I, Lalla
Page 16
The symbolism of the mustard seed occurs both in the Buddhist and the Christian wisdom traditions. The Buddha, in a parable concerning the inevitability of death, asks a grieving woman who wants him to revive her dead child, to bring him a mustard seed from a family in which no one has ever died; naturally, she cannot. She gains an insight into the nature of desire, sorrow, change and wisdom; and the mustard seed became a symbol for right understanding (see Easwaran 1987, 41–42). Jesus, in a parable concerning the nature of the Kingdom of Heaven, compares it to a mustard seed—which, though the smallest of seeds, once planted, grows into a large tree with many branches, and offers shelter to many birds (Luke 13: 18–19; Mark 4: 30–32; Matthew 13: 31–32).
Such symbolisms were in active circulation, for nearly a millennium between the first and seventh centuries CE, along the Silk Route that linked the deep heart of Western China with the Eastern Mediterranean, and included Kashmir in its larger ambit. Buddhist, Hindu, Zoroastrian, Manichean and Christian ideas, practices and iconographies are known to have been transmitted along the cities of the Silk Route and diffused further, through the interactions of monks, merchants, scholars, storytellers and translators. Among the many examples of this flourishing cultural confluence is the fact that a number of stories from the Buddhist Jatakas eventually found an afterlife as tales about Jesus or various Christian saints, through the writings of St John of Damascus; similarly, a number of stories from the Panchatantra, the Hitopadeśa and the Ramayana found their way into the narrative cycles of Boccaccio and Chaucer.
131. G: 50
trayi něngi sarāh sȧri saras
As in poem 117, Lalla offers an apocalyptic yet potentially redemptive vision of pralaya, the world-dissolving deluge. The world is again imagined as a lake: one that has overflowed its own shores three times, perhaps alluding to three cosmic cycles that Lalla has witnessed in previous lives. The ‘lake mirrored in the sky’, when nothing exists except water and sky, may refer to a mahā-pralaya or great deluge—when not only the known universe but also the realm of the gods and even the demiurge Creator, Brahma himself, are destroyed, to be replaced by a new Brahma, new gods, and a new world.
The reference to a lake bridging Mount Haramukh in the north with Lake Kausar in the south provides us with an ancient and mythic geography of Kashmir: the extent so described is, in fact, the Valley of Kashmir, which was said to have been a lake called Satī-saras at the beginning of our present kalpa. In the last line of this poem, Lalla claims to have seen the world vanishing into the Void seven times. These momentous acts of recall, these memories stretching across vast periods of time (a kalpa is reckoned by Hindu cosmologists as 432 million years) are intended to generate a sense of the incalculably long journey of the continually reborn self towards its ultimate release.
132. G: 81 | K: 116
mad pyuwum syundu-zalan yaitu
Lalla speaks here both as the individual self and as the voice of the Self, which has passed through many births on its voyage across the ocean of existence. The Sindhu is the Indus, one of Kashmir’s principal rivers: its crystalline water is the wine that she has drunk over a concourse of births. The reference to eating human flesh seems to have puzzled or unsettled several observers. Following Grierson, I would annotate this image in the following way: Lalla visualises the Self here as an anthropophagic entity, one that has, metaphorically, consumed numerous bodies in passing through a sequence of lives. Admittedly this image is cast in the rasas or affective registers of bhayānaka (the terrifying) or bibhatsa (the disgusting), and so may not accord with the taste of readers who prefer their classical authors to be well-behaved, measured, circumspect and attentive to the proprieties. The truth is that Lalla is not a classical author in this limited sense; rather, she claims the authority of a classic by virtue of her thunder-loud utterances, her robust images and her lightning-clear insights, which pierce the heart of the universe.
133. K: 125
raṅgas manz chuy byǒn byǒn labun
Here, as in the preceding poem, Lalla employs the allegory of the world as a theatre: the venue for līlā, the play of forms by which the Unmanifest manifests Itself. The Self is the actor who has worn many personae on this stage, and vanishes behind the parts He plays. How can one find Him? By ridding oneself meticulously of all negative emotions, Lalla teaches, and by developing the qualities of equanimity and resilience.
