AVG 2.16

Chapter 2 (The Seekers Joy at Self-Cognizance): Verse 16

द्वैतमूलमहो दुःखं नान्यत्तस्याऽस्ति भेषजम् ।

दृश्यमेतन्मृषा सर्वं एकोऽहं चिद्रसोऽमलः ॥ २-१६॥

PURPORT:

Oh!, our sense of dichotomy is the root

of all suffering, and, there are no separate 

panaceas for this; other than the realization 

that all discernible phenomena are illusory.

Understanding this, I am now transformed  

into an essence of pure comprehension.

TRANSLITERATION:

द्वैतमूलम् अहो दुःखम् न अन्यतः तस्य अस्ति भेषजम् ।

dvaitamūlam aho duḥkham na anyataḥ tasya asti bheṣajam ।

दृश्यम् एतत्  मृषः सर्वम् एकः अहम् चिद्रसः अमलः ॥ २-१६॥

dṛśyam etat mṛṣaḥ sarvam ekaḥ aham cidrasaḥ amalaḥ ॥ 2-16॥

MEANING:

dvaitamūlam (द्वैतमूलम्) = having duality as the source of (compound of dvaita (द्वैत) meaning duality/dichotomy and mūlam (मूलम्) meaning root/source/basis)

aho (अहो) = astonished! [as an exclamation of being pleasantly surprised at himself]

duḥkham (दुःखम्) =  sorrow/distress/misery/suffering

na (न) = not

anyataḥ (अन्यतः) =  other/separate

tasya (तस्य) = of that (referring to duḥkham (दुःखम्) =  sorrow here)

asti (अस्ति) = is

bheṣajam (भेषजम्) = remedy/cure/antidote/panacea ।

dṛśyam (दृश्यम्) = visible object/palpable entity/discernable phenomena 

etat (एतत्) = this

mṛṣaḥ (मृषः) = false/unreal (as in everything other than awareness is false and unreal)

sarvam (सर्वम्) = all

ekaḥ (एकः) = one

aham (अहम्) = I

cidrasaḥ (चिद्रसः) = essence of awareness (compound of cit (चित्) meaning awareness/comprehension and rasaḥ (रसः) meaning essence/juice/essential basis)

amalaḥ (अमलः) = spotless/stainless/shining/pure ॥ 2-16॥

COMMENT:

The sense of dichotomy or duality referenced by Janaka and implicated as the cause for suffering and confusion stems from the mistaken notion that reality is fundamentally composed of two parts where the composition of the two parts can take various formalisms and formulations depending upon the school of thought that the person identifies with - formalisms of dualisms ranging from mind separate from matter to consciousness separate from corporeal entities to the separation of theistic essences between concepts like 'god' and the world etc. 

While we have strict dualism of this fashion on the one side, there is also the other side that consists of monism - where oneness or a over-arching unity is posited where all existing things go back to a source and strictly speaking there exists only a single thing, the Universe, which can only be artificially and arbitrarily divided into many things.

Janaka here is not talking about strict duality nor of strict monism, but, of a path that allows for complementarity - where reality - both material as well as immaterial are fundamentally inter-dependent systems that complement each other, where one part cannot be specified or stipulated without direct (or implicit) reference to the other portion to which the first part is inter-dependently linked. 

In this sense, the complementarity is seen between an existent entity and the causal conditions supporting the entity like a person observing and the object observed, or the emotion of desire and the desirous person or the arising of existent entities and the conditions for such arising or the actor and her action. 

Let us briefly examine the example of fire and fuel to make this a little more clear: Fire and fuel are not mutually separate as per strict dualism nor are they one as per strict monism; if fire and fuel were mutually separate and one can find them as separate entities in nature. But, fire never stands alone in and of itself. Fire exists due to a combustible entity being burned and the combustible entity is designated so as it has the potential to catch fire (or because the fuel is on fire). Fire and fuel are mutually and reciprocally interlinked. One cannot exist without the other and one cannot be designated as such without the presence of the other. One sees only complementarity within manifest reality. Reality boils down to an understanding for Janaka where existents cannot lay claim to having an own-being or independence. Fundamental reality does not consist of single, isolated corporeal or intangible moieties, instead, entities arise only in dependence to and in complement with other things. Understanding this, Janaka says that he is transformed into an essence of pure comprehension. 

