Rather than explaining it myself, I’ll quote from Teachers Have It Easy: the big sacrifices and small salaries of America’s teachers (Daniel Moulthrop, Nínive Clements Calegari, Dave Eggers). The rest of the book is mostly like this excerpt: brief testimony from teachers, with chapter introductions and interstitial commentary from the editors.

Julia Normand, 65, English—Goldenview Middle School,
Anchorage, Alaska

When I was working at a law firm as a computer-support person, my typical day amounted to coming to my desk with a cup of coffee and a roll. I’d sit down and go through messages, drinking my coffee. I’d greet my co-workers when they came in; I’d make a phone call to set up a meeting and plan my day. If I had to go to the bathroom, I just got up and went. I was in charge of my own body, my own life, and my own schedule. I had certain things to get done, and if it took longer than a day, I got paid overtime for it. It was a high-pressure job in many ways, but not in terms of having thirty people needing your attention immediately and knowing that legally, I’m required to be in the room. As a teacher, if I step out of the room to go to the bathroom and something happens, legally, I’m responsible.

It’s just such a different thing. You feel like a person when you’re working at another job, and you don’t feel like a person when you’re teaching. It feels like being a train. Somebody switches it on, and it’s moving and you had better keep running. You don’t have the option to make a personal choice like “I think I’ll put this off until tomorrow.” There are thirty people, and they need things. You go with it all day.

I guess the equivalent might be if thirty people called me at the same time to tell me their computers crashed. But that’s just impossible. The network could go down and thirty people could call, but there’d be five or six of us in the IT department who would go troubleshoot it and one person would man the phones and say to people, “This is probably what we think is happening, it’ll probably be about fifteen minutes, we’ll let you know.” You work at high speed on it, but it’s not thirty people standing over you wanting immediate attention.

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Teachers are required by law to stay within their classrooms. They are responsible for anything that happens when a student is in their charge. This is a reasonable requirement, yet because there aren’t reasonable breaks in school schedules, teachers often lack the basic liberties most occupations take for granted.

Few other professionals see thirty or more clients at once, all with different needs, some of whom may be determined to work counter to your goals. The combination of these factors can be stressful, to say the least—especially when there is no possibility, for hours on end, of respite.

pp. 116–118

Most people seem to think that only (2) is the full-time job of teaching, and that (1) and (3) are mere periphery requirements. These people are wrong. I could easily fill a full 40+ hour week doing any one of them, and realistically I spend 20–30+ hours weekly on each, sometimes skimping on one (generally (3), or parts of it) for a week or two and then spending a maddening weekend or taking a sick-day (or both) to catch up.

I would gladly do any one of these jobs—I think I would even enjoy doing any one of them—or alternate between them from semester to semester or year to year. Ideally, if I were doing only one of them and two others were doing the other two, we would work in very close collaboration.

But giving each of the three the attention it ought to get is difficult-bordering-on-impossible, and this is one of the reasons I will not be able to keep doing this job forever.

In our (the Roman) alphabet, the order of the letters roughly follows that of the Greek alphabet, which itself follows that of the Semitic alphabets. Thus, a-b-c from alpha-beta-gamma from aleph-bet-gimel. But in all of them, this order is to all appearances arbitrary. Not so in India.

All of the consonants in Devanagari, as in most (or is it all?) of the other Indian scripts, are divided into five groups called sthānas—which literally means “standing,” or “position”—according to the place of articulation in the mouth, and the sthānas are themselves arranged according to distance from the throat.

Thus, the first group is articulated nearest the throat: the ka-sthāna.
The second is forward slightly: the ca-sthāna (“ca” being pronounced as what in English we would write “cha”).
The third is not necessarily further from the throat, but uses a further-forward part of the tongue: the ṭa-sthāna. (This is the “retroflex” sthāna, pronounced with the tip of the tongue straight up in the palate. It’s the stereotypical feature of Indian speech mocked in fake Indian accents.)
The fourth is at the teeth: the ta-sthāna.
The fifth is at the lips: the pa-sthāna.

