Lal Ded's Spiritual Journey-IV

Dr S S Toshkhani

This is the fourth and the last part of the text of a paper read by Dr. S.S. Toshkhani at the seminar on Lal Ded organised by the Foundation for Universal Responsibility of His Holiness the Dalai Lama held at the India International Centre, New Delhi, on March 15, 2008-Editor.

The end of moonlight", of course means the early dawn when the night of ignorance is over. The mad one" is none else but the mind, "intoxicated and maddened by worldly illusion". "The loved one" who is "awakened" by Lalla is

the self.

The first step in this mystic progression is "self-annihilation or destruction of all doubt and dualism", and the culmination is one's Shiva nature. It is an inexpressible and indescribable state in which nothing remains except Shiva consciousness.

In telling images, Lal Ded tries to describe the state of her mind as she attunes herself to feeling Shiva's presence everywhere and in everything, naturally and freely. As one ineffable and undifferentiated reality, He transcends all polarities and yet is immanent as Shakti, making Himself known through the world of phenomena which She unfolds as His creative power. The two, in fact, are not separate from one another but two aspects of the one absolute reality. Lalla experiences the bliss of their union as she enters the garden of her own heart. And it is there that she finally quenches her thirst for the "nectar of un-differentiation":

Through the door to the garden of my mind

I, Lalla, entered and lo what bliss!

I saw Shiva in communion with Shakti

There I became immersed in the lake of nectar

Now what can Death do unto me?

For I shall be dead even though alive!

This is the height of mystic experience that

Lalla now attains the state of becoming a jivanmukta or liberated while still alive. In such a state death ceases to have any meaning.

Yet, even in the state of rapturous union with Shiva "full of incomparable sweetness" which has "filled the abyss of separation" as Utpaldeva says, the ecstasy may last only for a moment like "a flash of lightning". It is samaavesha or total immersion in the Lord that the Shaiva mystic craves for. Like Utpaldeva, Lalla too is apprehensive that she may not after all be able to drink from the "cups of nectar" full to the brim that she sees tantalisingly before her

Absorption in the Self led me to that house of nectar

There were cups filled to the brim but no one was drinking.

Eventually, Lalla reaches a stage where she acquires an uninterrupted and unmediated awareness of the Ultimate Reality. This is anupaya or 'no-means' in which there is direct experience of reality without recourse to any means. If all is Shiva, then there is nothing for the seeker to do but to remain as he or she is. Here all contradictions resolve and all opposites merge. The difference between subject and object, liberation and bondage disappears. It is an experience of the absolute beyond. transcendence and immanence (Shiva and Shakti), existent or non-existent. It is about this state that Lalla speaks in this verse:

Nothing exists there

Word or mind, manifest or transcendent

Nor vow of silence, nor yogic gestures

Have any admission there

Nor Shiva, nor His Shakti there reside

If anything remains then take that as the precept.

At another place we find her saying:

Neither you, nor I, nor meditation or its object exists

All actions are forgotten automatically

The blind could make nothing of it

But the wise became one with this supreme state.

Lalla attempts to express her experience of immersion into the ineffable reality called Shiva, whose essence is inconceivable and beyond. contemplation except in terms of the concept of shunya or emptiness. She takes us along this difficult metaphysical terrain with relative ease. Her favourite expression "shunyas shunyah milith gav" (emptiness has merged with the emptiness) is widely relished by her readers though its actual meaning evades the understanding of most of them. The term shunya has actually been taken by Kashmir Shaivite philosophers from Madhyamika Buddhism but interpreted in their own way by them to denote 'fullness' of the Absolute. Lalla often uses it to point to her state of absorption into the Supreme:

When the sun disappeared, there remained moonlight

When the moon vanished, only mind remained

When the mind too disappeared, then nothingness was left

Then earth, ether and sky merged into vacuity.

