Song of the Universal Mother
While visiting a small island in the middle of Japan called Inoshima, where there is an image and temple of Sarasvati, I had a special experience and wrote it down. I became habituated to superficial appearances, helplessly causing me to feel happy and unhappy like a child's dependence on its mother. My childish nature ran after that Universal Mother further and further until all of a sudden my preconception of Her disappeared and I became afraid and froze in my tracks. Simultaneously I hoped She would reappear and yearned with anticipation. My panicky mind followed every stimulus and became tired. Within the spaciousness of conceptual exhaustion the voice of voidness told me that I myself was the Mother, and She sang this song:
Good and bad outer appearances of existence are always changing and uncertain.
The deceiving and seductive movement you are perceiving is actually the dance of the wrathful and aggressive female cannibal. Wanting to possess her, you run after the assumed form of the Mother.
What's the use of torturing your body and mind?
Small child of the eight consciousnesses (1) who is deluded by the illusion of habitually contrived karmic existence,
Don't think that the Mother is outside and search far and wide.
In the place of the dissolution of all phenomena
The true face of the Universal Mother is revealed without fabrication or effort.
Small child cheated by illusion, if you want to see your true Mother's face
Abandon your crazy temperament which is running around and screaming.
Try to purify dualistic grasping towards things and ideas.
The Mother is not far, not outside of you.
Outer appearances mask the Mother's true face.
Small boy, your grasping is like a cataract in the eye, blurring your vision.
You are caught by perception - the seductive dance of the cannibal woman.
What a pity to experience happiness and unhappiness, laughter and tears.
Totality, the unfabricated nature, is the face of the Universal Mother.
Realizing that in non-duality there is no separation between subject and object,
And that the truth of the Universal Mother of Reality is free from theories of oneness or pluralism,
You must cultivate understanding, do the practice, experience and realize this by yourself.
Due to your mental habituation to illusory duality,
Deceived by appearances - the dance of the seductive and scary cannibal,
Her destructive gestures creating self and other;
In the end you will see that you have been deluded all along, always engaged with the suffering of hope and fear.
The three doors (2) are like waves in motion to be subsided,
So let these three rest however you like,
And the inexhaustible treasure of wish-fulfilling gems - the three Kayas (3)
From which you have never been separate throughout the three times (4) will be glimpsed.
Self-luminous clarity - the natural wisdom child free from conceptuality is pristine awareness,
Liberated from the net of duality conditioning body and mind,
Upon the void and vast lap of the Universal Mother
Happiness and suffering are celebrated in one taste.
The original Tibetan text was translated into English by the author with the assistance of Ed Heckerman in November 1994.
1 The six aggregates of consciousness - the consciousness of the eye, ear, nose, tongue, body, and intellect, with the addition of the consciousness of the ground-of-all and the consciousness of the intellect endowed with conflicting emotions from which the other six arise. Extracted from p149-50, 156-57 glossary of enumerations, "The Nyingma School Of Tibetan Buddhism" (by H.H. Dudjom Rinpoche), Volume Two: Reference Material by Gyurme Dorje and Matthew Kapstein, Wisdom Publications, Boston, 1991.
2 body, speech, and mind
3 The three Buddha-bodies: The body of reality (chos-sku, Skt. dharmakaya), the body of perfect rapture (longs-spyod rdzogs-pa'i sku Skt. sambhogakaya) and the emanational body (sprul-pa'i sku, Skt. nirmanakaya). p. 110 op.cit.
4 past, present, and future
