The Boat of Kanha: The Mahāsiddha Kṛṣṇācāryapāda and His Song of the River
A Song Sung at the Edge of the River
Twelve centuries ago, in the green delta where the great rivers of Bengal braid themselves together before they pour into the sea, a yogin sang a song about a boat. He had walked on water and sunk beneath it. He had pressed his foot into rock and seen royal canopies float above his head. He had been scolded by ḍākinīs, humbled by a weaver, refused by a girl beneath a lychee tree, and brought to the threshold of death by his own pride. And at the very end, with seven days left to live, he sang of crossing the ocean of existence, not by miracle, but in a small boat rowed by five Buddhas, with emptiness and compassion as his two companions and his own mind at the helm.
His name was Kṛṣṇācāryapāda, the Black Master, called Kanha or Kāhna in the old tongue of Bengal and Odisha. He stands among the Eighty-Four Mahāsiddhas as one of the most human of them all: brilliant, restless, gifted with every power, and for most of his life a stranger to the one thing his powers could not give him. His story is the story of how a great practitioner was slowly, mercilessly, tenderly stripped of everything that was not the nature of mind. His song is what remained.
What follows is his story, a renewed rendering of his song from the Caryāgīti, and a commentary that reads the song as it was meant to be read in the Secret Mantra: as the inner river of the central channel, which is also the river of life itself; as the two ladies of the side channels; as the five Tathāgatas who row; as the senses left undisturbed in their own place; and as the body and the world, the Magical Net, allowed simply to drift.
The Story of the Black Master
As Abhayadatta tells it in The Lives of the Eighty-Four Mahāsiddhas
The scribe's son of Somapurī
He was born the son of a scribe, in the western reaches of what is now Bangladesh, into a family whose work was the careful shaping of letters. Perhaps that is why he was drawn so early to the letters that are not written: from his youth the signs of a deep spiritual destiny gathered around him, and he took robes at the Somapurī Mahāvihāra, the vast red-brick monastery that King Dharmapāla had raised on the plains of Varendra.
There, in secret, the great siddha Jālandhara took him by the hand and opened for him the maṇḍala of Hevajra.
The first trembling of the earth
For twelve years Kanha practised. Then one day Hevajra arose before him, radiant, surrounded by his whole circle of deities, and as the vision unfolded the very earth shook beneath his seat.
And Kanha's heart swelled. It is done, he thought. I have arrived.
At that moment a ḍākinī appeared before him, and she was not gentle. This, she told him, was nothing but the preliminaries. The main practice had not even begun. Chastened, Kanha turned back to his sādhana.
Footprints, levitation, canopies and drums
Disciples now gathered around him in great numbers, and Kanha could not quite resist the temptation to test what he had become. One day he set his foot upon a rock and left his footprint pressed into the stone as if into soft clay. Instantly the ḍākinī was there, pointing him back to his āsana.
Some time later he rose out of samādhi to find himself floating an arm's length above the ground. Again she appeared, and again she warned him of the subtle pride that feeds on attainment, and again she pointed to his seat.
The fourth time he came out of meditation, seven royal canopies were floating in the air above his head, and seven ḍamaru drums were sounding by themselves, filling the sky with their beat.
This time no ḍākinī came. And Kanha said to his disciples: Now no one can say that I have not reached the goal.
The sea at Rāmeśvaram
With three thousand followers he set out for the island of Laṅkāpurī. When they reached the coast at Rāmeśvaram, he decided to show what he could do, and began to skip across the surface of the sea. And as he went, a thought rose in him: Not even my guru can do this.
The instant the thought was complete, the water opened and he sank.
The waves rolled him back onto the shore. As he turned over to spit the sand from his mouth, he saw his teacher Jālandhara floating serenely in the sky above him.
Where are you going, Kanha? asked the guru. What is the matter?
Kanha confessed everything: the pride, the boast, the sinking. Jālandhara simply laughed. Go to Pāṭaliputra, he told him. There you will find my most accomplished disciple. He is a weaver. Do everything he asks of you. Obey him wholly and fully, and you will realise the ultimate reality, which you have not yet understood.
Kanha bowed, and as he rose, his powers returned to him. The canopies and the drums reappeared in the sky; once more he could walk on water and mark the rock with his feet.
The weaver whose thread mends itself
Leaving his disciples outside the city that is now Patna, Kanha walked alone into the street of the weavers and began to search with his penetrating gaze. One by one, as he looked at them, the threads of their looms snapped. One by one, the weavers bent over and patiently knotted their broken threads by hand. So he walked on.