Now, within each sthāna the letters are arranged according to prayatna (literally, “effort”). These begin with the unvoiced, unaspirated consonant, so the first letter in the pa-sthāna is “pa.” Next is the unvoiced but aspirated form, so the second letter in the pa-sthāna is “pha” (pronounced the same as “pa,” but with more breath). Next is the voiced and unaspirated: “ba.” Then the voiced and aspirated: “bha.” Then the nasal: “ma.” This pattern is repeated for all of the sthānas.

Some of these distinctions can be hard for English-speakers to hear and produce, since we pay less deliberate attention to them. For instance, we do have aspirated and unaspirated consonants, but we don’t distinguish them in writing, and most of us are usually unaware of the difference though we hear people who get them wrong as somehow vaguely foreign-sounding. The “p” in “pot” is aspirated; the “p” in “spot” is unaspirated. If you’re a native speaker, you’ll put more breath into the former, though you might not realize it, and you’ll think people sound non-native when they get it wrong.

It also looks like we don’t have so many nasals in English; but we have more than you might think, and just use “n” as a generic nasal-marker. For instance, people sometimes refer to “dropping” the letter “g” from words ending in “ing”; but nothing is being dropped, only replaced. “Talking” ends in a nasal of the ka-sthāna (a “velar nasal”); “talkin” ends in a nasal of of the ta-sthāna (a “dental nasal”). The place of articulation of the sound has changed, but neither form has more sounds than the other. You might say we’re using “ng” to indicate a single sound, which would be indicated with a single letter in Devanagari.

So the consonants in Devanagari are arranged like so:

k — kh — g — gh — ṅ
c — ch — j — jh — ñ
ṭ — ṭh — ḍ — ḍh — ṇ
t — th — d — dh — n
p — ph — b — bh — m

Each row is a different place in your mouth; and then within each row, all of the letters are pronounced with your mouth in the same position, but changing the manner of enunciation. So with your mouth in the position for the “k,” add breath to get “kh,” add voice to get “g,” add breath and voice to get “gh,” and make it nasal to get “ṅ” (which is the “ng” in our “-ing” words).

(The vowels and other letters come before the consonants, and are similarly—though perhaps less obviously—arranged according to manner of enunciation.)

One consequence of this ordering is that, whereas when looking up a word in an English dictionary I find myself singing the alphabet song in my head, when looking up words in Sanskrit I find myself moving my tongue through the different positions in my mouth.

When I first learned this, it seemed like something Tolkien would have used for Elvish. And it’s the main reason I think Devanagari is awesome.

(Download PDF)

Do Not Interrupt This Class (Sign)

These photos were taken 40 years ago tonight, probably by my father but conceivably by my uncle, aunt, grandfather, or grandmother, about 14 months after they arrived to the United States from Argentina.

Her name is Fujitsubo. Her gentlewoman is Ōmyōbu. Now, some years later, Genji is about 18:

Princess Fujitsubo was not well and had withdrawn from the palace. Genji felt deep sympathy for His Majesty, whose anxious distress was evident, but he also ancitipated feverishly now, at last, a chance for himself, and he no longer went out at all. At the palace or at home he spent the daylight hours daydreaming and those after dark hounding Ōmyōbu. How Ōmyōbu brought off their meeting is impossible to say, but to poor Genji even these stolen moments with her seemed quite unreal. To Her Highness the memory of that last, most unfortunate incident was a source of enduring suffering, and she had resolved that nothing of the kind should ever happen again, yet despite her obvious consternation she remained thoughtful and kind, even while she continued to resist him with a profound dignity so far beyond the reach of any other woman that Genji could not help wondering in anguish why it was never possible to find in her the slightest flaw.

How could he have told her all he had to say? He must have wished himself where darkness never ends, but alas, the nights were short now, and their time together had yielded after all nothing but pain.

“This much we have shared, but nights when we meet again will be very rare,
and now that we live this dream, O that it might swallow me!”

he said, sobbing; to which Her Highness compassionately replied,

“People soon enough will be passing on our tale, though I let our dream
sweep me on till I forget what misfortune now is mine.”

Genji could not blame her for being in such torment, and he deeply regretted having caused it. Ōmyōbu gathered up his dress cloak and so on and brought it to him.

