Poet of Blissful Awareness

Once, when the great 11th-century translator Marpa was being detained by tax collectors in Nepal, he was visited by an unlikely guest: the 10th-century poet-yogin Saraha. In a dream, after being carried on a palanquin to a fig tree grove in south India, the sleeping translator encountered Saraha seated on a corpse and requested his blessing. Saraha blessed Marpa’s body and entreated him to “eat flesh, be a madman, be like a fearless lion, [letting] your elephant mind wander free.” Marpa awoke the next day with a sense of clarity so deep that “even if I were to meet the buddhas of the three times, I would have nothing to ask them. This was the decisive experience of mind-itself.”

This “decisive experience of mind-itself” characterizes many of the stories surrounding Saraha, a mystic known for his fierce exhortations to cut through the layers of delusion in order to experience the true nature of mind directly. While Saraha is considered one of the founders of the Vajrayana tradition and has been incorporated into a number of Tibetan Buddhist lineages, there have been relatively few academic examinations of his full body of work and its ongoing legacy. With Saraha: Poet of Blissful Awareness, scholar Roger R. Jackson presents the first thorough treatment of Saraha’s context, life, works, poetics, and teachings, including new translations of nearly all of Saraha’s dohas, or spontaneous songs.

In a recent episode of Tricycle Talks, Tricycle’s editor-in-chief, James Shaheen, sat down with Jackson to discuss Saraha’s many different personas, what it means for the mind to be primordially pure, and how to situate Saraha’s radical claims in the context of the mainstream Buddhism of his time.

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In his King Doha, Saraha writes, “Just as motionless water turns to waves when moved by surging winds, so the king sees Saraha appearing in various guises, although he is one.” So let’s talk about these guises. Could you lay out some of the main guises you’ve identified? I thought of Saraha at one point as being like a character in a postmodern novel, where you start out with a character, and eventually they just disappear. After searching for some core Saraha through his writings, I kind of throw up my hands and say, well, let’s just talk about Saraha in the different guises that we see him take on: Saraha the Critic, Saraha the Radical Gnostic, Saraha the Tantric Yogin, and Saraha the Mainstream Buddhist.

Saraha: Poet of Blissful Awareness
by Roger R. Jackson
Shambhala Publications, 2024, 588 pp., $34.95, paper

I think one of the problems in the study of Saraha and the mahasiddhas more broadly is that people tend to focus on the Critic and the Radical Gnostic aspects, which Saraha is most famous for. Now, by gnostic, I don’t mean the specific heresy within Christianity about the division between spirit and matter. I mean gnostic in the sense of looking directly to gnosis, to divine wisdom or transcendental knowledge, and saying that this is what we have to directly understand. This is in effect the flip side of his social and religious critique. He makes fun of Brahmins; he makes fun of Jains; he makes fun of other Buddhists; he even makes fun of Tantric Buddhism. But if he’s radically negative in those ways, he’s also radically affirmative of the absolute purity of the mind and the need to cut through everything to realize that directly.

That’s Saraha the Critic corresponding to, on a more positive note, Saraha the Radical Gnostic. But people often forget that Saraha existed within a historical, cultural, and religious context and that he was almost certainly a practitioner of what we would call the yogini tantras, or the “mother” tantras, these very late-appearing tantric systems that include the Cakrasamvara Tantra, the Hevajra Tantra, and the various Vajrayogini-related tantras.

Saraha was clearly a practitioner of and very familiar with the language of these tantras, but even more broadly than that, we have to recall that Saraha is a Buddhist. Others may try to claim him in certain respects, but he is above all a Buddhist, and for all his social and religious critique, for all his radical gnosticism, for all his exploration of sexual yogas and various transgressive elements of the tantric tradition, the frame within which Saraha is working is still quite classically Buddhist.

How so? There’s a famous line from his People Doha where, after he’s critiqued various religious systems, he says, “Bereft of compassion and abiding in emptiness, / you won’t attain the supreme path, / but if you meditate only on compassion, / you’ll remain in samsara and won’t win liberation.” This is classic Mahayana path theory. Saraha is still a Buddhist, and in some ways, he’s even a classical or sometimes a conservative Buddhist. He may, on the one hand, talk about different elements of tantric sexual practices, but, on the other hand, he’ll make fun of people who think they’re going to attain enlightenment just by having sex. So he plays very skillfully at taking one guise and then another, and because of the way these texts are often organized, you have to be alert to see that he’s switching guises on you.

