I, Lalla
Page 4
By contrast with bothYogācāra and Vedānta, though, Kashmir Śaivism does not dismiss the world as an illusion or delusion. It treats the world as a creative expression of the Divine, a necessary articulation through which the Divine may unfold and fully realise itself. Shiva, through Shakti, creates a world that is not different from Himself. This world is constantly renewed through the cosmic vibrations or spanda—emanations of the Shiva-principle—that, in their outward-expansive and inward-contractive rhythm, unmeṣa and nimeṣa, define the universal cycle of creation and dissolution. Further, in the Kashmir Śaivite system, the Shiva-principle has a triadic nature, devolving through the world as the three energies of knowledge, will and action: respectively, jñāna-śakti, icchā-śakti and krīyā-śakti. Sustained by this triadic structure, the world is seen to replicate it at many levels; that is why Kashmir Śaivism is also known as Trika, the ‘Path of the Triad’. It is difficult not to hear, in these formulations, an echo of the triadic preferences of the Yogācāra theorists, who propounded the trikāya or ‘Doctrine of the Three Bodies of the Buddha’ and the corresponding trisvabhāva-nirdeśa or ‘Teaching of the Three Natures’.
At the other end of the scale from this vision of the cosmos is the individual soul, which is imprisoned because it has forgotten its true nature and become enmeshed in the net of thought, attachment and the consequences of unreflective action. Once it recognises the continuity between Shiva and the world, both through the appropriate rituals but far more importantly through the insight gained from sustained meditation, the soul can join in the festivity of being, recognising all to be the play or līla of Shiva. That recognition, or pratyabhijñā, is the key transformative experience in Kashmir Śaivite practice: it recurs constantly in Lalla’s poetry. As she says in poem 25:
Lord! I’ve never known who I really am, or You.
I threw my love away on this lousy carcass
and never figured it out: You’re me, I’m You.
All I ever did was doubt: Who am I? Who are You?
The major texts of Kashmir Śaivism include the Śiva Sūtra of Vasugupta (mid-eighth century); the Stava-cintāmani of his disciple, Bhatta Nārāyana, who images Shiva as prakāsha or light, and Shakti as vimarśa or self-awareness; the Spanda literature of the ninth to eleventh centuries; and the writings of Somānanda (c. 875–925) and Utpaladeva (c. 900–950).This textual tradition peaks in the writings of the encyclopaedic master Abhinavagupta (c. 950–1020) and continues through texts such as Śitsikāntha’s Mahānaya-prakāsha (c. 1250), regarded as the first complete text written in Kashmiri.
The continuity of Lalla’s thought with this philosophical lineage is evident, as I shall demonstrate by a few apposite comparisons of her poems with those of her predecessors. Such comparisons reveal the high degree of intertextuality that binds Lalla’s texts to those of her predecessors in an active continuum knit together by allusion and the adaptation of ideas and images already in circulation among initiates and adepts. For instance, Utpaladeva writes, in his tenth-century Śiva-stotra (translated from the Sanskrit by Constantina Rhodes Bailly; Heehs 2002, 246):
In that state, O Lord,
Where nothing else is to be known or done,
Neither yoga
Nor intellectual understanding
Is to be sought after,
For the only thing that remains and flourishes
Is absolute consciousness.
Recording her experience of the same condition of expanded awareness four hundred years later, Lalla says, in poem 115:
Word or thought, normal or Absolute, they mean nothing
here.
Even the mudrās of silence won’t get you entry.
We’re beyond even Shiva and Shakti here.
This Beyond that’s beyond all we can name, that’s your lesson!
