If you’re interested in more detail about what, exactly, the experience of dharma megha is, this section of the “Appendix” may help. The definitions and comments about this final stage of meditation in Patanjali’s last six sutras describe the experience as a physical sensation like rain throughout a person’s body. Another way of describing it is a feeling of fire, as discussed below in relation especially to the symbol of the Hindu god Agni. As a fire within, it is more like what our modern times might describe as a mild to medium electric current in the body, one that feels good. The following discussion describes examples of this rain and fire experience in additional Hindu, Buddhist, Christian, Jewish, and other religions’ scriptures.

Dharma megha is the last major state of meditation Patanjali discusses in his final sutras, 4.29-4.34. As described in them here, dharma megha is neither a mere abstract concept nor a symbol, but a living experience.

But is “rain” an accurate word for the phrase dharma megha? And how important is the experience? What does it mean to meditators? Here is both a spiritual and scholarly explanation of dharma megha from what likely were Patanjali’s own scholarly readings and from sources in other religions.

Linguistically, dharma megha often existed in Hindu and Buddhist scriptures as a single compound word: dharmamegha. However, in Hindu texts about its meaning, the word more often gained its definitions in the use of two separate words: dharma and megha. For that reason, it is separated into two words in this section of the “Appendix.”

In most classical and modern translations of Patanjali’s sutras, dharma megha is interpreted as something like “a rain cloud of dharma.” Clearly, Patanjali believes it is important because he not only places it at the very end of his sutras but also appears to be saying that it is the final or end peak experience to which all of his other sutras are leading. It is, in short, Patanjali’s capstone experience in “yoking to God.”

Just what, exactly, is this experience? Translators and interpreters have given it a variety of meanings, from the first commentator on the sutras, Vyasa, in about 400 CE, to the present. The meaning is vague enough, however, that if you read ten contemporary translations, you easily may find ten slightly different explanations. Unfortunately, in many translations, the phrase is explained as an abstract concept, or just a symbolic change. Some of these interpretations say it stands for the idea of losing or shucking away all worldly thoughts, feelings, and concerns. Others says it is means no more than that you become perfectly in step with how the world works in a good or virtuous cosmos.

However, there is strong evidence that Patanjali does not intend mere abstractions. He likely is talking about a specific inner experience–just as he does in the rest of his sutras. Turning to early texts before and after Patanjali’s time can better explain dharma megha.

Starting with classical and modern Hindu scriptures after Patanjali’s lifetime, the word dharma usually is translated in words and phrases like “natural law,” “order of the universe,” or “goodness and morality in the world.” Dharma is, in Western religious terms, God’s Law, or the Laws of the Universe when they are working well and rightly for furthering good purposes.

In these classical and modern Hindu scriptures, the word megha usually is defined in words and phrases such as “rain,” “cloud of moisture,” or “rain cloud.” Placing these meanings together for the two words is the reason that many translators of Patanjali have developed the definition of dharma megha as, or in words similar to, “rain cloud of virtue.”

However, the pre-classical, ancient Hindu scriptures, especially the earliest written one, the Rig Veda, define dharma a little more specifically: it is the basic “stuff” of the universe. This “stuff” is the individual particles or energy of pre-matter that eventually form into the patterns of physical matter that science can see. Scientifically, a comparable analogy might be to the “strings” of physicists’ “string theory.” These strings in theoretical physics are the basic, string-like structures that are the building blocks of quarks, which are the building blocks of neutrons and protons–and they, in turn, are the building blocks of the nuclei of atoms.

And megha has its own history of ancient meanings. Generally, it means “cloud,” usually a “rain cloud” or a “rain shower.” It also may mean “cloud filled with rain droplets” and “thunderhead.”

If we combine all these definitions, the result is something like “basic energy particles of the universe appearing as clouds of rain droplets and thunderheads” in meditation. So, what, exactly, is Patanjali saying? Why are these two words descriptive of a felt event in meditation?

Fortunately for better understanding, we can turn to a different set of scriptures developed in India: Buddhist texts. The phrase dharma megha, together as one, is common in them. These texts were written just before and during Patanjali’s era, and as a scholar, he would have had access to them. Would he have used ideas from them? Georg Feuerstein says in his own scholarly translation of the Yoga Sutras that Patanjali obviously borrowed from a number of sources close at hand, and sometimes, Patanjali may have taken advantage of Buddhist writings.

