ध्यानमूलं गुरुर्मूर्तिः

A single verse, and one of the most quoted in the whole guru literature, because it fixes the teacher at the base of four different things in four quarters. The root of meditation is the form of the guru; the root of worship is his feet; the root of mantra is his word; the root of liberation is his grace. The construction is what makes it stick: the same word, mula, opens each quarter and the same word, guru, follows it, so the line can be recited by anyone who has heard it once. It is used as an invocation before recitation rather than as a hymn on its own, which is why it stands here without any apparatus, and it is the verse the longer guru-stotras of this corpus are usually working outward from.