There, did you miss it? You can hardly be blamed if you did. But she’s pregnant on the next page! (There’s no other reference to the “most unfortunate incident,” but there is a translator’s footnote suggesting that “stolen moments” contains a verb for “seeing,” which implies sexual intimacy.)

Shortly later:

Her highness continued to lament the misery of her lot, and meanwhile she began feeling more and more unwell, so that she could not make up her mind to go straight back to the palace, despite a stream of messengers from there urging her to do so. No, she really did not feel herself, and her silent guesses at what this might mean reduced her to despair over what was to become of her.

She rose less and less during the summer heat. By the third month her condition was obvious enough that her women noticed it, and the horror of her fate overwhelmed her. Not knowing what had actually happened, they expressed surprise that she had not yet told His Majesty. She alone understood just what the matter was. Women like Ōmyōbu or her own foster sister, Ben, who had attended her intimately when she bathed and therefore had before their eyes every clue to her condition, did not doubt that something was seriously wrong, but they could not very well discuss the matter, and Ōmyōbu was left to reflect in anguish that her mistress’s fate had struck after all. To His Majesty, Ōmyōbu presumably reported that a malevolent spirit had obscured Her Highness’s condition, so that at first it had gone unnoticed. This was at any rate what Her Highness’s own women believed. His Majesty was deeply concerned about her, and the unbroken procession of messengers from him inspired mingled dread and despair.

But no need to fear, at least so far. I’m only about 200 pages into the 1100-or-so pages of The Tale of Genji, but the little boy has been born, and though the narrator tells us he looks just exactly like Genji, the emperor and everyone else seem to think that since Genji is so damned beautiful, how could anyone else so beautiful fail to look a lot like him? The little tyke even appears to be on the road to becoming emperor himself one day.

(And this book—ostensibly written by a Japanese noblewoman about 1000 years ago—continues to be excellent and entertaining, and of everything I’ve read in the last year would be my most unreserved recommendation to any amateur lover of books.)

I’ve got a few weeks away from school, so maybe I’ll finally finish. I would like to go back to the beginning, but maybe that’ll have to wait awhile.

Thoughts on seasons two and three:

(1) Most intriguing and perhaps most unlikely character: Brother Mouzone. Where can such a man come from, and can he even be? A neatly-dressed, bow-tied and jacketed, eloquent Muslim killer-for-hire who reads all the same magazines I do. The allusion seems to be, at least superficially, to the Nation of Islam (or perhaps their paramilitary wing), but no such affiliation is ever mentioned by name; and his showing up to provide muscle for a drug operation doesn’t seem to be a good fit. I immediately wondered about his background, about the world that could have produced a Brother Mouzone, and hoped the series would be up to exploring it, but it seems not to be.

Ah, but they do say where he is from: New York. Of course. And he is thus one more facet (maybe the plainest, actually) of the nebulous but recurring role of New York City on the periphery of The Wire (and of Baltimore?). In Brokeback Mountain—I don’t remember whether the movie or the short story or both—either Jack or Ennis wonders exasperatedly what people do who find themselves in their situation, and the other says he doesn’t know, they must go to Denver or something. Denver might be Athens or Babylon, it’s fairly close but strangely far away, quite like here and full of people from here but bigger than here and more complicated and mysterious and maybe frightening, and just as much of the rest of the world as of here, or maybe where the rest of the world and here meet, so really not like here at all. This might be something like the relation people have with nearby cities everywhere; but Baltimore is itself a city, its inhabitants not rural people, and yet something like this relation seems to be what the hazy presence of New York City on the horizon means in The Wire. And of course Brother Mouzone is from there. I want to know about his world, but The Wire just places it in New York and doesn’t have the audacity to go there. I suppose he stands in for the bigness of the world, and for the non-exhaustiveness of The Wire’s depiction of it—that the Barksdale empire should have connections all the way to NYC and to people like Brother Mouzone!—but I’m not sure whether to think his mysteriousness is a strength of the show, or if its inability to account for him is a weakness and its appeal to him a gimmick. I do want to like him, in either case.

