4.9 · Across the Gap

Even when separated by birth, place and time, they follow without a gap, because memory and impressions have one form.

Word by word

jāti-deśa-kāla

birth, place and time

vyavahitānām

of those separated by

api

even

ānantaryam

immediate succession, no gap

smṛti-saṃskārayoḥ

of memory and impressions

eka-rūpatvāt

because they have one form

Where it fits

If only matching tendencies wake (4.8), what of those laid down lives ago? Distance in birth, place and time makes no gap, because memory and impression have one form. Vyāsa's example is the tendencies of a former cat-birth waking at once. Their persistence raises the question of 4.10: did they ever begin?

Reading

A tendency can sleep for years, across places and, in the tradition's view, across lives, then wake as if no time had passed. The reason is that memory and impression have one form: an impression is a stored experience, and a memory is that experience surfacing. Vyāsa's example is a being reborn as a cat after many other births, whose cat-tendencies wake at once. Most of us know the smaller version: one smell, and twenty years vanish.

Vyāsa

“As experiences are, so are latent impressions, and these match the latent tendencies left by karma. As the tendencies are, so is memory. So memory arises from impressions even across intervening births, places and times, and from memory impressions arise again.”

Vyāsa's Yoga-bhāṣya, the oldest commentary. New translation from the Sanskrit, with reference to Woods (1914), p. 307.

Practice

Choose a smell or a song from long ago, one tied to a gentle or pleasant memory, and spend a few minutes with it. Notice how quickly the feelings return, whole. Then notice that you can watch them return without being taken back. If something painful comes up, stop and come back to the breath.

A question to sit with

What old impression came back today as if no time had passed?

Key ideas

saṃskāra (latent impressions), karma (action and its residue)