by Lal Ded
90. K: 28
tsālun chu vuzmal ta traṭay
Most of Lalla’s vakhs are autobiographical testaments of the questor’s journey, with its agonies and its ecstasies; but she rarely permits herself to dwell on the personal sufferings she experienced before liberating herself from the world of householders and crossing over to the religious life. Poem 90 is perhaps one of the few utterances in the LD corpus that are personal in this sense, and it speaks of what she endured while making this transition: resilience is what she needed, and received as grace from the Divine, when she submitted herself willingly to the rigours of the quest. To ‘stand in the path of lightning’ is to yield yourself receptive to enlightenment and the sometimes violent and certainly irreversible transformation of consciousness it generates. To ‘walk when darkness falls at noon’ is surely a metaphor for the paradoxical and liminal experiences that many mystics report during their initiation. To ‘grind yourself fine in the turning mill’ is to refine yourself through deepening spiritual practice.
91. K: 42
rut ta krut soruy pazěm
Lalla speaks here in the voice of equanimity, embodying the Bhagavad Gita’s exemplar of the stitha-prajña: one who is unshakeably anchored in knowledge. This corresponds to the Buddhist ideal of upekṣa (Pali upekkha), which is one of the four brahma-vihāras or abodes of perfection—states of being-in-the-world and being-towards-the-world envisioned by the Buddha as immeasurable expansions of the self into an embrace with all sentient beings and the universe. The other three states are maitri/metta, loving-kindness; karuṇā, compassion; and muditā, the gift of feeling joy in the joy of others (Skilton 1994, 35).
When Lalla sings, ‘I don’t hear with my ears, I don’t see with my eyes’, she signals the suprasensory awareness that the yogi gains access to, through the sustained practice of pratyāhāra, mentioned earlier in the note to poem 51. As Swami Niranjanananda Saraswati of the Bihar School of Yoga explains: ‘What do we do in this practice? First we become aware of the senses. Later on, we become aware of the thought process, and finally, we try to disconnect the senses and the thought process by observing them and eventually stopping their activity’ (1995, 166). The ‘jewel-lamp’ or ratnadīp that ‘burns bright even in a rampaging wind’ is the Self awakened within the individual, the Shiva-principle that, once ignited, cannot be extinguished. This image is analogous to that of the precious jewel held within the lotus in Tantrayāna Buddhist usage: the Bodhi-citta or will-to-enlightenment in the body, the Buddha-principle in the cosmos, memorialised in the cherished Tibetan chant, Om maṇī padmē hum.
92. G: 21 | K: 38
gāl gȧnḍiněm bōl pȧriněm
93. G: 18 | K: 39
ösā bōl pȧriněm sāsā
94. G: 20 | K: 40
mūḍ zönith pashith ta kôru
‘The adept of Kulācāra is a yogi, and once he reaches his goal of suprapolar existence, he becomes an irritation, a mockery, an enigma to a world continuing in differentiation and forms,’ notes Heinrich Zimmer (1984, 219). Imagine how much worse the situation would be for a yogini. As a woman who had renounced society and walked away from an oppressive marriage, leaving behind the circumscribed role of wife, daughter and daughter-in-law, and adopting the life of the parivrājikā, the peripatetic spiritual seeker, Lalla attracted much derision. Many legends are current about the daily insults she faced.
In these three poems, Lalla answers her detractors. Her greatest protection is her self-assurance, her conviction that she has chosen the path best suited for her temperament and orientation. Accordingly, in poem 92, she declares herself immune to insults and curses; even if her detractors were to see the error of their ways and come to offer her ‘soul-flowers’, she smiles, this would mean nothing to her. A stitha-prajña and a jīvan-mukta, she remains indifferent equally to slander and to praise, to pleasure and to pain, for she is beyond them; as she says in poem 93, ‘I belong to Shiva.’ The realised soul is Shiva’s mirror; the reference in the last two lines of the poem is to the highly polished metal mirrors of the fourteenth century, best cleaned with ashes.