At the very end of the street, at the edge of the city, he came to a loom where the thread his gaze had broken simply wound itself back together, untouched by any hand.
He needed to look no further. He prostrated, circled the weaver three times, and said: Please teach me the ultimate truth.
Will you obey me in all things?
I will.
The cremation ground
The weaver led him to the śmaśāna, where a fresh corpse lay. Can you eat the flesh of this corpse?
Kanha knelt, drew his knife, and was about to cut. Not like that! shouted the weaver, with contempt. Like this! And he became a wolf, leapt onto the body and tore into it. When he had resumed his human form he said: You may eat flesh only when you can transform yourself like this.
Then the weaver squatted on the ground and relieved himself. He picked up one of the three pieces and held it out. Eat it.
People would laugh at me, said Kanha. I will not do it.
So the weaver ate one piece himself. The devas came down and took the second. The nāgas rose from below and carried the third away to their underworld.
The feast without end
Back in the city, the weaver bought five pennies' worth of food and drink. Call your disciples, he said. We will celebrate a gaṇacakra.
Kanha obeyed, privately thinking: That is not enough to feed one man.
But when all three thousand were seated, the weaver blessed the offerings, and every bowl was filled with rice, sweets and every delicacy. The feast went on for seven days, and still the offerings were not used up.
There is no end to this, Kanha thought. I am leaving. He threw out the remainders, the ucchiṣṭa, as an offering to the spirits, called his disciples, and walked away.
The weaver shouted after them:
Ah, you miserable children!
You are ruining yourselves!
You belong to the kind of yogīs
Who separate the emptiness of awareness
From the active compassion of life!
What will you gain by running away?
Royal canopies and ḍamarus are small achievements.
Meditate and realise the nature of reality!
But Kanha would not listen.
The girl beneath the lychee tree
He led his followers east, to a town called Bhadhokora, some four hundred and fifty miles from Somapurī. On the outskirts, beneath a lychee tree heavy with fruit, a young girl was sitting.
Give me some fruit, said Kanha.
I will not, said the girl.
Angered, Kanha fixed the tree with his gaze, and the fruit fell. The girl looked up, and with a gaze as strong as his own she sent every fruit back to its branch. She was a ḍākinī.
And Kanha, instead of bowing to her, cursed her with a mantra so powerful that blood began to pour from every opening of her body. A crowd gathered. Yogīs are supposed to be compassionate, they murmured. This one is a murderer.
Ashamed, Kanha withdrew the curse. But the moment the girl recovered, she spoke a curse of her own, and Kanha fell to the ground, vomiting and bleeding.
Bhande and the herb of Śrīparvata
He called his beloved companion Bhande, herself a ḍākinī, and begged her to go to the mountain of Śrīparvata in the far south and bring back a herb that could heal him. A journey of six months: she made it in seven days, found the herb, and turned for home.
On the last day of her return she came upon an old woman weeping by the roadside. Not recognising the very ḍākinī who had cursed her master, Bhande stopped and asked why she wept.
Is the death of the Lord Kanha not reason enough to weep?
Bhande threw the herb away and walked on in grief. She expected to see the smoke of a funeral pyre. Instead she found her master alive, though at the edge of death, and in tears she told him how she had been deceived.
Seven days of song
This time Kanha did not rage. He accepted what his own actions had brought, and surrendered himself into the nondual sphere of the ḍākinīs. Knowing he had seven days left in which to teach, he sang. He sang many spontaneous songs, and he gave the sādhana of the Severed-Headed Vajra Vārāhī, closely kin to Chinnamuṇḍā, Chinnamastā, the goddess who cuts off her own head.
On the seventh day the Lord Kanha breathed his last. His body dissolved into pure light, and he passed into the nondual sphere of the ḍākinīs in infinite space, a khecara, one who moves through the sky.
Among the songs of those last days, the tradition remembers one about a boat.
