Dhruva Stuti

Meaning:My Lord, You are the all-powerful holder of every potency. Having entered within me, You have, by Your own splendour, revived my dormant power of speech, and also enlivened my other faculties — my hands, legs, ears, sense of touch and life-energy. Unto You, the Supreme Person, I offer my obeisances.

Meaning:You alone, O Lord, by Your own potency called Maya with its mighty modes, create this entire universe beginning with the mahat-tattva, and then enter within it as the indwelling Person, appearing as if manifold among its qualities — just as fire, though one, appears variously in pieces of wood.

Meaning:By the intelligence You bestow, this surrendered soul perceives the whole world, like one awakened from sleep, O Lord. How then could a wise person, O friend of the afflicted, ever forget the soles of Your feet, which alone are the shelter granting liberation?

Meaning:Surely their intelligence is stolen away by Your Maya — those who worship You, the desire-fulfilling tree, for some other end such as deliverance from the cycle of birth and death; for the pleasures they crave are corpse-like enjoyments, obtainable even in hell.

Meaning:My Lord, may the bliss that embodied beings derive from meditating upon Your lotus feet, or from hearing the glories of Your devotees, never be exchanged even for merging into the impersonal Brahman of Your own effulgence — let alone for the heavenly pleasures of those whose airplanes are shattered by the sword of death.

Meaning:O unlimited Lord, may I always have the association of those great, pure-hearted souls whose devotion to You flows ceaselessly; for, intoxicated by drinking the nectar of narrations of Your qualities, I shall easily cross this fearsome ocean of material existence with its terrible dangers.

Meaning:Those, O Lord, who have developed attachment for the hearts of devotees greedy for the fragrance of Your lotus feet, O lotus-naveled one, no longer cherish even the dearest things of this mortal world — sons, friends, home, wealth and wife.

Meaning:O unborn one, I know this gross universal form of Yours, made of the mahat-tattva and the rest, populated by beasts, trees, birds, reptiles, gods, demons, humans and all manner of beings, both manifest and unmanifest. Beyond it I know that supreme reality of Yours about which there can be no dispute.

Meaning:I offer my obeisances to that Supreme Lord who, at the end of the cosmic cycle, holds this entire creation within His belly and lies down, self-luminous, beside Ananta-Sesha as His companion, while from the ocean of His navel sprouts the golden lotus on which the radiant Brahma takes birth.

Meaning:You are the eternally liberated, perfectly pure, fully awakened Self, the unchanging original Person, the Lord of the three (modes / worlds). By Your undivided vision You remain the witness of every state of intelligence, presiding over creation and maintenance, yet ever distinct and aloof.

Meaning:I take shelter of that Brahman — the source of the universe, one, unlimited, primeval, pure bliss alone and free of all change — in whom contradictory powers such as knowledge and ignorance and various other potencies eternally arise in succession.

Meaning:O Lord, true indeed are the blessings won by serving Your lotus feet, for You are the very embodiment of life's supreme goal. And yet, O noble one, the Lord protects His poor devotees even beyond their prayers — as a mother cow, anxious with affection, tends her helpless calf.