Ishvara Pranidhana

When my daughter was little, we had a bedtime ritual of reading picture books together. It was probably she was about three or four years old when I introduce her a book called "Tomtem" from Norse mythology. It's the story of a little guardian sprit of home, passed down through generations in the Nordic countries. Every night, the Tomtem walks from room to room through the house while the family sleeps, and also visits the barn and the animals outside, praying for everyone's safety and health. After finishing his rounds, there's a scene where he gaze out at the forest stretching beyond the snow-covered plains and loses himself in philosophical thoughts: "Where do we come from, and where are we going.....?" My dear daughter in such a young age, too, held onto this very simple, yet unanswerable question for a long time. Eventually, as she entered the world of school--a warld surrounded by invisible wall to shape the organic mind into the mechanical mind– this question was pushed into a distant corner of her mind. It wasn't just my daughter; it disappeared from my mind, too. In exchange, we both are gaining the wisdom needed to survive in the so called real world, then the essential questions that sprout within us fell into a deep slumber.

This unanswerable question resurfaced in my mind three or for years after I was engaging to deep yoga Sadhana. The catalyst was encountering the book called "Where Are We Come From, and Where Are We Heading?" by Hiroshi Motoyama, a teacher who had helped cultivate my spiritual world.

At this stage , I have arrived at the abstract notion that the answer might be found by delving deeply into the physical body. My understanding has deepened primarily through reading the "Hatha Pradipika" and "Tattva-bhata", while observing my own physical body through my mental seeing ability. These ancient texts, written in Sanskrit, are rich with wisdom on what it means to be human and what we gain through yoga. To translate these texts into Japanese in a way that I can understand, whoever made it happened must have a deep understanding of their culture, language, and historic context; otherwise, the translation would amount to nothing more than a superficial exchange of words.　We must keep in mind that the availability to access this ancient wisdom is the result of the efforts of those who distilled its essence into the Sanskrit language and recorded it; and the ascetics who have preserved it through the generations; and the teachers who, with deep respect and a commitment to preserving the essence as much as possible, have devoted considerable time to deepening their understanding and translating it into other languages. The fact that the wisdom of yoga has been passed down continuously from ancient to the present represents a flow from our origins to the present moment. Passing this wisdom on to the next generation serves as a bridge to the future, and perhaps this is something we cannot achieve on our owm. We need to let go of our attachiment to what we have accomplished, believing our work will find its way to someone in this world and will pass down to the next generation. The world may be designed like this way that things connect to each other unexpected ways, --just as the philosophical questions posed by Tomtem, which I encountered while reading picture books to my daughter, led me to an ancient text book to bring deeper understanding of the human. Those who equipped ancient wisdom call this sequence of events "Dharma," and they say that surrendering oneself to this cosmic flow is "Ishvara Pronidhara." It's an action of trust, not giving up.