by Lal Ded
This divine coupling, which is the most sacred symbolic image of Tantra, has arguably found exquisite iconic expression in the extraordinary yab-yum images of the esoteric Tantrayāna Buddhism of the eighth to the twelfth centuries, a religious system profoundly influenced by Śaivite Tantra. We think, at once, of the Bodhisattvas Mahāsukha, Vajradhara and Akṣobhya, represented in coition with their respective śaktis or Tārās. As Zimmer (1984, 201) writes:
The Divine Essence, which is both Being, eternally at rest, and Motion, constantly at play, exists here, fixed in totally compelling, immobile form, beyond the oscillating shimmer of some time-bound gesture and beyond the transitoriness of the moment; it lives here in a pose of love, in the face of which all things bound to time and space—the onrushing, crashing breakers of desire and the prolonged drifting, gradual ebbing of bliss—are in our beclouded consciousness but fleeting reflections.
69. K. Pr: 56
dilakis bāgas dūrü kar gösil
As S.S. Toshkhani has observed (see the note to poems 17 and 18 above), poem 69 is a quatrain composed or rephrased by a certain Azizullah Khan in the early nineteenth century. In consonance with my argument concerning the LD corpus as a multi-user domain built up by various, largely anonymous contributors over the centuries, I would prefer to retain the poem while indicating its provenance, with no attempt to source it back into the fourteenth century. Certainly, the office of the tehsīldār or tax-collector did not exist in the village economy of the historical Lalla’s time. That said, the poem presents a moving portrait of the questor as patient gardener, pruning away the weeds of negative feeling from the heart, knowing that the narcissus of insight will blossom; meanwhile, Death awaits his moment, ready to press the accounts of karma upon the spirit that has barely shaken off the demands of the body.
70. G: 84 | K: 118
yih kyāh ösith yih kyuthu rang gōm
cang gōm tsaṭith hudahudañěy dagay
71. G: 85
yih kyāh ösith yih kyuthu rang gōm
běrongu karith gōm laga kami shāṭhay
Companion vākhs, poems 70 and 71 open with an identical first line, which I have rendered as ‘I can’t believe this happened to me!’ Grierson, reporting that the meaning of some of the key words appeared to have been lost over the passage of time, professes a surprising bafflement: ‘These are two of Lalla’s hard sayings which are unintelligible at the present day, although there is no dispute as to the text’ (1920, 99). One of the words that troubled him in poem 70 is hudahudañěy, in the second line; Professor Jayalal Kaul suggested that this was a reference to the hudhud or hoopoe. I find this suggestion both appealing and convincing, and have based my interpretation on it.
The hoopoe, distinguished by its brown crest and the long digger beak with which it taps at trees or the ground, is the mystical guide and leader of the group of birds who set out to meet the Simorgh, the King of Birds, in the Sufi master Farid ud-din Attar’s beautiful allegorical poem, Mantiq at-Tair (‘The Conference of the Birds’, 1177 CE ). Only thirty of the birds survive the arduous journey, and at its end, find only their reflections in a lake. They realise that they have themselves become the Simorgh, a Persian word that yields up the meaning of si-morgh, ‘thirty birds’:
Their souls rose free of all they’d been before;
The past and all its actions were no more.
Their life came from that close, insistent sun
And in its vivid rays they shone as one.
There in the Simorgh’s radiant face they saw
Themselves, the Simorgh of the world—with awe
They gazed, and dared at last to comprehend
They were the Simorgh and the journey’s end.
(ATTAR 1984, 219)
This Sufi allegory of the self’s discovery of its unity with the Divine, while heterodox from a strictly Islamic point of view, is analogous to the Kashmir Śaivite approach, and may offer evidence of the confluences of ideas that took place along the Silk Route and its byways, which linked present-day China, Tibet, Kashmir, Afghanistan, Iran and Iraq, among other regions.
