Conduct of the liberated: indifference to merit, demerit, rite and worship

PS_68

Thus awakened, [offering up] all thought-constructs through the wind of contemplation, [the liberated one], pouring them as oblation into the kindled fire of the light of the Self, becomes [himself] made of light.

PS_69

Eating this or that, clad in whatever [comes to hand], tranquil, dwelling wherever [he may be] — the one who is the Self of all beings is liberated.

PS_70

Though he should perform a hundred thousand horse-sacrifices or [commit] a hundred thousand slayings of brahmins, the knower of the highest reality (paramārtha), being stainless, is touched neither by merits nor by sins.

PS_71

Free of pride, exhilaration, anger, lust, dejection, fear, greed, and delusion, without [recourse to] hymns of praise or ritual exclamations (vaṣaṭ), let him wander like one inert [insentient], his mind beyond disputation.

PS_72

This class [of afflictions] beginning with pride and exhilaration arises from the delusion of differentiation; how then could the awakening to the non-dual Self ever be touched by it?

PS_73

There is for him nothing whatever, separate [from himself], to be praised or to be offered in sacrifice; [so] would he be pleased by praise and the like? The liberated one is therefore beyond [the rites of] salutation and ritual exclamation.

PS_74

Sustained by the thirty-six tattva (ontological reality-principle (here the 36)), full of the lattice-windows [the apertures] of the bodily structure — his own body, or another's, or a pot or the like — that is for him the temple of the deity.

PS_75

And there he abides, worshipping the deity — the supreme Self, the great Bhairava-Śiva, conjoined with His own power (śakti) — with the pure substances [of offering] that are [nothing but] the [reflexive] awareness of the Self.

PS_76

For him who offers up the whole store of the great seeds [of differentiation] — the conceptual division into outer and inner — the fire-oblation (homa) takes place without effort, in the intensely blazing flame of consciousness.

PS_77

His meditation (dhyāna) never sets [is unceasing]; for this Blessed One emits the variegated forms — and that very [emitting] is [his] meditation: [the world] having the reality of what is sketched out by [his] resolve.

PS_78

And [the act] by which he revolves within [his own] inner awareness the entire series of worlds, the ordered array of principles, and the host of sense-organs — that is declared to be his recitation (japa).

PS_79

[The liberated one,] who sees all with an equal eye and who [thus] reflects upon [his own] consciousness — [a consciousness] delighting in the cremation-ground that is the universe, equipped with the imagined skull-staff (khaṭvāṅga) that is the body —

PS_80

— and who savours [the contents of] the skull-bowl held in his own hand — the fragment of the knowable [object] — brimming with the wine that is the essence of the universe: this is his [great] vow (vrata), both most hard to attain and [yet for him] easy to attain.

PS_81

Thus, having attained [that reality] free of birth and destruction, named the supreme-real Great Lord (paramārtha-maheśvara), through the manifest light of [pure] perceiver-hood, he abides — his task accomplished — as he pleases.

PS_82

Whoever thus knows [the Lord] — all-pervading, declared to be the Self of all, with [all] manifoldness shaken off, [whose] supreme bliss is beyond compare — he becomes [wholly] made of That.

PS_83

Whether at a holy ford (tīrtha) or in the house of an outcaste, even with memory lost, [when] casting off the body — [already] liberated from the very moment of knowing — he attains mokṣa / kaivalya (liberation; aloneness/isolation), his grief slain.

PS_84

Resort to a holy ford [is] for [the gaining of] merit, [and] death-passage in the dwelling of an outcaste [is] for [going to] hell; but when there is no touch of the stain of merit or demerit, of what use is [any of] that?

PS_85

[Even] casting back the kernel of rice — once well separated from husk and hull — into the midst of husk-fragments does not make it [re-]identify with that [husk-]form again.

PS_86

Just so, consciousness, [once] separated from the cluster of sheaths (kañcuka (the limiting 'sheaths')), [though] it remain here [in a body] on account of [residual] habit-traces (saṃskāra), is liberated in Self and becomes free of [any further] touch by them.

PS_87

A gem, [even though] made spotless by the most skilled lapidary, [seems] sullied [while shut up] within the limiting casket; but upon the severance of [that] limiting condition (upādhi), its true nature (paramārtha) is [seen to be] limpidly clear.

PS_88

So [too], the cognition [of the Self], abiding in the purity [established] by the true teacher's instruction, though [still] freed [from bondage even while bound] by the limiting condition of the body, shines as the very form of Śiva — as if void of any [further] limiting condition.

PS_89

[One who,] even [merely] through unwavering faith [grounded] in the authority of scripture and the rest, has attained [some] state of being made of That — that very one [may] first [pass through] heaven, hell, [or] human birth.

PS_90

But the last moment [of life], in his case nourishing a meritorious or a sinful state, [merely] serves as a cooperating cause for the deluded [in determining their next destiny]; it is not the [true] cause of [that] destiny [for the knower].