The Mahasiddha Aryadeva

(Karnaripa), The One-Eyed

All Buddhas Past, present and future, have one essence;

Intuiting this essence you know your own mind's nature;

Let go, and relax into unstructured reality,

And with constant relaxation you are a yogin.

Aryadeva was miraculously born on the pollen-bed of a lotus flower. As soon as he was of age he was ordained in the academy of Sri Nalanda, and eventually he became the abbot there. He was then the preceptor of one thousand monks and the instructor of numerous scholars, but he had not realized his own perfect potential. In order to gain ultimate knowledge he resolved to find the Great Guru Nagarjuna, whose extraordinary powers and virtue had inspired his profound respect.

    He left Nalanda and set off for the South. On the way, on the banks of a broad lake, he met the Bodhisattva Manjusri in the guise of a fisherman, and after bowing down to him and presenting offerings he asked him where Nagarjuna could be found. The fisherman told him that the master was living in a nearby jungle, preparing an alchemical potion that vouchsafed immortality. Aryadeva followed his directions and discovered Nagarjuna collecting the ingredients for his elixir. He prostrated before the master and begged for instruction. Nagarjuna gave him initiation into the mandala of Guhyasamaja, precepts to practice and permission to stay with him and practice his sadhana.

    It became these two masters' habit to go to the town near their jungle hermitage to beg for food. Now while Nagarjuna found great difficulty in begging anything at all, Aryadeva would return to the hermitage laden with all kinds of good things.

    "You are being provided for by lustful women," Nagarjuna told his disciple. "Your food is therefore unwholesome. In the future you will eat only what you can lift on the end of a pin. Enough of these feasts on banana-leaf dishes!"

    Aryadeva obeyed his Guru, eating only the single grains of rice that he could lift with a pin. But the women of the town prepared barley-cakes covered with sweetmeat for him, so that he could eat well without breaking the prohibition. He took the cakes to his Guru, who ate them hungrily. When he reported how he had obtained them, he was ordered to remain in the hut in the jungle. Aryadeva obeyed, but this time a tree-nymph brought him delicacies, and she even neglected to cover up her resplendent naked form while she sat and talked. The food she gave him he took to his Guru, along with descriptions of the tree-nymph. Nagarjuna went to the tree in which the nymph lived and called to her; the nymph appeared, showing her head, but modestly refusing to expose herself fully.

    "Why do you show yourself to my disciple but not to me?" he asked her with chagrin.

    "Your disciple is utterly free from passion," replied the nymph, "but in you there is still a trace of lust to be eradicated."

    It was at this time that Nagarjuna gave Aryadeva his name, Sublime God.

    When Nagarjuna's elixir of eternal youth was prepared, he anointed his tongue with a few drops and gaveAryadeva the bowl to do the same. Aryadeva threw the entire bowl against a tree, which immediately broke into leaf.

    "If you waste my elixir like that," Nagirjuna protested, "then you must replace it."

    Aryadeva took a bucket of water, urinated into it, stirred it with a twig and gave it to his Guru.

    "This is too much," said Nagarjuna. His disciple splashed half the bucket's contents over another tree, which also came into bloom. Nagarjuna then said, "Now you know that your realization is mature, do not stay in samsara!"

    At these words Aryadeva floated up into the sky in exaltation. But at that moment Aryadeva was approached by a woman who had been following him from place to place for some time. She prostrated before him, giving him honor and worship.

    "What do you want, woman?" Aryadeva asked her. "Why have you been following me?"

    "I need one of your eyes," the woman replied. "I have been following you because I must have one of your eyes."

    Aryadeva plucked out his right eye and gave it to her. Thereafter he was known as Aryadeva the One-Eyed (Karnaripa).

    Aryadeva had followed the instructions of his Guru implicitly and the obscurations of his mind had been eradicated, so that merely by hearing his Guru say that he was liberated he was so, and he levitated to the height of seven palm trees. Thereafter, floating in the sky, he taught the Buddha's message to all beings, bringing their minds to maturity. Finally, turning himself upside down, showing the soles of his feet to the sky, he placed his palms together in adoration and prostrated to his Guru. As he reversed himself the gods showered flowers down upon him, and he vanished.

Sadhana

The thread running through this legend is a sense of Aryadeva's humility and modesty. "Lotus-born" Bodhisattvas are born enlightened and they need only go through the motions of learning, both mundane and spiritual, before they recognize their status as Buddhas. There seems to be no other point to the rather obscure anecdote concerning the distribution of Nagarjuna's elixir than to demonstrate Aryadeva's enlightenment and his ignorance of this fact. The unawareness of his spiritual status, which Aryadeva showed even in Nalanda, is evidence of maturity on the path. "He who calls himself a Buddha is certainly an imperfect student," says Virupa in one of his dohas. Aryadeva's stream of non-dual perception seems to have been free even of the occasional hiccough that allows an objective thought about oneself to slip in and undermine one's power. Insofar as evolution on the path implies a progressive loss of the ego identity that poses questions such as "Who am I?" and "Am I enlightened yet?" the initial diligent striving and fervent aspiration necessary to enter the path gradually dissolves and with it the notion that there is any such attainable state as "liberation," "enlightenment" and "Buddhahood." Thus Aryadeva needed a Guru to tell him that he had achieved all that there was to achieve, which is to say, the recognition of his original condition as nirvana. The metaphysics of sadhana can be conceived as a sacred dream that derives its validity from the power to take the initiate out of his samsaric condition only to return him to his starting point free of all mental obscurations and emotional defilements.

