Alaya Vijnana

 

Inside the vast stretch of mirrors 

That have captured me

Across lifetimes:

A torrent of reflections lain on silver roads

Paved by the roaring moon.

 

Glimpses of my brief figure

Distorted in this liquid journey of rippling reflections 

Plowed with duplications of shadows

Falling beneath scythes of silver rays of karma.

Rich harvests of the silhouettes of joys and terrors

Piled high upon moon-laden rafts

Where the soul, working day and night,

Is but a poor farmer of his seeds and fruit,

Finding karma a hard buyer for his merchandise

Melons and papayas upon rafts

Floated down a river like a spilled bottle of perfume

Fruits split in half, spilling more seeds into lambent rivers

Hundreds of moons brought to be weighed

Upon the scales of the waves

To a warehouse filled with seeds

Seeds of thoughts braided into echoes of more realities

Tied like ropes to a myriad of rafts 

Moored to a spit of beach

Upon a margin of tongue unable to remember or understand

Through the Ten Ages

Where muddy deltas of the five senses conflate to

The rivers of the deluded mind;

Only moments on which a tiny raft floats

Onward toward a vaster sea of unvarying law and dharma

Note:  AlayaVijnana is a Sanskrit word given philosophical significance by the Yogacarra School. that means something like "storehouse consciousness. Literally, Alaya means “mooring”, or so I was told.  The early Buddhist philosophers who elaborated on this term,which was only used a few times in the Sutras by Shakyamuni and with some reluctance, intended by it a complex metaphor in which Alaya was both the stream of consciousness and the boat that floated down this current, given that there was no external reality. Alaya is the storehouse of Karma, the treasury “perfumed with the seeds” of karmic tendencies. Our personal boat is docked at this mooring and laden with karma which is determinative on the course of our journey along the stream of consciousness.  Through this poem I have come to clearly realize that the mind cannot be systematized by poetry, and I actually greatly question the validity of this strain of Buddhist philosophy.  Nonetheless, it was a topic I wanted to poetically extrapolate on.