The house of the song

The builder is the teacher himself; the shape of the house is his own teaching. The foundation is a single despairing evening — a man who cannot see why he should fight, laid down as the ground everything else is built on, because every house needs the honesty of that question before it needs an answer.

Above it, three floors. The first is worked in karma — knowledge, action, renunciation, mastery of the self — the floor of doing. The second is worked in bhakti — the seen and unseen, the paths and their steps, kingly knowledge, splendour, the great vision, love — the floor of turning toward. The third is worked in jñāna — field and knower, the three strands, the highest person, the divine and its opposite, the three faiths, the final letting go — the floor of seeing clearly.

The same three floors carry a second set of names, and they describe what a reader does rather than what a book contains: the first is śravaṇa, the hearing; the second manana, the turning of what was heard over and over in the mind; the third nididhyāsana, the long dwelling in it until it stops being something you know and becomes somewhere you live. Read that way the house is not a shelf of eighteen books but a staircase, and the only way up it is to keep climbing.

No one is kept out of any room — not by birth, belief, or anything else. You may look, touch, and carry away whatever you find, and the house is never emptied by it. Whatever measure you take, the measure remaining is the same as before.