The Song of the Boat
Caryāgīti, the song of Kṛṣṇācāryapāda
The old Bengali and Odia text
tiśaraṇa ṇāvī kia aṭhaka mārī |
nia deha karuṇa śūna meherī ||
tarittā bhava-jaladhi jima kari māa suinā |
mājha veṇī taraṅga ma muniā ||pañca tathāgata kia keṛu āla |
bāhaa kāa kāhnila māā jāla ||
gandha parasa rasa jaisoṁ taisoṁ |
niṃda vihune suinā jaiso ||cia kaṇṇahāra suṇata māṅge |
calila kāhna mahāsuha sāṅge ||
The Sanskrit rendering of Śānti Bhikṣu
tri-śaraṇa-naukāṃ kṛtvā aṣṭakaṃ hatam |
nija-dehe karuṇā-śūnyate mahile ||
tīrṇo bhava-jaladhiḥ yathā kṛtvā māyā-svapnam |
madhye veṇīṃ taraṅgo mayā mataḥ (= jñātaḥ) ||pañca-tathāgataṃ kṛtvā kenipātam |
vāhaya kāyaṃ kṛṣṇa māyājālam ||
gandha-sparśa-rasā yādṛśās tādṛśāḥ |
nidrā-vihīne svapna-sadṛśāḥ ||cittaṃ karṇadhāraḥ śūnyatā-mārge |
gataḥ kṛṣṇo mahāsukha-prasaṅge ||
A renewed English translation
The Three Refuges are boat. I have left behind the eight worldly concerns.
Within my own body, compassion and emptiness are my two ladies.
I cross the ocean of becoming, seeing it as an illusion, as a dream.
At the confluence, where the braided rivers meet,
I have come to know the wave (of bliss).Making the Five Tathāgatas the oars,
Kanha, let the body, this Magical Net, drift.
Fragrance, touch, taste, and the rest:
let them be, just as they are, in their own place,
as in a dream but without being asleep.The mind is the helmsman on the voyage to emptiness.
Kanha has set forth, in union with Great Bliss.
Commentary I: The Life Is the Song
The song is not an ornament hung at the end of the story. It is the story's answer. Every image in it was first lived, usually badly, and then understood.
At Rāmeśvaram Kanha tried to cross the sea by walking on it, carried by his powers and by the thought that not even his guru could do the same. He sank. In the song he crosses the ocean of becoming again, and this time he does it in a boat, and the boat is refuge. The one who would not bow now sails in the vessel made of bowing.
The weaver's reproach was precise. You belong to the kind of yogīs who separate the emptiness of awareness from the active compassion of life. Kanha had awareness without warmth; he could empty a tree of its fruit and fill a girl's body with blood. In the song, emptiness and compassion are no longer two doctrines he holds apart. They are two ladies, and they live inside his own body.
The eight worldly concerns run through his life like the eight winds they are called. Fame was the seven canopies and the declaration that no one could now deny his attainment. Praise was the boast on the shore. Fear of blame was his refusal on the cremation ground: people would laugh at me. Gain and loss were the feast he thought too small and then could not bear to see without end, and the fruit he demanded from a child. Pleasure and pain came at last as the curse, the vomiting, the blood. One by one the winds blew and one by one they were shown for what they were. Only when all eight had been struck down could the boat leave the shore.
Then there is the weaver himself. Kanha's gaze snapped every thread in the street. Ordinary weavers bent down and knotted their threads by hand, as ordinary practitioners mend each disturbance with an antidote. But the master's thread wound itself back together of its own accord. Here, before a word of teaching, is the whole of the Great Perfection: not a net that never tears, but a net that frees itself, whose broken strands return to wholeness without the touch of any hand. It is no accident that the song will later call the body a jāla, a net, a woven thing. Kanha had to meet a weaver before he could understand that.
The girl beneath the lychee tree said a single word, no, and with her gaze sent every fallen fruit back to its own branch. Hold that image. The song will ask us to leave fragrance, touch and taste just as they are, each in its own place, and she had already shown it: nothing taken, nothing forced, everything returned to where it hangs. Bhande, his beloved, crossed six months of road in seven days to bring him medicine, like a wind moving through the body with love. Between the one who refused him and the one who served him, between the ḍākinī who withheld and the ḍākinī who gave, Kanha passed into the middle, into space. These are the two ladies of the song, walking in his life before they were named in his channels.
And the last teaching he gave was the sādhana of the Severed-Headed Vajra Vārāhī, sister of Chinnamastā. She stands having cut off her own head, and from her neck three streams of blood arc into the air. Two pour into the mouths of the companions at her sides; the third, the central stream, flows into her own mouth. This is the iconography of the song itself: the two ladies fed by the left and right currents, and the yoginī drinking the central river of her own life, severed from the head that thinks it is someone. Kanha gave this to his disciples while dying, and in the same days he sang of the two ladies and the braided river in the middle.
