लभते जनिं यः परमे स्वमूले
विचार्य् कस्मादहमित्युदायः।
स एव जातः स च नित्य जातो
नवो नवो 'यं सततं मुनीन्द्रः।।
labhate janim yah parame svamuule
vicaarya kasmad aham ityudayah.
sa eva jatah sa ca nitya jato
navo navo 'yam satatam muniindrah.
He attains birth in the highest root of the Self having thought "From where does this 'I' arise?"
Constantly new, this Lord among sages alone is born, and he is born into eternity.
Well, it's apparent that I have allowed some lax in a 'blog lately. A little laze, if you will, results from the return of an old friend of mine named schedule; and schedule's friend, habit, takes hold on somnolent and ambulatory patterns like a maid efficient in organizing one's living space. In the former, a familiar pattern that I recognize from a number of years ago, has (re)emerged at mystical times between waking and sleep.
When I moved to Pune, Mahrashtra, India twenty-one months ago, I stepped into a dreamworld. I told my mother as much before boarding my flight West from St. Louis, Missouri, "I feel like I am living a dream."
And settling in Pune, then, amidst a group of American scholars and peers, I spoke by phone with my mother:
"I want to make my study of Sanskrit relevant to today," I told her. And she replied, "Good luck!"
But more than simply luck, my mother and father consistently display a humble and encouraging force that, like good-habit, affects some ultimately mystical grace that guides my life in ways mostly unrealized. This in the form of love that they shower seems to fertilize a knowledge capable of coming to know that which is, at first, seemingly unknowable. It is the stuff of dreams. And in comparison to those dreams of two years ago, my recent dreams are of a similar nature: Too pleasurable to be a thing of waking conscious but too conscious to be a thing of sleep...
A glass within a glass. Each one floods into the other. The contents--one from the other--increasingly indiscernible, become some mixture of a world whose possibility is limited only by the thoughts that the mind chooses to hold. Our collective limitation, the stuff of language, is realized to be a creative bind.
ಆಶಾ ನಾಮ ಮನುಷ್ಯಾನಾಂ ಕಾಚಿದಾಶ್ಚರ್ಯ ಶೃಞ್ಕಲಾ
ಯಯಾ ಬದ್ಧಾಃ ಪ್ರಧಾವನ್ತಿ ಮುಕ್ತಾಸ್ತಿಷ್ಠನ್ತಿ ಪಂಗುವತ್
Imaginative hope has become some sort of fantastic fetter: Those who stand unchained are lame like a cripple; those bound by it run forward. They choose to create a mould for the future, realized (perhaps quixotically) in language.
The mangala shloka, or opening verse of this 'blog entry I memorized in the room where the mother of Bhagavan Sri Ramana Maharshi attained liberation.
The writing that follows that shloka is excerpted from a diary of about one month ago. It seems fitting, now, that this experience preceded my journey to live for three days at the base of Arunachala in Tiruvannamalai, Tamil Nadu.
From the late 19th through the mid-20th century lived Bhagavan Sri Ramana Maharshi. The Self-realization and teaching on matters of the soul that Maharshi exposed has garnered hundreds of thousands of devotees across the world. Many of them (the fortunate ones, I suppose) descend upon what I can only imagine as a once quiet town in the South of India. The town, Tiruvannamalai, takes its name from the Annamalai Temple that dates from about the mid-9th century.
This is one of five prominent temples of Shiva in South India. Each one of these five prominent temples (four in Tamil Nadu and one in present-day Andhra Pradesh) is dedicated to Shiva. I spoke with one Sadhu, Maheshvara, on the slopes of Arunachala who strove to assist me in memorizing the places of these temples by giving to me a handy acronym: Tk^2TC. That is Tiruvannamalai, Kanchipuram, Kaalahasti, Thiruvannaikkaval, and Chidambaram. Each temple in each city is dedicated to Lord Shiva existing as different different elements, respectively: fire, earth, air, water, and ether/space.
