I, Lalla

by Lal Ded

  107. K: 54

  kus mari tay kasū māran

  108. K: 55

  gǒr śabdas yus yatsh patsh barē

  The sentence of execution that preoccupies these companion poems refers, not to a physical death, but to the possibility of spiritual suicide. Lalla makes reference here, clearly, to the backslider who gives up at an early stage of the journey towards enlightenment and lapses again into worldly affairs, and the intellectual, emotional and moral variability that these demand.

  In poem 107, having given up the incremental meditation on Shiva’s name (‘hara hara’ or ‘Shiva! Shiva!’), the backslider runs around the circuit of home and work, profit and advancement (‘gara gara’ or ‘My house! My house!’). He thus loses the opportunity for self-overcoming, and condemns himself to a new lease of servitude to the cycle of rebirth. In poem 108, Lalla has better news for the backslider, a conditional ‘come back, all is forgiven’: trust the guru, practise the perfection of mindfulness, gain mastery over the senses, she says, and you earn your reprieve from the cycle.

  109. G: 5 | K: 133

  par töy pān yěmi somu mônu

  The fully realised exponent of Kashmir Śaiva philosophy has received the vision of Shiva, described here, as in poem 60, as sura-guru-nātha, the ‘Teacher who is First among the Gods’. He has savoured the omnipresence and omnipotence of the Shiva-principle, and understood that the transcendent and the immanent, the unchanging and the mutable, are expressions of the same Supreme Being. At the social level, accordingly, such an enlightened self also renounces the distinctions between self and other.

  110. K: 103

  shüñuk mä’ dān kōdum pānas

  Lalla’s solitary traversal of the Field of Emptiness, an experience of the Void in its infinite vacancy of manifestation yet plenitude of possibility, evidently comes about after a deep immersion in the practice of pratyāhāra, when the senses are withdrawn from their sense-objects, the reason is gradually superseded and a range of suprasensory experiences open up. This has already been spoken of in the notes to poems 51 and 91. The experience of the Field of Emptiness is identical with that of Lalla’s arriving at the Field of Light in poem 51. The transcendence of self and the recognition of its identity with Shiva is the secret that belongs to the questor, as to every individual, in Kashmir Śaiva theory; yet few even know that they possess a secret of such magnitude. The awakened consciousness—purified of karmic residues and luminously replete in its unity with the Supreme—is the lotus that rises from the marsh of existence, sensory attachments, and the confusions and mixed motives of an unexamined life. The lotus rising from a marsh could also be a deeply moving self-portrait: Lalla as she saw herself, retaining the purity of her vision in an unpromising social environment.

  111. K: 47

  parum pōlum apǒruy purum

  Lalla takes a pragmatic view of learning. Having imbibed all that the scriptures and treatises of Kashmir Śaivism and Yoga had to teach her, she experimented beyond them, a prepared questor apprenticing herself to direct experience. As a result of this, she is no mere scriptural expert or ritual specialist, but an adept, a living master. There is no divergence between what she teaches and what she practices. Always ready to grapple robustly with life and its challenges, Lalla has entered the forest of the spirit, where the seeker must confront her or his deepest terrors and phantoms, and emerged victorious. She has ‘wrestled with the lion’, which here symbolises worldly ambition, stripping it of its power to dominate the individual’s imagination and monopolise her or his energies.

  112. K: 127

  tan man ga’yas bǒh kunuy

  113. K: 132

  chuy dīvu gartas tu dartī srizakh

  Poems 112 and 113 are songs of praise for the Divine.Yet, even in a hymn of surrender such as poem 112, when Lalla describes the experience of the clear note of the Divine ringing through her, she retains the freedom of agency: her being and consciousness amplified far beyond the horizons of normality, she situates herself in the totality of the expanded universe, figuratively gaining access to the celestial as well as the infernal regions. In poem 113, Lalla invokes the Divine as Transcendence: as the ruler of the universe; as the inspiration behind the five great elements that sustain the world; as the anāhata nāda, the deep sound of the universe, which is the silence that opens at the edge of sacred words; and as infinite extension, beyond the reach of ordinary instruments of measurement.

