hides in the earth,
a sweetness in fruit;
and in plain-looking rock
lies a golden ore,
and in seeds,
the treasure of oil.
Like these,
the Infinite
rests concealed in the heart.
No one can see the ways
of our jasmine-white Lord.
:JH
Not one, not two, not three or four,
but through eighty-four thousand vaginas
have I come,
I have come
through unlikely worlds,
guzzled on
pleasure and pain.
Whatever be
all previous lives,
show me mercy
this one day,
O lord
white as jasmine.
:AKR
Would a circling surface vulture
know such depths of sky
as the moon would know?
would a weed on the riverbank
know such depths of water
as the lotus would know?
would a fly darting nearby
know the smell of flowers
as the bee would know?
O lord white as jasmine
only you would know
the way of your devotees:
how would these,
these
mosquitoes
on the buffalo’s hide?
:AKR
Husband inside,
lover outside.
I can’t manage them both.
This world
and that other,
cannot manage them both.
O lord white as jasmine
I cannot hold in one hand
both the round nut
and the long bow.
:AKR
Who cares
who strips a tree of leaf
once the fruit is plucked?
Who cares
who lies with a woman
you have left?
Who cares
who ploughs the land
you have abandoned?
After this body has known my lord
who cares if it feeds
a dog
or soaks up water?
:AKR
People,
male and female,
blush when a cloth covering their shame
comes loose.
When the lord of lives
lives drowned without a face
in the world, how can you be modest?
When all the world is the eye of the lord,
onlooking everywhere, what can you
cover and conceal?
:AKR
Make me go from house to house
If I beg, make them give nothing.
If they give, make it fall to the ground.
If it falls, before I pick it up, make a dog take it,
O lord
white as jasmine.
:AKR
Riding the blue sapphire mountains
wearing moonstone for slippers
blowing long horns
O Śiva
when shall I
crush you on my pitcher breasts
O lord white as jasmine
when do I join you
stripped of body’s shame
and heart’s modesty?
:AKR
If He says
He has to go away
to fight battles at the front
I understand and can be quiet.
But how can I bear it
when He is here in my hands
right here in my heart
and will not take me?
O mind, O memory of pasts,
if you will not help me get to Him
how can I ever bear it?
:AKR
Mahādēviyakka
MAHĀDĒVIYAKKA BELONGED to an outspoken, antiorthodox group of poets who sang or wrote in Kannada, a language of Dravidian stock, spoken in the southern state of Mysore. Collectively these poets are called Vīraśaiva—heroic Śiva worshippers. Each poet’s vacanas or “poems” carry an identifying signature line, an aṅkita, which bears not the poet’s name but the name of one of Śiva’s specific local forms. You can identify the poet by the form of Śiva he or she sings to. Mahādēviyakka, born in the twelfth century, was initiated at the age of ten by an unknown guru, and from then on considered her lover to be Mallikārjuna, a form of Śiva housed in her home village of Uḍutaḍi. A.K. Ramanujan translates the name—Mallika (jasmine), Arjuna (white)—“lord white as jasmine.”
Renowned for her beauty and sparkling intelligence, but pledging herself to her god, Mahādēvi (akka, elder sister, is an honorary title) refused the advances of human suitors. A local chieftain named Kausika finally took her for his wife, but the marriage was doomed. Some of her poems play on the friction between her divine lover and her mortal husband.
Mother,
because they all have thorns
in their chests,
I cannot take
any man in my arms but my lord
white as jasmine.
(AKR translation)
Shortly after her wedding, Mahādēvi deserted her husband, her family, and her social ties, and took to wandering, intoxicated by god. Defiant in the face of social convention, particularly any oppressive to women, she shed her clothes, covering herself with long tresses of raven-black hair. She made her way to the city of Kalyana, where two older Vīraśaiva poets had formed a spiritual community founded on equality and fierce resistance to orthodox religion.
One of these poets, Allama, received Mahādēvi in quarters they called the Hall of Experience. The ensuing conversation—seasoned skeptical guru examining wildly passionate young visitor—became notable in Vīraśaiva lore. Mahādēviyakka’s surviving songs seem to stem from these dialogues. Allama asked to whom she was married; her reply: “the White Jasmine Lord.” One inevitable question was why she would throw off her clothes, as though she could shed illusion along with her raiment. Then, if free from human convention, why veil herself in hair? Her reply:
Till the fruit is ripe inside
the skin will not fall off.