Saraha will not seem to give you any guidance whatsoever: Just see mind as it is.

You mentioned Saraha the Radical Gnostic, where Saraha insists on the possibility of direct, unmediated entry into knowledge of the ultimate. Could you tell us a bit about Saraha the Radical Gnostic? What is it that he’s putting forth? I would say that this is a rhetorical style that Saraha uses a great deal. The idea is really that the mind itself as it is, without any kind of interference or conceptualization, is primordially pure. If you’re familiar with traditions like Zen or the Dzogchen or Mahamudra teachings from Tibet, this is a very familiar claim, and it goes back in the Indic tradition to a passage in the Pali canon, which says that the nature of mind is luminosity, and its defilements are only temporary or accidental or adventitious. It’s a fundamental claim in the buddhanature literature as well. Saraha himself doesn’t talk about buddhanature explicitly, yet the rhetoric of buddhanature is working its way profoundly through his Radical Gnostic side.

The implication of this is that you’ve just got to drop concepts and stop thinking. Of course, this is a dramatic claim. Granted, from the beginning, Buddhists have recognized that there are limits to rationality and limits to language, but the virulent insistence that you’ve got to, in effect, sit down, shut up, drop everything, and just see your mind the way it already is, is a fundamental claim of Saraha the Radical Gnostic. Sometimes he’s so uncompromising that it’s almost like a pathless path, to borrow a term from Krishnamurti, and Saraha will not seem to give you any guidance whatsoever: Just see mind as it is.

Other times, he will gesture somewhat at modes of meditation through which you might come to this, and it turns out it does have something to do with control of the breath and cutting through the layers of consciousness to the mind as it truly is in its original state. 

Saraha the Radical Gnostic is fairly uncompromising. It’s like, “Yeah, cut through all the crap, and just see it.” But, of course, that’s easier said than done, and as much as we may delight in Saraha the Radical Gnostic, it’s important to recognize that this is within a larger context of tantric practice and Buddhist practice. That’s where things get tricky, and it doesn’t turn out to be quite as easy as you think.

What about Saraha the Tantric Yogin? How are his writings situated within esoteric tantra? We can’t really read much of Saraha’s work, and certainly not the works that are authentically Indic, without reference to these tantric systems in late first millennium to early second millennium India. Saraha is part of a circle of tantric Buddhist practitioners of the very last tantras to appear in India before Buddhism began to go into decline there, roughly around the year 1200. Saraha himself was a century or two before this. He and many of the figures who went to Nepal and Tibet and translated his works were steeped in these yogini tantras, which are notable for their frequent references to great bliss, their sometimes detailed accounts of tantric sexual practices, and their celebration of the four joys that might be experienced within the central channel of the subtle body in the most advanced tantric practices.

He clearly upholds notions of Buddhist ethics and of kindness and of being selfless.

All of this is the milieu in which Saraha and most of the other mahasiddhas seem to be operating. And so what this tells us is that while we immediately gravitate to a guise like Saraha the Radical Gnostic, not to mention Saraha the Critic, if we want to understand how Saraha really intends most of what he’s talking about, we have to reinject ourselves into that milieu. Now, we can’t do that, historically speaking. The closest we can come to it, I suppose, is to practice Tibetan instantiations of these practices, receive initiations, and undertake various practices, understanding and respecting the fact that this is not easy stuff. These are highly esoteric systems of theory and practice.

If we hear Saraha saying, “Drop everything, cut to the chase,” you can’t just do that without reference to these kinds of practices, some of which he even makes fun of. He makes fun of mantras and mandalas and obsessions with the fourth initiation. But actually, if you haven’t been through [these initiations and practices], you’re not going to be in a position to have direct access to the actual nature of mind that’s been there from the beginning.

