Recognition

Dhāraṇā 53 · The Five Mudrās and the Gaze

Through Karaṅkiṇī, Krodhanā, Bhairavī, Lelihānā and Khecarī, at the time of the steady gaze, the attainment of the Supreme is made manifest.

For once the text speaks in the closed vocabulary of its own ritual world. Five mudrās are named — Karaṅkiṇī, Krodhanā, Bhairavī, Lelihānā, Khecarī — and one condition: dṛṣṭi-kāle, at the time of the gaze. Through these, held in that steady seeing, parāvāptiḥ prakāśate — the attainment of the Supreme stands revealed.

What can honestly be saidमुद्रा-पञ्चक

The names themselves speak: karaṅka is a skeleton, and Karaṅkiṇī is 'she of the skeleton'; Krodhanā is 'the wrathful'; Bhairavī is the terrible Goddess herself; Lelihānā, from the intensive of the root 'to lick,' is 'she who flickers her tongue' — the serpent's or the flame's gesture; Khecarī is 'she who moves in the sky,' the mover in the space of consciousness. These are the fierce attendant-energies of the Bhairava cult, and a mudrā here is more than a hand-sign: it is a total attitude — posture, gaze, and inner state fused — in which the body is sealed (the root sense of mudrā) into the shape of a divine energy until the energy's state comes over the practitioner.

Beyond this, honesty imposes restraint. The verse gives no descriptions, and the working details of these five belonged to instruction within the Āgamic lineages, transmitted from teacher to disciple rather than written for the open page. Reconstructions exist in the wider tantric corpus, where several of these names recur with differing content; none of that will be paraphrased here as if it were this verse's teaching. What the verse itself asserts is the frame and the condition — five embodied seals, and the gaze.

The part any reader can practise

Dṛṣṭi-kāle is the verse's own emphasis, and it is not esoteric. In every mudrā of this family, whatever the limbs do, the gaze is held steady, wide, unblinking, resting in space — seeing without fastening on anything seen. That gaze is available now: eyes open and soft, fixed on no object, the seeing itself continuing while the seizing stops. It is the common thread of the practices around it — the dappled air before it, the fixed gaze on a gross object soon after — and this verse's testimony is that the great seals of the tradition converge on the same open seeing. The elaborate five are a lineage's property; the steady gaze is anyone's.