Frontispiece: Radha-Krishna, ca. 1735–1757, used by permission of the Philadelphia Museum of Art.
Shambhala Publications, Inc.
4720 Walnut Street
Boulder, Colorado 80301
www.shambhala.com
© 2004 by Andrew Schelling
Poems 38, 46, 54, 68, 81, 84, 86, 87, and 97 originally appeared in The Cane Groves of Narmada River, © 1998 by Andrew Schelling.
Reprinted by permission of City Lights Books.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.
Cover art by Bariskina/Shutterstock
ISBN: 9781611807110
eISBN 9780834826151
Library of Congress Cataloging in
Publication Control Number: 2018041921
v5.4
a
For Dale Pendell (1947–2018)
ethnobotanist, poet, philosopher
nāstyacauraḥ kavijanaḥ
There is no poet
who is not a thief.
—Rajashekhara
CONTENTS
Introduction
Acknowledgments
EROTIC LOVE POEMS FROM INDIA
Afterword
Bibliography
About the Author
Also by Andrew Schelling
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INTRODUCTION
Love and the Turning Seasons
“It is well known,” writes Anandavardhana, the ninth-century Kashmiri yogin and literary critic, “that a single stanza of the poet Amaru…may provide the taste of love equal to what’s found in whole volumes.” This statement, from his seminal work on Sanskrit poetics, the Dhvanyaloka, is the first historic mention of the author to whom the verses in this volume are commonly attributed. The collection, known in Sanskrit as the Amarushataka (“One Hundred Poems of Amaru”), was compiled in the eighth century and remains to this day one of the celebrated books of poetry in India. It is remarkable that nobody had translated the Amaru collection into American or English verse until 2004, when this book first came into print.
The popular account of the collection’s origin is so vivid, precise, and magical it could only have come from South Asia. Tradition says that the venerable Shankara (788–820), India’s formidable master of Advaita Vedanta, or Nondual Philosophy, was locked in public debate with Mandanamishra, an advocate of a rival school of philosophy, the Mimamsa. Shankara was roundly defeating his opponent when Mandanamishra’s wife entered the fray. A sly and sportive lady, she posed a series of metaphysical questions to Shankara, couched in detailed metaphors of sexual love. Shankara, being celibate, was silenced. He requested an adjournment of the debate for a hundred days and nights to prepare a suitable response.
Leaving the stage and entrusting his body to his disciples, Shankara employed his yogic powers to enter the corpse of a just-deceased Kashmiri king named Amaru, already lying on an unlit funeral pyre. Amaru’s body quickened—thrilling the harem girls of Srinagar and Jammu, no doubt—and Shankara in the borrowed form spent a hundred nights studying love at first hand, each with a different lady of Amaru’s court. He devoted his daytime hours to a careful examination of Vatsyayana’s Kama Sutra and its commentaries. When his hundred nights had come to an end, Shankara added a few additional ones—for good luck, or simply to further his studies. Then he abandoned Amaru’s body to its fate and returned to his own.
Taking the stage of debate, Shankara proved himself adept at the science that had formerly eluded him, and vanquished his opponent. It is said that he composed a poem to memorialize the lesson of each of those nights, and all the manuscripts hold a few more or a few less than one hundred poems. Once he had gathered the poems into a volume, he signed the collection with Amaru’s name—a touch of gratitude for the lessons received at Amaru’s court, through the king’s own body.
This story first appears in a fourteenth-century hagiography of Shankara, the Shankara-digvijaya by Madhava (also known as Vidyaranya). A later commentator on the Amarushataka, Ravichandra, provides a somewhat different account. In his version Shankara pays a visit to the court of the Kashmiri king. Amaru, a great sensualist as well as a warlord, was known to devote his waking hours to his carefully selected court ladies. Hoping to improve his epicurean host’s karma, Shankara devises a hundred spiritually instructive poems in which he couches metaphysical teachings in the Sanskrit conventions of love—a lesson delivered in terms Amaru might understand. After Shankara recites the verses, the king’s advisers and courtiers, too dull to catch the subtle intent, mock Shankara for composing a cycle of love poetry. If the renowned celibate has held to his vows, how could he detail such intimacies? Shankara fills with rage at their small-mindedness. Through his yogic powers he seizes Amaru’s body and delivers a spiritual exegesis of his poems through the king’s mouth. And Amaru, hearing his own throat give angry vent to such teachings, is transformed on the spot.
The best research by contemporary scholarship dates the Amarushataka to about the year 750 CE. Indian scholars since Anandavardhana’s time have attributed the work to a single poet, his name given as Amaru, Amaruka, or Amaraka. For over a thousand years India has read it as a single poem, or more properly, a cycle of interlocked stanzas that lead the reader along a carefully charted course. All the flavors or nuances of love are said to lie within the book, though you’ll notice that the emphasis falls more on the bitter taste of separation, jealousy, or betrayal than on the sweets of enjoyment.