So the story is not only a life. It is the outer telling of the inner journey that the song describes, and the song is the inner telling of the life.
Commentary II: The Boat of Refuge and the Eight Winds Stilled
Making the Three Refuges my boat, I have struck down the eight worldly concerns.
No one crosses a river by thinking about the far shore. One needs a vessel, and the first line names it. Following the commentary of Ācārya Munidatta and the instructions our Root-Teacher, the boat of refuge is built in four ways, each hull inside the last.
Outwardly, the Three Refuges are the Buddha, the Dharma and the Saṅgha: the one who crossed, the way he crossed, and those who cross with us. Inwardly, they are the Guru, the Iṣṭadevatā and the Ḍākinī: the source of blessing, the source of accomplishment, the source of activity. Innermost, they are the nāḍīs, the vāyus and the bindus: the channels, the winds that move in them, and the luminous drops they carry. The very body becomes the refuge. Secretly, they are the nature of mind itself: its essence, which is empty; its nature, which is luminous; and its compassionate energy, which is unceasing. These are the three that Garab Dorje points to and that the whole Great Perfection unfolds.
At that last level something remarkable happens to the word kia, “having made". On the outer levels the boat is made: we take refuge, we cultivate devotion, we train the channels and winds. At the secret level the boat is found to have been there all along. The vessel that carries us across is the very awareness that wished to cross.
With the boat ready, the eight are struck down. They are the eight worldly concerns: gain and loss, pleasure and pain, praise and blame, fame and disgrace. The tradition calls them winds, and the word is exact, for they are not first of all ideas but movements. They blow through the subtle body as karmic winds, tossing attention toward what we hope for and away from what we fear. Every one of Kanha's falls was carried on one of them.
How are they slain? Not by force. A yogin who fights his hopes and fears only adds a ninth wind. They are slain the way wind is stilled on water: when the air has nothing more to push against. Within refuge, gain and loss have no owner. Within the channels, the karmic winds that bore them begin to gather toward the centre and lose their power to drive the mind outward. Within the nature of mind, praise and blame arise like echoes in an empty valley, heard, and gone. This is what it means that the eight are struck down: not that the world stops offering them, but that they find no one to land on.
Only then can the boat leave the shore.
Commentary III: The Two Ladies and the River in the Middle
Within my own body, compassion and emptiness are my two ladies. I have crossed the ocean of becoming, seeing it as illusion, as dream; in the middle, where the braided rivers meet, I have come to know the wave.
The two ladies
Kanha was a son of the Hevajra lineage, and the Hevajra Tantra gives the three great channels names that are all feminine. On the left flows Lalanā, the playful one; on the right, Rasanā, the one who tastes; in the centre, Avadhūtī, the one who has shaken everything off. In the tantra, Lalanā carries wisdom and Rasanā carries method; in Kanha's song they are emptiness and compassion. Munidatta reads the two ladies as the winds of the left and right channels, and an older rendering hears the line as the chamber of one's own body, where emptiness and compassion are united. Both are true.
Why ladies? Because they are companions, not tools. A yogin does not use his channels as a mechanic uses a pipe. He lives with them, is accompanied by them, is loved, tested and finally released by them, exactly as Kanha was by the girl beneath the tree and by Bhande on the road. As long as the two ladies go their separate ways, life swings between them: now the cool, clear, withdrawing current of emptiness that can turn into indifference; now the warm, reaching, involved current of compassion that can turn into attachment. This was the weaver's charge against Kanha. His awareness had gone one way and the warmth of life another.
In the song the two ladies are no longer apart. They walk together into the middle.
The river in the middle is the river of life
The ocean of becoming, bhava-jaladhi, and the river in the middle are not two waters. The ocean outside is crossed by entering the river inside.
The central channel is called in the Tibetan tradition the life-channel, the srog rtsa, and in it dwells the life-sustaining wind, the breath beneath the breath. When a being is conceived, consciousness enters along this channel; the body grows outward from it like a tree from its stem. When a being dies, the winds of the side channels dissolve back into it, the white and red essences meet at the heart, and the clear light dawns. All of life flows along this one hidden stream, from the first moment to the last. So the river of the central channel is not a technique applied to life. It is the river of life itself, seen from the inside.