I laughed over this acronym with Maheshvar, and joked that this is the 21st century Maheshvarasutra. (The Maheshvarasutra, for those non-Sanskritists, is a list of 14 phoneme clusters from which is derived elements of Sanskrit grammar.) Indians, too, are fond of acronyms as my brother, Chris, can tell you all about from reading Indian English language newspapers during his visit last year. He astutely pointed out that if you don't know a lot of acronyms, you're out of luck!
Maheshvara then told me that I had been enlightened by this acronym on b^2p, or the mathematical name of Arunachala-- beauty, bliss, and peace. However, to see Arunachala is something of a waking dream-like experience. To describe it with mathematical equations that signify adjectives like beauty and majesty falls short of its grandeur.
Maheshvar and I spoke for some time, and I sang some poetry for a small group of us who had gathered together on this path in a special place with all types of wonderful human experiences effortlessly packaged for us mortals by a respectable and great sage.
Sri Ramana Maharshi's teachings focus a great deal on becoming increasingly aware of our self through a practice called self-inquiry: From where does this 'I' arise? The question originally forwarded by Maharshi to his first disciples was in Tamil, naan yaar, which closely resembles the same question translated either into Telugu (nevu...?) or Kannada, ನಾನು ಯಾರು naanu yaaru: "Who am 'I'" को 'हम्् ko ham in Sanskrit.
Jesus, too, is recorded as making a similar question in the form of a statement in Psalm 46.10: "Be still and know that I am god."
So what does it all mean? The beauty of the statement, like the the best poetry, has infinite and always new potential meaning. That is, it is timeless. It is timeless in the most transcendent and most imminent way simultaneously. It is both the core of our self and that which we seek. Never not present; also, often, unrecognized. When it is recognized, too, it is often not a conscious or fully aware recognition. It is the stuff of heaven in which we walk here, and that into which we will be born hereafter.
Try to imagine not understanding the language you grew into your young self. It is a difficult task, if not impossible. Can we ever not understand our primary language, having acquired it? Like our primary language, can we ever not know our self having understood the full breadth and depth of what the 'I' experiences?
Maharshi, the great seer, calls our attention to our experience of three types of awareness: Waking, dreaming, and deep sleep. These are all aspects of experience to which we can relate an 'I'. I experience the world awake, and I experience--perhaps--a world away in my dreamscape; but I have little, or altogether different, or no recollection of the material world in dreams; and while I am in deep sleep, there is no awareness of a world or an 'I' at all, be it of dreams or 'real'. We can thus know via negative knowledge (the experience of waking in the morning) that 'I' exists even when we are not conscious of that 'I', an experience to which we can all relate.
Usually, too, I, while awake, have little or no recollection of 'I' in dreams; but when I do recollect, I also understand that 'I' in dreams to be different from the 'I' awake. What I think Maharshi tells us, then, is to strive to become increasingly aware of this 'I' in these three different aspects of conscious experience.
This is the stuff Maharshi's unique blend of Advaita, or non-dual, vedanta philosophy. Vedanta comes from the four traditions of sacred Sanskrit texts, the Vedas. Veda + anta = Vedanta literally means the end of the Vedas, and therefore refers to a collection of nine texts known as the Upanishads, or--literally-- those which are spoken while sitting near [the feet of the guru presumably].
The question-- in all its various formulations: naan yaar, ko 'ham, naanu yaaru, who am I?-- I think, poses a really interesting challenge that is productive in a lot matters of life. kasmaad aham itudarah? From what, because of what did 'I' arise? What did 'I' arise to do?
Clearly all of us will neither choose to sit nor are we destined to sit for years in meditation as the great sage, Ramana Maharshi, sat meditating in caves on the mountain of the dawn, Arunachala. But it seems to me reasonable that we attempt to bring our dreams and the rejuvenating pleasures of deep sleep into ever greater dimensions of self-awareness. The next step--and this is probably more important and more challenging-- is to give up that 'I'.
What is it, then, that we really need? If we accept this challenge to increase our domain of conscious experience, very little remains essential.