134. K: 117
asi āsi tay asīy āsav
This poem revisits what I have called the ‘dance of perpetual circularity’, which Lalla dwells on in poem 8. The substance of the Self abides across time, even as the universe comes into being, is dissolved and is brought into being again. Shiva is invoked here as the Breaker of Worlds, as regular as the solar cycle, presiding over the wheel of existence, guiding every kalpa from one cosmic deluge to the next.
135. G: 78 | K: 120
kus ḍingi ta kus zāgi
136. G: 79 | K: 121
man ḍingi ta akǒl zāgi
Paired as question and answer, like poems 66 and 67, vākhs 135 and 136 carry the cadence of an initiation ritual. The questioner asks a series of questions of seemingly vast and cosmic-scale import, beginning with the memorable ‘Who’s asleep and who’s awake?’ The answers centre the locus of redemption in the bodied self: the mind and its ability to slough off the material attachments and parameters of space, time and particularity that weigh it down; the organs of sense, their energy replenished by the activated sahasrāra, are the lake from which a rain of nectar falls constantly; Shiva’s favourite offering is ‘knowledge of Self’; and the parama-pad or Supreme Word—this term can also mean ‘Supreme Place’—that the seeker is looking for is tsētana-Shiv, ‘Shiva-consciousness’, the recognition that one is identical with the Shiva-principle. I have compressed this recognition as ‘The Supreme Word you’re looking for/is Shiva Yourself.’
137. K: 43
maṅdachi hāṅkal kar chaynäm
As in poems 92–94, in which she responds to the curses and insults of her detractors, Lalla here contemplates the shame in which other people try and mantle her. She indicates the strategies by which the chain and robe of shame can be eliminated. Resilience is called for, as well as the need to curb and tame the wild horse of the mind, so that it remains focused on the inward quest and is not tempted to divert its energies into reacting to provocations.
138. K: 44
parān parān zěv tāl phajim
139. K: 34
treśi bǒchi mō kreśināvun
140. K: 31
kaṅdyo karakh kaṅdi kaṅdē
141. K: 32
sǒman gārun manz yath kaṅdē
In the small garland of poems from 138 to 141, Lalla contemplates questions of spiritual hygiene, dwelling variously on themes such as the relationship between the body and the mind, the difference between the mere repetition of mantras and the inspired entry into transcendent awareness, and the correct attitude towards the body.
In poem 138, Lalla ridicules the mindless repetition of prayers and chants, undertaken as quantitative performances meant to generate spiritual merit rather than in the spirit of devotion and self-overcoming. While they may exhaust the individual physically—tongue cloven to the palate, thumb and finger raw from telling the beads—they can neither qualify as true worship nor can they purify the consciousness of its persisting discontents.
In vākh 139, Lalla turns the searchlight of critique on the pursuit of mindless austerities. She addresses a perennial tendency within haṭha-yoga—the branch of Yogic practice dedicated to the purification of the body in preparation for higher meditational exercises—which fetishises the cult of self-mortification as an end in itself. Instead of brutalising the body with fasts and extreme vows (which is really to yield to the spiritual sin of arrogance), she urges the aspirant to practise a rigorous morality: to demonstrate altruism and compassion, to release the self towards others and their needs. This poem, like poem 91, resonates with the Bu
ddha’s teaching of the brahma-vihāras, the accent here being specifically on maitri/metta, loving-kindness, and karuṇā, compassion.
Pointing to the inevitable fate of the body as a perishable vehicle for the Imperishable, in poem 140, Lalla deplores the obsession with the body as an expression of doomed and futile vanity. This poem has the ring of a meditation intended to guide the aspirant beyond normal, body-centred consciousness, and to pass beyond the illusion of the permanence of the body, its desires and idiosyncrasies. Such meditations on mortality are well documented in other spiritual traditions as well: for instance, the Aghora Śaivite practice of meditating in cemeteries, the Tantrayāna meditation on a skull, and the Catholic monastic exercise of contemplation in an ossuary.
