by Lal Ded
52. G: 4 | K: 98
damāh-dam korumas daman-hālē
This poem refers to two subtle, powerful Yogic breathing techniques known to practitioners as ujjayi prāṇāyāma and bhastrikā prāṇāyāma. In the first, the conventional pattern of breathing through the nasal passages is bypassed and the breath is directed, instead, through the throat, so as to exert a slight pressure on the carotid arteries, lower the blood pressure and stabilise the mental processes; in the second, which literally means ‘bellows breath’, the breath is charged until the practitioner speeds up her respiration to twice its normal rate, purifying the nervous system and clarifying the mental processes through oxygenation (Satyananda Saraswati 1983, 118–21). The blazing up of the lamp symbolises the awakening of the Self that results from the attentive pursuit of these practices, in conjunction with Lalla’s ongoing quest, and which clears a path for her through the long night journey of the spirit.
53. G: 56 | K: 95
yē gǒrā Paramēshwarā!
54. G: 57 | K: 96
nābi-sthāna chěy prakrěth zalawȧñī
Poems 53 and 54 are cast in the classic mode of Tantra, in which the female disciple asks the male teacher for clarification and receives wisdom; this archetypal situation mirrors the primal dialogic setting of Tantric teaching, when Shakti approaches Shiva for instruction. These poems refer to the rhythm of exhalations during the practice of prāṇāyāma, when Lalla notices that her shorter exhalations emerge cool while her longer exhalations emerge relatively hotter; such practices induce an extreme awareness of the micro-climates of the body’s various organs and processes.
Her teacher’s reply must be understood in terms of the inner body/spirit geography developed by the Yogic adepts: the main channel for subtle energy within the body is the sushumna-nāḍi, the base of which rests in an energy centre beneath the navel, sometimes called the sun, and whose uppermost extremity is the sahasrāra or nectar moon, situated in the brain region, which we have come upon several times already. During the practice of prāṇāyāma, the vital breath passes up and down this route in the form of currents. When the hot current rising from the sun beneath the navel passes through the throat by itself, it is longer and retains its heat; however, when it meets the cooler current descending from the nectar moon, it loses its heat and comes out shorter and cooler.
55. G: 35 | K: 104
samsāras āyěs tapasiy
Having come into samsāra, the world of facades and trapdoors, the seeker has found her way out by means of what she calls bōdha-prakāsh, the light of the mind achieved in poem 52. For an illumined one, the distinctions between life and death, oneself and another, the extinction of one body and the emergence of another, are all dissolved. The logic of the dichotomy between samsāra and mokṣa has lost its grip on her consciousness.
56. G: 101 | K: 13
dēhacě larě dārě bar trǒpȧrim
This poem employs the pun on prān, onion/life-breath, which we have already encountered in poems 26 and 27. The onion-thief or thief of life is the worldly nature, which would rush out into the agora, eager for gossip, rumour and transaction; he must be trapped inside the body by the methods of prāṇāyāma, confined to the space of the heart that is both intimate and cosmic, sometimes poetically described by yogis as hridaya-ākāśa, the heart-sky, and be subjected to the discipline of the primal and formative mantra. This last part of the treatment of the wayward nature is pungently described by Lalla, using the language of corporal punishment: ōmaki cōbaka tulumas bam, ‘I stripped him with the whip of Om.’
57. K: 24
gǒras pr’tsōm sāsi latē
The figure of the guru is crucial to Lalla’s poetry, and to the understanding of her spiritual journey. She invokes the guru variously as ‘Māli’ or ‘Master’ (poem 128), ‘Siddha-Māli! Siddhō!’ or ‘Perfect Master! Perfected One!’ (poem 35; translated here as ‘Master, my Master’), and ‘yē gǒrā Paramēśwarā or ‘O Guru, Supreme Lord’ (Poem 53; translated here as ‘My Guru, Supreme Lord’). While some of Lalla’s poems may well be inquiries or apostrophes addressed to her mentor, Siddha Śrīkāntha, the figure of the teacher or guide often serves as a proxy for, or manifestation of, the Divine in her poetry.