That is why the old poet chose the word veṇī, the braid. At Triveṇī the white Gaṅgā and the dark Yamunā meet in plain view, and the Sarasvatī, it is said, joins them from beneath, unseen. So too in the body: the white channel and the red are visible in their effects, in breath and warmth and the swing of moods, while the central river runs hidden between them. Like a woman's plaited hair, the three are woven around one another, and where they cross, at the heart and at the other centres, they bind into knots. Ordinary life is lived along the outer strands of the braid. The yogin unbraids nothing by force. When the two ladies are no longer pulled outward by the eight winds, they turn of themselves toward the middle, the knots loosen, and the three streams become one.
When Kanha's body dissolved into light at the end, that is what the tradition is describing: the whole river of his life poured at last into its own source, and the source was space.
The wave
At the confluence, Kanha says, I have come to know the wave.
This wave is the bliss that arises when the winds of the two ladies enter, abide in and dissolve into the central channel. It is the descent and ascent of the four joys and their sixteen shades, the melting of the white bindu from the crown and its rising from below, each stage more subtle, more pervasive, more empty, until the innate joy shines as the very taste of reality. This is no side road to the Great Perfection. It is the same nature of mind, felt in the body. Bliss that knows itself as empty is wisdom; emptiness that is felt as bliss is the body's own understanding of the view.
But notice the verb. Kanha does not say I rode the wave, or I was swept away by it. He says muniā, jñātaḥ: I have known it. Years earlier, in the cell at Somapurī, the earth had trembled under him and Hevajra had shone before him, and he had mistaken the wave for the far shore. The scolding ḍākinī told him it was only the beginning. Now he knows the wave for what it is: the surface of the water lifting in joy, never separate from the depths beneath it. He neither grasps it nor flees from it. He knows it, and the boat sails on.
Commentary IV: The Five Tathāgatas Are the Oars
Making the Five Tathāgatas the oars.
A boat on a Bengal river is driven by oars, and Kanha's has five. They are the five Tathāgatas, the five Buddha families, and with them comes everything the Secret Mantra gathers into fivefold order: the five aggregates and the five elements, the five poisons and the five wisdoms, the five ḍākinīs and the five activities, the five colours and the five lights. To say that the Tathāgatas are the oars is to say that nothing in our experience is left on the shore. Every part of us rows.
And here is the secret of the oars: they are made of the very poisons that drowned us. An oar is a blade that enters the water, pushes against it, and lifts out again with the water falling from it. So it is with each affliction. It rises, it meets the current of experience, and if it is recognised in its own face it lifts away, dripping light, and the boat moves forward. The same anger that sinks the swimmer drives the boat when it is known as mirror-like clarity. Nothing is thrown overboard; everything is turned into a stroke.
In the way the Nyingma tantras most often arrange them, the five oars are these.
Vairocana, the Exceedingly Brilliant, white, at the centre, lord of the Buddha family. His substance is ignorance, the dull unknowing that rests in the ground of everything, and his oar is the wisdom of the dharmadhātu, the all-encompassing space in which every other wisdom moves. He is the aggregate of form and the element of space. His ḍākinī is the Buddha Ḍākinī, and his activity is the spontaneous, all-embracing activity that holds the other four.
Akṣobhya, the Unshakeable, blue, in the east, lord of the Vajra family. His substance is anger, the hard and cutting reaction to what opposes us, and his oar is the mirror-like wisdom, clear and unmoved, reflecting everything without being stained by it. He is the aggregate of consciousness and the element of water. His ḍākinī is the Vajra Ḍākinī, and his activity is pacifying: calming disturbance, sickness and obstacles.
Ratnasambhava, Born of Jewels, yellow, in the south, lord of the Ratna family. His substance is pride, the inflation of self that made the earth tremble under Kanha's seat, and his oar is the wisdom of equality, which sees every being and every experience as equally precious, equally empty. He is the aggregate of feeling and the element of earth. His ḍākinī is the Ratna Ḍākinī, and his activity is enriching: increasing life, merit, wisdom and abundance.
Amitābha, Limitless Light, red, in the west, lord of the Padma family. His substance is desire, the reaching and clinging that wanted the lychee fruit, and his oar is discriminating wisdom, which knows each thing in its distinctness with warmth and without grasping. He is the aggregate of perception and the element of fire. His ḍākinī is the Padma Ḍākinī, and his activity is magnetising: drawing beings, blessings and circumstances into the maṇḍala.
