A Song of Joy ~ Shabkar

All appearances are vast openness,
Blissful and utterly free.

With a free, happy mind
I sing this song of joy.

When one looks toward one’s own mind –
The root of all phenomena –
There is nothing but vivid emptiness,
Nothing concrete there to be taken as real.

It is present and transparent, utter openness,
Without outside, without inside –
An all pervasiveness
Without boundary and without direction.

The wide-open expanse of the view,
The true condition of the mind,
Is like the sky, like space:
Without center, without edge, without goal.

By leaving whatever i experience
Relaxed in ease, just as it is,
I have arrived at the vast plain
That is the absolute expanse.

Dissolving into the expanse of emptiness
That has no limits and no boundary,
Everything i see, everything i hear,
My own mind, and the sky all merge.

Not once has the notion arisen
Of these being seperate and distinct.

In the absolute expanse of awareness
All things are blended into that single taste –
But, relatively, each and every phenomenom is distinctly,
clearly seen.

Wondrous!


Shabkar

from the book The Life of Shabkar: The Autobiography of a Tibetan Yogin

translated by Matthieu Ricard


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