Poetic Rendering
The body of a true devotee, O Lord,
must be like the stem of the plantain
tender, open, without hardness inside.
Those ripened in Your grace
are wholly consumed fruit,
seed, and skin alike.
They leave behind nothing
no residue, no return.
For one whose heart is
soft as the plantain core,
rebirth finds no root,
and ego finds no seed to sprout again.
The Plantain Stem and the Seedless Heart of the Sharana This vachana represents Basavanna’s profound teaching on the nature of complete spiritual transformation through the exquisite metaphor of the plantain tree. He presents the ultimate state of the realized being as one who has become completely permeable to divine grace, leaving no residual ego-structure that could sustain the cycle of rebirth.
The teaching reveals the Way of Basava’s understanding of liberation: not as an achievement but as the natural consequence of being utterly consumed by divine love, where every aspect of one’s being physical, mental, and spiritual becomes nourishment for the cosmic whole. Basavanna demonstrates that true spirituality is not about building a better self but about the complete dissolution of the separate self into the divine reality.
Spiritual Context
Core Spiritual Principle: Liberation Through Total Edibility (Sarva-Bhakṣya Mukti). Final liberation (mokṣa) is achieved not when the soul becomes invulnerable or eternal, but when it becomes completely “edible” utterly usable, digestible, and transformable by the divine process. Resistance (hardness) is the only barrier.
Cosmic Reality Perspective: This is a non-dual vision of the universe as a digestive system of consciousness. The Shiva-Shakti dynamic is one of consumption and transformation. Shakti is the manifest world (the plantain). Shiva is the transformative principle (the eater, the fire). In ignorance, the individual hard seed (ego) resists digestion and is thus recycled (rebirth).
In wisdom, the entire being gross (skin), subtle (fruit), and causal (seed)surrenders to be transmuted into pure energy of consciousness. Koodalasangama is this alchemical digestion where the devotee becomes one with the consuming reality.
Historical Reality (Anubhava Mantapa Context): This vachana presented the ultimate goal of the Linga yoga path to the community. It countered notions of liberation as heavenly transit or eternal individuality. It defined the Sharana’s aim as utter self-dissolution in the divine, like a drop losing its boundaries in the ocean. This fortified the community’s radical ethic of self-offering (dāsōha), framing it not as charity but as practice for the final, total offering of the self.
Interpretation
1. “The body of a true devotee… must be like the stem of the plantain tender, open, without hardness inside.” This describes the necessary condition for transformation: perfect permeability. The “hardness” is the core of a haṃkāra (ego-sense), the unquestioned conviction of being a separate, solid entity. Tenderness is vulnerability to grace; openness is transparency without hidden agendas. The stem is structurally strong yet composed of soft, layered sheaths a perfect metaphor for a being of great functional integrity with no central, defensive citadel of self.
2. “Those ripened in Your grace are wholly consumed fruit, seed, and skin alike.” This outlines the comprehensive scope of surrender. “Fruit” represents visible actions, virtues, and achievements. “Skin” represents outer identity, social persona, and physicality. “Seed” is the most profound: the latent potential for future becoming, the saṃskāras and vāsanās (mental impressions and tendencies) that propel rebirth. Total consumption means no aspect of being is withheld from the transformative fire.
3. “They leave behind nothing no residue, no return… rebirth finds no root.” This declares the finality of this transformation. “Residue” is leftover karma (karma-śeṣa). “Return” is punarjanma (rebirth). The hard seed is the bīja (germ) of individuation. When even that is consumed, the metaphysical cycle is broken. There is no latent, unmanifest “self” waiting to reincarnate; the process of identification has ended.
Practical Implications: Spiritual practice is a progressive softening and offering. One must audit one’s being for areas of “hardness”: rigid opinions, cherished identities, secret hopes for spiritual attainment. These are to be consciously softened in prayer and offered up. The goal is not to build a better self, but to make the self so tender and transparent that it ceases to be an obstacle to the divine flow, and is ultimately dissolved in it.
The Cosmic Reality
Anga (Human Dimension): The Anga’s final purpose is to become perfectly nourishing food for the Divine. Its journey is from being a hard, inedible seed to becoming a soft, sweet, seedless fruit that can be wholly absorbed into the body of the absolute. Its work is to ripen through surrender until it is ready for this final consumption.
Linga (Divine Principle): Koodalasangama is the agent and the result of consumption. It is the ripening grace, the digestive fire, and the nourished wholeness that remains after the offering. The Linga is the totality that welcomes the part back into itself, not by destroying it, but by transmuting it into its own substance.
