Scripture and Suffering

Shambhavi and the Jaya Kula community gather for satsang and get real about all the questions we humans want answered. Intimate, courageous, heartfelt spiritual talk about pretty much everything. So happy you are here! A podcast from Satsang with...

Show Notes

Welcome to our weekly Satsang with Shambhavi podcast. Shambhavi and the Jaya Kula community gather for intimate, courageous, heartfelt, and often humorous conversations about spirituality, politics, culture, and pretty much everything. Published each Wednesday here and wherever podcasts are found.

Our podcasts are recorded at live satsangs. They are delivered to you each week fresh and new.

You are also invited to join Shambhavi and the Jaya Kula community LIVE for satsang & kirtan every Sunday at 3:00pm Pacific. Come in person to 1215 SE 8th Ave, Portland, OR, or email [e-mail] to request the Zoom link for satsang.

Shambhavi Sarasvati is the spiritual director of Jaya Kula, a nonprofit organization offering opportunities to practice in the traditions of Trika Shaivism and Dzogchen.

Visit https://jayakula.org/ to find out more.

Get Shambhavi’s podcast, teaching schedule, ramblings, and other writings on Substack: https://satsangwithshambhavi.substack.com/

Help others find these teachings! Please rate and review our podcast. Jaya Kula is a community-supported nonprofit organization. You can make a donation at https://jayakula.org/giving. You can also choose to contribute by offering a paid subscription to our podcast at https://satsangwithshambhavi.substack.com/. Subscriptions start at $5/month.

Thanks for listening! And much love to you, wherever and however you are.

What is Satsang with Shambhavi?

Join Shambhavi Sarasvati for a weekly exploration of self-realization, death, love, devotion, and waking up while living in a messy world. Satsang is an ancient spiritual practice from India. It means "being in reality together." During satsang, people gather with a teacher to learn, ask questions, find community, chant and sing. Shambhavi gives satsang in Portland, Oregon and elsewhere. The dharma talks offered here are recordings of the live satsang.

Shambhavi is the spiritual director of Jaya Kula, a nonprofit organization. Her training is in the View and practices of Trika Shaivism from Kashmir and the Dzogchen tradition of Tibet. She is a householder sannyasini and a devotee of Anandamayi Ma. Visit jayakula.org for her full teaching schedule and more information.

Shambhavi's books include Mother Poems and A Crack in Time (2025), The Reality Sutras: Seeking the Heart of Trika Shaivism (2018), Tantra: the Play of Awakening (2012), Pilgrims to Openness: Direct Realization Tantra in Everyday Life (2009), Returning (2015), and No Retreat: Poems on the Way to Waking Up (2016). All of Shambhavi's books are available on Bookshop.org and on Amazon.

Hi.
This is Shambhavi.

Welcome to my weekly podcast about spirituality,
love, death, devotion, and waking
up while living in a messy world.

The Satsang with Shambhavi podcast is recorded
live each week with students of our
non-profit community, Jaya Kula.

For more information and to find out
about attending a satsang, visit jayakula.org

Thanks for listening.

Much love to you, wherever and however you are.

STUDENT: Would you please talk about scripture
in Trika? Both how to orient to it,
and also the lay of the land?

SHAMBHAVI: Sure. There's basically three kinds
of what we could call scripture.

There is what are called the tantras,
which are handbooks written for students by their
teachers in ancient times

that are structured just like the teachings
that we have today.

They're structured with view teachings first,
pretty much exclusively in the form of a dialogue

between some version of Shiva
and some version of Shakti.

And usually one of them is playing the role
of the teacher, and one of them is playing
the role of the student.

Questions are being asked and answered.

So again, it's in this
dialogic form, like satsang.

Then there are actual instructions for practices.

These were written before there was printing,
and bookstores, and Kindles,

and they weren't intended to be distributed
to anyone but the students of these teachers.

Then there are what are called the shrutis.

The word shruti means a received
text, or a text that's heard.

And these are texts, or teachings that not
necessarily came as texts per se,

but might have been heard in dreams
or visions of some sort or another.

But, in general, the shruti appear
in one of two ways:

either a very adept practitioner, who can be
trusted by other realm beings

who are bringing these teachings
into the human realm,

they can be trusted to faithfully interpret
these shruti, and faithfully teach them to others.

These are the people who get chosen to receive
shruti. People who are highly
trustworthy practitioners.

For instance, Vasgupta,
who received the Shiva Sutras,
Lord Shiva came to him and said,

"Go to this river and touch this particular rock,
and you'll receive something special," and he did
that, and the whole Shiva Sutras

came into his mind in one blast,
and then he spent the rest of his life
writing them down,

faithfully, word by word,
making sure he got it right.

And he spent the whole rest of his life
studying them and teaching them to other people.