Amoghasiddhi, Unfailing Accomplishment, green, in the north, lord of the Karma family. His substance is jealousy, the restless comparing that could not bear to be outdone, even by a guru, and his oar is all-accomplishing wisdom, which acts without hesitation, precisely and spontaneously. He is the aggregate of formation and the element of wind. His ḍākinī is the Karma Ḍākinī, and his activity is the wrathful, subjugating power that cuts through what cannot be pacified, enriched or magnetised.
The tantras do not always seat the five in the same directions, and Vairocana and Akṣobhya in particular sometimes exchange places. The principle never changes: whatever we are made of, rightly known, is a Buddha.
Within the body the oars are not elsewhere. The five root winds that sustain the body's life are the moving energy of these five families; the five centres along the central channel are their seats; the five lights that shine from the heart of awareness, which the Great Perfection reveals in its direct path, are their natural radiance. When the oars dip together in rhythm, these five winds no longer pull in five directions. They row as one, and the boat moves down the middle of the river.
Notice too who rows. Not Kanha. In the song he is not told to take up the oars; the Tathāgatas are the oars and the body is carried. The ḍākinīs, the energy of the five families in action, are the strokes. The yogin's task is not to labour at the crossing but to stop interfering with it.
Commentary V: Fragrance, Touch and Taste Left in Their Own Place
Fragrance, touch and taste: just as they are, so let them be, like a dream without sleep.
Three that stand for eight
Kanha names only three senses, but a song is not a catalogue. The three stand for the whole gathering of consciousness, the eight spheres in which experience takes place: the consciousness of the eye, of the ear, of the nose, of the tongue and of the body; the mental consciousness that thinks and names; the afflicted mind that turns every experience into mine; and the all-ground consciousness, the ālaya, in which the seeds of every habit lie stored.
Why fragrance, touch and taste? Because they are the most intimate, the most bodily, the ones that cannot be held at a distance. Sight and sound reach us from afar; smell, touch and taste enter us. And because these were exactly the senses in which the weaver tested Kanha on the cremation ground. The stench of the fresh corpse, the feel of the knife against dead flesh, the taste of what the weaver held out to him: in each, Kanha was asked to meet experience without the eight worldly concerns, and in each he flinched. People would laugh at me. Now, at the end, he sings of those same three, and he no longer flinches. Fragrance is simply fragrance. Touch is simply touch. Taste is simply taste.
Just as they are
Jaisoṁ taisoṁ, yādṛśās tādṛśāḥ: such as they are, so. This is the whole instruction of the Great Perfection compressed into two words. Nothing is to be added to experience and nothing removed. The sense consciousness is not suppressed, as the ascetic would have it, nor followed, as the worldly person does. It is left in its own place.
A.dzom Rinpoche gave this instruction for looking into the mirror of the mind: do not follow past thoughts, do not anticipate thoughts to come, and as for what is present, do not adjust or modify it in the slightest, but leave it just as it is, totally free, in its own natural resting place. That is Kanha's line, spoken more than a thousand years later in another tongue.
To leave each consciousness in its own place has a precise meaning. Each sense has its own ground, its own native awareness. When a fragrance arises and is not grasped, it does not travel up into the afflicted mind to become my pleasure or my disgust; it does not sink into the ālaya to become a seed of future craving. It arises, it is known, and it is released, all in the same place, like a letter written on water. This is what Longchenpa calls self-liberation: not a liberation that follows experience like a cleaner following a guest, but experience freeing itself in the very moment it appears. The eight consciousnesses are not slain, as the eight concerns were. They are freed, and in their freedom they are revealed as the one light of awareness shining through eight doors.
The girl beneath the lychee tree had already shown Kanha this. He wrenched the fruit from the branches with his gaze, as the grasping mind wrenches each sensation from its place and drags it into the story of self. She looked up and every fruit returned to its own branch. Nothing was destroyed. Everything was simply put back where it hangs.
In the Great Perfection there is a further subtlety. The ālaya, the all-ground, is not the dharmakāya, though the two are easily confused. The ālaya is a neutral, cloudy ground where habits sleep; the dharmakāya is the awake, empty, luminous nature of mind. Jigme Lingpa insisted on this distinction, and it matters here. To leave the senses in their own place is not to sink into a vague blankness. It is to rest in the wide-awake clarity in which every sensation shines and no sensation is owned.
A dream without sleep
This is why the line ends as it does: like a dream without sleep. In ordinary dreams we are asleep. We take the dream to be real, and it carries us wherever it goes. Kanha speaks of a dream in which no one has fallen asleep: appearances as vivid as ever, fragrance as fragrant, taste as rich, and yet seen through, known from within as luminous display.