Jangama (Dynamic Flow): The Jangama is the living example of one who has been consumed. A true Jangama walks as “seedless” consciousness. Their actions bear no fruit of karma for themselves, their identity has no hard boundary, and their presence nourishes the world without leaving a trace of a separate doer. They are grace in motion, fully digested and fully digesting.
Shata Sthala
Primary Sthala: Aikya. The description is the lived reality of Aikya. In union, the separation between the consumed (the individual soul) and the consumer (the Divine) vanishes. What remains is the singular reality that was always present, now free of the illusory “seed” of separation.
Supporting Sthala: Pranalingi. For the Pranalingi, the Linga is the life breath. This vachana shows the ultimate consequence: when the Linga is your very life, your individual life-form is willingly offered back as breath to the air, leaving no separate trace. The breath is consumed in the atmosphere.
Practical Integration
Arivu (Awareness Practices): Practice “Feeling for the Seed.” In meditation, inquire: “Where in my psyche is the ‘hardness’? Where do I feel a defensive core, a secret claim to ‘this is me, this is mine’?” Don’t fight it; bring soft attention to it, allowing it to be seen and offered.
Achara (Personal Discipline): Engage in “Conscious Consumption.” When eating, reflect: “May my own hard seeds be softened and consumed just as this food nourishes me.” Use daily acts of nourishment as metaphors for your own desired state.
Kayaka (Sacred Action): Perform work as an act of “becoming fruit.” Let your labor be of such quality that it is wholly beneficial (“consumable”) to others, leaving no residue of resentment, pride, or expectation (“no seed”).
Dasoha (Communal Offering): Foster a community that values tenderness over rigid righteousness. Celebrate those whose humility and openness (“soft stems”) allow conflict to dissolve. Make the community a “ripening grove” where members help each other soften and offer their hard seeds.
Modern Application
The Cultivated Self and Spiritual Capitalism. Modernity encourages us to cultivate a “branded self,” a hard seed of unique identity for marketplace success. Spirituality is often co-opted into this project (“self-improvement,” “enlightenment as the ultimate achievement”), which directly contradicts the seedless state.
The Practice of Creative Disappearance. The path of Lingayoga today is the courageous undoing of the curated self. It is to use one’s talents and life not to build a legacy (a bigger seed), but to offer them so completely in service and love that the “author” disappears into the act. It is to find freedom not in self-actualization, but in self-donation, becoming like the plantain: utterly useful, utterly transient, leaving nothing but nourishment in its wake.
Essence
All my life I feared being eaten,
so I grew a stone at my center.
Now I learn that sweetness
lies in having no center at all.
Let grace be the heat that ripens me,
the hand that peels me,
the hunger that receives me.
I want to be so entirely used
that when I am gone,
the only thing left
is the taste of You
on the tongue of the world.
This vachana describes spiritual evolution as a process of increasing entropy within a bounded system leading to system dissolution. The individual ego is a low-entropy, highly-ordered system (the hard seed). Grace introduces energy (heat) that increases entropy (softens, disorders the hard structure). Final liberation is when entropy is maximized the bounded system (the separate self) dissolves completely into the surrounding field (the divine), achieving thermodynamic equilibrium. No potential energy (seed for rebirth) remains. The “plantain” is a dissipative structure that maintains its form temporarily by consuming energy, but its purpose is to ultimately be consumed, returning its order to the universe.
Imagine an ice cube (the hard ego) in a warm ocean (divine consciousness). Liberation is not the ice cube becoming a bigger, stronger, more dazzling ice cube. It is the ice cube melting completely, losing its distinct boundaries and temperature, until it is indistinguishable from the ocean. The “seed” is the last frozen crystal at the very center that refuses to melt. Basavanna says: Let even that melt. Then, and only then, are you truly free not as a special piece of ice, but as the ocean itself.
Our deepest instinct is for self-preservation. We spiritualize this as seeking immortality or eternal selfhood. Basavanna confronts us with the shocking, liberating truth: real immortality is not the preservation of the self, but the participation of the self in the immortal by ceasing to be a separate self. The terror of annihilation is the last fortress of the ego. Walking through that terror offering the very seed of our selfhood we find not annihilation, but our true, boundless nature. We are not the plantain that perishes; we are the life that grows it, consumes it, and grows again. To be the fruit is to be temporary. To be the process is to be eternal.
In the 12th century, plantains and bananas in India still contained small or partial seeds not the hard stones of wild bananas, but not yet the completely seedless varieties we enjoy today, thus, Basavanna’s imagery carries deeper meaning.
Basavanna’s plantain stem thus becomes a metaphor for sustainable living: soft inside, strong outside, nourishing to all, harming none. Every act of awareness, humility, and compassion ripens the collective soul toward liberation not after death, but here, in the very pulse of life.
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