(2) After my growing excitement and awe over the first season, my first impression of the second, taken together, is that it seems to be less of a whole. This is one reason I want to go back to the beginning, since I’m not sure whether this impression is accurate or an artifact of viewing the first season without many expectations and then placing the second into the context of the first. But it seemed to me that the show could have finished after the first season and been a complete entity, and an admirable work of art, while the second season had a different rhythm and sent out more narrative threads. It occurred to me that the first season, at least in outline, might have been made without expectation of continued funding, but that the second season was anticipating the continuation of the series. I don’t know whether it happened that way, but that’s how it felt to me. At the end of the first season, the second might never have come, or it could have come and done anything; at the end of the second, I thought I could tell basically how the third would have to start.

(3) The feds are generally presented as being hyper-competent, having unlimited money and resources, and being utterly uninterested in what’s going on locally. Their distance, their powerful but transient influence, their mysterious depths and mostly superficial depiction, make their role not entirely unlike that of New York. (If ever there is anything like a deus ex machina in The Wire, it will be connected either to New York or the feds.)

The way the feds deflate the local investigation into The Greek was maddening, and though it’s not hard to believe that this is often quite how it works in such a vast web of bureaucracies and competing interests, I want to believe there’s a better way. So this guy is helping you with information in your investigation into international terrorism, and he’s under investigation for unrelated crimes by another agency. Tip him off and spoil their investigation, or communicate with that agency? I suppose if you’re dealing with very sensitive stuff you don’t want to create any new possibility for leaks. Also a possibility is that you don’t give a shit about that agency or their investigation. But really? Is this how it has to be? Can there be no better way? (That may be a fairly characteristic reaction to the show in general, I guess.)

(4) In the way that the first season is clearly about the drug trade and the Barksdale empire, and the second is clearly about the longshoremen, the third season is not so clearly about anything. From what I had heard, I anticipated its being similarly focused, but on city politics. It seemed instead to be more like a return to the first season, but with a newly expanded scope. Is this because local politics is by itself less whole and delimited than the drug trade or the docks? Because, quite the contrary, it is too isolated, and would too much change the character of the show? Because the one-season-one-setting paradigm is wrong?

(5) Perhaps the most obvious foray into concrete public policy debate is the “Hamsterdam” plotline. They make it unambiguous several times, someone or other saying in disbelief to Major Colvin, “You legalized drugs.” And despite the unsubtlety of that repeated assertion, I appreciated the subtlety in their depiction. The “legalization” does have immediate and obvious beneficial effects, but they don’t shy away from the ugliness, either, which makes for a more fair-minded look at the problem of drugs and the law than most.

I’m now working my way slowly through Season Four. The understanding of the public school system is remarkable, and not just of the classroom, which movies and television are notoriously bad at. The look of the school, the meetings. Oh, the meetings. Watching the school scenes, after trial-by-fire in Mississippi, is unspeakably bizarre. It manifests physically. I feel dazed and slightly giddy, utterly enthralled. Mary goes noticeably pale and sweaty, and wants to turn it off.

First, and as much a disclaimer for what I write here as a point of contention with Horgan and Florien, “Buddhism” is a pretty big tent. I have not read any of the (quite recent) books or writers Horgan mentions — and perhaps his criticisms would be apt if directed at the formulations of those authors — but from having read and taken seriously some hundreds (out of the thousands) of pages of the Pāli Canon, some Nāgārjuna, some Mahāyāna sutras and some early Zen, it is clear that despite some reassurances that underlying principles are the same, not everything called “Buddhism” presents the same character. The contrast is especially stark between the relatively sober Pāli Canon — which represents the oldest surviving (and allegedly original) strand of Buddhism — and some of the much more fantastical Mahāyāna sutras. Horgan’s and Florien’s respective characterizations (and rejections) of, for instance, reincarnation, even if they accurately reflect the positions of some schools of Buddhism (and I am not at all sure that they do), are therefore not accurately reflective of “Buddhism” taken generically.