In poem 70, Lalla exclaims that a hoopoe has cut her claws off with his beak, which may indicate an experience of ‘thunderclap enlightenment’ induced by sudden insight or the poetics of shock, somewhat in the nature of a Zen satori. The truth of all her dreams strikes her in a sentence, but this enlightenment also creates a complex sense of being isolated and cut adrift in the cosmos, here symbolised by a lake. In poem 71, she seems to lament a topsy-turvy life, characterised by the mismanagement of choices, which she must set right by achieving fine-tuned insight into the true nature of the self.
72. G: 46 | K: 84
asi pǒndi zǒsi zāmi
As she does in poem 1, Lalla reminds the ascetic, who attempts to store up merit by visiting one shrine and pilgrimage centre after another, that the Divine is neither outside nor far away, but within. She administers this insight through a series of physical, viscerally intimate images: the Divine is not merely a Doppelgänger to the self, but laughs, sneezes, yawns and coughs for the self, as the self; and indeed, while performing all these clumsy variations on the practice of Yogic exhalation, is the self/Self. The slash between the two is eliminated when Lalla suggests the simple civility of recognition.
73. G: 9 | K: 85
bān golu töy prakāsh āv zūnē
The human body is a microcosm of the universe, in Yogic theory. Accordingly, as we have seen in the note to poem 54, the sun and moon mark the base and pinnacle, respectively, of the sushumnanāḍi, the seven-chakra channel that is mapped onto the spine, and along which the body’s psychic and life-breath energy must be aligned in Yogic practice. The sun, or mūlādhāra chakra, is situated in the abdominal region; and the moon, or sahasrāra chakra, in the brain region. In states of intense contemplative absorption, when the chakras have been fully activated and the kuṇḍalinī energy has been awakened, the awareness of the centres vanishes and only the faculty of thought remains. In yet deeper meditative states, from the Kashmir Śaiva point of view, thought with all its conceptual distinctions is also left behind, and all cognitive and affective powers are absorbed into the energy field of the Supreme. With consciousness itself re-absorbed into the Shiva-principle, the universe melts back into the Supreme, and the elements become emptied of their reality.
74. G: 11 | K: 89
tanthar gali töy manthar mǒtsě
75. G: 30 | K: 90
lūb mārun sahaz větsārun
76. G: 69 | K: 91
tsitta-turogu wagi hěth roṭum
Poems 74, 75 and 76 form a group of vākhs, sharing the same closing line: shüñěs shüñāh mīlith gauv, ‘A void mingles with the Void.’ To the Kashmir Śaivite, the world of appearances is not a counterfeit reality so much as it is the play or dream of the Divine, an expression of Shiva’s desire to create form and motion as a counterpoint to formlessness and stillness: the aim of true knowledge is to understand how the universe extends from its Source, and is immersed back into it. The Void connotes, simultaneously, an absolute emptying-out of particularities as well as an unimaginable abundance of potentialities.
In poem 74, Lalla traces a trajectory of gradual re-absorption by which the world-as-manifestation is drawn back into the Supreme. The locus of knowledge shifts inexorably from the scribal to the oral to thought, and finally, to that space of recognition in which the Divine awakes from the dream of the universe and recognises its own transcendence. The same drama of awakening is phrased more directly as counsel in poem 75, and more lyrically in poem 76, where Lalla describes a Yogic experience of the expansion of being and consciousness through a threefold practice: the concentration of the mind, which is visualised as a high-spirited horse; a commitment to prāṇāyāma; and the activation of the sahasrāra chakra.
77. G: 26 | K: 52
tsitta-turogu gagani brama-wônu
Lalla visualises the mind as a powerful stallion capable of enormous feats of en
durance, covering great distances at extraordinary speed, but cautions that it is capricious and dangerous too, and cannot be trusted without the bridle of wisdom to control it. Without that bridle, it could destroy the ‘wheels of breath’s chariot’, by which she means prāṇa and apāna, the two principal life-breaths within the subtle body. In the Yogic system, the coordination of these life-breaths into a steady rhythm is an essential step towards preparing for the experience of enlightenment.