NOTES:

From the book Figuring by Maria Popova: "All of it — the rings of Saturn and my father’s wedding band, the underbelly of the clouds pinked by the rising sun, Einstein’s brain bathing in a jar of formaldehyde, every grain of sand that made the glass that made the jar and each idea Einstein ever had, the shepherdess singing in the Rila mountains of my native Bulgaria and each one of her sheep, every hair on Chance’s velveteen dog ears and Marianne Moore’s red braid and the whiskers of Montaigne’s cat, every translucent fingernail on my friend Amanda’s newborn son, every stone with which Virginia Woolf filled her coat pockets before wading into the River Ouse to drown, every copper atom composing the disc that carried arias aboard the first human-made object to enter interstellar space and every oak splinter of the floor-boards onto which Beethoven collapsed in the fit of fury that cost him his hearing, the wetness of every tear that has ever been wept over a grave and the yellow of the beak of every raven that has ever watched the weepers, every cell in Galileo’s fleshy finger and every molecule of gas and dust that made the moons of Jupiter to which it pointed, the Dipper of freckles constellating the olive firmament of a certain forearm I love and every axonal flutter of the tenderness with which I love her, all the facts and figments by which we are perpetually figuring and reconfiguring reality — it all banged into being 13.8 billion years ago from a single source, no louder than the opening note of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony, no larger than the dot levitating over the small i, the I lowered from the pedestal of ego.

How can we know this and still succumb to the illusion of separateness, of otherness? This veneer must have been what the confluence of accidents and atoms known as Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., saw through when he spoke of our “inescapable network of mutuality,” what Walt Whitman punctured when he wrote that “every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.”

One autumn morning, as I read a dead poet’s letters in my friend Wendy’s backyard in San Francisco, I glimpse a fragment of that atomic mutuality. Midsentence, my peripheral vision — that glory of instinct honed by millennia of evolution — pulls me toward a miraculous sight: a small, shimmering red leaf twirling in midair. It seems for a moment to be dancing its final descent. But no — it remains suspended there, six feet above ground, orbiting an invisible center by an invisible force. For an instant I can see how such imperceptible causalities could drive the human mind to superstition, could impel medieval villagers to seek explanation in magic and witchcraft. But then I step closer and notice a fine spider’s web glistening in the air above the leaf, conspiring with gravity in this spinning miracle.

Neither the spider has planned for the leaf nor the leaf for the spider — and yet there they are, an accidental pendulum propelled by the same forces that cradle the moons of Jupiter in orbit, animated into this ephemeral early-morning splendor by eternal cosmic laws impervious to beauty and indifferent to meaning, yet replete with both to the bewildered human consciousness beholding it.

We spend our lives trying to discern where we end and the rest of the world begins. We snatch our freeze-frame of life from the simultaneity of existence by holding on to illusions of permanence, congruence, and linearity; of static selves and lives that unfold in sensical narratives. All the while, we mistake chance for choice, our labels and models of things for the things themselves, our records for our history. History is not what happened, but what survives the shipwrecks of judgment and chance.

Some truths, like beauty, are best illuminated by the sidewise gleam of figuring, of meaning-making. In the course of our figuring, orbits intersect, often unbeknownst to the bodies they carry — intersections mappable only from the distance of decades or centuries. Facts crosshatch with other facts to shade in the nuances of a larger truth — not relativism, no, but the mightiest realism we have. We slice through the simultaneity by being everything at once: our first names and our last names, our loneliness and our society, our bold ambition and our blind hope, our unrequited and part-requited loves. Lives are lived in parallel and perpendicular, fathomed nonlinearly, figured not in the straight graphs of “biography” but in many-sided, many-splendored diagrams. Lives interweave with other lives, and out of the tapestry arise hints at answers to questions that raze to the bone of life: What are the building blocks of character, of contentment, of lasting achievement? How does a person come into self-possession and sovereignty of mind against the tide of convention and unreasoning collectivism? Does genius suffice for happiness, does distinction, does love? Two Nobel Prizes don’t seem to recompense the melancholy radiating from every photograph of the woman in the black laboratory dress. Is success a guarantee of fulfillment, or merely a promise as precarious as a marital vow? How, in this blink of existence bookended by nothingness, do we attain completeness of being?

There are infinitely many kinds of beautiful lives.

So much of the beauty, so much of what propels our pursuit of truth, stems from the invisible connections — between ideas, between disciplines, between the denizens of a particular time and a particular place, between the interior world of each pioneer and the mark they leave on the cave walls of culture, between faint figures who pass each other in the nocturne before the torchlight of a revolution lights the new day, with little more than a half-nod of kinship and a match to change hands."