The Body-Substances Pervaded by Space (Verse 47, Dhāraṇā 24)¶
1. Exercise Title & Verse¶
The Body-Substances Pervaded by Space (Verse 47, Dhāraṇā 24)
2. Sanskrit (IAST)¶
sarvaṃ dehagataṃ dravyaṃ viyadvyāptaṃ mṛgekṣaṇe | vibhāvayet tatas tasya bhāvanā sā sthirā bhavet || 47 ||
3. English (Literal)¶
O doe-eyed one, one should contemplate all the substances present in the body as pervaded by space. By that, that meditation of his becomes steady.
4. Main Commentary (Bhāṣya)¶
Padārtha. Sarvaṃ dehagataṃ dravyaṃ means "all the substance that has gone into, or is present in, the body." Here dravya does not mean abstract substance in a philosophical vacuum. It means the actual bodily stuff: flesh, bone, marrow, blood, and the other tissues or constituents that make the body seem solid. Viyad-vyāptam means "pervaded by space," "filled with sky," or "saturated with openness." The point is not that the body disappears as an idea, but that its felt compactness is penetrated by spaciousness. Vibhāvayet means one should actively contemplate or imagine in a way that becomes experientially persuasive. Tatas tasya bhāvanā sā sthirā bhavet means "from that, his contemplation becomes steady." The verse is openly remedial and stabilizing.
Anvaya. The sentence runs plainly: "O doe-eyed one, let the practitioner contemplate all the bodily substances as pervaded by space; by means of that, his meditation becomes firm and steady."
Tatparya. Verse 47 gives the new turn in this spaciousness sequence. Verse 46 asked for a direct flash: take one place in the body and see only emptiness there, even for a moment. Verse 47 recognizes that such immediacy may not yet hold. So it widens the entry. Instead of one spot, all the body's substance is taken up into the contemplation. Instead of demanding instant void-recognition, the verse trains the mind to see solidity itself as space-pervaded. This is the new contribution: the spaciousness is no longer momentary and local, but distributed through the whole bodily mass so that the bhāvanā can stabilize. Verse 48 will go further still by treating the skin as a mere wall with nothing inside. Here, however, the method is transitional and practical: loosen the body's felt density into spacious pervasion until void-awareness stops collapsing.
Sādhana. Sit quietly and bring attention into the body, not outside it. Take one bodily layer at a time: skin, flesh, blood, fat, bone, marrow, or the bodily substances you can actually feel or imagine clearly. Do not try to make them vanish. Instead, feel each as pervaded by space, porous with openness, less like a hard mass and more like density floating in sky. Move from the more outward to the more inward if that helps steadiness. The doing is the repeated contemplative placement: this too is space-filled. The non-doing is equally important: do not force blankness, numbness, or dissociation. Stay until the sense of interior density relaxes into openness. When the whole body begins to feel quietly space-suffused, remain there. That steadiness is the fruit the verse names.
5. Jaideva Singh — The Logical¶
The verse is grammatically compact and exact. Sarvaṃ dehagataṃ dravyaṃ is a collective accusative object: "all the substance present in the body." The adjective-participle viyad-vyāptam agrees with dravyaṃ and states what is to be contemplated about it, namely that it is pervaded by space. The verb vibhāvayet is optative-instructional in force: one should cultivate this contemplation deliberately. The correlative ending tatas tasya bhāvanā sā sthirā bhavet marks consequence: from that practice, that contemplation becomes stable. Singh also preserves the sequence-logic by making Verse 47 a concession to one "incapable of śūnya-bhāva immediately." So the verse does not replace the direct void of Verse 46; it prepares the aspirant for it by extending spaciousness through bodily constituents such as bone and flesh. His note classifies this contemplation as śāktopāya.
