Songs for Siva
Page 3
Akka and I
I first came across the vacanas in the oral tradition to which they really belong. There are still a number of ‘minstrels’ in our villages who sing the vacanas. Many of them are unlettered but can sing hundreds of songs literally ‘by heart’. Listening to some of these songs, I could discern the vague outline of that very path on which these poems reverberate. They echo in the caverns of my own heart as I stumble upon the tail end of it, and I cannot help gasping ‘Ah!’ Hence these translations, and the more personal nature of what follows.
It may not be out of place here to go a little into the Narayana Gurukula tradition to which I belong. Founded in 1923 by Nataraja Guru (1895–1973), disciple and successor of Narayana Guru (1854–1928), the Gurukula is a worldwide contemplative community dedicated to self-realization and world citizenship. Its motto is the maxim voiced by Narayana Guru: ‘Humanity is of one caste, of one religion and of one God.’ (The words ‘race’, ‘faith’ and ‘goal’ could be used instead of ‘caste’, ‘religion’ and ‘God’ to convey the meaning more broadly.) The Gurukula is open to all regardless of class, religion, sex, language, nationality or other divisions.
That Homo sapiens is one species needs no argument to establish. That religion is also one may require some explanation. We can do no better than to quote Narayana Guru: ‘Every person at all times makes effort in every way, aiming at self-happiness; understand this to be the one religion of the world.’ This self must be understood as a universal concrete, abstracted and generalized so as to be free from all limitations of name and form. Just as all shades of the colour green can be seen in different leaves, it is also possible to understand the colour in the abstract, free of any leaf. To quote Narayana Guru again, ‘What we know here as this man or that, reflection reveals to be the Self’s prime form; conduct aimed at securing one’s own happiness must at the same time result in the happiness of the other.’ Thus it is that the seer is moved to act always with the general good in view. No one would dispute that, of all that is dear to a person, nothing is dearer than his or her own self, since it is only with reference to oneself that anything can be of value. One’s own well-being is inextricably linked with the well-being of all, and this realization brings about a giving up of all that is detrimental to the general good. It is in this sense that sannyasa, renunciation, must be understood. It is not in any way to be confused with notions of holiness or institutional pomp.
The Isa Upanishad unequivocally connects God and the world when it says, ‘The Lord (Isa) abides in all this, whatever there is in this moving world.’ One could also place universal personal happiness as the common goal of all, abolishing all duality of ends and means. Such a goal as a high value could replace the word ‘God’ for those who have trouble with it, making it possible to remain in a neutral state between belief and scepticism, and doing away with the need to divide the human family into believers and infidels. No one, even an atheist, could claim total indifference to values.
This explanation should make it easier to understand the Gurukula as an educational rather than a religious institution. Its founder Nataraja Guru, while being a disciple of a Guru in the context of perennial wisdom-transmission, was also a trained scientist. Sent by Narayana Guru to Europe to familiarize himself with the best that Western traditions could offer, Nataraja Guru was awarded the D.Litt. with triple honours by the Sorbonne University in 1933 for his thesis ‘The Personal Factor in the Educative Process’. He travelled extensively, founding gurukulas in different parts of the world.
We have already seen that the gurus of humanity are moved by their great compassion to re-evaluate and restate the enduring and fundamental verities in terms of their own times. Most of their fellow beings are far too involved in the need of the hour to be able to gain a glimpse of the eternal. It thus becomes imperative for the benevolent seer to interpret his or her grand vision so that the moment may be correctly understood as the meeting point of past aspirations and future possibilities. Otherwise, life loses its dignity of purpose and degenerates (as it usually does) into ‘ignoble strife’. The most familiar example of re-evaluation is Jesus’s oft repeated, ‘You have heard it said … but, verily, verily, I say unto you’. We find Akka on many occasions saying, ‘O brothers who argue about … listen.’
Narayana Guru, in his Scriptures of Mercy, equates grace, love and mercy with the unitive value of compassion or kindliness that underlies all the world’s religions and philosophies, citing all the known teachers and prophets as exemplars of this one single value. In the India of Narayana Guru’s time, caste and religious rivalry was the most damaging problem that needed attention. He exposed it theoretically through his writings, showing how such inhuman practices were not sanctioned in the scriptures or according to common sense, and he founded model communities transcending all barriers.
Following the same lines, Nataraja Guru recognized the need to bring science and philosophy together – a need he felt all the more keenly as a result of his extensive sojourns in Europe between and after the two world wars. The one-sided growth of the physical sciences, which gradually appropriated the very word science, was a reaction to the earlier one-sidedness of the church. Both needed correction ‘to normalize and re-normalize’ themselves in terms of each other, as Nataraja Guru would say.