I’d a feeling it would hurt you
if I displayed the body’s seals of love.
O brother, don’t tease me
needlessly. I’m given entire
into the hands of my lord
white as jasmine.
(AKR translation)
A.K. Ramanujan calls Mahādēviyakka a “love-child.” In the early 1970s at the University of Chicago, where he produced his translations, he must have thought the students on campus looked just like her. In her own time, the Vīraśaivas regarded Mahādēviyakka as the most accomplished of poets and the one with deepest insight. Her vacanas are not rustic or unstudied. They depict the phases of love found in Sanskrit poetry and drama, and speak of adulterous love with a secret partner, of insufferable hours when her lover is absent, and of rapture at sexual union. “In her,” Ramanujan writes, “the phases of human love are metaphors for the phases of mystic ascent.”
: LAL DED
(EARLY FOURTEENTH CENTURY)
Beneath you yawns a pit.
How can you dance over it,
how can you gather belongings?
There’s nothing you can take with you.
How can you even
savor food or drink?
:AS
I have seen an educated man starve,
a leaf blown off by bitter wind.
Once I saw a thoughtless fool
beat his cook.
Lalla has been waiting
for the allure of the world
to fall away.
:AS
This world,
compared to You—
a lake so tiny
even a mustard seed
is too large for it to hold.
Yet from that lake all Beings drink.
And into it deer, jackals,
rhinoceri, sea-elephants falling.
From the earliest moment of birth,
falling and falling
in You.
:JH
I searched for my Self
until I grew weary,
but no one, I know now,
reaches the hidden knowledge
by means of effort.
Then, absorbed in “Thou art This,”
I found the place of Wine.
There all the jars are filled,
but no one is left to drink.
:JH
Ocean and the mind are alike.
Under the ocean
flames vadvagni, the world-destroying fire.
In man’s heart twists the
flame of rage.
When that one bursts forth,
its searing words of wrath and abuse
scorch everything.
If you weigh the words
calmly, though, imperturbably,
you’ll see they have no substance,
no weight.
:AS
It provides your body clothes.
It wards off the cold.
It needs only scrub and water to survive.
Who instructed you, O Brahmin,
to cut this sheep’s throat—
to placate a lifeless stone?
:AS
I might scatter the southern clouds,
drain the sea, or cure someone
hopelessly ill.
But to change the mind
of a fool
is beyond me.
:AS
I came by the public road
but won’t return on it.
On the embankment I stand, halfway
through the journey.
Day is gone. Night has fallen.
I dig in my pockets but can’t find a
cowry shell.
What can I pay for the ferry?
:AS
The god is stone.
The temple is stone.
Top to bottom everything’s stone.
What are you praying to,
learned man?
Can you harmonize
your five bodily breaths
with the mind?
:AS
You are the earth, the sky,
the air, the day, the night.
You are the grain
the sandalwood paste
the water, flowers, and all else.
What could I possibly bring
as an offering?
:AS
Solitary, I roamed the width of Space,
and left trickery behind.
The place of the hidden Self
unfolded and out
of the muck,
a milk-white lotus.
:AS
To learn the scriptures is easy,
to live them, hard.
The search for the Real
is no simple matter.
Deep in my looking,
the last words vanished.
Joyous and silent,
the waking that met me there.
:JH
O Blue-Throated God
I have the same six constituents as you,
yet separate from you
I’m miserable.
Here’s the difference—
you have mastered the six
I’ve been robbed by them.
The six kancukas, “husks” or “coverings” of existence in Kashmir Śaivism:
appearance, form, time, knowledge, passion, fate.
:AS
I, Lalla, entered
the gate of the mind’s garden and saw
Śiva united with Śaktī.
I was immersed in the lake of undying bliss.
Here, in this lifetime,
I’ve been unchained from the wheel
of birth and death.
What can the world do to me?