And in poem 94, Lalla offers the aspirant a quick guide to survival, suggesting the strategy of maintaining an outward show of conformity, or even the deliberate cultivation of an eccentric or harmless personality. Such camouflage—which would assuage the suspicions or invite the scornful pity of the orthodox—gives the aspirant the necessary respite to conduct his or her spiritual experiments.
95. G: 94 | K: 21
gǒran wonunam kunuy watsun
Poem 95 is the vākh whose last line—in the original, 'taway mě hyotum nangay natsun’—has launched an infamous flotilla of writings about Lalla’s supposed espousal of nudity. These range from the sensational portraits of ‘Kashmir’s naked saint’ put about by well-meaning New Agers, to the equally solemn ripostes of outraged commentators who claim purely metaphorical significance for the nakedness that Lalla celebrates here, and explain away the reference to dancing as merely a synonym for ‘being’ or ‘walking’. For one party, Lalla is the wild woman who defies the most basic norms of a patriarchal society; for the other, she is the chaste Brahmin woman, apparently mindful of the sensitivities of future generations even while she goes about demolishing various canonical strictures.
Both parties in this contention overlook that Lalla elsewhere mentions her skirt (poem 45) and a robe (poem 146), indicating reasonable acquaintance with other sartorial choices. On a more serious note, the poem is centred on the mandate of inwardness: at the heart of inwardness, for the yogi or yogini, is Shiva. As Alain Danielou observes, ‘All the teachings of yoga and the process of liberation are witnessed by the yogi in the cavern of his heart as the form of Maheśvara’ (1991, 202).
To become identical with Shiva is to become indifferent to one’s outward form, one’s skin and clothes; significantly, one of Shiva’s iconographical attributes is that he is dig-ambara, sky-clad, naked. Poem 95 thus yields up several levels of meaning. It could be read to mean that, in her ecstatic state of communion with the Divine, Lalla has cast away the construct of her identity as an individual separate from the Supreme, as exemplified by her clothes. It could also be read to mean that the yogini who has realised Shiva has no need of the costume of social sanction or conditional protection: she is liberated from the codes of patriarchal authority that determine and constrain her social behaviour. In this, Lalla’s stance is analogous to that of the twelfth-century Vīraśaiva woman saint-poet from Karnataka, Mahādēviyakka, who cast off her clothes and went about mantled only by her tresses (see Ramanujan 1973, 1 12).
96. G: 62 | K: 22
rājěs böji yěmi kartal työji
Lalla sets up an array of desires here, with the necessary prerequisites that correspond to them. She begins with political power, which can be secured by military force, and goes on to religious merit, which can be acquired through penance and the performance of conventional good works. But true enlightenment, Lalla argues, can result only from the instruction of the guru, who directs the seeker towards knowledge of his or her karmic profile, and indeed of the Self.
97. G: 72 | K: 29
tsala-tsitta! wǒndas bhayě mō bar
In an intriguing reversal of the usual division of attributes, Lalla credits the mind, usually the stable seat of reason, with prompting restlessness and fear in the heart, usually the mercurial centre of emotion. In the oblique rhetoric of poem 97, the true addressee is not the mind but the Divine, who is reminded of the self’s hunger for transcendence, its need to be carried across the ocean of life.
98. G: 51 | K: 77
zanañě zāyāy rȧti töy kȧtiy
99. G: 52 | K: 78
yǒsay shēl pīṭhis ta paṭas
100. G: 53 | K: 79
rav mata thali-thali töpitan
101. G: 54 | K: 81
yihay matru-rūpi pay diyē
102. G: 80
zānahö nāḍi-dal mana raṭith
Poems 9
8, 99, 100, 101 and 102 form a group of vākhs, linked by their closing line: Shiv chuy krūṭhu ta tsēn wǒpadēsh, here translated as ‘But Shiva can play hard to get: hold on to that message.’ In each of these five poems, Lalla invites the listener or reader to attend to a brief exposition of this theme. Each poem serves as a caveat, it would appear, to the aspirant who imagines that the quest will inevitably culminate in enlightenment, oblivious to the misadventures, errors, failures and disappointments that lurk along the route.
