Svetasvataropanisad by Devadatta Kali

Author:Devadatta Kali
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780892545858
Publisher: Nicolas-Hays, Inc.

14

sahasraśīrā purua sahasrāka sahasrapāt /

sa bhümi viśvato vtvā aty atihad daśāgulam //

14. Having a thousand heads, a thousand eyes, and a thousand feet, and surrounding the earth on all sides, this Person extends beyond it by ten fingers′ breadth.

This and the following mantra are identical to gveda 10.90.1–2, the first two verses of the Puruasūkta, a highly significant hymn that extols the Supreme Being as the primordial reality and omnipresent, life-giving consciousness.

This transcendent-yet-immanent universal Self is said to have a thousand heads, a thousand eyes, and a thousand feet. The ancient metaphor means that it possesses innumerable organs of thinking, perceiving, and acting. It is a single consciousness that experiences the untold vastness and variety of its own creation, refracted through the awareness of countless individual creatures.

However far we look across the broad expanse of this earth, in whichever direction, there is no place where the divine presence is not. It encompasses the whole world and saturates it through and through. Yet we must not forget that this ever-present, shining reality is not limited to the forms of creation. Here the verse reveals an extraordinary truth, although the language that expresses it may strike us at first as puzzling: this divine presence (purua) extends beyond the earth by ten fingers' breadth.

The gvedasahitā is replete with such figures of speech, and the meanings of many are lost to us today. In the present instance we are fortunate to have in the Śvetāśvataropaniadvtti an interpretation that is not only convincing but compellingly so. In the human body the heart lies at a distance of ten fingers’ breadth above the navel. This is the heart of awareness, the center of consciousness described in the previous mantra. By making the fragmented awareness of ordinary experience one-pointed—by uniting all the mental powers, directing them inward, and merging them in the single inner light of the heart that is their source—the meditator can reach beyond the multiplicity of the world and enter into the ineffable peace of the pure Self. Miraculously that blissful core of reality is but the breadth of ten fingers away.

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