For example, Feuerstein says that six of Patanjali’s eight Astanga Yoga “limbs”–discussed extensively in over twenty sutras in Chapter 2-B–are the same as six of the eight “folds” in Buddhism’s important “Eight-fold Path.” Thus it is reasonable to assume Patanjali borrowed other elements of Buddhist language. In addition, why would he even use the words dharma and megha together when it was uncommon to do so at that time in Hindu writing. It is reasonable to think he borrowed the phrase and its meaning from Buddhist texts.

What does dharma megha mean in those ancient Buddhist texts? Scholar Karen O’Brien-Kop provides a number of such references in her “Dharmamegha in yoga and yogacara” in the Journal of Indian Philosophy. She describes how some of the older Buddhist scriptures call dharma megha a “virtue cloud,” “rain of substance,” “cloud of irreducible experiential forms,” “delightful, fragrant rain shower,” “cloud of well-being rain,” and “anointment or coronation.”

Notably, she adds, dharma megha is the tenth and final stage for an enlightened yogi in Buddhism. That person then is called a bodhisattva. For such a person, she says, dharma megha “is like an ocean that can soak up the infinite amount of knowledge that rains down like a deluge from a raincloud.”

Another Buddhist scripture, the Apadana, speaks similarly. It is a Pali canon–a work of great importance–in Theravada Buddhism. According to O-Brien-Kop, the scripture says, “While the dharmamegha rains, may all contaminations cease; may [people] live according to their perfections, may they become stream-enterers” (trans. O’Brien-Kop). Yet another text, she says, the Buddhavamsa, describes Buddha as “the agency of the cloud,” which “rain[s] the showers of dharma:...’he rained down from the cloud of Dhamma [dharma] making the world...cool” and “moistening” it (trans. Horner in O’Brien-Kop).

She says that the early School of Buddhism called “Mahayana” claims that Buddha himself is the provider of such experiences for meditators experiencing them. O’Brien-Kop tells us that the Saddharma Pundarika Sutra describes Buddha as the “King of Dharma...who arose [to] teach to beings...this great cloud, filled with water, wreathed with lightning” that “[r]esounds with thunder, and refreshes all the creatures” (trans. Conze in O’Brien-Kop).

Once we understand, from this Buddhist literature, just what the experience of dharma megha is, we then can look for similar descriptions by other names in very early Hindu scripture. There we find in the Rig Veda that the highest god was Indra.

Indra was India’s version of Zeus and Thor in the West. In the Rig Veda he is a storm god who “milks the cloud-cows” that give life, strength, marriage, and healing. Indra’s vehicle for moving about is, in fact, a cloud, which in even earlier times was a chariot, and later became a white elephant. The source of Indra’s name is debated, but one theory says it was developed from the word indu, which means “raindrop,” because in the Rig Veda, he conquered rain, bringing it to earth. Another theory says his name came later from similar root words meaning “great power,” “strong,” and “fire starter” who ignites the vital life force of prana (“breath/spirit”). All of these descriptors thus may be metaphors for the dharma megha experience within a meditator.

An interesting story about Indra in the Rig Veda shows him slaying his greatest enemy, the evil serpent-demon Vrita. From this killing, Indra is called vrtraghna or “slayer of obstacles.” Notably, according to Patanjali, vrtta (also spelled vritta, similar to the serpent-demon’s name “Vrita”) are “whirlpools” that act as obstacles you must dissolve or slay to enable you to reach the clear mind and, with it, dharma megha.

So important is Indra in the Rig Veda that over a fourth of this most-ancient book’s 1028 hymns mention him. In the complete Vedas (the Rig Veda was first; several others followed), he is a lightning god (related to thunder and lightning, or rainstorms), rain god, and river-aiding god. The pressing of soma (a fermented fruit juice used in rituals) was dedicated to him: soma is a famous food of divine intoxication. The Vedas also sometimes refer to Indra as the twin brother of the fire god Agni. Some passages say they are the same.

Indra’s twin or namesake, Agni, also is featured in the Rig Veda. He is described as both fire and water. His “[w]aters make [the inner flame] grow increasing in his bulk like a sea in its motion,...bliss-giving like fast-running water...and like a flowing river.... He is the close comrade of the Rivers.... He breathes in the Waters.... He is the God of the Wine...” (Aurobindo, Mandala One, Sutra 65, “Parasara Shaktya,” Hymns to the Mystic Fire). “He is like a river running in its channel and sends in his front the descending Waters... (Sutra 66). “He who has perceived him when he is in the secret cave, he who has come to the stream of the Truth,...he is Knowledge in the house of the Waters... (Sukta 67). All of this is meant, according to this esoteric translation of the Rig Veda, to describe the inner experience a meditator may have of Agni.