  114. G: 1 | K: 134

  abhyösi savikās layě wǒthū

  115. G: 2 | K: 135

  wākh mānas kǒl-akǒl nā atē

  116. G: 59 | K: 136

  tsah nā bǒh nā dhyēy nā dhyān

  117. G: 93 | K: 138

  tsěth nowuy tsạndarama nowuy

  In the four poems that I have grouped together as 114–17, Lalla describes and celebrates the state of transcendent awareness, achieved through intense Yogic practice, when the known and perceptible universe reveals itself as a subsidiary manifestation of the Supreme. In this state, all normal faculties are transcended, along with their lexicon of names and forms, mind-focusing devices and metaphysical concepts.

  Poem 114 turns on its second line: gaganas sagun myūlu sami tsraṭā. Literally, this can be rendered as ‘The manifest and qualified universe merged completely with the sky (or Ether, or the Infinite).’ I have chosen to focus on the nuance of the seemingly simple onomatopoeic word, tsraṭā, which conveys the sound of water splashing on water, to demonstrate the recognition of complete identity between the manifest universe and the Infinite, leading the seeker to the awareness of the Void. In Kashmir Śaiva thought, however, this recognition does not constitute final enlightenment, but is a threshold leading to complete absorption in the Supreme. The Void is an intermediate phase in the process by which the Supreme associates Itself with Māyā, or cosmic illusion, to manifest Itself in the particularities that we know as the world we experience. By passing beyond the Void, in the final stage of Yogic absorption, the seeker reaches awareness of the Supreme, which Lalla describes as anāmay, purified of all illusion, illimitable consciousness.

  In poem 115, Lalla makes plain that the state of transcendent awareness is beyond the domain of the discursive and the conceptual: it cannot be captured in words or mapped in thoughts. My rendering, ‘normal or Absolute’, represents Lalla’s kǒl-akǒl. The word kǒl means ‘family’ (from the Sanskrit kula), and refers to the constellation of the jīva or individual soul, prakṛti or primal matter, space and time, and the five elements of earth, water, fire, air and ether. These form the basis of normality; that which transcends these is akǒl, the Absolute. Taken together, the normal and the Absolute embody all creation, both the manifest and the Unmanifest. All this is left behind by the yogi in the state of transcendent awareness. Even Shiva and Shakti are seen to be constructs, provisional conceptions that are not identical with the Supreme, but only symbols and indications of it. The Supreme is the Unnameable, the grand surplus that exhausts all our attempts at naming and form-making, decipherment and approximation, in Lalla’s teaching.

  In poems 114 and 115, as elsewhere in the LD corpus, it is the scholar-priest, tied to his routines of prayer, scriptural citation and observance, who receives the brunt of Lalla’s thunderclap counsel.

  Lalla continues to contour the state of transcendent awareness in poem 116. She indicates the blurring of the sharp lines separating personal identities and their interests, and also the dissolution of the separation between the object of contemplation and the act of contemplation itself. What the seeker now realises is that the world is the Supreme as associated with Māyā, ‘the All-Creator, lost in His dreams’. Some remain at this level of understanding of the Void, but others plunge deeper into enlightenment, and become fully absorbed into an understanding of Perfection.

  The infinitive layun plays a crucial role in poems 114 and 116. It means both the attainment of beatitude and a dissolution into the cosmos, Nothingness or Perfection. Here, as in Indic me
taphysics and Indian classical music, the word, with its noun form laya, carries the sense of a deeply resonant and unceasing rhythm: a structuring and patterning of time and experience into combinations of movement and pause; a wave of creation and dissolution from which notes and motifs arise, and into which they drown only to be re-made. Seemingly outside oneself, laya is suddenly recognised as resonating inside oneself and, in some sense, having always resided and resonated inside oneself.