Other shruti arrive in different ways.
They arrive more piecemeal.

In the Tibetan tradition, these are called terma,
or treasure texts, and my Dzogchen teacher was
what's called a terton,

someone who receives treasure texts.
And he got them in chunks.

So, there would be a very long, complex teaching,
and he would have dreams over many,
many years transmitting to him this teaching.

Every time a new dream would happen,
the teaching beings that were sending it to him
would repeat what had come before

to make sure he got it right, and then give
another little bit that was new. And this just
would continue over years.

And when he wrote these down,
he wrote them down exactly the way he was given
them, so with all the repetition included.

Really beautiful, faithful, reliable person.

So, there are those two kinds of texts, shruti or
termas, and the tantras, which are teaching texts.

And then there are the commentaries.

So, a lot of what we encounter are commentaries.
Long commentaries on the shruti, or on the tantras.

And this is largely what Abhinavagupta wrote
and what Somananda and Utpaladeva wrote.

They wrote commentaries which stand alone as
great teachings in and of their own right.

There are also various collections of hymns
and other kinds of devotional spiritual writings.

We got lots of those from Utpaladeva,
and Abhinavagupta wrote a whole bunch of hymns.

According to academics, the earliest texts
that we have are from about the 5th century.

A lot of those texts are partial.
We don't have the entire text.

We don't have a complete text.

And then those texts themselves make reference
to earlier texts that have been entirely lost.

So, when we talk about the scriptural history
of the tradition, we're talking about
a partial history,

and we're talking about a history that begins,
there's a phrase in Latin, in media res.

It means in the middle of things. It
starts in the middle, not at the beginning.

The written, textual history starts in the middle,
but then the oral history starts way
before anything was written down.

All these kinds of traditions started out as oral
traditions, oral transmission, and then are still,
even though we do have texts to support us, right?

But the oral transmission in both Trika
and Dzogchen is considered to be primary.

In Buddhist traditions in general from Tibet,
there is another tradition called lung,

which is where they transmit the text to the
students by reading them very, very quickly.

I'm not really sure what the View behind that is
but, [laughs] but they do oral transmission
of texts, too, in the Tibetan traditions.

So that's pretty much the lay of the land, and if
anybody has more questions
about that feel free to ask.

STUDENT: How does the Gita and the Yoga Sutras
fit in with this tradition?

SHAMBHAVI: There is a Kashmiri version of the Bhagavad Gita.

The Bhagavad Gita isn't just one text.

Like all of these texts,
there are different versions of the Gita.

And then you have the whole issue of how
the translation culture of India

is so, so different from what I would call
Christian translation culture.

Christian translation culture says,
"We're trying to find the one true meaning
of this," even though it's totally biased,

but that's, you know, it's supposed
to be finding the one true meaning.

But translation culture in Judaic traditions
and in the Indian traditions is more like,

oh, let's have fun making this mean
whatever it is we want it to mean.

So not only are there different
texts that are the Bhagavad Gita with variations,

there are also interpretive Gitas, and translated
Gitas that are different from each other.

Now within that context, there is a Kashmiri
version of the Gita that is quite old.

I don't know exactly when it comes from but it's
not a modern text,
and it has some extra verses in it.

And there is a commentary by Abhinavagupta.

He did it when he was very, very young, and we have
a couple of translations of that into English.

The Patanjali's Yoga Sutras is
a completely different story.

So, that is a dualistic text.
Absolutely no question about that.

So it's a really different View than is taught
in Trika. And it's also unclear who wrote it.

There was Patanjali, but there's a lot of questions
about if he actually wrote it, or not, or
if it's more of a group effort over time.

In any case, the main point about
the Yoga Sutras is that it's a dualistic text.

God and human cannot meet, never meet,
they're two different things.

Humans can go to Brahmaloka, but there's
no identity between God and other beings.

They always stay separate.

STUDENT: I was curious about how we should
relate to our lives, with the idea of lila,
and us as actors in this play.

There's a lot of things that are happening
in the world, or that have happened, and

I've been trying to think of it as us being
a little bit more detached from what happens
to our character.

SHAMBHAVI: I completely understand
where your question is coming from,

and, in various forms, that question gets asked
probably more than any other,

especially now, because we're in times where
there's so much suffering, and things are so hard
to deal with and digest,

and our cultures and our economies are falling
apart, and the world's got its knickers
in a twist, as they like to say.

So, the real answer to that is that you have to
do practice so that you have a real perception
of what's happening here,

and then you can directly experience,
without trying to experience,
the playfulness of everything here.

There really is only one way to relate to things
as lila, and that is to actually
experience them as lila.

It might be useful to understand the View
in a more intellectual way.

But we have to be careful in our culture,
especially these days,

to not mistake intellectual understanding
for what it is that we're aiming for.