Nataraja Guru developed and used a proto-linguistic structuralism based on the Cartesian coordinates that underlie wisdom literature the world over. The Mandukya Upanishad even says, ‘this self is four-limbed’, meaning that the structure of consciousness consists of the four states of waking, dreaming, deep sleep and the transcendent (the last called simply ‘the fourth’ because it is beyond thought or word). The four states are also referred to as the actual, virtual, causal and ultimate. The first two make up a horizontal world of paradox and multiplicity, while the last two make up a vertical scale of unitive values. In fact this is merely a two-dimensional description of a dynamism which must be understood from within, intuitively, as consciousness or awareness itself must be. This structure, then, becomes capable of containing all possible value-visions and apparently irreconcilable systems by assigning each its proper place. Nataraja Guru developed from it an ‘integrated science of the absolute’ in which physics and metaphysics or science and poetry lend support to and verify each other.
Elaborating on particular applications of this science of unitive values, Guru wrote manifestos on ‘One-world Education’, ‘One-world Economics’, ‘Ethics’, ‘Aesthetics’, ‘Unified Science’, etc. He also translated and commented on the major works of Narayana Guru and on the Saundarya Lahari of Sankara, a masterpiece of structuralism on erotic mystisicm, the subject matter of all genuine poetry. It was while he was teaching, translating and commenting on this last text, which he translates as ‘Upsurging Billow of Beauty’, that chance brought me to him, or, less egoistically speaking, the grace of the Goddess brought us together. (Guru would say, ‘Bring in the God too, so that the god and the goddess may cancel each other out. Don’t be one-sided. By cancelling them out, you get a neutral unitive value.’) You could call it whatever you liked – truth, goodness, beauty. What mattered was that the wonder intoxicated you, freed you, giving you the peace that ‘passeth understanding’.
I have gone into all this at some length so that the reader may share something of my own interest and background in contemplating the vacana literature. As stated earlier, vacana means ‘commitment’, ‘a word given’. According to Nataraja Guru, the Gurukula is based on ‘unlimited liability’. Kula, as in Gurukula, means ‘family’. ‘From each according to his ability, to each according to his need’, ‘All for one and one for all’ were among the guidelines he cited for students.
Even though I had no more than a smattering of Kannada when I first encountered the vacanas, the content of at least some of them was not unfamiliar. This brings us back once more to the universal poet-singer tradition of the seers and their wisdom. Thus, it is not as a stranger that I have approache
d the vacanas but as a humble disciple of the perennial lineage of the guru tradition, understood independently of its historic and geographic peculiarities which are incidental and only secondary to the pure wisdom content. Even the names of the gurus are relevant only in so far as they exemplify, in their own persons, this wisdom of the universal self – and are of supreme value to the seeker. Even now there are many gurus, simple women and men who represent this wisdom in and through their own lives. That most of them remain unrecognized by the world does not detract from their personal importance. They contribute more to world peace than the armies of all nations put together. Rural Karnataka still fosters this priceless tradition.
The vacanas have been very helpful to me in connection with caste as it exists in the villages around us. Untouchability, though illegal, is still observed. In my encounters with caste I have found a tremendous source of support in the openness of the vacanas, which give my words validity when I quote Narayana Guru on the absurdity of the caste system. All these factors have shaped my understanding of the vacanas.
My work on the vacanas began when Nitya (Guru Nitya Chaitanya Yati), who succeeded Nataraja Guru, found a number of them in an English translation and asked me to translate some from Kannada into Malayalam. As these Dravidian languages are first cousins, I was able to make a much closer rendering than was available in English. Nitya liked the translations and asked me to continue, in both Malayalam and English. He was very happy to hear that the translations were arousing interest and, but for his failing health, would have introduced them himself. He was looking forward to seeing them published when, in May 1999, he merged back into the Unmanifest. However, on our last day together, in response to a three-line verse of my own, he wrote the vacana
May the tender dew-drop
In the jasmine bud
Protect us.
Bowing in profound adoration before the wisdom and love of the Absolute, which is the sum total of us all, this book is dedicated to you, beloved reader.
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Like treasure hidden by the earth,
Like taste hidden by the fruit,
Like gold hidden by the stone,
Like oil hidden by the sesame seed,
Like fire hidden by the wood,
Channamallikarjuna, jasmine-tender,
Hides as the being behind becoming;
No one knows him.
Channamallikarjuna: one of the names of Siva; see Introduction.
being: the Absolute, bomma (from Brahman).
becoming: bhava, the phenomenal cycle of birth and death.
2
When I did not know myself
Where were you, tell me?
Like the colour in gold,
You were in me.
