Psalms of the Brethren CCL: Telakani

Oh the long days I cast about in thought,
Ardent to find truth [that could set me free]!
N o peace of mind I won, [but up and down
I fared,] asking of brahmin and recluse:

‘What man in all the world hath got beyond?
Who in the Ambrosia hath a foothold won?
Whose doctrine can I to my bosom take,
Whereby the Highest I may come to know?’

Caught on a hook within, my spirit hung
E’en as a fish that swallows baited food.
Captured I lay, as Yepachitti once,
The Asura, in mighty Indra’s toils.

I dragged my chains along, nor found release
From this [unending source of] grief and dole.
Is there no man on earth who can unloose
My bonds, and make me know Enlightenment?

What brahmin, what recluse can tell me how
To break them off? Whose Norm can I accept,
Able to bear away old age and death?

Behold this load! coil of perplexity
And doubt, the mortal force of it
Wearing the temper, stiffening the mind,
And lacerating with a vast desire,

Fell offshoot from the bow of craving, due
To [forms of false opinion,] twice fifteen —
Behold, I say, how mightily about
My breast this pressure crushes where it lies!

By this transfixed I stagger to and fro,
And quiver as a leaf blown by the wind.

Tis from within me that hath sprung the dart,
Whence swiftly is consumed this self of me,
Even this body with its sixfold field
Of contact, where it doth proceed alway.

I see him not, that surgeon skilled, who can
Extract the dart and purge me of my doubts
By subtle probe, and not by other knife.

Can any one, without or knife or wound,
Leaving the members of me all unscathed,
Draw out this shaft that’s stuck within my heart?

He who is master of the truth and best,
Who can the venoms fever-scathe disperse,
Who, were I fallen in the deep, could show
A hand and point where shallows sloped to land.

Yea, in a pool it is that I am plunged,
A pit of dust and mire undrainable,
Extended wide with treacherous counterfeit,
Envy and overstrain, torpor and sloth.

Thunder of thought distracted overhead,
And fettering wraiths of cloud about my path
The rush of lust-borne impulse and intent
Doth thither sweep me— to a sceptic’s doom.

And everywhere the streams are flowing by,
And ever burgeoning the creeper stands—
Those streams whose strength avails to stop?
That creeper who can sever from its root?

Make thee a dyke, good sir, to dam the streams;
See that the mind’s strong current ruthlessly
Dash thee not hence like any log away!

’Twas even so for me who sought in fear,
On this side for the distant shore, when He,
The Master, followed by his saintly throng,

He the true Refuge, and with insight armed,
Held out to me a stairway, strongly wrought,
And firm, made of the Norm’s pure heart of oak,
And to me toiling spake: ‘Be not afraid!’

I climbed up to the terrace where the mind
Alert and vigilant applies itself,
Thence I could contemplate the sons of men
Delighting in that sense of ‘I’ and ‘mine,’
Wherein I once was wont to nurse conceits.

And when I saw the Way, even the ship
On which to embark, and dwelt no more on Self,
’Twas then that I beheld Nibbana’s shore.

The dart that sprang from self, offshoot of her
Who to becoming leads — to stop all that
The perfect Path [the Ariyan] he taught.

The knotted bonds long buried in my life,
Fixed up about me for so many years,
The Buddha loosed and cast them off from me,
And every poison canker purged away.