Kauai Aadheenam

Dakshinamurti literally means “south-facing form.” Dakshinamurti is Lord Śiva depicted sitting under a banyan tree, teaching four rishis at His feet through mauna, silence, while showing the chin mudra with His right front hand. In chin mudra, the tips of the thumb and forefinger are joined to form a circle while the other fingers are kept open and extended. The palm faces outward. It is a gesture of imparting spiritual knowledge and is also known as jnana mudra. The joining of the two fingers symbolizes the realization that jiva and Śiva are in nondual union. The index finger represents individual consciousness, the jivatma, while the thumb symbolizes supreme consciousness.

The Dakshinamurti Sadhana for Pilgrims

Among the many sadhanas that pilgrims can perform, one of the sweetest is the Dakshinamurti Sadhana, honoring the Silent Guru within. Dakshinamurti teaches not through words or intellectual instruction. Rather, His silence is the force that awakens the spiritual knowledge already resident within us.

Sadhana Practice

Standing before Dakshinamurti, north of Iraivan Temple, offer flowers and chant a simple Dakshinamurti chant three or more times.

Below is a simple chant that may be used. If you prefer another traditional chant to Dakshinamurti, it may also be recited. Afterwards, sit quietly and reflect upon Dakshinamurti’s silent revelation of the nondual union of jiva and Śiva.

Guru Brahma! Guru Vishnu!
Guru Devo Maheswaraha!
Guru Sakshath Parabrahma
Tasmaisree Gurave Namaha!
Gurave Sarva Lokanam
Bhishaje Bhavaroginam!
Nidhaye Sarva Vidyanam
Sri Dakshinamoorthaye Namaha!

Quote from Gurudeva

“Once freed by God’s grace from these bonds—which do not cease to exist, but no longer have the power to bind—the soul experiences nirvikalpa samadhi. This is the realization of the Self, Atattva Parabrahman—timeless, formless, spaceless—a oneness beyond all change or diversity.”

“The creation of a thousand forests is in one acorn.”
— Ralph Waldo Emerson

Of course, all gardens had their beginning in the miracle of the seed. But the monastery’s recent bout with Hurricane Lowell has returned our thoughts to the importance and the promise of seeds. Not that we are oblivious to that fact, but it takes on new significance as we contemplate replanting devastated areas of Siva’s Sacred Gardens.

We begin today’s reflections with the two seeds above. One is Aerides odorata, an orchid famous for having one of the tiniest seeds in the plant world. Amazingly, 3.4 million seeds weigh a mere gram (1/28th of an ounce). The other is a coco de mer (Lodoicea maldivica), a single seed of which can weigh 25 kg, or 55 pounds.

By weight, that means it takes about 85 billion Aerides odorata seeds to equal the weight of one very large coco de mer seed!

Yet virtually every living cell in a seed contains the plant’s complete genetic instruction set, encoded in DNA so extraordinarily thin that it cannot be seen by the unaided human eye.

Within those tiny spiraling molecules lies Siva’s User’s Manual for making the plant. In the coconut palm, that genetic manual contains about 2.4 billion base pairs. If we take each base pair as a single letter of the English alphabet and print the User’s Manual in 12-point type on 7 × 10-inch pages, the entire manual would fill about 6,000 books of 200 pages each.

As amazing as that is, the User Manual for the coast redwood (Sequoia sempervirens), with its vastly larger genome, would require roughly 70,000 such books!

That’s how much information Siva encodes in the DNA of a seed. Talk about efficiency!