Liber Terrae - Chapter 5

Verses

Verse 69

The student said, “I am trapped upon Earth.” The teacher asked, “Show me the boundary between Earth and the body that complains.”

Verse 70

The student struck the soil and said, “This.” The teacher struck his chest and said, “And this?”

Verse 71

Earth is the name given to solidity when the mind forgets that solidity also appears within knowing.

Verse 72

Clay says, “I am a pot.” Flesh says, “I am a person.” In both cases the name is later than the substance.

Verse 73

Do not despise the body because it changes. Despise only the mistake that says change can be the Self.

Verse 74

Pṛthvī bears saint, thief, worm, palace, battlefield, flower and dung without becoming any of them.

Verse 75

Learn from that bearing, but do not imagine the bearer is your final identity.

Verse 76

The mountain does not practice detachment. It merely has no opinion concerning the clouds that pass.

Verse 77

You require practice because you have mistaken every cloud for autobiography.

Verse 78

One man fled to the desert to escape the world. He carried the world there in the sentence “I have fled.”

Verse 79

Another remained in the market and discovered the witness untouched by market, profit, hunger, praise and noise.

Verse 80

Which one had gone farther?

Verse 81

The Earth is not bondage. “I am only this earth-made body” is bondage.

Verse 82

The Earth is not liberation. “I have escaped the Earth” is merely another thought passing through awareness.

Verse 83

Before birth, where was your possession of ground? In sleep, where is your continent?

Verse 84

Yet upon waking you say, “Here I am,” and the prison rebuilds itself from grammar.

Verse 85

A cat sleeps on the warm stone without doctrine. When waking comes, it stretches; it does not reconstruct a metaphysics.

Verse 86

Do not imitate the cat. Notice what in you knows both imitation and refusal.

Verse 87

If all forms are waves, Earth is a beautiful heavy wave.

Verse 88

If all names are provisional, “Earth” is a useful name for the place where feet meet resistance.

Verse 89

The sage does not need to hate resistance. Resistance teaches where the imagined body ends.

Verse 90

Dig downward and you find no final floor, only layers. Look inward and the same error occurs when you seek a final object called “me.”

Verse 91

What you are is not buried beneath the layers.

Verse 92

It is that by which layer, shovel, thought, body, Earth and sky are known.