  The sense of laya is carried forward in poem 117, which is a celebratory hymn charged with the presence of pralaya (zalamay in Kashmiri), the deluge that enacts a cosmic dissolution at the end of every kalpa or cycle of time and marks the beginning of the next, in Indic cosmology. Lalla delights in a vision of regeneration, the world enchanted once again, suffering and delusion cleansed away: the mind, freed of its phantoms, is new; the moon, whether as activated sahasrāra, earth’s satellite or ornament in Shiva’s hair, is new. Lalla, evidently recounting the experience of many past lives and periods, has seen the cosmic ocean renewed epoch after epoch. These epic-scale regenerations are reflected in Lalla’s own transfiguration, through the rigorous self-purification of Yogic practice.

  118. G: 24 | K: 64

  shīl ta mān chuy pôñu kranjě

  119. G: 38 | K: 113

  zal thamawun hutawah taranāwun

  120. K: 63

  shishiras vuth kus raṭe

  121. G: 34 | K: 72

  okuy ōṁ-kār yěs nābi darē

  In the four poems sequenced here as 118–21, Lalla develops a portrait of the true yogi or yogini. She meditates on sham and substance, contrasting the easily acquired reputation of the showman with the genuine worth of the contemplative. In poem 118, she lays out a series of impossible conditions—reputation is water in a fisherwoman’s leaky basket—and asks around for someone who can perform superhuman feats not met with outside fantasy literature, as a possible candidate for belief in the vanitas of reputation.

  In poem 119, Lalla dismisses the miracle-mongering of self-styled spiritual adepts who remain trapped at the level of demonstrating their vibhūtis or siddhis—the paraphysical powers that the yogi or yogini acquires as incidental effects during the process of attaining prajñālōka, the light of perfect knowledge—in order to attract and hold the attention of the swelling ranks of their devotees. Lalla disposes of such performances summarily, as sakolu kappaṭa-tsarith, blatant charlatanry.

  When poem 120 begins, we suspect that Lalla is about to launch another denunciation of mountebanks parading as saints, but her tropes of impossibility are not satirically intended or purely rhetorical this time. She proposes the yogi, one who has conquered his senses, as one who can also command the elements, the seasons and the cycle of day and night, metaphorically indicating his anchorage in the Self and his consequent indifference to all rhythms of change. Poem 121 offers a portrait of the realised yogi, whose breath, contained and amplified within his body through the discipline of kumbhaka or the ‘jar exercise’, prepares him for the demanding act of focusing, body and soul, on the Supreme. A yogi at this stage of accomplishment no longer chants consciously: his chanting of the supremely powerful mystic syllable Om has achieved constancy, and emanates from the centre of the body’s life-force, which is known in Yoga as the kanda or bulb and is situated beneath the navel. Since he is animated by the puissance of Om, the mantra of mantras, he has no need for any other incantations.

  122. G: 55 | K: 109

  kanděv gēh tězi kanděv wan-wās

  123. G: 64 | K: 110

  kalan kāla-zöli yidaway tsě golu

  124. G: 32 | K: 112

  kēh chiy nēndri-hȧtiy wudiy

  125. G: 6 | K: 119

  tsidānandas jñāna-prakāshěs

  In the four vākhs arranged here as poems 122–25, Lalla addresses herself to the classic question of choice that many aspirants must make: Should they take up their responsibilities in the world of householders, or should they renounce society and retreat to the forest, the hermitage, the monastery? Lalla suggests that we should attend, not to one option over the other, but to the cultivation of mindfulness and steadfast dedication of purpose in whatever path we choose to take through life. In poem 122, she notes that the restless individual could escape from home or from the hermitage, since it is not the external situation but the inner temperament that prompts such impulsive, erratic action: ‘No orchard bears fruit for the barren mind.’ Similarly, in poem 123, she makes no distinction between hermit and householder. You are as good as the accuracy and intensity of your knowledge: what matters is whether you have ‘dissolved your desires in the river of time’. If you have, you will be graced with transcendent awareness, the vision of the Self as perfection.

