The Vāsiṣṭha Atlas

The prince's despair is read as the first sign of wisdom.

He knew already; he needed only to hear it said.

A whole kingdom lives inside the room where the dead king lies.

One wish on a hillside became a king's whole life.

A seventy-year life and a war, held in one chamber's empty space.

Hunger made small is still hunger; made wise, it guards.

Ten brothers thought 'I am the Maker', and ten worlds appeared.

No punishment reaches the mind that is elsewhere.

The mind beats itself, then runs from its own blows.

The world is a nurse's tale we enjoy without understanding.

Two hours on a still horse; sixty years an outcaste.

One glance, countless lives; one full recall, and he is free.

Invincible without an I; undone by mine; freed by their story.

The same power, without ‘mine’, leaves no trace.

The mind is a king who builds cities of air.

When spirit fills everything, there is nothing left to seek.

A king overhears a song and wakes inside his life.

One loss, seen among thousands, loosens its grip.

A thousand years of trance, and a drum to return.

Bliss that cannot return is unfinished; Viṣṇu's conch calls Prahlāda back.

One moment underwater: a whole life, and whose was it?

Uddālaka talks his own mind down into trance, and back out.

A king who judged from stillness, and called that stillness samādhi.

Grief stalled in solitude, released when two friends speak of "we".

The body waits in the mud; the mind returns by sunlight.

Between the outgoing and returning breath, the crow outlives time.

The true offering is equanimity; the temple is attention.

One fruit, countless worlds as seeds, and nothing divided.

Every lotus carved in stone is still the stone.

Act fully; what you are neither kills nor is killed.

A hundred dreamers wake, see one another, and go home.

One answer stills every riddle; the hungry demon forgets hunger.

Holding nothing, he could rule and bring a river down.

She woke first, then came disguised to wake him.

Searching for a lost shell, the miser finds a moon-bright gem.

The healer borrows a form so that the truth can be heard.

Doubt lets the real gem fly; craving keeps the glass.

Breaking the chain is not the same as ending the hunter.

Offered heaven, he answered: my heaven is everywhere.

The only thing to abandon is a self that never existed.

The pot breaks; the space inside it was never lost.

Do everything, enjoy everything, relinquish everything; hold on to nothing.

Seven rungs from good desire to light: the map of awakening.

The stag ran past; the sage, resting in the fourth, saw nothing.

A thousand years of pleasure; one seed of ‘I’ beneath it all.

Fleeing defeat, Indra hid in an atom and built a world.

Even after seeing Brahman everywhere, old habit regrows the throne.

Tired of holy places, the pilgrim sheds his seeking like a skin.

The hunted deer-mind is not killed; it rests in shade.

Whole worlds open in the stone for eyes trained to see.

A wish born of the mind burns, tires, then seeks freedom.

When desire withdraws, a world ends, and the dreamer wakes.

A dwelling made of wishing vanishes when the wishing stops.

Even the sage, unseen and ungraspable, was a ghost for a while.

Four selves can search forever; only remembering brings one home.

The corpse that buried the world became the ground beneath it.

A curse becomes a gnat when the mind broods on it.

He breathed into another's dream and could not find the way back.

The figure was always in the wood.

Ten brothers thought themselves into worlds while beasts ate their bodies.

Eight brothers each ruled the whole earth inside his own house.

Seeking firewood, a few found the wish-fulfilling gem.

A king's questions meet one answer: the mind makes its world.

Absorption is complete only when it can stand up and serve.