    Aryadeva's state of innocence and purity was an irresistible attraction to women. This must have arisen from his inability to conceive of women as external objects, particularly as sexual objects. Nagarjuna, still not entirely free of lust, had spent twelve years propitiating female elementals; Aryadeva attracted female spirits to serve him without any effort whatsoever. His disinterest in the tree nymph induced her to display herself to him unsolicited. The woman who followed him may also have intuited Aryadeva's condition, but she wanted to exploit it. In another Tibetan account of this episode the woman was a saiva tantrika who needed the eye for a reason similar to the brahmin's need for Nagarjuna's head; she required the eye of a learned monk to complete the prerequisites for attainment of siddhi. She may have been a kapalika.

    Nagarjuna's alchemical sadhana is called "the alchemy of mercury." Nagarjuna was one of the foremost rasayana siddhas (see p. 120), and greatness in this yoga can be defined as the initiate's ability to apply the alchemical process at every level of his being. Thus in the alchemy of mercury, on the physical plane a material substance, a herbal or mineral panacea, is produced that will bestow immortality (or transmute base metal to gold, according to the alchemist's precepts). On the level of the subtle body, by a hathayoga technique analogous to the process of creating the actual alchemical substance, that is to say, through control of the psychic energies that correspond to the "mica" (abhra) in the "seed" of the divine woman, and control of the creative seed (bodhicitta) of the divine man, an immortal, subtle body is created that is capable of the sensual pleasure and mental abilities of the gross physical body. Finally, on the absolute level, "a body of light" identical to the naths is realized, and this is immortal in the sense that it is beyond creation and destruction and beyond birth and death. To attain this final level is to attain mahamudra-siddhi. To attain the immortal subtle body, as do the naths of the legends, is to attain mundane siddhi or magical powers. By such a crude delineation of the metaphysics of rasayana it can be seen how the alchemy of mercury is compatible with other siddha-yogas, such as the techniques of the creative and fulfillment processes of meditation.

Historiography

The two great Nagarjunas each had a disciple called Aryadeva, but the Aryadevas are confounded inextricably just like the Nagarjunas. These Gurus and disciples are referred to as Fathers and Sons. Both Aryadevas were their Gurus' principal lineage holder (although Nagabodhi is a rival to the later Aryadeva); both were prolific writers, both elucidating the works of their masters. The early Aryadeva gained immortal fame by elaborating Nagarjuna's metaphysics and applying its ramifications to the practice of the Bodhisattva; his best known treatise, the Catuhsataka, explained for the first time how the Bodhisattva should act in the light of madhyamika insight. As to the eighth-ninth century Aryadeva, it is notable that he wrote nothing on rasayana; it was the tenth century Nagarjuna who was the rasayana-siddha; the Catuspitha-tantra appears to have been his sphere of practice and commentary.

    Taranatha's following story of Aryadeva concerns the second century mahayana philosopher, but has added, tantric elements, Aryadeva was born from a lotus in the pleasure garden of the King of Sri Lanka. He abdicated after reaching the throne and took ordination. He completed study of the Tripitaka, and on pilgrimage to India he met Nagarjuna and sat at his feet on Sri Parvata Mountain (at Srisailam), receiving mahayana teaching besides rasayana instruction, and he attained magical powers. After Nagarjuna's death Aryadeva built many monasteries in the South. He remained there until he was called by a message attached to the neck of a crow that had emanated from the heart of a self-manifest image of Mahakala at Nalanda, begging him to go North and defeat a brahmin tantrika called "The Evil One Difficult to Subdue". (According to Bu ston this brahmin was the great poet Matrceta - ca. AD 160 - who composed many beautiful Buddhist verses after his conversion.) On the journey he was waylaid by a woman who required his eye for use in her sadhana. Then "with the help of a shameless layman, a cat, and a jar of black oil, he subdued a sister pandita, a parrot, and chalk of the brahmins. He encircled the place of contest with the brahmin with mantra, and tattered rags, etc., so that Mahadeva could not enter into the heart of his opponent." Aryadeva defeated this brahmin, arrested him and imprisoned him in a temple where in a sutra he read a prediction of his own conversion and accordingly converted to Buddhism. Aryadeva then sang the oft-quoted stanza: "Siva has three eyes but cannot see the truth; Indra has a thousand eyes but is spiritually blind; but Aryadeva, with only one eye, can see the true nature of the entire three realms of existence." Aryadeva's one eye is, of course, the third eye of non-dual awareness.

    Aryadeva has one Guru, Nagarjuna. His principal disciple, and his regent and lineage-holder, was a Rahula whom he taught at Nalanda and in the South (see p. 255). Udhili, who he taught to fly by an alchemical method (see 71), was also his disciple. Aryadeva, who lived in the late tenth century, is also known as Vairaginath or Kanheri, which may be synonymous with Karnari; Vairagi is also the name of a nath siddha disciple of Gorakhnath.

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