6. Swami Lakshmanjoo — The Lineage¶
Take what is in the body and see the hollowness there. That is the hinge. Do not look for void somewhere above the head or in an abstract philosophy. Take deha-gatam dravyam exactly as the material in the body, "flesh, bones, and marrow," and imagine that there is nothing solid inside it. When Denise asks, "It's hollow?" the answer is immediate: "It is hollow there." This is the practical correction. The verse is not asking for anatomical analysis, and it is not asking you to destroy the body in thought. It is asking you to place awareness in the apparent substance of the body until the awareness of void becomes established there. When that establishment becomes firm, the mind enters the nirvikalpa condition. Lakshmanjoo calls this pure śāktopāya.
7. Mark Dyczkowski & Christopher Wallis — Context & Philology¶
Wallis offers the clearest direct verse-specific help located in this pass: Vijñaana-bhairava-tantra verses 43-48: the Spaciousness practices. He glosses dravya as the body's tissues or substances and reports the commentator's more specific reading through the bodily dhātus: hair, skin, muscle, blood, fat, bone, and marrow. That matters because it turns the verse away from a vague metaphysics of "substance" and toward a bodily practice done layer by layer. His gloss of viyad-vyāptam as "pervaded by space or sky" and his practical note that the tissues can be contemplated one by one, from outermost to innermost, sharpen the verse's actual procedure. Wallis also places the verse higher, calling it a śāmbhava-upāya practice suitable for all levels. That is valuable evidence of current official Wallis framing, but the local Singh and Lakshmanjoo sources do not support collapsing the verse into that classification.
Dyczkowski's official PDF translation, The Vijnanabhairava Tantra, gives direct verse support but not a separate prose commentary. Its most useful contribution is the sequencing cue: "If (one is unable to do this), one should reflect that all the substance present in the body is pervaded by the Void; then one's contemplation (of the Void) will be firm." That opening clause makes Verse 47 explicitly remedial relative to Verse 46. The same PDF also places Verses 46-48 under the heading "The Body," which supports the reading of a deliberate triad: one bodily place as empty, then all bodily substance pervaded by void, then skin as wall with nothing inside. No stronger verse-specific Dyczkowski prose commentary was located in the official sources used here.
8. Daniel Odier — The Somatic Grounding¶
Let space enter the body's density. Bone does not need to be imagined as broken, flesh does not need to be despised, and blood does not need to be abstracted. Feel instead that every bodily substance is porous from within, as if ether were already threading through it. The body becomes less a packed object and more a field with depth, layers, and inner room. Odier's line, "let ether pervade your body," is most faithful when it is taken literally in sensation: not outside the skin only, but through the felt mass itself, until mind and body open into the same spatiality.
9. Paul Reps — The "Sudden Hit"¶
Feel your substance, bones, flesh, blood, saturated with cosmic essence.
10. Upāya Type¶
Śāktopāya. Singh explicitly notes, "This contemplation is also śāktopāya." Lakshmanjoo is even more emphatic: "This is śāktopāya, pure śāktopāya." Because both local sources ground the classification directly, that is the safest assignment here.
11. Resonance Check (Adhikāra)¶
This practice suits someone who can work with bodily imagination without becoming theatrical and who needs a steadier entry than the sudden one-point void of the previous verse. It especially helps the practitioner who feels the body as dense, packed, and over-real, yet can patiently re-educate perception through repeated contemplative placement.
12. The "What Else?" — The Pitfall¶
The trap is to repeat "the body is empty" while actually holding the flesh rigid and treating the practice like an anatomy lesson. Then the tissues stay conceptually labeled but never become space-pervaded in experience, and the result is dull dissociation rather than steady spaciousness.
13. Verse-Specific Glossary¶
- dravya: in this verse, the bodily substances or tissues that make the body seem materially solid. It should not be flattened into an abstract philosophical "substance."
- viyad: sky, space, open expanse. Here it means the spacious openness that is contemplated as already pervading bodily density.
- bhāvanā: contemplative imagination made experientially effective. Here it is not fantasy but the repeated placing of awareness until the body's apparent solidity is re-seen.
- sthirā: stable, steady, firm. In this verse it names the maturation of spaciousness-practice from a fragile glimpse into an abiding contemplative hold.