The Kulārnava Tantra, a central text of the Tantra system, is most illuminating on the subject of the identity between the teacher and the Divine in a Tantric teaching lineage:
Śiva, the Omnipresent One, too exquisite to be perceived, the Ecstatic One, the Undivided, the Immortal, Like-unto-heaven, the Unborn, the Infinite—how is He to be worshipped? It is to answer this question that Śiva has assumed the body of a teacher and dispenses, if he is worshipped with passion, material [bhukti] and spiritual release [mukti]. Clothed in human form, Supreme Śiva Himself walks the earth, to the delight of all true disciples. (Arthur Avalon and Tārānātha Vidyāratna’s 1916 translation, quoted in Zimmer 1984, 206–07)
The ‘Nothingness’ of which Lalla speaks here is the Void that is also Wholeness, the deep and unmanifest reality that is the ground state of the universe, and will be achieved after the yogi has emptied out all the contents, impressions and attachments of material existence from his consciousness: the shūña or Shunya of Hindu thought.
58. G: 17 | K: 66
dēv watā diworu watā
59. K: 65
laz kāsiy shīt něvariě
In poems 58 and 59, Lalla confronts the temple priest with pithy critiques of idol worship and animal sacrifice. Her mode of addressing the ritual specialist is direct and, in this context, almost insultingly familiar, coming as it does from a woman in a feudal society governed by patriarchal norms. In the third line of poem 58, for instance, she asks: ‘Pūz kas karakh, hōṭa baṭā?’ Dismissing the worship of an idol and the religious economy of the temple—‘all stone’—she emphasises that the Divine is to be reached through the Yogic practice of prāṇāgnihōtra, the offering of the body’s awakened vital energies.
In poem 59, she attacks the priest for offering a lamb or ram as sacrifice to the gods, contrasting the animal’s modest and undemanding way of being, and the usefulness of its wool, to the cruelty, wastefulness and ingratitude involved in sacrificing it. While Hinduism has long been associated with non-violence and vegetarianism, animal sacrifice has traditionally been part of the worship of Shakti, the Great Mother, in the dynamic and even warlike forms of Durga and Kali. Goats are still killed as offerings at centres of Shakti worship such as the Kalighat temple in Kolkata and the Kamakhya temple in Kamrup, Assam.
Meat has traditionally been used as an offering in certain ritual elaborations of Kashmiri Hinduism. After the mass migration of Kashmiri Hindus from the Valley in the early 1990s, however, these distinctive practices have practically disappeared in their homeland. In a situation veined with multiple ironies, Kashmir’s Hindu shrines are now staffed by priests from the Gangetic plains or elsewhere in the subcontinent, hired by the armed forces: these men enforce the vegetarian norms of mainstream Indian Hinduism strictly, and regard animal sacrifices with horror.
60. G: 65 | K: 111
Shiwa Shiwa karān hamsa-gath sǒrith
Shiva’s name is the mantra that holds the potential of deliverance. The Swan’s Way, no echo of Proust, is hamsa-gath, the mystical designation accorded to the famous utterance of realisation: ‘sō-’ham’, ‘I am He’. Recited as an a-japa japa or repetition that deepens from words into silence and awareness, the syllables of this utterance reverse and rearrange themselves as ‘ham-sah’, which means swan. This graceful bird has therefore been used for many centuries, in India’s wisdom traditions, to denote the illuminated questor. When used as a title or honorific, for yogis who are regarded as having achieved unity with the Shiva-principle indwelling within the individual consciousness, the word is expanded into ‘Parama-amsa’ or ‘Great Swan’.
The questor is seen to have achieved that state of being which the Bhagavad Gita refers to as ‘nishkāma karma’ or action without tho
ught of reward, and which the teacher J. Krishnamurti referred to as ‘choiceless awareness’. Having passed beyond all dualities, he has focused his mind on transcendence, and goes through the motions of ordinary life like an actor in a play—with complete assurance and commitment, yet knowing that it is not identical with his real life.
The somewhat unusual and highly Sanskritic designation sura-guru-nātha, which I have rendered here as ‘Teacher who is First among the Gods’, translates literally as ‘gods-teacher-lord’ and refers to Shiva as Mahādeva, the Great God, and as Yogīśvara, the Lord of Yoga. This designation also appears in poem 109.