Longchenpa devoted a whole treatise, Finding Rest in Illusion, to this way of seeing. He gives eight similes for appearance: a dream, a magical illusion, an optical illusion, a mirage, an echo, a city of gandharvas, a reflection and an emanation. The song has already named two of them, illusion and dream, and now it names the wakefulness in which they are recognised. One does not need to fall asleep to dream lucidly. One needs only to stop falling asleep inside the waking world.
Commentary VI: The Body, the World, the Magical Net
Kanha, let the body, this Magical Net, be carried on the current.
The body is a net
Kanha calls his body māyājāla, the Magical Net, and he does not choose the word idly. It is the name of the great cycle of the Guhyagarbha, the Tantra of the Secret Essence, which the Nyingma hold as the king of all tantras, and its vision is exactly this: that the body, the world and every being in it are a net of illusion, woven of light, in which every knot is a deity and every strand a wisdom.
Look first at the body. It is not a lump. It is a mesh of seventy-two thousand channels, branching out from the central river into the limbs, the senses, the organs, the finest pores, like the threads of a net cast from a single cord. Along these strands the winds move and the bindus shine. The tantras call this the network of channels, and the Guhyagarbha sees in it the maṇḍala of the hundred peaceful and wrathful deities: the five aggregates as the five Tathāgatas, the five elements as their five consorts, the eight consciousnesses as the eight bodhisattvas and their objects as the eight female bodhisattvas, the limbs and sense-gates as the wrathful guardians. Nothing in the body is ordinary. It was never a cage. It is a palace woven of channels, a maṇḍala of light in the form of flesh.
This is why the inner yoga of channels and winds is not something added to the Great Perfection from outside. The net of the body is the very loom on which awareness weaves its display. To know the channels, to let the winds gather into the central river, to taste the wave of bliss at the confluence, is to know the Magical Net from within.
The world is a net
The same is true outwardly. The world is not a collection of separate things but a single fabric of interdependence, in which every appearance is held by every other. The Avataṃsaka Sūtra describes the net of Indra, hung across the heavens with a jewel at every knot, each jewel reflecting every other, and each reflection holding all the reflections again, without end. Pull one thread and the whole net moves. Nothing stands alone, and nothing is solid. It is magical, māyā, not because it is nothing, but because it appears so vividly while being nothing graspable at all.
Body and world are therefore not two nets, but one. The channels within and the interwoven appearances without are the same Magical Net seen from two sides, and the eight consciousnesses are the places where the inner net and the outer net touch.
Let it drift
And what does Kanha tell himself to do with this net? Not to tighten it, not to cut it, not to repair it. Vāhaya: let it be carried. Let it drift.
This is the most delicate instruction in the song. All his life Kanha had tried to steer the net: to make the body float, to press it into rock, to walk it across the sea, to make the fruit fall. Every one of those efforts tore a thread. And every torn thread had to be knotted again by hand, through confession, through the guru's laughter, through humiliation and illness.
The weaver of Pāṭaliputra had shown him the alternative on the very first day. His thread mended itself. A net that is left to itself does not unravel; it is held together by its own nature. The body does not need Kanha to hold it up. The world does not need Kanha to arrange it. When the yogin stops gripping, the winds settle by themselves into the central river, the senses rest by themselves in their own places, and the whole net of body and world floats on the current of the nature of mind like a fisherman's net drifting in clear water, every knot shining, nothing caught.
The Guhyagarbha says that all phenomena are primordially pure and primordially enlightened. To let the net drift is simply to stop contradicting that. It is not passivity. The oars are rowing; the five wisdoms are fully active; the helmsman is awake. What has stopped is only the anxious hand of the self, which wanted to carry what was always carrying itself.
Commentary VII: The Helmsman and the Embrace of Great Bliss
The mind is the helmsman on the way of emptiness. Kanha has set forth, in union with Great Bliss.
The mind at the helm
After all this letting be, one might expect the mind to be thrown overboard. It is not. It is given the helm.
The karṇadhāra is the one who holds the steering oar at the stern. He does not row. He does not push the boat. He keeps it pointed down the middle of the current, so that the five oars and the drifting net move toward the sea and not into the banks. This is the right place for the mind in the Great Perfection. The same mind that was the source of all Kanha's trouble, the mind that boasted and cursed and could not bear ridicule, turns out to be, in its own nature, the steersman. Its essence is empty, its nature is luminous, and its responsiveness is unceasing: that responsiveness is the hand on the helm. Saraha sang in his Dohā that the mind is the seed of everything, from which both saṃsāra and nirvāṇa spring. Seed or helmsman, it is not abandoned. It is recognised.