One of Horgan’s concerns seems to be the role of the supernatural in Buddhism, and it may be especially easy to be confused about this point. It is not at all clear to me what the role of the supernatural in Buddhism is, and my sense is that it is not the same for all buddhisms. To understand why it would be this way, it is helpful to understand something that seems fairly common in Indian religion that may seem peculiar from the perspective of the Abrahamic ones.

I’ve been told a story that might well be exaggerated or apocryphal, but the continued telling of which is nevertheless illustrative. It goes like this: When the Buddhists first arrived in Japan, they went around building stūpas next to the old Shinto shrines. The Shinto priesthood, tolerant though they were, were taken aback by this audacity, but were reassured by the Buddhists that there was no conflict: the Shinto deities were all Buddhists now.

Though it is quite unlike the treatment of idols and false gods by Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, this feature is not wholly peculiar to Buddhism. In fact, despite Buddhism’s being a “heterodox” (nāstika) teaching — it does not accept the authority of the Vedas, and even denies the Upaniṣadic permanent Self, or Ātman — the Buddha is named in the Gītagovinda and elsewhere within Hinduism as one of the incarnations of Kṛṣṇa, who is an avatar of Viśnu, God-made-flesh.

In addition to Horgan’s suggested reason for the rising popularity of Buddhism in West — that it seems at first blush to be compatible with our “scientifically oriented culture” — this tendency not only to tolerate but to welcome or incorporate other traditions may offer another (and a reason for the rising popularity in the West of Eastern religion generally): people want a spiritual tradition, preferably with the accompanying authority of great antiquity and influence over the culture of a continent, that endorses our attitudes toward diversity. (Even one with sacred scriptures that don’t seem to condemn homosexuality; imagine that!)

It also helps explain the difficult relationship to the supernatural. In some of the oldest Buddhist texts, the Buddha doesn’t seem to have much use for the traditional supernatural ordering of the cosmos, or in fact for “idle speculation” of any sort, but neither does he go out of his way to deny it. And as different schools of Buddhism arose and made their way through Asia, some of them seem to have picked up more and more.

Horgan’s early view that Buddhism is surprisingly compatible with a scientific outlook, or to go further than he, that it is largely naturalistic, is not at all crazy. The Buddha presents himself as a man, not a deity. When nearing death, he chides some of his followers for their attachment to his decaying body, telling them that the Buddha is the Dhamma (or dharma— which is to say law, or teaching, or way-things-are). He arrived at the teaching through careful observation, and calls it a come-and-see-thing. He allows that acceptance of dogma can have some utility, but not that it is sufficient for liberation, and he asserts that one must finally know the truth for oneself. To this end he compares his teaching to a raft, which one must use to reach the other shore, but must not then cling to and drag along forever. (A later Zen exhortation: if you should ever meet the Buddha in the road, slay him.)

Perhaps the central metaphysical claim of Buddhism is that of impermanence, or of conditioned and dependently-arisen nature. Take the life-span of a table: you have dirt, then tree, then lumber, then table, then scrap and firewood or termite food and dust. The start- and end-points here are functional, but otherwise arbitrary, the “transformation” being basically continuous and infinite in both directions. It is for practical considerations that we draw a box around part of that span, take it to be a discrete unity, and call it a table. But this is a purely conventional assertion and not a reflection of the most fundamental reality.

To put it another way: You can give the river a name, but the water is always moving, the banks always eroding, the path and boundaries always shifting, with no permanent substratum giving it unity through time. In the language of Buddhism, to assert that there is thus no river is nihilism (the same term is sometimes translated as annihilationism); to assert that there really is a river, a permanent unity, is eternalism. For the Buddha, the truth of his teaching is neither nihilism nor eternalism, but the “middle way.”

And both nihilism and eternalism are manifestations of clinging — of attempting to reify and make permanent what is conditioned, dependently-arisen, impermanent — and lead to suffering.

It is this understanding that leads to the so-called “denial of the self,” which is more a denial of the permanent substratum, the unity of the Self. I am an aggregate, too, like the table or the river. I am a heap of cells and tissues and desires and cravings and habits and so on. And it is quite easy to deny that the person in a childhood photograph is the same me. I’ve inherited a lot from him, to be sure, but it’s not hard to say that the “I” is different. And though it’s much harder to say this of myself yesterday, the line is arbitrary.

