Making an Earth Kasiṇa

24. But when a man has had no such previous practice, he should make a kasiṇa, guarding against the four faults of a kasiṇa and not overlooking any of the directions for the meditation subject learnt from the teacher. Now, the four faults of the earth kasiṇa are due to the intrusion of blue, yellow, red or white. So instead of using clay of such colours, he should make the kasiṇa of clay like that in the stream of the Gangā,^[1] which is the colour of the dawn. [124] And he should make it not in the middle of the monastery in a place where novices, etc., are about but on the confines of the monastery in a screened place, either under an overhanging rock or in a leaf hut. He can make it either portable or as a fixture.

25. Of these, a portable one should be made by tying rags of leather or matting onto four sticks and smearing thereon a disk of the size already mentioned, using clay picked clean of grass, roots, gravel, and sand, and well kneaded. At the time of the preliminary work it should be laid on the ground and looked at.

A fixture should be made by knocking stakes into the ground in the form of a lotus calyx, lacing them over with creepers. If the clay is insufficient, then other clay should be put underneath and a disk a span and four fingers across made on top of that with the quite pure dawn-coloured clay. For it was with reference only to measurement that it was said above either the size of a bushel or the size of a saucer (§22). But that is bounded, not unbounded was said to show its delimitedness.

26. So, having thus made it delimited and of the size prescribed, he should scrape it down with a stone trowel—a wooden trowel turns it a bad colour, so that should not be employed—and make it as even as the surface of a drum. Then he should sweep the place out and have a bath. On his return he should seat himself on a well-covered chair with legs a span and four fingers high, prepared in a place that is two and a half cubits [that is, two and a half times elbow to finger-tip] from the kasiṇa disk. For the kasiṇa does not appear plainly to him if he sits further off than that; and if he sits nearer than that, faults in the kasiṇa appear. If he sits higher up, he has to look at it with his neck bent; and if he sits lower down, his knees ache.

Footnotes and references:

[1]:

“Gaṅgā (= ‘river’) is the name for the Ganges in India and for the Mahavaeligaṅgā, Sri Lanka’s principal river. However, in the Island of Sri Lanka there is a river, it seems, called the Rāvanagaṅgā. The clay in the places where the banks are cut away by its stream is the colour of dawn” (Vism-mhṭ 119).