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| A saffron flag flutters before the sun, the dharmachakra glowing like the heart of the same light that burns in all beings |
The Reflex to Measure Light
We are a species that measures.
We measure distance, wealth, success—and, when the language of spirit enters, we measure holiness too.
Somehow, even the most ineffable realities become ranked: “greater masters,” “lesser saints,” “more evolved souls.”
The mind builds its altars as it builds its cities—vertically.
We look at the figures who gathered thousands of disciples, who wrote volumes or founded movements, and we call them “great.”
We look at the ones who lived and died quietly, leaving no record, and we call them “unknown.”
As if the size of the flame depended on how far its light travels.
This habit is ancient and almost innocent.
We need visible signs to anchor faith.
When a teacher’s presence shakes the air, when eyes soften in his company, when miracles cluster around him, we take it as proof that realization itself must be larger in him than in others.
The mind loves hierarchy; it feels safer when the infinite looks like a pyramid.
But truth has no scale.
The Self does not expand with the number of followers or contract in solitude.
There are lamps that shine only for one life and suns that light a civilization, yet both burn with the same fire.
Only the radius differs.
The Verse of Abhinavagupta
More than a thousand years ago, Abhinavagupta looked at this same human habit — the urge to weigh realization by visibility — and answered it with a single, luminous image.
In the thirteenth āhnika of the Tantrāloka, he wrote:
svamuktimātre kasyāpi yāvad viśvavimocane |
pratibhodeti khadyota-ratna-tārendu-sūryavat || 13.159“In some person, intuitive illumination (pratibhā) arises—at first only sufficient for their own liberation,
and in others extending even to the liberation of the whole universe—
just as light shines with ascending brilliance as that of a firefly, a gem, a star, the moon, or the sun.”
It is one of those verses where the commentary feels already contained in the image.
Every being who awakens is a flame of the same fire, but the reach of that flame varies.
For some, the light suffices to burn away the darkness of their own being; for others, it spreads across lives and worlds.
Yet the essence of the luminosity is identical.
Jayaratha in his Viveka explains softly:
“From the strength of this example, it is to be understood that there are intermediate gradations also:
some free a few souls, others more—each according to the power of their radiance.”
Here Abhinava dismantles hierarchy with precision.
He does not divide beings into greater and lesser; he describes degrees of diffusion, not degrees of truth.
The firefly does not need to envy the sun.
It burns with the same elemental fire; only the field of manifestation differs.
Liberation is not a pyramid but a spectrum of shining.
The measure is not in how far the light reaches, but in the fact that it burns at all.
The Parallel from Annamalai Swami
A thousand years after Abhinavagupta, the same truth surfaced again—this time in the voice of a man who had spent his life in the radiance of Ramana Maharshi.
When asked whether all realised beings share the same understanding, Annamalai Swami smiled and reached for a simple image:
“You see a big lamp before you. Your own lamp is unlit.
You bring your lamp close, and when it catches, you walk away with your own flame.
The state of jñāna is the same for all.” (Annamalai Swami — Final Talks)
He went on:
“Some jñānīs guide many people; others, equally enlightened, may guide only a few—or none at all.
Water can be in a well or in a lake: the same water, different reach.
A small lamp lights a room; a big lamp lights a whole street.
Bhagavan was one of those big, blazing lights.
But whichever light you go to, the light is always the same.” (Annamalai Swami — Final Talks)
The analogy could have come straight from the Tantrāloka.
Both men, one steeped in the ritual subtlety of Kashmir and the other in the naked directness of Ramana’s silence, speak the same vision:
realization is identical in essence, unequal only in expression.
The difference between the hidden hermit and the world-teacher is not depth but circumference.
Grace expresses itself according to temperament and destiny—what Abhinava called śaktipāta, what Annamalai simply called God’s will.
Some flames remain sheltered under clay; others blaze into public daylight.
But when you kneel close enough, the heat is the same.
One Fire, Many Fields
The mind prefers clear hierarchies; the heart of realization knows only gradients of expression.
Both Abhinavagupta and Annamalai Swami dissolve the false link between visibility and depth, between the breadth of impact and the purity of awakening.
A being may shine like a sun, illuminating multitudes, or like a candle that warms only one trembling heart — yet the substance of light is one.
The difference lies not in essence but in field, not in realization but in the prārabdha — the unique shape destiny takes once truth is known.
One carries stillness into a cave; another carries it into marketplaces.
Both embody the same unmoving awareness.
It is a radical correction to our spiritual reflexes.
The firefly and the sun are not rivals but continuous points on a single spectrum.
Even the smallest gleam of recognition partakes of the same incandescence that blazes through the universe as the Self.
What we call “great masters” are simply those in whom the circumference of radiance is vast — but the source is never more or less divine.
This insight dismantles both inferiority and idolatry.
It leaves us with reverence for every flicker of awakening — our own included.
The work, then, is not to enlarge our light through effort or publicity, but to keep it unmixed, steady, and true to its own nature.
A clean flame is complete wherever it burns.
The Path of Radiance and the Play of Karma
“What we call ‘great masters’ are simply those in whom the circumference of radiance is vast.”
That radiance, says Annamalai Swami, has nothing to do with a greater Self—for the Self admits no degrees.
“If the ego is destroyed, only non-dual consciousness remains.
There is no higher or lower in that state.
You cannot say that one jñani is superior to another.
The inner state of all is the same; their outer activities differ because each has a different destiny to fulfill.” (Living by the Words of Bhagavan)"
Here destiny is not will or preference but the echo of prārabdha karma—the residual tendencies and structures through which realization expresses itself once the “I” has fallen away.
Even that which we call a “mission” arises not from intention but from the leftover trajectory of life-energy.
As he says, some jñānīs have done tapas not only for their own realization but for the liberation of others; in their wake, the world brightens almost involuntarily, like gold falling from the sky after desire has vanished.
It is the same principle that Abhinavagupta hinted at: the firefly, the moon, and the sun differ only in extent, not in essence.
One illumines a few steps ahead; another, an entire horizon.
But both burn with the same substance of consciousness.
Even bodily suffering, as Annamalai explains, follows this law of spontaneous remainder.
Some sages bear the karmas of disciples; others experience the frailty of a “hut shaken by an elephant.”
And a few, like Vidyāraṇya, see the rewards of old austerities return as absurd abundance—gold bricks before the door of one who has forgotten the idea of ownership.
Their lives no longer reveal moral progression but the afterglow of causality meeting freedom: prārabdha fulfilling itself in the field of what no longer clings.
The Measureless Light
When the firefly looks at the sun, it might think, “He is greater than I.”
But the sun, if it could speak, would whisper, “We burn with the same flame.”
This is the heart of both Abhinavagupta’s verse and Annamalai Swami’s teaching:
difference exists only in the play of destiny, not in the substance of truth.
In realization, the idea of “one who shines more” dissolves.
The Self does not expand when worshipped or shrink when ignored.
It glows through every awakened being according to the pattern left by the body and its karmic residues —
through one as a stillness that liberates a few, through another as a current that moves nations,
and through yet another as silent anonymity that touches no one but the air.
When we understand this, admiration becomes reverence rather than comparison.
We no longer ask how much light a being has, but simply recognize the same light in all who have seen through themselves.
To meet such a being — whether they live in a hut or a monastery, whether they write books or sit unknown — is to feel the proof that essence never competes with essence.
It only shines.
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