The Earth Is My Mother — Reverence for the Five Elements, and the Protection of the Small
Mātā bhūmiḥ putro ahaṃ pṛthivyāḥ — the Earth is my mother, and I am her child. To protect her body and to protect the child, the mother,…
Category: Philosophy and Mithya
Saṃskāra as Algorithm — The Bound Code Running in All Conscious Systems
A child in a kitchen in Pondicherry watches her grandmother grind ginger. The grandmother does not look at her hands. She is reading a letter on the c…
The Five Prāṇas — The Breath in the Body Is the Breath of the World
Six seekers came to the sage Pippalāda, and one asked the question everything rests on: what powers hold this body together? The answer was the fivef…
Aparigraha — Enough, Held Well
A boy at the door of Death is offered everything, and refuses. Not because wealth is bad — because he has noticed the substitution. A person is not …
Asteya — The End of Skimming
Ninety minutes, six people, a decision that needed eleven. Nothing was taken in any sense a ledger would record — and nine hours of human life are g…
Siddhas in Malaysia — The Tamil Lineage That Crossed the Bay of Bengal
Climb the 272 steps at Batu Caves on Thaipusam morning, and you meet the Tamil Siddhar tradition still alive on the Malay peninsula — temple, vaidya…
Satya — The End of the Divided Life
A person can be scrupulously honest with everyone they meet and still be living inside a lie. Satya is not a rule about speech — it is a discipline …
Kāmadeva — The Hindu God of Desire, the Flower-Arrowed, the Bodiless
Kāmadeva — the god of desire incinerated by Śiva's third eye and restored as Anañga, the bodiless. His sugarcane bow and five flower arrows, the …
Brahmacarya Is Not What You Were Told — The Restraint That Was Never a Wall
Brahma means higher awareness; ācharya means to live in. The word is about where a person lives, not about what they may do in bed — and Patañjali…
The Supreme Yoga (Yoga Vāsiṣṭha) — Vol. 1: Vasiṣṭha’s Counsel to a Disillusioned Prince
Prince Rāma returns from his travels and stops eating. The sage Vasiṣṭha is called to counsel him. From that hush rose the Yoga Vāsiṣṭha —…
Ahiṃsā Faces Inward Too — The Harm Nobody Reports
The tradition had karuṇā and dayā available and named the restraint by negation anyway. Ahiṃsā does not ask you to add kindness. It asks you to…
The Yoga Sūtras of Patañjali — An Interpretive Edition
One Sanskrit word — atha, 'now' — opens the most precise statement of the inner science of yoga ever written. A companion piece to Patañjali's 19…
The Fence Before the Practice — The Five Restraints as One Thing
Patañjali calls the five restraints a single great vow, unqualified by birth, place, time or circumstance. Not five virtues — five places where a l…
A Series of Lessons in Gnani Yoga — Yogi Ramacharaka (1907)
An American autodidact in 1907, a forest dialogue three thousand years older, and the discipline both were trying to name: neti neti, the yoga of know…
The Student Who Will Not Leave — Brahmacarya as a Season, and the Failure of Staying
Patañjali's four conditions for a practice that holds are all about time, not talent. The season built on them fails in one specific way — not thro…
The Season That Was Taken — On Lives Lived Out of Sequence
A tidy diagram of four stages lands on a life with a hole in it like a bill that cannot be paid. What the tradition actually says is that circumstance…
The Turning Season — Vānaprastha, and the Twenty Years Nobody Planned For
"Just sit down, let others do it." Heard as a demotion it is unbearable. Heard correctly it is the most precise instruction the tradition gives about …
Four Things a Life Is Allowed to Want — The Puruṣārthas, and the End of the Apology
The same civilisation that produced the Yoga Sūtra wrote a manual on running a treasury — and filed money among the legitimate aims of a human life…
The Householder Is Not the Lesser Path — Karma Sannyāsa and the Life You Already Have
Sannyāsa does not mean giving up. It means holding the whole estate in trust — which a person with children, debts and a job can do without leaving…
The Four Seasons of a Life — What the Āśramas Actually Divide
Four stages, two legal routes through them, and a structure that is younger than it looks. Most suffering about age turns out to be an argument with w…
Brahma Vidyā — The Knowledge of the Vast, and the Lineage Born of a Mind
A young man named Bhṛgu walks up to his father Varuṇa and asks the only question that matters. From that hunger rises brahma-vidyā — the knowle…
Kṛṇvanto Viśvam Āryam — The Soma Prayer of the Ṛg Veda
Three words from Ṛg Veda 9.63.5 — 'make the whole world noble' — as a window into the Vedic cosmology of Soma: the lunar-restorative principle t…
Yoga in Daily Life
A systematic approach to bringing yoga practice off the mat and into the rhythms of ordinary days — morning protocols, breath practice integrated wi…
Tibetan Dream Yoga — Milam, Six Yogas of Nāropa
A practitioner's guide to milam — dream yoga as transmitted through the Six Yogas of Nāropa. Covers the preparatory practices (recognition of the d…
The Butter Thief — Kṛṣṇa’s Makhan-Chor Cycle
The makhan-chor cycle — Kṛṣṇa's childhood thefts of butter in Braj — as a sustained text of Vaiṣṇava theology. The butter is śakti in i…
Shunyata, Tao, and Returning to the Root
Three traditions — Taoist, Buddhist, and yogic — converge on the same territory: the ground of awareness before self and world divide. What each c…
Indra — The Vedic God of Thunder, Rain, and Cosmic Order
Indra in the Ṛg Veda — 250 hymns, the slaying of Vṛtra, the release of the waters, the establishment of dawn. Indra in the Purāṇas — the an…
Where Is the Gāṇḍīva? Draupadī’s Rage in the Locked-Mouthed Hall
In a hall full of the powerful, every mouth stayed locked while Draupadī was dragged by her hair. Satish Srijan's poem, performed by Vaishnavi Sharma…
One Charge She Would Not Deny: The Daughter of Fire Speaks
For five thousand years the heroes discussed her. Sutapa Bhattacharya's poem finally lets Draupadī speak. The truest Draupadī we have met.
"a heav…
Bhaṇḍāsura and the Victory of Mahātripura Sundarī
The Lalitopākhyāna narrative from the Brahmā Purāṇa — Bhaṇḍāsura born from Kāmadeva's ashes, ruling the three worlds for sixty thousand …