Sutra 49 From The Radiance Sutras, A New Version Of The Vijnana Bhairava Tantra
CHOCOLATE. A PERFECTLY RIPE peach. Wine. A warm cinnamon roll. Cold lemonade on a hot day. Hallelujah, there is a meditation technique for savoring your favorite treat. Wow, that means there’s a chocolate meditation. If you can meditate on Om, then you can meditate on mmmmmmm.
Meditation techniques use the senses to go beyond the senses. Mantra Yoga engages the sense of hearing: when we find a mantra we love, we can let it carry us beyond sound into a vibrant silence. Pranayama employs the kinesthetic senses of touch, temperature and motion to follow the rhythm of breath and awaken into the life-force. Yantra uses vision – the capacity to see light, colors and shapes – and invites us to bathe in the luminosity of the inner dimensions through gazing at sacred geometric configurations.
Sound, tactile kinesthetic sensations and vision seem like proper, respectable avenues to meditation. But taste? Can taste really be a means for meditation? Can it really be considered part of Yoga?
Yes, every sense is relevant to Yoga. Each sensory pathway is an opening to the universe. The root of the word Yoga is yuj, to join together. Yoga practices invite us to join together all the senses, and link together body, heart, and mind to contemplate the divine.
The Vijnana Bhairava Tantra is a treasury of 112 classic Yoga practices. The first 48 of these practices given by Shiva include ways of focusing on breath, mantra (sacred sound), the chakra (energy centers), and energy flows in the body.
In this particular technique Shiva says, “Well, now that you are all tuned in, why not go ahead and meditate with your favorite taste and see what happens?”
This is Sutra 49 of The Radiance Sutras, a dharana on rasa:
When sipping some ambrosia,
Raise your glass, close your eyes,
Receive the nectar on your tongue
As a kiss.
Toast the universe,
For the Sun and Moon,
Earth and rain danced together
To bring you this wine.
Tasting chocolate, a ripe apricot, your
favorite treat,
Savor the expanding joy in your body.
How astonishing, to realize the world can taste so good
And please you so deeply.
Rising pleasure, overwhelming jubilation.
Be here for this celebration
As nature offers her substance to you.
jagdhip?nak?toll?saras?nandavij?mbha??t |
bh?vayed bharit?vasth?? mah?nandas
tato bhavet ||
Look at that first line of 39 letters. The scribe who long ago joined seven words into one long compound got 118 Scrabble points. Way to conjoin!
We see a lot of juicy, inviting words folded in here: jagdhi – eating; pana – drinking (especially spirituous liquors), drinking the saliva or kissing; kritah-ullasa – the happiness, merriment, joy, light and splendor created by that; rasa – juice, essence, water, drink, elixir, taste, aesthetic delight; ananda – happiness, joy, sensual pleasure, “pure happiness” as an attribute of atman or Brahman; vijrimbhanat – focus on the enjoyment arising; bhavayed – meditate; bharita-avastham – state of fullness; maha ananda – great joy, supreme bliss; tatah – then; bhavet – becomes.
The practice is straightforward: focus on the supreme delight of tasting your favorite treat. As the joy arises in you, the bliss of tasting, rasa-ananda, meditate on the bliss and dissolve into maha-ananda, supreme bliss. The text can also be read as simply enjoy your food and meditate on that enjoyment.
What could be more irresistible?
There are a couple of challenges in this practice. The first is to explore the world and find out what, to you, constitutes a worthy treat. What food or drink evokes the bliss of tasting? It’s different for everyone. Another challenge is to acquire the treat and then arrange for circumstances in which to relish it. For example, to really enjoy cold lemonade you may first have to walk a couple of miles and get hot and thirsty. Or the flavor of a particular wine may only come out when you sip it with people you love. Getting the maximum pleasure out of a bowl of soup may involve waiting for it to be ready, smelling it, feeling really hungry and then finally sitting down to consume it. To enter into rasa ananda, you have to give yourself permission to be in shameless delight, close your eyes and give over to the bliss. Mmmmmmmmm. This often feels more sinful than virtuous – yet the sutra says this is a “high spiritual condition!”
When you bring the full power of your attention to taste, you may be surprised to find out that you don’t actually like what you thought you like. I crave chocolate, and used to find myself walking to the store in the afternoons to get a chocolate chip cookie. One day I was tasting a deluxe cookie while focusing on it, I realized I did not in fact like it. I didn’t know why. Then I found I don’t like chocolate cake either. Neither food was chocolate enough. Exploring further, I found that I only like dark chocolate, and what I really crave is to let it melt on my tongue. When I do this, I am totally satisfied by a small amount, and one bar lasts me several weeks.
Most of taste is actually smell. Physiologists like to say, astoundingly, that about 75% to 90% of taste is smell. I find this hard to believe, but they claim to have done studies. They have people eat perfectly good chocolate, while blocking their noses so they can’t smell and the chocolate tastes like chalk. What a waste!
To fully taste food, therefore, involves subtle breathing awareness, which we could call rasa pranayama. If you have a taste on your tongue and breathe out a little with your mouth closed, the air flows over the tongue, and up into the nose and you can savor a bouquet. Odor molecules are very sensitive to temperature, and the warmth of your mouth releases the fragrance of that apricot or chardonnay. As the senses of smell and taste become more educated, they in turn contribute to a greater appreciation of what it is to breathe, even ordinary air.
In our tantric practice, the simple moments of daily life are sacred and the senses with which we perceive are divine. When we take in the sustaining gift of food and drink, this is an occasion for celebration: the sacred is meeting itself. Life is providing the nourishment and what we can bring to the party is our delight. This is our offering – intense gratitude. In this sense, gourmets are natural yogis of taste, because they know how to take small amounts of things and extract the maximum rasa.
I first experienced the power of rasa while eating a bowl of green beans with sliced almonds and a little bit of butter. I was a teenager and I’d been praciting Yoga and meditating for a few months, just long enough to tune my senses. When I took a bite of the green beans, my tongue, then my mouth, then my whole body lit up with joy. It was as if I had never really tasted anything before in my life. Of course, it was the 1960s, so my friends and I immediately forgot about actually tasting food. That was too simple. We became suspicious of food, and got involved in a multi-year food fight – vegetarianism, fruitarianism, breathairianism , macrobiotics and the yogic principle of the three gunas: tamas (heavy, dull, solid), rajas (active, changeable) and sattva (peaceful, steady, uplifting). It took years to de-hypnotize ourselves from these clashing theories and recover the simple ability to enjoy food again. You don’t necessarily have to search out exotic or expensive delights. If you get hungry enough or thirsty enough, any bite of food or sip of plain water can evoke delight and gratitude.
Enjoy the rasa, Shiva says.
The Vijnana Bhairava Tantra describes 112 Yogas of wonder and delight for touching the divine in the midst of daily life. The teaching is framed as a conversation between lovers, Shakti and Shiva, the Goddess Who is the Creative Power of the Universe, and the God who is the Consciousness That Permeates Everywhere.
Dr. Lorin Roche began practicing with the Vijnana Bhairava Tantra in 1968 as part of scientific research on the physiology of meditation. He has a PhD from the University of California at Irvine, where his research focused on the language meditators generate to describe their inner experiences. He is the author of The Radiance Sutras and Meditation Made Easy. With his wife, Camille Maurine, he wrote Meditation Secrets for Women. A teacher of meditation for 46 years, Lorin’s approach centers on how to customize the practices to suit one’s individual nature. Lorin leads the Radiance Sutras Meditation Teacher Training, a 200 hour certification program registered with Yoga Alliance. Lorin teaches regularly at the Esalen Institute and around the world.