Poem 98 dwells on the arduousness of the journey towards enlightenment, the series of births over which it is staged; the beauty of the newborn is contrasted with the patience required to wait at the door of transcendence, the compression of the poem leaving it to us to imagine the hopes, anxieties, dreams and frustrations of the years between the two events, recurring over many lives. Poem 99 is crafted around the ubiquity of stone and the diverse material and symbolic valencies it can bear: in the walls of the temple, as flagstones on the road, as the basis of earth and territory, as the grinder in the mill. Similarly, Shiva too is everywhere and appears in diverse manifestations, but cannot be grasped without a deep commitment to the contemplative life.
In poem 100, Lalla speaks of the impartial manner in which the sun and water make no distinction between one country and another, one house and another; but Shiva, she implies, does make distinctions. At first glance, this may seem surprising, since Shiva is universal, suprapolar and beyond all binaries. The esoteric meaning of the vākh is that knowledge of the sahaja or sahaz, while theoretically available to all who seek it as the ground nature of their being, can only be attained by those who apprentice themselves to the wisdom traditions, who apply themselves to mastering the techniques of breath control and right mindfulness.
Poem 101 sits oddly in the mouth of a woman mystic and poet, since it rehearses a schedule of prescribed roles for a woman as mother, wife and temptress, collectively representing a life cycle in the course of which the self is nurtured, flourishes, and dies. If the aspirant thinks that the same inevitability attends the quest, he or she is mistaken: Shiva is not, if we go along with the rhetoric of this poem, so alien to our post-feminist sensibilities, as predictable as woman. Given the unpredictability of her own choices, it seems bizarre that Lalla would deploy such an analogy; on this count alone, I would speculate that this poem was added to the LD corpus at some point by an anonymous male contributor.
Lalla uses a mixed allegory in poem 102. She passes rapidly from expressing the wish to improve her command over prāṇayāma by cutting and binding her breath-streams or nāḍis, which would allow her to refine the flow of her vital life-breaths, to wishing she could have crushed pain—all as prelude to fulfilling the alchemist’s dream, discovering the Elixir of Life, which is a symbol for the knowledge of the Self here.
Poem 102 draws on the resources of breath control, surgery and alchemy, all three regarded as the most refined sciences of Lalla’s time and place, with lineages going back a millennium into the past. These sciences had been codified by thinkers who enjoyed the patronage of the Kushan rulers. The Kushan empire, which endured from the first to the fourth centuries CE, marks a most unfortunately undervalued period in Indian history. Among its capitals and prominent regions were Purushāpāra (present-day Peshawar, in Pakistan), Oddiyāna (once a centre of Buddhist learning, today the vexed and Taliban-brutalised Swat Valley, in Pakistan), and Śrīnagara (today’s Srinagar, Kashmir).
It was under the Kushans—originally West Central Asian immigrants who choreographed a confluence of Indian, Greek, Chinese and Persian cultural energies—that epochal advances were made across a range of fields and disciplines. To list only a few of these: the Buddha was bodied forth as a human image for the first time, as well as given a biography by Aśvaghosa; Mahāyāna Buddhism emerged as a distinct system under the patronage of the Kushan ruler Kanishka; the deities that we now regard as definitively Hindu were rendered into iconography for the first time, including Shiva, Vishnu and Shakti; indeed, Shakti was first introduced into India, as a naturalised version of the West Asian war goddess Nanaia; and medicine and surgery made the transition from oral archives to sophisticated written treatises, in the hands of masters like Charaka and Jīvaka. All these developments flow into the time horizon of Lal Děd and have a significant bearing on her own work as well as that of her contemporaries. As we have seen, Mahāyāna Buddhist philosophy and the presence of the Mother Goddess through the medium of Tantra underpin Lalla’s ideas, images and allegories in crucial ways.
103. G: 16 | K: 83
tūri salil khoṭu töy tūrē
As the action of the sun on ice and snow reveals, water, in all its avatars, remains essentially water. Lalla employs this metaphor to expound a central teaching of Kashmir Śaiva philosophy. In this account, all things are manifestations of the Supreme Consciousness: they are created in the playful spirit of spanda, the originary vibration by which the Supreme Consciousness extends Itself into the universe; when the outward phase of the vibration returns to its source, the differentiated forms of the universe dissolve back into unity.
