Dhyana: Meditation the Shiva Way

Stillness without becoming cold

Every Shaiva practice eventually leads to sitting still. The chapter ends here. This lesson opens with the ninth-century Kashmiri householder Vasugupta finding the Shiva Sutras on a rock face, then walks the tradition's actual meditation instructions from the Vijnanabhairava Tantra: 112 ways to still the mind.

The Rock at Mahadeva Mountain

In the early ninth century, in a small Kashmiri village a few kilometres outside Srinagar, a householder named Vasugupta woke from a dream. In the dream, Shiva had told him to walk up Mahadeva mountain at first light and look for a rock. On the rock would be sutras. He was to copy them down before the sun was high.

Vasugupta was not a famous man. He had a household, a small library of Tantras, and a modest reputation as a Shaiva scholar in Pravarapura, the old name of Srinagar. He took his wife's lamp and a sheaf of birch bark and walked up the hill in the cold dawn. The path was steep. His sandals slipped on dew. He found the rock. On its underside, half hidden by lichen, were inscribed seventy-seven short sutras in old Kashmiri script.

He copied them. He brought them home. He read the first one before he sat down to breakfast.

caitanyamātmā. Consciousness is the Self.

The Shiva Sutras had arrived. From these seventy-seven lines, Vasugupta and his student Kallata would build the foundation of what is now called Kashmir Shaivism, and through it, one of the most precise meditation traditions the world has ever produced. Whether the rock was real or the dream a literary device, the Shaiva tradition has held the story for twelve hundred years, because the story makes a point. The instruction did not come from a textbook. It was found, by an ordinary householder, on a real morning, on a real mountain.

Three Doorways, Three Methods

The Shaiva tradition is unusually honest about meditation. It admits that practitioners begin in different places and need different doors. Vasugupta and his successors named three.

The āṇavopāya is the method of the body and the breath. It uses posture, breath counting, mantra, and the small mechanical aids that any beginner needs. The Shaiva tradition does not look down on it. It is where most practitioners begin and where most practitioners stay, and the tradition's view is that this is fine.