Saraswati

Tenzen’s childhood was an unusual one. While he had achieved past-life recall in past incarnations, it would usually happen much later, always fragmentary, first in dreams, and only much later through deliberate meditative practice. This was the first time he was able to transition from an earlier life fully conscious, without losing anything, or rather not losing much, since we are always forgetting something gradually, life is impossible without forgetting.

Many have misconceptions about remembering past lives, thinking it is either something that you can or can’t do. While of course this is partly true, certain rare individuals are capable of recalling past lives without any effort, or more accurately do so thanks to an acquired karmic predisposition, the truth of the matter is that anyone can do it if they just practice.

When Tenzen got into the topic more seriously in his past life, he had assumed that this required some exotic, secret, ear-whispered lineage practice, and thus was surprised to learn that in fact all you needed was good old calming Shamatha meditation, which along with focusing Vipassana were the two most common, generic forms of meditative practice.

Awareness is a funny thing. The more we are attached to our senses, the less we see. The clearest example of this is pain. When you are experiencing severe, physical pain it is hard to experience anything else. You aren’t thinking of yesterday or tomorrow, you may forget where you are, or even who you are, you just want the pain to stop. Ironically, the same thing happens with intense pleasure, as you lose yourself in bliss and all that matters is the current moment. Pain and pleasure are just two sides of the same sensual coin.

By cultivating calm, you can detach yourself from the senses and open up your awareness. This is quickly noticeable even to beginner meditators. As you keep sitting in stillness, you start noticing sounds from farther and farther away, things that completely fell below your threshold of awareness before, even though they have always been there, a neighbor coughing, a dog barking in the distance.

Just as your spatial awareness expands, so does your time awareness, since after all, space-time is ultimately one thing. Memories from farther and farther back start surfacing, the faces of childhood friends, songs you haven’t heard in years. With enough concentration, it is possible to bring these into detailed clarity, like focusing the lens of a camera, like remembering all the lyrics of a song you only heard ones, or seeing the words on the page of a book you read as a kid appear before you as if you were holding it in your hands. If you keep at it, you can come to remember the moment of your birth, your time in the womb, or even what happened before that. All you need is time and the freedom to cultivate meditation.

Since nobody expects much of an infant, time is one thing Tenzen had plenty of. He would spend hours lying in his crib cultivating Shamatha, making sure not to forget his past lives. His parents were overjoyed to have such a quiet child. While Tenzen was their first, they knew that infants generally require constant care and cry all the time, and so thought they would not have a good night’s sleep for months once the baby came. Instead, the gentle, peaceful child radiated tranquility through his quiet concentration, to such a degree that his parents felt pacified just being in the same house as him.

Most afternoons, Maya would read to him, making sure he could see the writing, so that he could learn to read. While the script was different from any of the ones used in his previous life, within a few weeks he was able to follow along, and after a couple of months, asked his mother to move on from children’s books to more complex texts. He thought it was fortunate that he was born to a family with a fairly large library, since it did not seem like this world had printing, and all the books and scrolls were hand-copied on parchment, and appeared quite old.

In the evenings, once it was too dark to read, Maya would sing to him. The melodies followed very different melodic structures from what he was used to. It was strange how what we consider harmonious is by and large conditioned by where and when we are born. The songs Tenzen was hearing now seemed like a curious mix of Indian ragas, Gregorian chant, and experimental micro-melodies, and relayed ancient histories, bizarre mythologies, and religious cautionary tales. The narratives broke away from the generic tropes of the Hero’s Journey, which some claimed to be common to all cultures in Tenzen’s previous life. They did not have the same focus on individuality and autonomy, but neither did they really promote a social unity. Rather, they were hymns of uncertainty, an artistic attempt to make sense of a chaotic, unstable world, with no clear distinction between friend or foe, god or mortal. As such, Tenzen couldn’t tell yet whether they reflected a failure to understand the workings of the world, or if they were explaining a level of complexity he was still failing to grasp.

As he would lie in his mothers arms while she sang, he could feel her chest vibrate, the soothing voice projecting from her diaphragm, the subtle way she would find just the right moments to inhale without interrupting the flow of sound, and felt like he was understanding the art of singing for the first time. Eventually, he would try to join in quietly, first following along so as to learn the melody, and once confident enough, attempting to harmonize. This was the most intimate music making either of them had ever done, since they could feel each other’s vibrations as if of one body, and when they were especially aligned, they reverberations would reinforce one another. Occasionally, Maya would tell Tenzen how glad she was that he inherited her pointed ears.

These clandestine music lessons taught Tenzen a lot about projection too. While they rarely went far from the house, Maya did carry around her child from room to room, and occasionally outside to the herb garden. Tenzen noticed how she would attune her voice to the space she was in, revealing a subtle understanding of acoustics. It was much more than just adjusting the volume, but rather exhibited a deep understanding of space, material, and environment, accounting for the shape of a room, what the walls and floors were made of, and whether there was a fire, rain, or wind present. She sang so effortlessly, Tenzen wasn’t sure whether she was able to make all the acoustic calculations mentally, or it came to her naturally, but either way she could fill up the room even with a whisper. Even though Tenzen had studied performance and played a few instruments in his past life, it was only now that he felt he was truly starting to understand music.

As Maya began to carry little Tenzen around the house, he finally got to have a closer look at the shrine in the corner of the bedroom. Inside it was a carved wooden statue of a beautiful, serene goddess with four arms, holding a book, a rosary, a water pot, and a stringed musical instrument. Tenzen immediately recognized her as Saraswati, the river goddess of music and speech, venerated in Hinduism, Jainism, and Buddhism, and who is credited with the invention of the Sanskrit language. It seemed to be Maya’s shrine, which she prayed at and made offerings every day. Tenzen wondered about the strange coincidence that he would see this goddess in another world, though it did provide a clue in explaining why this place used a language so close to Sanskrit. The statue was skillfully carved from a single block of light-colored wood. While fairly small and with fine details, the carving had something of a minimalist, decisive character to it. Tenzen was reminded of the esoteric Buddhas he had seen which had been carved by samurai in medieval Japan, which possessed a very particular kind of beauty, free from the ornamental uselessness of certain types of commercial art, where a trained artist hones popular elements to increase sales. No, this statue was a labor of love, and a work of redemption, a kind of desperate plea in the form of a wooden artwork, both an entreaty and a scream. The face reminded Tenzen of his mother’s.