In vākh 141, Lalla corrects the balance in favour of a sane respect for the body. Urging us not to reject the body, she describes it as the svarūp, the Self’s own form: an opportunity to take bodied human existence seriously as an experiment in perfectibility. Lalla suggests that, by refining away the lower passions, the aspirant can realise the potentiality of the soul’s corporal sheath, so that it reveals itself to be ‘this body as bright as the sun’, yathi kaṅdi tīz tay sor prakāśa.
142. K: 25
zanum prāvith věbav nō tsōṇḍum
In this brief and intensely moving manifesto, similar in tenor to poems 45 and 90, Lalla asserts that she never sought fame, notoriety or affluence in life; nor did she wish to indulge in the pleasures of the floating world of appearances and desires. The oddly personal detail in the third line, concerning her moderate meals, gathers poignancy when she passes lightly over her years of starvation and pain, to close the poem with the healing vision of the Divine.
143. G: 73
tsāmar chạthar rathu simhāsan
144. G: 74
kyah bǒḍukh muha bhawa-sǒdari-dārě
145. G: 75
karm zah kāran trah kǒmbith
146. G: 76 | K: 102
jñānȧki ambar pairith tanē
The poems numbered 143, 144, 145 and 146 here form a group of variations on the contrast between absorption in worldly pleasures and absorption in the spiritual question, with the fear of death as a constant presence; indeed, all four poems end with variations on the disquieting phrase, maranünü shökh.
Poem 143 lays out the privileges of royal status: the regalia of the chowry or yak-tail fly-whisk, the ceremonial canopy, the chariot and the lion throne; the enjoyment of theatrical performances, a comfortable bed. But can these withstand the fear of death? Poem 144 is set in the Kashmiri countryside, and pits the fugitive self that has squandered the opportunity for transcendence and fallen into the ‘marsh of shadows’ against the inexorable figure of Yama, Lord of Death. His warders are unforgiving in the prosecution of their task; in dragging the fugitive to Yama’s palace, they subject him, in Lalla’s words, to the mediaeval punishment known in Kashmiri as chōra-dārě karun, when the prisoner is dragged along the ground, so that he leaves a wake of blood behind him.
In poem 145, Lalla lays out a succinct metaphysics of redemption. There are two kinds of karma: good and bad, each leaving its residues. There are three kinds of causes of the conditional existence of the material world, all technically defined as malas or taints: āṇava-mala, the taint of believing that the soul is finite; māyīya-mala, the taint of maintaining cognitive distinctions between one thing and another; and kārma-mala, the taint of generating action, and therefore pleasure and pain. The residues of both kinds of karma and all three taints must be destroyed by the yogini, using the breath-control technique of kumbhaka, holding up and containing the body’s vital breath currents. The yogini’s passage through life must be, in J. Krishnamurti’s vivid and memorable phrase, like the flight of the eagle, which leaves no mark. Poem 145 celebrates the soul’s journey to the Supreme, transiting through the house of the sun.
In poem 146, the last vākh in this translation, Lalla invites the aspirant to put on the robe of wisdom and commit her vākhs to memory and practice. Through mindful devotion to the primal syllable, Om, she says, she became absorbed in the light of the awakened consciousness, tsěth-jyōti, and so defeated the fear of death: an exemplar that can be emulated, a spiritual technology of hope and liberation that can be passed on to future generations.
References
I. Lal Děd: Translations and Commentaries
Translations
Grierson, Sir George Abraham and Lionel D. Barnett, trans. and eds. 1920. Lallā-Vākyāni, or the wise sayings of Lal Ded, A mystic poetess of ancient Kashmir. Vol. 27 of Asiatic Society Monographs. London: The Royal Asiatic Society.
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