Expounding on the exemplar of the jīvan-mukta—the realised soul who is indifferent to living and dying, and who lives in the fullness of enlightenment—the tenth-century aesthetician, literary theorist, yogi and Tantric adept Abhinavagupta, writes in his Parātrimśikā-vivarana (adapted from a translation from the Sanskrit by Paul Eduardo Muller-Ortega; Heehs 2002, 248):
Through the peculiar efficacy of the ritual of adoration—by practising which he has remembered perfectly the mantra, and so attained to a very high degree the potency of that mantra, which is the reality known as the Heart—the tantric practitioner crosses over completely, either by himself or as a result of the clear and pristine lotus-word of the teacher, and in this way attains liberation in this very life.
Lalla, affirming the joyous liberation of the jīvan-mukta from the prison of mortal birth four centuries later, says in poem 125:
Those who glow with the light of the Self
are freed from life even while they live.
But fools add knots by the hundred
to the tangled net of the world.
Abhinavagupta, the most accomplished of the Śaiva āchāryas, also composed a beautiful and moving prayer called the Mahopadeśa-vimśatikam, in the third verse of which he writes (translation from the Sanskrit mine; for the original, see Deshpande 1989, 162):
Deep inside my body I searched and searched for my soul.
There was no soul there to be found but You, only You.
Compare this with Lalla’s account of her own quest, cast as a lover’s journey in search of an elusive Beloved, in poem 11:
I, Lalla, wore myself down searching for Him
and found a strength after my strength had died.
I came to His threshold but found the door bolted.
I locked that door with my eyes and looked at Him.
4. The Tantric Underground
Up, woman! Go make your offering.
Take wine, meat and a cake fit for the gods.
If you know the password to the Supreme Place,
you can reach wisdom by breaking the rules.
(POEM 19)
Since explicit references to Tantric rites appear in a number of Lalla’s vākhs, as in poem 19, we must attend to the probable circumstances of her association with theTantric path. The figure of her predecessor, Abhinavagupta, thus forms an appropriate link between the previous section of this Introduction and the present one: he incarnated both the intellectual rigour of Kashmir Śaivism and the seemingly heterodox practice of the Tantras. To conventionally raised Hindus, it may appear inconceivable that an intellectual who wrote authoritative accounts of aesthetic experience and spiritual perfection could also write the Tantrāloka or ‘The Radiance of the Tantras’. In the twenty-ninth chapter of this work, he elaborates on the rites of Kulācāra, which involve the cultivation of control over psychic processes and various forms of visualisation; these rites also include the controlled use of substances proscribed by the orthodoxy (such as wine, meat and fish) and taboo relationships (such as with women married to others, or far below the aspirant’s caste status, or too intimately related to him). This is how, in Lalla’s phrase, the aspirant may ‘reach wisdom by breaking the rules’.
These rites were designed to incite the sādhaka or spiritual aspirant’s consciousness into transcending the binaries governing acceptable social behaviour and the prevailing system of cultural assumptions. This was achieved by striking repeatedly at injunction and inhibition with transgression; by dramatising the dissolution of all differences between the sanctified and the unholy, the pure and the impure, the appropriate and the inappropriate, the permitted and the forbidden, under carefully regulated conditions presided over by an adept. Heinrich Zimmer’s explanation of the logic of Kulācāra helps us situate Lalla’s poems 19 and 20 in their correct context:
Just as deadly poisons administered at the right time and in proper dosages can save a life, so too, Kulācāra prescribes things forbidden in everyday life as components of its rite that will reveal to the initiate the path to his becoming divine [that is: recognising that he is, in fact, Shiva]. These ingredients are called, for brevity’s sake, the ‘five M�
�s’ (Ma-kāra-pancaka): alcohol (madya), meat (māmsa), fish (matsya), and illicit intercourse (maithuna) ; the fifth is the positioning of the hand and fingers (mudrā) . . . It is not so much their basic ability to intoxicate and liberate a person that makes them into sacramental elements, but rather the fact that they have the power, ennobled by rite and enshrined in ceremony, to transport the initiate beyond the moral order of his everyday existence. (1984, 216–17)
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The liberation of the sādhaka’s consciousness from the regime of duality was paramount, not only to Tantra, but also to a variety of other spiritual projects that had announced themselves across India between the tenth and the fourteenth centuries CE . Among the exponents of these projects, we find the Tantrayāna Buddhists who wove Śaivite and Tantric ideas of redemption, together with Mahāyāna Buddhist ideas of soteriology, into a new fabric. We find, also, the Pāśupata renouncers who deliberately behaved in countersocial ways to invite the scorn and abuse necessary to break down the body-centred individual ego. From this period, also, date the investigations of the Siddha magician-poets who pursued the goal of rasāyana or alchemy, both at a material and a spiritual level. Their contemporaries, the Nātha ascetics, dedicated themselves to the quest for the nectar at the heart of experience, looking not only for salvation from the cycle of rebirth but also attempting to extend the dynamism and longevity of the physical organism beyond their natural span. These heterodox questors established a sacred geography of migration paths and staging points across the Indian subcontinent, so that, even today, their presence is memorialised, if not always recognised, in regions as diverse and seemingly far apart as Kashmir and Karnataka, Bengal and Maharashtra, Punjab and Madhya Pradesh, Baluchistan and Uttar Pradesh.