A survey of Amaru scholarship shows that the provenance of South Asian manuscripts is a complicated affair. Scholars remain divided on the most elemental details: when the Amaru collection was put together, by whom, and where. Most Western scholars regard it as an anthology, considering Amaru a compiler who may have included some of his own poems. Indian scholars continue to credit a single author and to read it as a unified cycle.
Whatever its origins, for thirteen hundred years this work has retained its reputation in India as one of the foundational collections of poetry. It is indispensable for any literate person with a classical education. Poets and critics still use its verses as a template against which to consider other poems. For our own era, it shows that long ago India developed a love poetry as original and vivid as that produced anywhere on the planet.
* * *
—
Only partly evident upon a first reading of the Amarushataka is a hint of what holds together not only these verses of love and longing, but all of India’s old poetry: the presence of the revolving year. Love and the turning seasons. This theme might serve, in more ways than one, as a gateway through which to approach the Amarushataka. Its poems do indeed portray the revolution of a calendar cycle, as do many Asian anthologies. Yet it is the cyclic migrations of the human heart that receive the most considered treatment. Monsoon rainstorms and the winds that announce them, the aromatic unfolding of jasmine creepers or a dozen species of water lotus, the mating songs of peacock and kingfisher—these rise and subside around the poems of old India like the chant of an archaic chorus. The central drama remains human.
In India the love god is named Kama, Desire. He has many epithets, one of them Ananga, Bodiless, because he slips unseen through the world with the hunter’s bow and arrows. His consort is Rati, Sexual Pleasure. At Kama’s ap
pearance, growling, tenebrous storm clouds mount the horizon, signaling the onset of monsoon season. The heat-withered vegetation rewakens, aromatic flowers unfurl their petals, wild animals venture into the open, and lightning creases the boiling dark sky. Driven by cool winds, intoxicating fragrances plunge down from forested mountain ranges, and pollinating insects thread the meadows and riparian groves.
And humans? Humans in our sexual rapture—even our anguish—recuperate the oldest and most durable of traditions. This tradition, a ceremonial dance of fertility, antedates any known religion. Pursuing love, we enact a camaraderie with the planet’s sentient creatures. Even the geologic upheavals that produce mountain ranges, or the little-understood ocean currents that drive the weather through its yearly cycle, are stirred by the force that stirs the cicada, the antelope, the gods, and us.
This is why the poets of classical India regarded love as the first and deepest of passions, and the foremost theme for poetry. Love keeps humans, with our large well-organized brains and rich speculative ability, grounded in the biological world. It prevents us from slipping too far into mental abstraction. Kama, whose bow is the demonstrative eyebrow of a woman or the curved tines of the antelope, whose arrows come tipped with blossoming lotuses, whose agents are aroma-charged winds and charcoal-colored thunderheads, is the manifestation of procreative, generative Nature.
Kama must be an old Indo-European figure. He surfaces as Eros in Greece, Amor to the Romans. With a quick slip of gender he becomes Diana, Goddess of the Hunt, also depicted as a wielder of the bow.
The hunter’s recursive bow, and variations of the self-bow and longbow, have been known to both Eastern and Western Hemispheres since the last Ice Age. For thousands of years in southern Europe it has been shown in the hands of the goddess Venus, and is both instrument and symbol of the two arts of venery: love and the hunt. Linger over the Indo-European origins of the word a moment, and notice the vocabulary it gives rise to. Venus is the planet that governs erotic love. Venison is the wild animal in rut. Venom was originally a love potion. In India, vanam means sexual delight and remains the common word for forest. Venery, venereal. Observe the close association of the chase and the hunt with fertility. Humans have looked to the realm of magic to ensure success in love and in the taking of large game—those two intertwined mysteries—since at least the Upper Paleolithic, when, according to archaeological evidence, the earliest surviving bows were crafted.
Bow fragments dated at eleven thousand years before the present have been unearthed in peat bogs of Northern Europe. The oldest come from Denmark, Germany, and the British Isles, where the anaerobic environment of the bogs preserved the highly degradable materials: wood, resin, and sinew. The bow itself could conceivably be a much older weapon, but its organic materials simply wouldn’t have endured. Given its centrality for survival in cultures that knew the bow—and its astonishing ability to take down prey at a distance—a rich collection of magical lore has accumulated around its use. It is difficult to say, at this remove from its first appearance, when a deity armed with bow and arrows emerged on the Eurasian continent. But he or she must be an archaic figure indeed.
How curious that the deity of the bow got pressed to the margins of religious ceremony long ago by official creeds and their curators, both East and West. Stranger still that with no church, no priesthood, no altar, no ritual, the god of venery remains vivid to poetic and popular imagination. Look for him as the consort of Psyche in the Greek mystery stories; look for him in Chaucer’s tales, in Shakespeare’s; look for him in Kalidasa’s Kumara-sambhava (“Birth of the War God”), where the story is told of how the love god became bodiless. See his image everywhere on St. Valentine’s Day. In the Amarushataka, the goddess Mridani and the ferociously outfitted god Shiva conspicuously appear in the opening verses as wielders of the bow and arrow. In this guise they get called upon first to protect lovers (or is it readers of poetry?), then to burn off their infelicities.