:AS
Lal Ded
LAL DED was born in Kashmir early in the 1300s, probably to parents of some Hindu persuasion. Her vākh (verses, sayings) suggest an early education in her father’s house and eventual marriage into a Brahman family of Pampor, where her mother-in-law treated her with dispiriting cruelty. Lalla, as she calls herself in the signature line of her poems, took to visiting the nearby river each morning—traditional for an Indian woman who went to fetch the household’s water. But Lalla would cross the river secretly, maybe by ferry, to worship Naṭa Keśava Bhairava, a form of Śiva, in his temple situated on the far bank. Her mother-in-law, noticing her long absences, suspected her of infidelity. Rivers in Indian lore, particularly their shaded riparian groves and stands of tall, concealing rushes, are in convention the site of clandestine trysts. Lal Ded’s husband became soured by his mother’s suspicion and one day when Lalla entered the house with a pot of water on her head, struck it with his staff in a fit of violent jealousy. The earthenware jug shattered but the water remained “frozen” in place, atop her head, until Lalla had poured it into the household containers. A little leftover water she tossed out the door where it formed a miraculous lake, said to exist in the early twentieth century, but dry today.
Lalla’s reputation spread, based on a series of miracles she performed. People began to seek her out for assistance or simply to take darshan, that specifically Indian practice in which blessings come to a person who ceremonially takes sight of a deity, a saint, or a spiritual teacher. Lal Ded’s love of solitude was compromised by all the attention and the rancor in her house. She left her graceless marriage and took up the homeless life. Legend, based on the following verse, has it that she went forth naked, dancing on the roads, singing
her vākh.
My guru gave a single precept:
turn your gaze from outside to inside
fix it on the hidden self.
I, Lalla, took this to heart
and naked set forth to dance—
(AS translation)
One Muslim chronicler says she danced in ecstasy “like the Hebrew nabis of old and the more recent Dervishes.” Islamic writers chronicle her encounters with their holy men, while Hindu texts tell of gurus. The Kashmir of her day held Buddhists, Nath yogins, Brahman teachers, Sufis, and Tantric adepts. She may have learnt something from each of them. Still, she seems to have considered herself a dedicated Śaivite yogini (practitioner dedicated to Śiva); tales of insight and supernatural power surpassing that of her instructors began to circulate. Yet records of her don’t appear until centuries after her death, nor has anyone found manuscripts containing her vākh that date from anywhere near her lifetime.
Circulating oral stories make a good deal of her decision to live without clothing; this made her a spectacle at times. She was taunted. Jane Hirshfield tells the story of children pestering her, and a silk merchant who came to her defense with bundles of cloth. Taking two bolts of silk of equal weight, Lal Ded placed one on each shoulder and went on her way. “As she went through the day, each time someone ridiculed her, she tied a knot in the cloth on her left shoulder; each time someone praised her, she tied a knot in the cloth on the right. At day’s end, she returned to the merchant, and asked him to weigh the bundles again. She thanked him for his earlier concern, but also pointed out that, as he could see for himself, nothing had changed.” Whether blame or praise came her way, the bundles remained equal in weight.
Around the age of fifty Lal Ded sang some verses and a crowd gathered. On finishing she climbed into a large earthen pot and pulled another huge pot over her head. When she did not reemerge the spectators separated the two containers. She had vanished—as had Ā�
��ṭāḷ before her, and as Mirabai and Muktabai would in years to come.
: DHŪRJAṬI
(SIXTEENTH CENTURY)
My chest has been worn away
by the breasts of women rubbing against it.
My skin has been roughened
with love scars from their nails.
Lost in the straining of passion, youth
has gone.
My hair has started falling out,
I’m sick of it all.
I can’t go on in this circling world,
God of Kāḷahasti, make me
desireless.
:HH & VNR
Saying this is your wife, they bring a woman
and the knots are tied at the neck.
Then children come one after another
and the boys take their brides
and the girls are given in marriage.
O God of Kāḷahasti,
how did you fashion this worthless wheel
of family love that turns us,
cog meshing smoothly with cog around
and around?
:HH & VNR
When mourners cry out over the dead
burning on the river bank, they will say,
“O God of Death! We are coming,
we as well, you can be sure of us,
we know it!” Then they take the cleansing bath
and the fools move on and they forget
the real weight of what they have said.
O God of Kāḷahasti
:HH & VNR
How can you be praised in elaborate language,
similes, conceits, overtones, secondary meanings,
or textures of sound? They cannot contain
your form. Enough of them!
More than enough. Can poetry hold out
before the face of truth?
Ah, but we poets,
O God of Kāḷahasti,
why don’t we feel any shame?
:HH & VNR
In town after town,