his mission of converting that wild and warring country - a militaristic empire at the time - to the dharma teachings. 

"Let the fire burn!" exclaims the Guru.
"We are burning together! “says the Dakini.

We are told that “the Guru's vajra and the Dakini's lotus are joined" and they enter the trance of union. They are surrounded and protected by the goddesses of the five Buddha families, and legions of fierce deities and dakinis. Beams of light blaze from where their bodies are joined and rush towards Tibet like shooting stars, to enter a royal couple who are joined in lovemaking.

The name of the mother-to-be is Getso. In the arms of the prince, Getso sees a swarm of golden bees, Making the sound of lute music, they enter the prince through the fontanel. In the same moment he sees a vision of the princess with three eyes holding a beautiful young girl. The visions multiply and spill into the world. Lightning flares, thunder rolls, a spring near the castle becomes a lake. And dreams flower into majesty.

In the night the prince dreams of an eight-petalled lotus that casts light across the multiverse. A coral stupa rises from the crown of his head - where his wife saw the bees fly in - and multitudes come from all over the world to pay homage or try to steal it. He dreams that he plays a lute, and the music reverberates through countless universes. In her dreams, the princess - now pregnant - is given a rosary of coral and conch shell beads from which red and white ambrosia streams in a never-ending fountain..

Nine months later, Getso gives birth without pain to a baby girl who already has waist length hair. When she is offered the traditional knob of yak butter, Tsogyel sits up in a half-lotus posture and explains herself:

I am an apparitional being, a yogini.
After eating immaterial essences for so long
The memory of coarse food has vanished But I will eat to complete my mother's happiness.

The Dakini proceeds to swallow the whole knob of butter with one gulp, and with it "the whole of samsara”. She is now fully in the world.

This can all be read as a magnificent tale of the descent of spirit from Light through Imaginal realms, in changing vehicles of consciousness - though here I am at risk of forsaking Buddhist terminology - to settle in a vehicle in the realm of Illusion known as the physical world. 

It is time to project an emanation into the savage world. Now that's a way to embark on a journey towards incarnation. If we can presume to make some part of the story our own, it may give us clues to how we can pursue Yeats' intent: to find the face we had before the world was made.

I have drawn here from a remarkable work by Keith Dowman, Sky Dancer: The Secret Life and Teachings of the Lady Yeshe Tsogyel (Ithaca NY: Snow Lion, 1996). In a lively and creative translation, Dowman gives us the life of Yeshe Tsogyel delivered as a "mind-treasure" to a yogin on "black days in a forest hermitage". Tsogyel is credited with seeding many termas (“treasures”) on behalf of Padmansambhava, and some of her own as well. These hidden treasures might be concealed in a landscape, in the clouds, in a dream or in a mind, to be revealed at the right times across generations. Taksham claimed to have received no less than Tsogyel's autobiography, and this is how it reads in Dowman’s version. As Dowman tells us, he “took poetic license to use the first person throughout” and to “convey the precise meaning and feeling-tone of the original in fluent English, rather than to reproduce the peculiarities of the Tibetan style and diction.” In my opinion, he has succeeded brilliantly.

Far beyond the Buddhist community, the story of Yeshe Tsogyel will be of compelling interest to those of us who want to reclaim the suppressed history of women and contribute to the restoration of the Divine Feminine. If you are drawn to the Dakini, you may want  to compare the oral telling dictated by Tarthang Tulku in Mother of Knowledge, The Enlightenment of Yeshe Tsogyel (Berkeley: Dharma Publishing. 1983) and the classic early text by Namkahi Nyingpo and Gyalwa  Changchub, Lady of the Lotus Born. The Life and Enlightenment of Yeshe Tsogyal, translated by the Padmakara Translation Group (Boston: Shambala, 1999)

“The Dakini Yeshe Tsogyal is the mother of all Buddhas– the Wisdom Consort of Guru Padmasambhava. Yeshe Tsogyal possesses inconceivable primordial wisdom, compassion, and the power of protection and manifestation of the enlightened activities…From a historical point of view, it is due to Dakini Yeshe Tsogyal’s compassion, wisdom and power of total recall that we have the entire teachings of Guru Rinpoche intact." - Lama Chödak Gyatso Nubpa (1951-2009)