  A formal choice is no guarantee of the fulfilment of the wish implicit in that choice, as Lalla demonstrates in poem 124, and yet redemption lurks in the most unlikely circumstances. There are those who can be fully aware even in their sleep, there are those who sleepwalk open-eyed through life, captives of illusion and delusion. Then there are those who cannot wash their sins away even by bathing in holy ponds; and those who lead busy lives in the world of affairs and anxieties, yet their souls remain untouched and radiantly clear. This last class of people are the jīvan-muktas, and Lalla praises them in the first two lines of poem 125: ‘Those who glow with the light of the Self/are freed from life even while they live.’ As the Kulārnava Tantra expounds:

  The yogi enjoys sensual pleasures in order to help mankind, not out of desire; he is at play upon the earth, delighting all men, [that is how he conceals his true nature]. . . . the yogi is all-scorching like the sun, all-consuming like the fire; he enjoys all pleasures and yet he remains without blot or blemish. He touches everything as does the wind; he permeates all things as does the air. (quoted in Zimmer 1984, 219)

  In sharp contrast to the realised ones, however, are the fools—who continue to burden themselves with ill-considered actions and their karmic residues, trapping themselves ever more securely in the ‘tangled net of the world’. The metaphor of the world as a jāla or net, in which all beings are caught, is one that recurs in the poems, songs and teaching stories of India’s wisdom traditions. Likewise, the figure of the fool appears repeatedly in the same texts, as a cautionary tale about the necessary limits that a healing wisdom must set for itself.

  We could speculate that these poems were answers originally given by Lalla—possibly as improvised, spontaneous replies that were later shaped into scribal form—to questioners who came to her for advice on the shape and direction of their lives.

  126. K: 18

  muḍās gyānac kath nō vanizē

  127. K: 19

  dachinis ǒbras zāym zānaha

  In poems 126 and 127, as in poems 40 and 41, Lalla warns against the error of throwing wisdom away on one unprepared to receive it. Her metaphors are drawn from everyday life: sugar for an ass, which has no taste for it; the shifting sands of the riverbank or the riverbed; oil poured on cattle fodder; the southwest monsoon; and the patience of the physician.

  128. K: 45

  avětsāri pothěn chihō māli parān

  Lalla dismisses the practice of chanting from the scriptures by rote, with no understanding of the emancipatory potential of the words of wisdom and power contained in these texts. Here, as in poem 111, Lalla’s approach to enlightenment is an experimental, experiential one. Bypassing the scriptures, she regards the transmission of redemptive wisdom as taking place through the medium of discipleship: she underscores the importance of a guru’s direct teaching, presence and grace, and indicates that the true teaching passes from master to disciple as a direct, often unspoken but unmistakeably made gift. The ‘greatest scripture’, she insists, is beyond words and beyond sound. Her approach is remarkably congruent with those of the Siddha masters of late Tantrayāna Buddhism and the exponents of the dhyāna or Zen schools.

  129. K: 46

  parun sôlab pālun dôrlab

  In t
he same spirit as the preceding poem, this vākh points up the contrast between the scholar’s life, devoted to the study of texts, and that of the active seeker, whose text is the totality of experience. Practice is viewed, with some self-irony on Lalla’s part, as a fog, which, instead of blinding the unwary traveller caught in it, clears an occasion for profound insight.

  130. G: 47 | K: 114

  yěth saras sȧri-pholu nā větsiy

  This poem is structured around a wonderful play of scale that connects the infinitesimal to the cosmic. In comparison with the Infinite, Lalla says, the world is a lake so small that not even a mustard seed could sink in it. And yet this seemingly insignificant lake is the vast reservoir where all beings come, metaphorically, to drink water; where all beings are born and die, and are born again. Among the beings listed in poem 130, I have translated zala-hȧstiy, literally ‘water-elephants’, as ‘cloud-elephants’, since this is what the word seemed to imply: a personification of the pluvial aspect of the water cycle.