78. G: 14 | K: 122
Shiv guru töy Kēshěv palānas
79. G: 15 | K: 123
Anāhath kha-swarüph shüñālay
Poem 78 poses an indirect question as a prophecy, which poem 79 answers or fulfils. The trinity of Shiva, Vishnu and Brahma are distributed within an equestrian metaphor that seems, at first glance, oddly festive. Shiva, here to be understood not as the Supreme but as a specific manifestation of the Supreme, the Re-maker of Worlds, is the horse, symbolising the route to enlightenment. Vishnu, as Preserver, is at the saddle, ready to take that route. Brahma, as demiurge Creator, is jubilant at the stirrup, eager to be off and away. But the ride will not commence until the yogi decides which god shall mount the horse.
Poem 79 articulates the yogi’s apocalyptic vision of the Self rising within the self. Here we have Shiva as the Supreme Being, who strikes the deep sound of the universe (explained in the note to poem 63), whose body is space, whose home is the transcendental Void, who is not constrained by any conventional marker of identity. He is ‘both Source and Sound’, a reference to the Kashmir Śaiva model of the Supreme residing within an individual’s subtle body, as a bindu or intense dot of light, surrounded by the coiled parā-śakti, or supreme energy. In the first stage of enlightenment, when immersed deep in meditation, the yogi receives a blessed vision of the bindu (in my rendition, Source). This, in turn, triggers off the parā-śakti, which awakens with a primal cry (in my rendition, Sound).
From the perspective of the history of technology, India did not possess the stirrup until it was introduced into the northwest during the first Turkic raids led by Altagin and Sabuktagin in the late tenth and early eleventh centuries, its use then diffusing gradually through the subcontinent.
80. G: 28 | K: 33
yěwa türü tsali tim ambar hětā
81. G: 27 | K: 30
khěth ganḍith shěmi nā mānas
82. K: 27
khěna khěna karān kun no vātakh
In these three poems, with their vivid and compelling images, Lalla warns against the excesses of sensual gratification, the enslavement of the higher nature by the appetites. In poem 80, proposing a moderate way of life, she reduces the body to its essential mortality, envisioning it as merely ‘pickings for jungle crows’. In poem 81, she paints Death and Desire as twin tempters, terrible behind their winning ways. And in poem 82, she satirises both the obsession with the pleasures of the table as well as the self-righteous cultivation of ascetic virtuosity, underlining the importance of balance.
83. G: 88 | K: 35
atha ma-bā trāwun khar-bā!
The ass that may ravage one’s neighbours’ saffron gardens, in poem 83, is the mind. It must be placed under the control of spiritual and ethical disciplines by the higher nature, Lalla teaches, before it gives in to whim or caprice and expresses itself in destructive, self-defeating ways. Since saffron is a prized, expensive commodity, the saffron gardens are sacrosanct precincts, and their violation could invite severe penalties. The poem ends with a suitably harsh image of responsibility for one’s own karma. While many traditional societies, in Asia as in Europe, permitted men of standing to offer proxies to receive punishment on their behalf when sentenced, Lalla points out that the individual self cannot hope to pass on the karmic burden of its accumulated actions to a surrogate conscripted for the task.
The cadence of poem 83, as of poem 106, is calibrated to a taut, percussive music. In the original Kashmiri, poem 83 reads:
atha ma-bā trāwun khar-bā!
lūka-hünzü kǒng-wörü khěyiy
tati kus-bā dāriy thar-bā!
yěti nanis kartal pěyiy
84. G: 71 | K: 37
Mārukh māra-būth kām krūd lūb
85. G: 43 | K: 36
yemi lūb manmath mad tsūr môrun
In these two closely related poems, Lalla exhorts the aspirant on the spiritual path to overcome the negative emotions that occupy the mind and eclipse the will to perfection. Poem 84 suggests a contemplative discipline that permits the aspirant to disarm such negative emotions by analysing them, releasing the energy they knot up, and emptying them of their psychic influence and karmic weight, so that they vanish like the phantoms they are. Poem 85 carries this logic further, showing that the elimination of all negative psychic contents eventually opens up a course leading to the True Lord or sahaz Yīshwar in Lalla’s phrase. At the same time, the aspirant realises that the phenomenal world, manifested by the Supreme as a temporary reality, is predestined for negation and transcendence, ‘made of ash’.