61. G: 45 | K: 67
kush pōsh tēl zal nā gatshē
I have clustered together, as poems 61–68, vākhs in which Lalla emphatically shifts the locus of religious life from ritual practice to spiritual practice: she contrasts the merely formulaic nature of inherited, outward observance against the transfiguring potentiality of firsthand, inner experience. In poem 61, Lalla dismisses the impedimenta of ritualism and points to the guidance of the guru and a deepening immersion in meditative states as far more reliable ways of achieving oneness with the Divine. As the seeker gains liberation from the causalities of everyday life and accumulates fewer and fewer residues of karma or action and reaction, the possibility of mokṣa or release from the cycle of rebirth grows ever more certain.
The spiritual teacher Eknath Easwaran explains the doctrine of karma, with eloquent brevity, in the Introduction to his translation of the Buddha’s Dhammapada:
What we think has consequences for the world around us, for it conditions how we act. All these consequences—for others, for the world, and for ourselves—are our personal responsibility. Sooner or later, because of the unity of life, they will come back to us. . . . Karma means something done, whether as cause or effect. Actions in harmony with dharma bring good karma and add to health and happiness. Selfish actions, at odds with the rest of life, bring unfavourable karma and pain. In this view, no divine agency is needed to punish or reward us; we punish and reward ourselves. This was not regarded as a tenet of religion but as a law of nature, as universal as the law of gravity. . . . Unpaid karmic debts and unfulfilled desires do not vanish when the physical body dies. They are forces which remain in the universe, to quicken life again at the moment of conception when conditions are right for past karma to be fulfilled. (1987, 13–14)
62. G: 42 | K: 70
gagan tsay bhū-tal tsay
Since the Divine pervades all things, whether at the grand scale of the universe with all its elements or the intimate scale of the tray of offerings arranged for the pūjā or formal act of worship, what can the true devotee offer the Divine that It does not already contain?
63. G: 33 | K: 71
dwādashānta-mandal yěs dēwas thajī
The Unstruck Sound is the anāhata nāda, the deep sound of the universe, the silence that lies beyond understanding and is serenity and perfection. The focused recitation of the primal syllable Om is traditionally thought to be a key to the Unstruck Sound. As practitioners know, the syllable Om is treated as a sequence of four sounds when recited, beginning with ‘A’, passing through ‘U’, gliding across the hummed ‘M’ and culminating in a threshold between sound and silence, which marks the fourth sound, the sound not produced by any event or stimulus, the sound of the Void: the anāhata nāda.
In Yogic practice, anāhata also refers to the fourth of the seven chakras or centres of psychic and life-breath energy within the body; it is believed to be located on the spine, directly behind the heart, and governs emotional life. This chakra is closely related to the seventh and highest chakra, the sahasrāra or nectar moon, whose physical site in the anterior fontanelle of the brain is denoted by Lalla as dwādaśanta-mandal, known in the Sanskrit technical literature of Yoga as the brahma-randra. This is regarded by practitioners as the place in the body where the Shiva-principle resides, which is why Lalla’s yogi-protagonist knows ‘the crown is the temple of Self’. Having achieved identity with the Divine, the questor can hardly worship himself: he has passed beyond the gestures of worship and supplication, and grasped the secret of the paradoxical-seeming Sanskrit mystical utterance, ‘na devo devam archayet’ or ‘None but a god may truly worship a god.’
64. G: 58 | K: 139
yih yih karm korum suh artsun
In the condition of sahaja or sahaz, Lalla asserts, the true devotee becomes permeated with the Shiva-principle. In that expanded state of being and consciousness, every gesture and word expresses the presence of the Divine.