But then what of reincarnation? Horgan has a problem with the idea of a reincarnating “soul,” and also with the notion that “the self is an illusion,” but apparently doesn’t notice that these two doctrines would appear to contradict one another. What is reborn if not a permanent, unifying self?

The answer is not clear, and I suspect it is understood differently by different schools. What is clear is that it is not “me” in the sense I would ordinarily mean. In one book of the Pāli Canon (the Mahātaṇhāsankhaya), when one of the Buddha’s disciples says that it is “this same consciousness” that goes through the round of death and rebirth, the others are scandalized and try to disabuse him of the notion. Finally the Buddha himself says that holding such a view means having “not even a glimmer” of his teaching.

(The notion that reincarnation represents a kind of wishful thinking, or a means of attaining immortality, is a distinctly Western projection. Despite many doctrinal differences amongst the various Indian religionists, the one thing they all agree on is that the round of rebirths is terrible, and the ultimate goal is always some sort of liberation from it, whether understood as permanent transcendent unity with an underlying principle of the cosmos, or simple extinguishment — which is the most literal suggestion of the word nirvaṇa. And even for the orthodox Hindu who does posit a permanent Self, it is not like the popular conception of “soul” in Abrahamic religion, which is a kind of individuality. The Self is a witness, what remains the same in me even if everything about me that can change does. Mine thus looks quite a lot like yours. And indeed, for some schools it is the very same thing.)

There are suggestions that “death” and “rebirth” are happening all the time, within what we would call one human life — always becoming, never being. Of course there may still be a mystical or supernatural component to rebirth, especially within some schools; but when the government of China, in an effort to control Tibetan religion, claims the authority to require approval for reincarnations, and when the Dalai Lama himself suggests holding a public referendum to decide whether or not to reincarnate or perhaps to reincarnate without having died first, one wonders how far off it would be to suggest that Barack Obama is the 43rd incarnation of George Washington. (Or 44th? Some weird metaphysics with Grover Cleveland.)

(And hell, as long as we’re not talking about a real, permanent self, a consciousness, a “soul” in the Christian sense, the worldview would not seem to me altogether mad that saw some sort of “karmic inertia” manifested in Lincoln that is today become incarnate in Obama. Remember that the primary meaning of “karma” is action or deed. But maybe I’m just talking about poetry, now.)

Lastly, I want to acknowledge that Horgan’s concern about holding monasticism as an ideal is, to my mind, his most compelling point. He says, “It seems legitimate to ask whether a path that turns away from aspects of life as essential as sexuality and parenthood is truly spiritual.” And I suppose I agree with him, though I’m not sure what the path’s being “spiritual” would mean to the Buddha (or what it should mean to me). If this concern is the same as to wonder whether monasticism isn’t a mere fleeing from the richness of life, or if the best life doesn’t rely on some of the very things monasticism precludes, then I suppose I share it.

Nevertheless, though I am not about to leave for Thailand to don the yellow robes, it is not obvious to me as it seems to be for Horgan that the highest station of man requires sex and family. The call of monasticism seems to me neither novel nor shallow. The Buddha claims that he has deeply and thoroughly understood suffering, and also liberation from suffering. He says that the whole of his teaching is in service to this liberation. He says that sex and family life make liberation very difficult to achieve — which seems likely enough — though he does have lay followers; and later tradition does include “householders” who attain buddhahood. I’m not sold, but I am absolutely persuaded that he is worth my time and my careful consideration.

It seems like I’ve been writing a lot this year, and I’m curious to go back and see what my output was like as an undergrad. I don’t know if I’m actually writing more now or if it just feels like it. I’m definitely writing fewer but longer papers, but I’m not sure about totals.

Since September, I’ve written and turned in about 57 pages, or 18,239 words, in five essays. Plugged it all into Wordle (which is awesome) and produced the above.

