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All sounds are the resonance of voidness

Shabkar (Shabkar Tsogdruk Rangdrol), Shabkar (Shabkar Tsogdruk Rangdrol) poetry, Buddhist, Buddhist poetry, Tibetan poetry, [TRADITION SUB2] poetry,  poetry by Shabkar (Shabkar Tsogdruk Rangdrol)
(1781 - 1851) Timeline

English version by
Matthieu Ricard

Original Language
Tibetan

Buddhist : Tibetan
19th Century

All sounds are the resonance of voidness
Thoughts are freed just as they arise.
At death the net of the body is at last torn apart
Taking down the boundaries of one's retreat.

 

 

-- from The Life of Shabkar: The Autobiography of a Tibetan Yogin, by Shabkar Tsogdruk Rongdrol / Translated by Matthieu Ricard

Amazon.com

 

Themes

  Awakening
  Death
 
 
 


Recommended Books


Food of Bodhisattvas: Buddhist Teachings on Abstaining from Meat, by Shabkar
The Life of Shabkar: The Autobiography of a Tibetan Yogin, by Shabkar Tsogdruk Rongdrol / Translated by Matthieu Ricard
Rainbows Appear: Tibetan Poems of Shabkar, Translated by Matthieu Ricard
Songs of Spiritual Experience: Tibetan Buddhist Poems of Insight & Awakening, Translated by Thupten Jinpa / Translated by Jas Elsner

 

<<Previous Poem | More Poems by Shabkar (Shabkar Tsogdruk Rangdrol) | Next Poem >>

Commentary by Ivan M. Granger

This poem is a delightful vision of one profoundly at peace with the notion of death: The ensnaring "net" of the body is "torn apart" in an act of liberation of the self, not its loss. Death is "breaking down the boundaries" of our "retreat" hut. Death, in other words, frees us from the separation that is apparent in material embodiment and the sense of isolation that tends to emerge in the mind as a result of identification with the body.

Shabkar, always the wanderer, is saying that, at the endpoint of life our retreat is accomplished and the isolation created by the body is no longer necessary... We are now free to continue our journey through vastness.

 

 


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