And the way the helmsman steers is śūnyatā-mārga, the way of emptiness. Not a road paved with ideas about emptiness, but the open channel down the middle of the river, where nothing obstructs and nothing is grasped. The helmsman's whole skill is to keep the boat in that open water. When it drifts toward one bank, toward the cool lady of emptiness gone cold, or toward the other, toward the warm lady of compassion turned to clinging, a light touch on the steering oar brings it back into the middle, where the two ladies sit together in the boat.
Set forth into Great Bliss
The last line is not an instruction. It is a report. Calila kāhna: Kanha has gone. He has already set out.
On the lips of a man with seven days to live, the line carries two meanings at once, and neither cancels the other. It is the inner journey: the mind, its boat, its oars and its net carried down the central river into the vast sea of the dharmakāya, where awareness and space are one. And it is his death: the body that had pressed footprints into rock and sunk beneath the sea at Rāmeśvaram now dissolving into pure light, the river of his life pouring into its source, the yogin becoming a khecara, a traveller in space.
Mahāsuha sāṅge: in union with Great Bliss, in her embrace. In the end the two ladies, emptiness and compassion, are revealed to have been one lady all along, the ḍākinī of the nondual sphere into whom Kanha surrendered when he finally stopped fighting. Great Bliss is not a pleasure that comes and goes. It is the taste of reality when nothing is being held against it. It is the sea into which the wave was always falling.
The scribe's son who once shaped letters for a living ends his life by writing nothing at all, only singing, and the song he leaves behind is so light that it floats.
Setting Forth with Kanha
The song is also a map, and it can be travelled. Read slowly, it unfolds as one continuous voyage, each stage opening into the next.
First, the practitioner boards the boat. Refuge is taken outwardly, inwardly, innermost and secretly, until it is felt not as a formula but as the vessel one is actually sitting in: the guru's blessing, the body's channels, the nature of mind itself holding one up above the water.
Second, the eight winds are allowed to die down. Hope and fear about gain and loss, pleasure and pain, praise and blame, fame and disgrace are noticed as they blow through the body, and are neither fought nor followed. Without anyone to land on, they lose their force, and the surface of the water grows still.
Third, the two ladies are welcomed. The cool clarity of emptiness and the warm movement of compassion are felt in the body as two currents, left and right, and they are allowed to come into balance, neither pulling the boat toward its own bank.
Fourth, the boat enters the middle. As the side currents settle, attention and breath gather of themselves into the central river, the river of life. The knots of the braid soften. At the confluence the wave rises, the joys unfolding from subtle to more subtle, and the practitioner, like Kanha, comes to know the wave without grasping it and without fearing it.
Fifth, the five oars are given to the Tathāgatas. Whatever affliction rises, anger or pride, desire or jealousy, or the dull fog of not knowing, is recognised in its own face as mirror-like clarity, equality, discernment, accomplishment or open space, and each recognition is a stroke that carries the boat forward.
Sixth, the senses are left in their own place. Fragrance, touch and taste, sight and sound, thought and the sense of self and the deep ground of habit: each is left just as it is, arising and freeing itself where it arises, a dream dreamt by someone fully awake.
Seventh, the net is allowed to drift. The body with its channels and the world with its interwoven appearances are recognised as one Magical Net, and the hand that was trying to hold it up is quietly opened. The net floats, every knot shining.
Eighth, the helmsman rests at the stern. The nature of mind, empty, luminous and responsive, keeps the boat in the open water of emptiness with the lightest touch, and the boat is carried on into the embrace of Great Bliss.
In the little book in which this song is printed, A.dzom Rinpoche's counsel on its use is simple: give rise to great compassion for all beings, read a verse gently, breathe in deeply and breathe out three times, let mind and heart settle completely in a stream of kindness, and rest.
That is all Kanha had to learn, and it took him a whole life, a weaver, a child beneath a tree, a beloved companion and seven days of dying to learn it. We have his song. Let the eight winds fall still. Let the two ladies sit together in the boat. Let the five Buddhas row. Leave the senses where they are. Let the body and the world drift on the river of life like a net of light on clear water. And let the mind, awake at the helm, carry us where Kanha went: into the boundless embrace of Great Bliss, where there was never any shore to leave.