So, what we're aiming for through our practice is
that we would open the gates of our perceptions

so that we could actually directly perceive
with confidence the nature of reality and the Self,

and then we would see
the playful quality of everything.

But I'll give you maybe a story that could
help you to understand this a little bit.

One of the differences between Trika and some
of the versions of Vedanta is that, in some
versions of Vedanta, they say

that everything here is unreal, and there's like a big
division between the real and the unreal.

And what Trika says is that everything is real,
and the unreal can't exist, there's no such
thing as unreality, there's only reality.

But what we think is happening here is not quite
what is happening because we have limited
perceptions.

And our perceptions are limited not because
we're being punished,

it's because we're being played with, and
experimented with and experienced through.

So each of our characters, as you properly said,
is being played by that one living awareness
that is everything,

just the way an actor would play a part in a drama.

So when an actor plays a part in a drama,
it's not unreal, it's not fake.

It's a real drama with a real
actor playing a real part.

And what is the actor's experience?

Well, they're having fun.

They're enjoying playing a part.

If an actor has to pl ay a part of even a very
severely disabled person, maybe they'd enjoy
it more because it would be challenging, right?

Certainly, if you were in a very, very good movie,
high quality movie, playing the part
of someone who was severely disabled,

it would be way more fun than playing the part
of somebody's lover in a daytime soap opera,
[laughs] which would be relatively boring.

But in any case, what's happening
here is that there's only one Self.

There's one livingness that is the fundament
of all of existence and also

is giving rise to all these characters,
as you say, that are full of itself.

We're full of that enlightened essence nature,
enjoying itself through our senses and our lives,
playing out its own creativity,

and expressiveness, self-expressiveness.

That's what's here.

There really is no other.

There is no other person.

The highest teaching, in one sense, in both Trika
but also in the Buddhist traditions I've studied
in, like Dzogchen and the Kagyu tradition,

the teaching is there is no suffering.

There is someone playing the part of someone
suffering, but there's no actual suffering.

And the thing is that in order
to really grok that,

you need to have a direct experience of what
is the bhav, what is the feeling tone
of this reality?

How is this reality?

What is its personality, so to speak?

Then you'll understand that the opposite
of ignorance,

and not understanding what's
happening here, is not detachment.

Especially not detachment in the ordinary sense
of, "I'm going to stand back coolly

with my spiritually botoxed face,
and just witness everything."

It's certainly, [laughs]
it's certainly not anything like that.

If I can use the word God, but when I say God,
I just mean all of reality,

it is participating in everything
to the Nth degree.

So the point of all of this is to be immersed
in all of this, and to participate in all of this,
and then to enjoy it rather than to suffer.

And this is where Abhinavagupta says,
when we participate with enjoyment
rather than suffering,

because we've, we think that we're really here
in a certain way, and bad things
are really happening.

But when we participate fully, with awareness
of what's really happening here,

we become the player rather than the played.
Those were his words.

So we're kind of moving from being played, and not
really understanding what's going on,

to being the player and actually having more
understanding of what's going on.

And then as the player, we have more choices about
what role we play and how we relate to things.

The other mistake that people often make is
thinking that this is some giddy,
"I'm never gonna feel

anyone's sorrow or suffering. No sadness is ever
gonna be felt by me when I'm enlightened,"
or something like that.

This is also complete BS.

Because the feeling of sadness is also one of the
tastes on God's tongue,

one of the possible feeling tones
being invented by God to experience.

So when we are being more awake,
we are experiencing everything,

but from a different perspective,
from a different sort of ground.

And the compassion that we feel
for others is there more, not less.

People who have more realization are more
compassionate, more empathetic, not less.

There is no sense of, like, coolly hanging back,
you know, witnessing everything.

That isn't how it is.

And in our tradition, the primary metaphor
for this whole manifest experience
is the city, or a city.

That we're in this magical city
where we get to meet people, we get to have
interesting conversations,

we get to have surprising experiences.

People go to the city to participate in life.

They don't go to a city to sit
in their rooms and do nothing.

Although, these days...
But, you know, [laughs]

people used to go to cities to participate
[laughs] 'cause they wanted to participate more.

If you just think about what a city is,
and the excitement of being in a city,

and going to cafes, and going out to the theater,
and art shows, and sitting in parks
people watching,

and getting in surprising, random
conversations that you didn't expect
to have that day,

all of these things that happen
in a city. This is really what God is about,
and what this life is about.

[instrumental music plays]
Satsang with Shambhavi
is produced by Jaya Kula,

a nonprofit community offering opportunities
to learn and practice in the direct realization
traditions of Trika Shaivism and Dzogchen.

If you enjoyed listening,
please help us keep this podcast and many other
teachings open to all

by making a monthly or one-time donation.

Visit jayakula.org to make a donation
and explore more of our offerings.