Distributed throughout the LD corpus lie themes that would instantly be acknowledged as central by all these practitioners: the analogy proposed between the interior reality of the yogini and the reality of the cosmos; the tension between breaking down the body-centred ego while refining the body as the vehicle of the soul; and the spiritual quest as an all-possessing and all-transforming pursuit, which places the seeker at a tangent to society, as an eccentric, a holy fool, an inspired lunatic.
In poem 80, for instance, Lalla offers the aspirant the following counsel, intended to contain the body’s claims:
Wear just enough to keep the cold out,
eat just enough to keep hunger from your door.
Mind, dream yourself beyond Self and Other.
Remember, this body is just pickings for jungle crows.
But in poem 141, she proposes another and more Nātha-like way of relating to the body:
True mind, look inside this body,
this body they call the Self’s own form.
Strip off greed and lust, polish this body,
this body as bright as the sun.
In poems 92 and 93, already quoted in this Introduction, Lalla courts the insults and curses of her detractors. Her talisman against these assaults is an indifference born of her conviction that she ‘belongs to Shiva’. She treats them merely as ashes with which to clean the mirror of her consciousness (mirrors, in the historical Lalla’s day, were made of metal and not glass). We may usefully compare Lalla’s position in these poems with a laconic teaching of Lakuliśa or ‘The Lord of the Mace’, the founder of the Pāśupata cult: ‘Ill-treated, he should wander.’ His commentator, Kaundinya, offers the following gloss on this teaching, which is described as ‘the seeking of dishonour’:
This ill treatment should be regarded as a coronation to a poor man . . . [The aspirant] should wander under false accusations on the principle that he who is dishonoured is on [the path to] acquiring merit . . . Hereby he becomes cut off from the respectable castes and conditions of men, and the power of passionless detachment is produced. (quoted in McEvilley 2002, 226)
At the same time, Lalla was keenly aware of the charlatanry of the lower kind of wandering renouncer: the renegade Siddha, Nātha or Yogi who, falling away from the spiritual quest yet retaining superficial abilities of telekinesis and bodily control, could dazzle the populace of householders with his bag of tricks. In poem 119, she frames a sardonic critique of such bazaar magicians:
To dam a flood,
to blow out a forest fire,
to walk on air,
to milk a wooden cow:
any con artist could do it.
The apparent tension between the householder’s way and the renouncer’s path—and the delusion that the act of making a choice between them automatically marks the difference between ignorance and enlightenment—also exercised the ninth-century Siddha master Saraha, who meditated on the ‘fair tree of the Void’ at the confluence of Tantra and Mahāyāna Buddhism. As Saraha sang in his Dōhākośa or ‘Treasury of Rhymed Couplets’ (the translation from the Angika, a form of protoHindi, is D.L. Snellgrove’s; Conze 1959, 179):
Do not sit at home, do not go to the forest,
But recognise mind wherever you are.
