meditation 51
When bathed in fluctuant light, we may become entrained with its rhythmic play.
Swami Lakshmanjoo, when illuminating a verse of this scripture, will entrain with similar verses in sibling scriptures.
In Verse 51 of this scripture, an important term, सबलिकृते (sabalikṛte), denotes something multicolored . . . variegated . . . shapeshifting . . . as when the singularity of the sun's or the moon's light, for instance, becomes playfully multiform, multicolored, marbled, variegated, dappled–as when waves of light play across the bottoms of pools.
The word sabalikṛte combines sabal (meaning “many” or “various”) with kṛte (meaning “made” or “created”). The etymology itself points to the mystery of the one being the many, nondual and dual.
Perhaps, in his comments on this verse, Swami Lakshmanjoo entrains with Chapter 21 of the Mālinīvijayottaratantra, which details meditation on the moon's light in the sky and as reflected in water, and Chapter 22, which focuses on the light of the sun.
There are various types of variegated, shimmering, dappled light: one boldly patterned in contrasting colors, such as the stripes of a tiger prowling through bamboo, rays of sunlight or moonlight penetrating deep forest, sunlight dancing through sheltering foliage, leaf shadows of quaking aspen.
Each wave, shimmering through space, moving with the fluidly of dance, continually refers back to its womb of light—the eternally implied brilliance of consciousness.
As in the Cole Porter song, "You (as shoreless awareness) are the One. Only you beneath the moon and under the sun.
It makes no difference where you are
When gazing steadily
on any space
such as a lake or river
shimmering
with the light of the sun,
or a room aswim in wavering flames of candlelight,
or among bamboo
the stripes
of a stalking tiger
dappled with moonlight –
You, your Shoreless Awareness, is the One.
Glory be to God for dappled things –
For skies of couple-colour as a brinded cow;
For rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim;
Fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls; finches’ wings;
Landscape plotted and pieced – fold, fallow, and plough . . .
Dizzying twinkles of stars dappled against ebony sky –
Of apple blossoms scenting flowing hair.
The poet William Butler Yeats was friends with Walter Evans-Wentz, who wrote Tibetan Yoga and Secret Doctrines and The Fairy Faith in Celtic Lands.
On patterned light, Yeats penned these haunting lines:
The Song of Wandering Aengus
I went out to the hazel wood,
Because a fire was in my head,
And cut and peeled a hazel wand,
And hooked a berry to a thread;
And when white moths were on the wing,
And moth-like stars were flickering out,
I dropped the berry in a stream
And caught a little silver trout.
When I had laid it on the floor
I went to blow the fire a-flame,
But something rustled on the floor,
And someone called me by my name:
It had become a glimmering girl
With apple blossom in her hair
Who called me by my name and ran
And faded through the brightening air.
Though I am old with wandering
Through hollow lands and hilly lands,
I will find out where she has gone,
And kiss her lips and take her hands;
And walk among long dappled grass,
And pluck till time and times are done,
The silver apples of the moon,
The golden apples of the sun.
Source: The Wind Among the Reeds (1899)
Henri Martin
A tiger comes to mind. The twilight here
Exalts the vast and busy Library
And seems to set the bookshelves back in gloom;
Innocent, ruthless, bloodstained, sleek
It wanders through its forest and its day
Printing a track along the muddy banks
Of sluggish streams whose names it does not know
(In its world there are no names or past
Or time to come, only the vivid now)
And makes its way across wild distances
Sniffing the braided labyrinth of smells
And in the wind picking the smell of dawn
And tantalizing scent of grazing deer;
Among the bamboo's slanting stripes I glimpse
The tiger's stripes and sense the bony frame
Under the splendid, quivering cover of skin.
Curving oceans and the planet's wastes keep us
Apart in vain; from here in a house far off
In South America I dream of you,
Track you, O tiger of the Ganges' banks.
It strikes me now as evening fills my soul
That the tiger addressed in my poem
Is a shadowy beast, a tiger of symbols
And scraps picked up at random out of books,
A string of labored tropes that have no life,
And not the fated tiger, the deadly jewel
That under sun or stars or changing moon
Goes on in Bengal or Sumatra fulfilling
Its rounds of love and indolence and death.
To the tiger of symbols I hold opposed
The one that's real, the one whose blood runs hot
As it cuts down a herd of buffaloes,
And that today, this August third, nineteen
Fifty-nine, throws its shadow on the grass;
But by the act of giving it a name,
By trying to fix the limits of its world,
It becomes a fiction not a living beast,
Not a tiger out roaming the wilds of earth.
We'll hunt for a third tiger now, but like
The others this one too will be a form
Of what I dream, a structure of words, and not
The flesh and one tiger that beyond all myths
Paces the earth. I know these things quite well,
Yet nonetheless some force keeps driving me
In this vague, unreasonable, and ancient quest,
And I go on pursuing through the hours
Another tiger, the beast not found in verse.
Jorge Luis Borges "The Other Tiger"