86. G: 23 | K: 41
manasạy mān bhawa-saras
Lalla’s conception, in this poem, of the mind as the ocean of life is both poetically vibrant and philosophically rich. By the ‘ocean of life’, I would understand the experiences, memories, sensations, emotional investments, reflexes and propensities that an individual accumulates in the course of life; or, from the Indic perspective, many lives. In my view, Lalla inherits this conception from the philosophers of the Yogācāra school of Mahāyāna Buddhism (second to the fifth centuries CE), who first gave it powerful elaboration. It is no coincidence that Yogācāra was born and flourished in Gandhara and Kashmir, and has very clearly left its impress on later philosophical advances made by thinkers and practitioners in those regions.
The Yogācārins proposed the citta-mātra or ‘mind-only’ doctrine, widely misunderstood to represent a crudely solipsistic view that the world is merely the creation of mind. On the contrary, as the Buddhist scholar Andrew Skilton (1994, 123) observes, the Yogācārins argued
not that everything is made of mind (as though the mind were some kind of universal matter), but that the totality of our experience is dependent on our mind. The proposition is that we can only know or experience things with our mind. Every sense experience is cognised by the mind, therefore the things that we know, every element of our cognition, is essentially part of a mental process.
Thus the Yogācārins developed a sophisticated psychology, positing the existence of the ālaya-vijñāna or storehouse consciousness, which underlay several other strata of consciousness, associated with the senses and the mind. The ālaya-vijñāna, which is present in every individual, plays a pivotal role in Yogācāra spiritual practice: theYogācārin must contemplate the turbulent contents of this storehouse, confronting and reflecting upon them, fully grasping their influence on his conscious thoughts and actions, and gradually but surely eliminating them.
This practice is conveyed in Lalla’s awareness that the mind as ocean of life—or, as we may say, the ālaya-vijñāna—can deliver up ‘fire-harpoons that stick in the flesh’, but which, when weighed, ‘weigh nothing’. In the third line of poem 86, I meld two alternative readings of a key image, while leaving the sense of the utterance intact: nārücü chǒkh, meaning ‘wounds made by a fishing-spear’; or nāratsi-chǒkh, meaning ‘wounds caused by fire’. The persistence of the Yogācāra model is also manifest in poem 65, where Lalla proposes the metaphor of the animals grazing in the vegetable garden, awaiting sacrifice.
87. G: 12 | K: 48
hěth karith rājy phēri nā
Lalla begins with the portrait of an individual trapped in conflicting desires; with her empathetic insight into human nature, she notes that the desire for fame as a renouncer is as negative a mental state as the desire for dominance and control. Freedom from desire is the only route to immortality: she closes with lines in praise of the jīvan-mukta, the exemplar extolled by Abhinavagupta and other Ka
shmir Śaivite masters, one whose liberation from desire has emancipated him, even as he lives, from the cycle of rebirth. Like Shiva, he has passed beyond the binaries of subjective and objective, transcendent and immanent, pleasure and pain: he is simultaneously yogi and bhōgi, renouncer and enjoyer, and goes through life with a unique and luminous lightness.
88. G: 61 | K: 49
yuhu yih karm kara pětarun pānas
Lalla is inspired, here, by the Bhagavad Gita’s key ethical teaching: that of ‘nishkāma karma’, action undertaken in the spirit of selfperfection and without thought of reward. With no hoard of anticipation, frustration, elation and restlessness to carry, the seeker performs his or her actions in a condition of spiritual elegance, of beatitude.
89. G: 70 | K: 53
tsěth amara-pathi thövizi
As a wandering teacher, it is not improbable that Lalla had a small circle of disciples or that she taught transient acolytes. In this context, poem 89 may have served her as a teaching text—intended to guide the aspirant towards the practice of confronting the most disquieting and disruptive contents of the mind, which are usually the first to surface when one embarks on a course of silent meditation. The deliberate strategy of infantilising these monster thoughts would help neutralise them while the aspirant cultivates the meditative energy to gather his or her psychic resources into coherence.