When one abides in complete and perfect
enlightenment,
Where is Samsara and where is Nirvana?
O know this truth,
That neither at home nor in the forest does enlightenment
dwell.
Be free from prevarication
In the self-nature of immaculate thought!
The intertextuality that relates Lalla’s texts to those produced within her background traditions, which I have underscored in the context of her Kashmir Śaiva lineage, is dramatically visible and audible in the context of her Siddha affiliations as well. Five centuries after Saraha, Lalla employs the same imagery as he does, to confirm his diagnosis that illumination is not guaranteed to a renouncer or withheld from a householder; it comes to those who refine themselves to receive it. Lalla says:
Some run away from home, some escape the hermitage.
No orchard bears fruit for the barren mind.
Day and night, count the rosary of your breath,
and stay put wherever you are.
(POEM 122)
Hermit or householder: same difference.
If you’ve dissolved your desires in the river of time,
you will see that the Lord is everywhere and is perfect.
As you know, so shall you be.
(POEM 123)
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The texts of the Pāśupata, Siddha and Nātha lineages were not fossil fuel, but renewable resources: in Lalla’s poetry, we find a crucible in which they were fused at a new, intense and startling level of expression. This would, therefore, be the appropriate juncture at which to dwell on the genealogy of Lalla’s vākh as a literary form, and to accord it what I believe to be its rightful place in that family of more than twenty poetic forms which are grouped under the generic title of the dōhā. We may begin with one of Grierson’s speculations, made in an appendix to his 1920 edition. While investigating the subject of Kashmiri prosody, he noted that, during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Kashmiri writers customarily used formal Persian metres such as the hazaj, whether they were Muslims writing in Persian on Islamic epic subjects or Pandits writing in Sanskrit on Hindu philosophical or devotional themes. But the metrical system used in Kashmiri songs, under which rubric Lalla’s vākhs were classified, was quite unique. Unlike the metrical system used in North India, which is based on syllabic quantity, the measure of the Kashmiri song depended on a sequence of stress-accents. In Lalla’s poems, as Grierson notes, ‘four stresses go to each pada, or line . . . [they] will not scan according to Indian rules, but nevertheless [their] lilt is strongly suggestive of the Indian dōhā’. Having arrived at this potentially historic insight, Grierson settles down to analyse the structure of the dōhā, usually developed as a rhymed couplet read as four half-lines. He breaks the dōhā down into the instants of voiced duration it takes up (with one instant corresponding to one short syllable, and a long syllable counting as two instants; the standard term for Grierson’s ‘instants’ is m
ātrās or morae) and shows that the dōhā may be scanned as the following pattern of instants, or moraic count:
The same moraic count appears in many of Lalla’s vākhs, with the four half-lines opened out into a quatrain:
Unfortunately, despite his pioneering work in the study of Indian linguistics and literature, Grierson remained committed to the top-down model of cultural transmission that was pervasive among intellectuals of his class, education, citizenship and epoch. Their liberal outlook and encyclopaedic interests were tempered by their membership of the Club of Imperial Certitude. Convinced that only an elite could produce serious culture, and that cultural materials always become degenerate and vulgarised when they descend from the elite to the masses, he concluded that Lalla’s poems ‘were originally intended to be based on some standard metre, but that in the mouths of the rustics stress became substituted for quantity’ (1920, 144–48) Grierson chose to round off his sketch with the dismissive suggestion that Lalla’s prosody was merely a demotic and irregular version of that practised by classical Prakrit poets such as the Sātavāhana ruler Hāla. Had he taken his metrical speculations—and his notion that the vākh scansion was of ultimately Central Asian origin—to their logical conclusion, he might have been able to situate Lalla’s vākhs far more securely in a pan-Indian atlas of sacred poetry.