This same Agni–the god’s force and power, and its description as a spiritual experience–is not only water, thunder, and rain, but also fire. His “flames range wide, [his] lustres touch the heavens,” “a luminous energy,” his “red active smoke of passion...full of vision.... Burn utterly every eater of our being...O Vast of lustre.... [F]orceful are thy flames;...always thou do burn utterly the powers who detain...” (Sutra 36, “Kanwa Ghaura). He is “the Fire who came forth from the Truth...seated in the sun-world, making true all our works” (Sutra 70, “Parasara Shaktya”).

In addition, says the Rig Veda, Agni is a golden fire. He is “honey...possessed of honied tongue” and “sprinkled...clarified butter...” (Sutra 13, “Medhatithi Kanwa”). “[M]ay all bear him in themselves,...[the] sun” (Sutra 69, “Parasara Shaktya”).

In this esoteric meaning of the Rig Veda, all of these descriptions are details of what you can experience in dharma megha. The “rain cloud of virtue” looks like Agni or golden fire. It streams throughout the universe. On an individual basis, it appears in dharma megha in, around, and throughout a meditator as the Rig Veda’s Hiranyagharba, which literally means “golden womb” or “golden egg.” “In the beginning rose Hiranyagarbha,” says the Rig Veda, “born Only Lord of all created beings. He fixed and holdeth up this earth and heaven,...[g]iver of vital breath, of power and vigour, he whose [laws] all the Gods acknowledge” (Hymn X.121.1-2, Rig Veda, Four Vedas).

The combination of the fire god Agni and the concept of Soma or divine medicine highlight this interchangeable sight and feeling of golden fire and water. Much of Patanjali’s yoga is sourced from ancient Vedic practices. “The entire Vedic Yoga,” says David Frawley, “is based upon the underlying polarity and mutual transformability of Agni and Soma...like Yin and Yang.... The simplest way to look upon [them] is as Fire and Water.... We ourselves are a kind of fire...which exists in the field of body and mind as its Soma...with an ascending current of fire...and a descending current of nectar or grace” (p. 200).

The gods Indra and Agni are maps of the golden, fiery water experience of Patanjali’s final stage of meditation. The Prasna Upanishad (embedded in the Atharva Veda) also classifies the god Agni as part of prana, which usually is translated as the most basic “breath” and “spirit” of the universe.” Verses 2.3 and 2.5 say, “Prana, the primal energy, [is] supreme over...all [the senses].... As fire, prana burns; as the sun, he shines, as cloud, he rains; as Indra, he rules the gods; as wind, he blows; as the moon, he nourishes all. He is that which is visible and also that which is invisible. He is immortal life” (in Prabhavananda and Isherwood, p. 113).

In other words, dharma megha, Agni, Soma, Indra, fire, rain clouds, sun, and indeed the smallest units underlying matter itself are the same in experience and in substance. They are the underlying pre-matter of the universe, a building block of all that is material, and even, perhaps, what physics might term the most fundamental pure energy of which all else is formed.

Patanjali is saying that when you reach a far stage in meditation, you will feel dharma megha. It will be like rain, like fire–a showering, circling, or rising of what some call Shakti, ruach, psychic energy, ch’i, or qi–and an anointment pure and scintillating as the breath of the spirit.

If such an experience is so definitive in Patanjali, Hinduism, and Buddhism, then it should be apparent in other religions. There are references elsewhere if we know where to look.

The Christian Bible has a similar concept in the Gospel of John 3.3-8, as translated by French philosopher and mystic Simone Weil. In the following passage, Nicodemus, a Pharisee on the ruling Jewish council called the Sanhedrin, visits Jesus secretly and asks him how a person can be born again. Jesus answers, “Unless a person is born from on high of water and Spirit, he cannot see the realm of God.”

Weil considered the phrase “from on high” to indicate a mystical source “on high.” To be born “from on high” by both “water and Spirit” implies not just an experience of Spirit, but one of water. In fact, this Christian scripture resembles Patanjali’s own Sutra 29: “In an elevated state of disinterested, steady discernment, dharmamegha [comes] in deep meditation” (translation mine).