Despite all Saraha’s radical claims and departures from mainstream Buddhism, you nonetheless assert that he did adhere to mainstream Buddhist values and techniques. Can you tell us about Saraha the Mainstream Buddhist? This is a way of gesturing at the fact that despite his critique of every possible religious and social standpoint you could locate in his era; despite his often radical claims that we just have to drop conceptuality, get rid of language, and see mind as it is; despite his involvement in these very esoteric practices and circles of practitioners, which he almost certainly was part of in whatever his actual historical context may have been, he still hews in a very basic way to fundamental Buddhist values. He clearly upholds notions of Buddhist ethics and of kindness and of being selfless. One of the last lines of his famous People Doha is, “Not working to benefit others, not bestowing gifts on the needy: this, alas, is the fruit of samsara—better you should toss out selfhood.” I mean, this is Buddhist Ethics 101.

By the same token, the kind of language that he uses in talking about ultimate reality, the language of emptiness, is right out of the Perfection of Wisdom sutras and, in some cases earlier Buddhist materials. I’m not so sure whether or not we could call him a conservative Buddhist, but the fundamental values that we’re used to from more standard Mahayana Buddhism are there.

This is actually a theme among all the mahasiddhas, the great tantric adepts of India: Although they may seem to behave outrageously or say outrageous things, nevertheless, at the core, it still is about human kindness and the realization of the empty nature of things. They’re asking, What can we do with that? How can we live that out?

Maybe we, in our particular cultural context, can’t, and probably shouldn’t, try to live it out in quite the way that the mahasiddhas did, or even in the way that some of the legendary figures of the Tibetan tradition did, but it helps to loosen the weave in our practice to remember that not all of this is hard and fast.

As Saraha says in his King Doha, “When winter winds lash and roil the waters, it’s as if water, although soft, turns to stone.” If we can retain the fluidity and openness that Saraha is talking about, then at least we’re getting something of his spirit, even if not every element of what Saraha says and does is a blueprint for how we ought to be living.

This excerpt has been edited for length and clarity. Listen to the full episode at tricycle.org/podcast.

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Verses from People Doha (trans. Roger R. Jackson)

Improper gurus, who are like venomous snakes,
are stained by their flaws
and will certainly sully good people:
just to see them should make you afraid.

Brahmins don’t know thatness:
pointlessly, they recite the four Vedas.

They purify earth, water, and kusha grass
and sit at home, burning sacrificial fires;
their burnt offerings are meaningless,
and the smoke just damages their eyes.

With staff or trident, in the guise of a god,
they expound on difference or “I am that”;
they’re equally ignorant of good and bad,
and divert beings into falsehood.

Smearing their bodies with ash,
they pile their hair atop their heads;
staying at home lighting their fires,
they sit in a corner ringing their bells.

Seated in lotus posture with eyes closed,
they whisper in people’s ears and deceive them;
teaching others, such as widows and nuns,
they bestow consecration and collect their guru fees.

Long nailed, their bodies smeared with filth,
unclothed, they pluck out their hairs:
the Digambaras are deceived in thinking the self
will gain liberation on a path consisting of pain.

If nakedness leads to freedom,
then why aren’t dogs and foxes free?
If plucking out hairs leads to freedom,
then women with plucked-out hair must be free. . . .

If raising one’s tail leads to freedom,
then the peacock and yak must be free;
if eating food off the ground leads to freedom,
then why aren’t horses and elephants free?

Those so-called novices, monks, and elders,
and, likewise, renunciant clerics—
some are involved in explaining sutras,
while others are seen grasping for mind’s single taste.

Some run along with the Great Vehicle,
the authoritative treatises of the textual tradition,
or meditate on nothing but mandalas and cakras;
and some wallow in explaining the meaning of the fourth consecration.

Still others conceive thatness as the element of space
or see everything in terms of emptiness—
for the most part, they all live in disagreement. . . .

Bereft of compassion and abiding in emptiness,
you won’t attain the supreme path,
but if you meditate only on compassion,
you’ll remain in samsara and won’t win liberation.

Someone who’s able to join the two
doesn’t abide in samsara and won’t abide in nirvana.

♦

From Saraha: Poet of Blissful Awareness by Roger R. Jackson © 2024 by Roger R. Jackson. Reprinted in arrangement with Shambhala Publications, Inc.