Seven years' time has passed since I read 'Be As You Are', a compilation of Bhagavan's teachings edited by David Godman. A friend, John, had given me the book during my first year of college at The University of Colorado, and reading it I began to meditate on Bhagavan regularly for some years; however, with a busy life and lots of study my focus shifted and lots of other things began to pile into my mind. Life happened, I suppose. Lots and lots of life!
Anyhow, I finally arrived on 23 January 2010 at 3:30 A.M. to the place Bhagavan regarded with such favor during his 71 years, at the foot of Arunachala. Upon arrival I visited the room where Sri Ramana Maharshi attained Mahanirana. Shortly thereafter, the gates to one meditation hall were opened and young students of the Vedas came from their morning baths to chant the sacred texts in front of Bhagavan's murti, or statue. The students and their teacher were very kind to allow me to sit with them, and after they finished their hour-long rote recitations I surprised them all with a few minutes of Sanskrit conversation--they were thus pleasantly surprised, as was I, in the early morning at the base of Arunachala.
One of my great pleasures in India is to listen to Vedic chanting and inquire from the students to understand the sutras' meanings: both what it means to them as students of the tradition and what it means linguistically. Vedic Sanskrit is an altogether different beast from the Classical Sanskrit that I study; but with my late foray into the tradition of Grammar, I am being to be exposed to a lot of examples drawn from Vedic literature that constitute grammatical exceptions from the perspective of the classical corpus.
Following the welcoming surprise, I was shown to the room in which I stayed. I bathed and rested and walked to the mess hall for breakfast. The style here is very down-to-earth, literally. We eat on the floor from leaves pinned together by twigs and dried. Cleanliness is not an issue--the place is spotless! The food is prepared by a brahmin kitchen staff and it is considered as 'prasad', or a gift from Bhagavan. It is 'sattvik'. That is, very pure according to an ayurvedic point of view. It is not too spicy, but not too bland; Ramanashramam is in South India so these are rice-based meals; and the food is meant to act from the inside together with the environment to cleanse the mind-body and promote general well-beingness. It works as Arunachala does: Like a dream!
It is customary for devotees of Lord Shiva to circumambulate Arunachala, regarded as a naturally born manifestation of the god. This is to be done barefoot over one of two paths. One inner, the other outer. The outer path is 14 kilometers, and it is along this path that I began to walk after my lunch in the late afternoon on 23 January. The experience is a trying one, as the ground is hot and full of rocks and the road is full of big busses, horses, trucks, cows, pedestrians--some walking, some crippled, some otherwise destitute--tractors, goats, buffalo, sheep, bull-ox, rickshaws, elephants, motorcycles, and more! It's pretty regular. Besides spending some time in walking meditation, I gained a greater appreciation for cow patties. These little islands of dry turd on hot concrete are welcome relief to the sole!
To see Arunachala from all sides alone makes the walk incredibly worth-while. A night walk, when the roads are more quiet and the moon is full, however, might be advisable for a potential future visit I would like to make with you who read this 'blog!
And so as I again spend my days in Mysore sitting in libraries to study ancient grammar and treatises describing the nature of poetic beauty, I feel my self again entering into the state of dreamscape expanded. This is the place from where I pull my thoughts, and my thoughts, then, through language, become the medium with which I create some productive tension between myself and the divine that is to be reflected, ever anew, in the letters and words and sentences of paragraphs, papers, and concepts.
Knowledge and thought alone is the stuff of experience. To recognize patterns in thought, and to create knowledge of those patterns which are not readily apparent is the stuff of scholarship. This is how I have been trained to think by teachers in the past. It is along these lines that I seek to engage a study of medieval Indian social, political, and literary history using materials that that are 1000+ years old to comment on and critique structures of power in the present. This is no easy task. Moreover, the possibility of this task is only barely possible from the knowledge intellectuals have developed in available scholarship. How, then, might the fruits of such labour appear? What are the means by which the student or scholar might realize such knowledge, and what cautions, or limits, must that student or scholar bear in mind regarding the possibility of such knowledge?
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