65. G: 63 | K: 62
jñāna-mārg chěy hāka-wörü
The image of the garden recurs several times in Lalla’s poetry, as a space to be protected and nurtured, a site of discovery, transformation or ecstasy. In poem 68, she celebrates the soul’s jasmine garden; in poem 69, she speaks of the heart’s narcissus garden; in poem 83, she employs saffron gardens as her setting. The action of poem 65 takes place in a hāka-wörü or vegetable garden, such as is found even today in the Valley of Kashmir. Unusually, though, its cultivator has allowed goats to enter and graze. This garden of knowledge is the scene of a purification of the self from its accumulated karma: the vegetables are the residues of acts from previous lives that are carried forward into the present life; the goats are embodiments of those past acts.
When penned in by a hedge erected by weaving together spiritual and ethical disciplines, the goats of karma must confine themselves to feeding on what they find there. This is a metaphor for the practice of perfection of thought, feeling and effort that gradually eliminates all karma. The vegetables are eaten, the goats are killed, and the self gains the knowledge of liberation and is released from its karmic obligations. Reflecting the differences of style, stance and preoccupation within the LD corpus—the varying emphases of various contributors in different periods, in my view—poem 65, like poem 20, uses the metaphor of the animal sacrifice to articulate poetic and spiritual truths, in contrast to poem 59, which decries the ritual practice.
The term that Lalla uses to refer to the sacrificial animals is of special interest: lāmā-chakra-poshu, beasts bound for the circle of the mother goddesses. The Kashmiri lāmā is identical with the Sanskrit mātrikā or ‘little mother’, the personification of the female energies or śaktis of the principal divinities. Often worshipped in a group or circle of seven, known as the sapta-mātrikās, they were popular deities of fertility and abundance.
66. G: 39 | K: 68
kusu pushu ta kǒssa pushöñī
67. G: 40 | K: 69
Man pushu töy yitsh pushöñī
In these companion vākhs, structured as question and answer, we are taken into the heart of Lalla’s spiritual practice, which transcends all ordinary ritual and performance. Poem 66 is spoken in the voice of a yaja-māna, the patron of a ritual ceremony, asking a series of questions about the preparations for such a ceremony, from the point of view of conventional worship. He fusses over its details and the standing of its officiants. Poem 67 responds in a manner that bypasses this level altogether, rephrasing the act of worship at a far more spiritually advanced plane. The garland-maker turns out to be the mind; his wife the desire for bliss; the flowers they will offer are those of adoration; the water of the holy aspersion is nectar from the sahasrāra; and the chant is the chant of silence, the a-japa japa, the ‘sō-’ham’ whose significance has been explained in the note to poem 60.
On the Tantric path, the seeker graduates through four stages of sophistication: the entry level involves the use of offerings, flowers and ritual diagrams, homa-pūjā; the next level involves the recitation of formulae of praise, japa-stuti; the third level is based on the mental retention of a chosen inner image, dhyāna-dhāranā; and the highest plane is that of sahaja-avasthā, or sahai in Kashmiri, when the inborn divine nature has been fully realised and the seeker needs no props or aids to concentration. As the Kulārnava Tantra puts it: ‘To-act-not [a-kriyā] is the highest form o
f worship [pūjā]; To-keep-silence [a-japa] is the highest recitation; Not-to-think is the highest meditation [dhyāna]; absence of desire is supreme fulfilment’ (Arthur Avalon and Tārānātha Vidyāratna’s 1916 translation, quoted in Zimmer 1984, 224–25).
68. G: 68 | K: 131
Lal bōh tsāyěs sǒman-bāga-baras
Poem 68 is one of the most beautiful of Lalla’s vākhs, as sensuously evocative as it is charged with an ecstatic devotionalism that does not surrender meekly to enlightenment but embraces it with wild passion. The word sōman could mean, as in poem 6, one’s own mind; or it could be read as the identically pronounced Persian word for jasmine. Following Grierson, I am delighted to retain both meanings in my rendering, so that the poem opens with Lalla entering her ‘soul’s jasmine garden’, an image that conveys both visuality and fragrance. What she bears witness to, within herself, is the most exalted experience cherished by the Tantric philosophy, the overcoming of all binaries and the ascension into a state of transcendence: metaphorically embodied by Shiva and Shakti intertwined in sexual union. Overwhelmed by this vision, Lalla passes beyond living and dying, and throws herself into the lake of nectar, the reservoir of immortality, the amrěta-saras.