Could all the cold, far-seeing deities of Mount Kailash and all the quarrelsome gods of Mount Olympus be in the end no more than servants of Kama? As though five thousand years of organized religion were only a detour? How fitting that the Amarushataka’s two closing stanzas belong to him—the tracker and hunter—the “holy god of love.”
The world of India’s art is a topsy-turvy place. It comfortably holds contradictions that pale moralizing or humorless logic find intolerable most everywhere else. Religious texts use erotic language with blazing specificity; erotic poems come couched in precise theological terms. Sandstone and chlorite sculptures of teeming figures—human and animal, in pairs or in groups—enjoying explicit physical love, mount the towers of the holiest temples at Khajuraho, Konarak, and many other sites. With complex, coded language, spiritual adepts protect the most advanced erotic practices. So who is to say that profound spiritual insights may not be woven into the heartbreak and humor of the Amarushataka?
Or might humor and heartbreak themselves be insight enough? Amaru, the elusive eighth-century poet, is said to have been a warlord in the strategic valley of Kashmir, with Pathan warriors to the west, Rajput warriors to the south, and tough mountain tribes north and east. He ruled a notable dynasty in his day; he may have fought hand-to-hand in combat; and with cold military precision he could have sent obedient soldiers to their deaths. The centuries have swallowed what military or political success this ruler achieved. Yet the volume of poetry he sculpted survives—as though delivered into the twenty-first century by the ghost-hands of a warrior.
I wonder. When we who are currently living have passed through this world—through an era that seems unprecedented for its wars, its political corruption, its injustice, its senseless mishandling of plant and animal species—I wonder if what remains most vivid at the end won’t be a few moments of utterly vulnerable humor and tender heartbreak. Two or three stanzas of poetry.
ANDREW SCHELLING
Sugarloaf, Colorado
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I want to thank both the publishers and the readers of journals where some of these poems first appeared: a.bacus, Bombay Gin, Circumference, and Shiny, as well as the online periodical Cipher-Journal. Deep gratitude goes to the Witter Bynner Foundation for Poetry for providing a grant in 2001 to help with this project. Thanks to Naropa University for a seed grant used to pursue research in the Oriental and India Office of the British Library. I particularly want to thank my original editors at Shambhala Publications, Peter Turner and Liz Shaw, who capably helped turn the manuscript into a book in 2004. And to extend that thanks to Nikko Odiseos, Emily Coughlin, and Liz Shaw, again, for retrieving the book and their care with the new edition.
1
The goddess Mridani
takes the archer’s katakamukha pose—
bending the bowstring
back to her ear.
Red nails
by her ear a cluster of moist
glistening petals.
And her greedy blue side-darting
eye like a hornet—
May it protect you.
NOTE: Mridani is one name for the Goddess, wife of Shiva, whose many other manifestations include Parvati, Durga, or Kali. In some guises Shiva’s consort appears as a fearsome warrior as well as a voluptuous lover.
The katakamukha pose, known to classical dance and to yoga, is simply “(bow) string to the mouth.”
This verse serves as the first of four invocations in the Amarushataka to one or another of the gods.
2
Shaken off it clung
to their hands,
batted away it clutched
the hems of their robes,
rejected it caught at their hair.
When it fell at their feet they refused
in agitation to look.
Though dismissed it wrapped around the
teary blue-lotus-eyed girls
of Tripura citadel.
Not a lover caught
cheating but the fire of Shiva’s arrows—
May it burn off your
indiscretions.
NOTE: Central to the mythology of Shiva is his destruction of the stronghold of demons, Tripura, or the Three Cities, one built of gold, one silver, one iron, all magically linked together. Shiva caused a vast conflagration in the triple citadel by releasing a single flaming arrow empowered with mantras into its midst.
3
Front curls tossed in disorder
earrings scattered
beads of sweat smearing the sandal
paste on her brow—
now her eyes droop as astride her
companion she finishes.
May the face of this lady protect you.
Vishnu, Shiva, Brahma,
the gods
mean nothing.
4
Tender lip bitten she
shakes her fingers alarmed—
hisses a fierce
don’t you dare and her
eyebrows coil like a vine.
Who steals a kiss from a
proud woman flashing her eyes
drinks amrita.
The gods—fools—
churned the ocean for
nothing.
NOTE: After enormous labor, the gods collectively managed to raise amrita, the drink of immortality (Greek: ambrosia), from the ocean floor. They secured it in the moon, away from the grasp of their enemies, the asuras, warring titans who crave immortality. As a life-bestowing fluid on the moon, amrita became identified with soma, the potent vision-inducing drink of the Vedas. Precious, generative fluids, both amrita and soma hold strong sexual implications—the juices of life.
Erotic Love Poems from India Page 1