Though you were in me,
I saw you as different,
O Channamallikarjuna, Jasmine-tender!
Colour in gold: totally inseparable.
3
Maya has troubled the body as shadow,
Troubled breath as the mind,
Troubled mind as memory,
Troubled memory as awareness,
Troubled awareness as forgetfulness,
With a firm sceptre,
Maya rules the many worlds.
O Channamallikarjuna, jasmine-tender,
Who will overcome the maya
You have spread?
4
If I say I have left maya
Maya won’t leave;
If I don’t leave maya
It will ride on my back.
To the yogi maya became a yogini,
To the ascetic maya became
A female ascetic,
To the one with self-control
Maya become a flatterer.
I won’t be scared of your maya,
Channamallikarjuna, jasmine-tender,
I swear by you.
One with self-control: yati, a renunciant, sannyasi, from yama, ‘restraint’.
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Please cut away the delusion of my maya,
Take away the darkness of my body,
Please remove the restlessness of my spirit;
Channamallikarjuna, jasmine-tender,
May your grace loosen
The bonds of the world
That bind me.
6
When I say I have seen,
Seeing becomes a veil,
If I say I am united,
The mood becomes veil,
What shall I say and how?
If I say I know
Forgetfulness becomes a veil.
How can I overcome your maya?
Save me!
Channamallikarjuna, jasmine-tender.
The state of union is beyond all description, beyond all subject–object duality.
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Stream behind, river ahead,
Which is the way?
Lake behind, trap ahead,
Which is easy? Please tell.
The maya you have spread
Is killing.
Save me! Save me, do!
Channamallikarjuna, jasmine-tender.
8
The buffalo has one worry,
The cobbler has another;
The righteous one has one worry,
The evil-doer has another;
I have my own worry,
You have the worry of your desires!
No, go, let go my clothes, you fool!
I am worried that
Channamallikarjuna, jasmine-tender,
Won’t be pleased with me!
A vacana addressed to Akka’s husband Kaushika.
The righteous one … the evil-doer: dharmi and karmi (doer).
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If you jump into the sea
Carrying a stone
Will your troubles be over, O mother?
If, even after eating, you say you are hungry,
I’ll say ‘Too bad’.
If the mind burns at every place seen
How will the husband, Channamallikarjuna, jasmine-tender,
Be pleased, O mother?
10
Lord, see, my mind touches you
Yet doesn’t reach you;
My mind is troubled.
Like a toll-keeper at the city gates,
My mind is unhappy.
It cannot become empty
Forgetting the two.
Show me how you can become me,
O Channamallikarjuna, jasmine-tender.
You can become me: the way to complete union.
11
Ever my mind flows to my stomach;
I cannot see your face,
Cannot break your trap of maya.
O Channamallikarjuna, jasmine-tender,
Join me to you, by your grace.
12
To play, to sing, to speak, to ask, to walk, to talk
With your devotees is joyous harmony.
As long as I have
The gift of life from you,
May I spend my days in the company of your devotees,
O Channamallikarjuna, jasmine-tender.
13
What can I know of the initiations, O lord?
I shall remain ever a servant to the servants
Of the wise ones who dedicate themselves
To the guru, the linga and the mendicant,
And thus are freed from egoism.
Therefore I know none
Other than the retinue of
Channamallikarjuna, jasmine-tender.
ayata, svayata: outer and inner initiations, the former with a linga given by the guru, the latter relating it to one’s life-breath.
14
Even if a hair of his devotee is hurt
Siva will be hurt;
If his devotees change
He too will change.
As scripture proclaims:
‘The lord has the body of his devotees’ –
Their pain and gain reach Siva.
If the mother is hurt, the baby i
n the womb is hurt;
Similarly, if his devotees are hurt
Siva himself will be hurt,
See, Channamallikarjuna, jasmine-tender.
15
If the breath itself is fragrant, who needs flowers?
If one has patience, calmness, peace and forbearance
What need is there for the final peace of samadhi?
If one becomes the world itself
What need for solitude
Channamallikarjuna, jasmine-tender?
Samadhi: ultimate peace or illumination, the last of the eight limbs of Yoga, the state which the yogi strives to attain.
16
If you can pull out the fangs
And make it dance,
It is all right to play with the snake.
Free yourself from the bonds of the body;
It is all right to have a body.
Lust is frightening, like one’s mother turning into a demoness.
Channamallikarjuna, jasmine-tender,
Do not say those you are pleased with
Have taken bodies.
17
The body cannot be without senses,
Nor senses without body;
How can I say I am without desire, without fault?
If you are pleased, I will be happy;
If you are not, I will be sad,
Channamallikarjuna, jasmine-tender.
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