sāmbapañcāśikā

Fifty verses to the Sun, whose own colophon calls them an enquiry into brahman drawn from Veda and Agama together — not the remedy for skin disease that the legend of its author has attached to it. It opens by bowing to the single light of consciousness that feeds the gods with streams of nectar and fills the moon again each time it is drained. The Sun here is the Om sounding inside every creature and the breath moving in and out; he stands between the sleeping sky and earth and wakes them with cow-mouthed rays; he cooks the moon like an oblation, offers the world through the mouth of fire, and on the new-moon night eats its last digit, a householder performing his own sacrifice inside the world-egg. The closing verses set the northern path of the gods against the southern path of the fathers, and ask for a station beyond both.