Then the same Gospel of John, in its next chapter, tells the story of Jesus meeting the Samaritan woman by the well of Jacob. This occasions another discussion of water by Jesus. It is a particularly remarkable story because Galileans, as was Jesus, did not get along well with people from the next-door province of Samaria. Especially, a Galilean man never would be caught talking with a Samaritan woman.

She responded, “You are a Jew and I am a Samaritan woman. How can you ask me for a drink?”

Jesus then says, “If you knew the gift of God and who it is that asks you for a drink, you would have asked him and he would have given you living water.”

She says, “Where can you get this living water? Are you greater than our father Jacob, who gave us the well and drank from it himself?...”

Then Jesus supplies us a key statement. “Everyone who drinks this water will be thirsty again, but whoever drinks the water I give them will never thirst. Indeed, the water I give them will become in them a spring of water welling up to eternal life” (NIV 4.6-14).

This “living water” has an esoteric–an experiential–meaning. It is the Christian version of dharma megha.

A later text that was very popular in Christian churches in the first century CE refers to this, as well. The book, The Shepherd of Hermas, helped train new disciples in what Jesus and his first followers called “The Way.” Hermas, a shepherd, had a vision of an old woman who represented the newly developing Christian church. He describes the vision and then, in his vision, the old woman details the meanings of the symbols. She says,

The tower that you see being built is I, the church.... Here, then, is why the tower is built on water. It is because your life was saved and will be saved through water.... [The tower is built from] stones dragged from the deep water [representing spiritual leaders] and others were falling near the water [and] wanted to roll and to come to the water.

The key experiences in this passage are (1) the church is being built by people who come from deep in the water, (2) being “saved” (the key spiritual experience for joining “The Way”) means doing so through water, and, by implication, (3) some people come close to the water and want to enter it.

Similarly, the Jewish Qumran Essenes also spoke of water experiences in their Book of Everyday Virtues. They were an ascetic community, primarily male in their Dead Sea campus at Qumran, and they used their Book for guidance in their daily life in the desert. According to their lawbook Damascus Rule, they believed in a “fountain of waters,” which their Psalms Scroll calls “the eternal spring,...the fountain of glory,...the well of knowledge” (Hanson 8 and 45). “May the eternal open an unending fountain for you,” says their Blessings, “never holding back water from the thirsty ones” (104). “But you, my God, have placed in my mouth what amounts to an early rain which will water all–a fountain of living water. The skies will never fail to open,” says their Psalms Scroll (145).

These Essenes channeled fresh water into their monastic buildings. They bathed in it each day before eating. They did so not just for outer cleanliness but also, as their rulebooks describe, for inner spiritual cleansing.

Further emphasis on the importance of a water experience exists in the life of John the Baptist, cousin and friend of Jesus of Nazareth. Some scholars say John the Baptist may have been an Essene, and from their ritual and mystical baths he may have developed Christianity’s sacrament of baptism. In the first century or two of Christianity, baptism was accomplished in the same way as in the Dead Sea Essene community: by immersion.

In non-Essene Judaism, water in its purifying form is called a “mikveh” or “collection of water” that cleanses both body and soul. Earlier Jewish scripture in the Book of Jeremiah 17.13 and 22 refers to God using this word “mikveh.” Normally, the word is translated as “hope,” but it can be associated with “living water.” Verses 17.13 and 22 also refer to God as a “fountain,” “rain,” and “showers”:

The hope [meaning mikveh or “living water”] of Israel is Jehovah, [a] fountain of living waters. Are there among the vanities of the nations any causing rain? And do the heavens give showers? Art not Thou He, O Jehovah our God? (Young’s Literal Translation).

In two other religions, water also is highly important in spiritual life. In the very ancient Zoroastrian religion, which still is practiced, water is a central rite as both ritual and mystical event. Islam’s holy book, the Qur’an, says that “heaven” is, among other experiences, “rivers of clean water” (47.15) and “a gushing fountain” (88.11-12).

In Patanjali’s view, dharma megha is a final stage of meditation experience commonly available to all advanced meditators. It is clear that it also plays an important role in the mystical experiences of other religions. Most notably, it is an experience, not an abstract philosophical concept: real, present, and powerful in the later stages of meditation experience.

Patanjali discusses almost every step in his 196 sutras as some sort of experience. And offers all of his instructions in an abbreviated form. That he devotes six sutras–especially his final ones–to this beautiful rain-fire of goodness that fills up your whole being is testimony to how important he thinks it is.

Most recent content revision: 12 June 2022

Sanskrit Text: Patanjali, c. 400 BCE-400 CE

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