—

संजय उवाच ।
एवमुक्त्वा ततो राजन् महायोगेश्वरो हरिः ।
दर्शयामास पार्थाय परमं रूपमैश्वरम् ॥ ९॥

अनेकवक्त्रनयनमनेकाद्भुतदर्शनम् ।
अनेकदिव्याभरणं दिव्यानेकोद्यतायुधम् ॥ १०॥

दिव्यमाल्याम्बरधरं दिव्यगन्धानुलेपनम् ।
सर्वाश्चर्यमयं देवमनन्तं विश्वतोमुखम् ॥ ११॥

दिवि सूर्य सहस्रस्य भवेद्युगपदुत्थिता ।
यदि भाः सदृशी सा स्याद्भासस्तस्य महात्मनः ॥ १२॥

तत्रैकस्थं जगत्कृत्स्नम् प्रविभक्तमनेकधा ।
अपश्यद्देवदेवस्य शरीरे पण्डवस्तदा ॥ १३॥

ततः स विस्मयाविष्टो हृष्टरोमा धनंजयः ।
प्रणम्य शिरसा देवं कृताझ्जलिरभाषत ॥ १४॥

अर्जुन उवाच ।
पश्यामि देवांस्तव देव देहे सर्वांस्तथा भूतविशेषसंघान् ।
ब्रह्माणमीशं कमलासनस्थमृषींश्चसर्वानुरगांश्च दिव्यान् ॥ १५॥

अनेकबाहूदरवक्त्रनेत्रं पश्यामि त्वां सर्वतोऽनन्तरूपम् ।
नान्तं न मध्यं न पुनस्तवादिं पश्यामि विश्वेश्वर विश्वरूपम् ॥ १६॥

किरीटिनं गदिनं चक्रिणं च तेजोराशिं सर्वतो दीप्तिमन्तम् ।
पश्यामि त्वां दुर्निरीक्ष्यं समन्ताद्दीप्तानलार्कद्युतिमप्रमेयम् ॥ १७॥

त्वमक्षरं परमं वेदितव्यं त्वमस्य विश्वस्य परं निधानम् ।
त्वमव्ययः शाश्वतधर्मगोप्ता सनातनस्त्वं पुरुषो मतो मे ॥ १८॥

अनादिमध्यान्तमनन्तवीर्यं अनन्तबाहुं शशिसूर्यनेत्रम् ।
पश्यामि त्वां दीप्तहुताशवक्त्रं स्वतेजसा विश्वमिदं तपन्तम् ॥ १९॥

द्यावापृथिव्योरिदमन्तरं हि व्याप्तं त्वयैकेन दिशश्च सर्वाः ।
दृष्ट्वाद्भुतं रूपमुग्रं तवेदं लोकत्रयं प्रव्यथितं महात्मन् ॥ २०॥

—

Saṃjaya said:

Having spoken thus, the Great Yoga Lord Kṛṣna
Showed Arjuna his highest lordly form,

Many mouths and eyes, many marvelous sights,
Many divine ornaments, many divine weapons upraised,

Wearing divine garlands and garments, divine scents and oils,
A God composed of all wonders, endless, facing all directions.

In a sky of a thousand suns that have at once arisen,
Such light would be as the light of this Great One.

In the body of the God of Gods, Arjuna saw
The whole world standing there together, divided in many ways.

Then, in amazement, hair standing on end, Arjuna
Bowing his head to the god, making reverent gesture said:

“I see gods in your body, O God, and all kinds of beings come together,
Lord Brahmā in a lotus-seat, and all the seers and divine snakes,

“Many arms, bellies, mouths, eyes— I see you in all directions, endless form.
No end, no middle, no beginning of you do I see, O Lord of All, O Form of All.

“With crown, with club, with discus, a mass of splendor, shining in all directions,
I see you who are hard to see completely, shining immeasurable light as sun or fire.

“You are the imperishable, the highest to-be-known, you are the highest refuge of all,
You are unchanging protector of eternal dharma, you are the Eternal Person, I understand.

“Without beginning, middle or end, with endless power, endless arms, eyes of sun and moon,
I see you, with mouth of burning fire, lighting all this with your splendor.

“All between heaven and earth is filled by you alone, and in all directions.
Seeing this, your marvelous and awful form, the three world tremble, O Great One.”