104. K: 57
Shiv chuy thali-thali rōzān
Often and widely cited as evidence of Lalla’s indifference to sectarian distinctions and her embrace of Hinduism as well as Islam, poem 104 is a manifestly late addition to the LD corpus or a comparatively recent recasting of earlier material. It does not appear in the Darwēsh—Śāstrī—Grierson line of transmission, but was included by Professor Jayalal Kaul in his meticulously framed and authoritative Lal Děd collection, although Kaul insisted that no categorical assurances could be offered as to the ‘authenticity’ of much extant LD material.
The second line of this poem, mō zān hyǒnd ta musalmān, uses the designations ‘Hindu’ and ‘Muslim’, which were not current during the historical Lalla’s lifetime. During that period, Hindus were more likely to be known by their caste membership, and Muslims were known throughout the subcontinent as ‘Tūrka’ or ‘Tūrushka’, denoting Turki or Turkic, the ethnicity to which many Muslims who settled in India between the eleventh and fourteenth centuries belonged. And while the Arabic title of sāhib or ‘Lord’, applied to Shiva in the last line of this poem, offers pleasing evidence of a cross-fertilisation between languages, it does not necessarily mark a synthesis of religious ideas.
While the Śaivite questor takes, as his mandate, the establishment of the seamless identity between seeker and Sought, it would be blasphemous for the Muslim questor to imagine that the human individual and the Divine could, at any level, be of the same essence. The Sufis courted the anger of the orthodox for their suggestions in this latter direction; indeed, the Persian mystic Mansūr al-Hallāj (c. 858–922) was executed by the Abbasid Caliphate for daring to declare, ‘Anā l-Haqq’, translatable either as ‘I am the Truth’ or ‘I am God’, utterances that form the basis of Vedantic spiritual practice.
That said, the ecumenical sentiment of poem 104 resonates with the Kashmir Śaivite conviction that the differences between self and other, appearance and reality, are illusory, since all dualities are pervaded and supervened by the Shiva-principle. It should also be remarked that the originally Arabic title of sāhib has been adopted organically into the ceremonial language of syncretic traditions in India that have drawn both on Hinduism and Islam, such as the Nanak-panth, universally known as Sikhism, founded by Guru Nānak Dēv (1469–1539) and codified by the nine Gurus who succeeded him. The Sikhs had already spread widely across the subcontinent by the seventeenth century, settling in the Valley of Kashmir as well. It is not improbable that the language of poem 104 could reflect the anonymous LD contributor’s acquaintance with Sikh usage. The chief scripture or ‘Primordial Book’ of Sikhism, for instance, is described as the Guru Granth Sāhib; this honorific is also applied to the major Sikh shrines, such as Harmandir Sāhib and Śīśganj Sāhib.
105. K: 82
Shiv chuy zävyul zāl vaharävith
In con
sonance with the theory of spanda, mentioned in the note to poem 103, the Divine is seen here as a recovery net that spreads out to trap and trawl back all the manifestations of Itself. Not only does the Divine pervade the universe but It also permeates the individual self. This vision of wholeness and re-integration waits to disclose itself to the prepared consciousness. Prepare your consciousness to receive it in this life, says Lalla, because it is in the present that such a vision matters the most. Now is your best chance to transfigure the course of your life. There is no exalted vision of the Divine in the afterlife, for the Kashmir Śaivite—since the afterlife, for the unprepared or half-baked consciousness, is merely the next birth, a return to the fate of standing and waiting for the door of transcendence to open, as poem 98 puts it.
106. G: 87 | K: 17
niyěm karyōth garbā
This poem shares the same cadence as poem 83, a song-like beat that quickens our perception of its teaching: the self comes into the world with a mission from a previous birth, that of continuing the quest for transcendence; but the memory of this mission weakens and is overwritten by fresh experiences and new memories, the resolve made in the previous life vanishes, and only a stern rebuke from a teacher such as Lalla herself can recall the migrant self to its resolve. To die to the traffic of desire, dream and sorrow while yet alive, to arrive at the serene state of the jīvan-mukta, is the ideal to which the seeker launched on the path of Kashmir Śaivism aspires.