When the Tantras disappeared, the mantras remained

When mantra disappeared, the mind remained

When mind too disappeared then nothing remained

Emptiness merged with the emptiness.

The vicissitudes that Lal Ded goes through to arrive at the threshold of this experience are many. She traverses, in fact, a reverse journey from manifestation to undifferentiated awareness, from the categories of existence to the supreme subjectivity of Paramashiva, from the gross to the subtle and subtler. It is a process that involves piercing of the veils of Maya and expansion of consciousness to include the entire universe as one's own self. It does not take place in any i external realm but in one's own mind.

Though He was within, I searched for him outside

The control of breath soothed my nerves

Through meditation, I realised that the world and God are one

The manifest world became one with the unmanifest

Kashmir Shaivism is a life-affirmative philosophy that regards the human body as an abode of the divine. It validates the reality of the material world and considers consciousness to be the substratum and ground of everything. "yathaa tatra tathaa anyatra", "As it is there so it is here", says the Shivasutra. As such, what is outside is not different from the core of one's own inner being. And that is what is integral to Lal Ded's thinking also.

Lalla's mystic journey to realisation was by no means an easy one. She attained the spiritual heights she came to scale after straining every nerve. She tells us of her excruciating experience in quite a few of her verses:

The soles of my feet tore off and smeared the paths I walked

Then the One alone showed me the one true path

But she emerges from this ordeal unscathed and brimming with self-confidence. It is a new Lalla, transformed in both body and mind. And she talks about this transformation with a new sense of self-assurance and in an unusually ecstatic tone:

The soul is ever new, the mind is new,

The waste of water I saw new and new!

Since body, mind I scoured through and through

I, Lalla, too, am ever new and new. (Trs. Nila Cram Cook)

Her illumination to her is a real experience and she begins to see things in a new light.

As a spiritual genius whose face radiated all the wisdom of an enlightened Shaiva sage ("T diffused my inner light in the world outside"), Lal Ded now starts wandering from place to place to share her insights with everybody who cared to listen. Displaying a Bodhisattva like compassion, she tries to reach out to the common people and engages in discourse with them. Shiva is not someone out there, she tells them, Shiva is everywhere. Shiva is everyone's innate nature.

This must have certainly had a great impact on all those who came to Lal Ded for spiritual guidance. She seems to have known her audience well to which she explained the Triadic (trika) vision of oneness of God, man and the world in an idiom it could easily understand.

However, a non-conformist as she was, a rebel in, her total rejection of outer ceremony, animal sacrifice, fasts and other shams and pretences, sacred dates and sacred places, and other forms of religious shams and pretences against which we find her lashing out in her vaaks, must have offended some sections of the society of her times. To her these were mere "orthodox ritual genuflections", to borrow an expression from A.K Ramanujan, but her scathing attacks evoked hostility from the orthodoxy for which religious formalism was an accepted way of life. Not taking it kindly, they reacted sharply and in turn subjected her to mocks and jeers. She, however, remained unruffled, taking all the slander in its stride and refusing to get provoked, her humanistic impulses guiding her even in her relations with her detractors:

Let them hurl thousands of abuses at me,

I will not entertain any grievance in my mind

If I a true devotee of Shankara be

How can ashes stain the mirror, after all?

Here Lal Ded unambiguously affirms her status as a Bhakta of Shankara, and it is in this capacity that adoration or abuse does not disturb her equanimity. This is an important assertion as Bhakti for her is not "just a simple attitude and an unthinking act of faith", to put it in the words of Krishna Sharma which she uses in while talking of Kabir, "but a well reasoned and individual act of spiritual striving." "Indeed it is her intense longing to be immersed in the love of the divine that gives her poetry the distinct flavour it has. But she gives this yearning of oneness with Shiva as the transcendent reality a unique twist by expressing her desire to be one with His immanent aspect also. If "Shiva is all" then how can He be different from the ordinary man the man on the street who laughs and sneezes and coughs and yawns, she says in a powerful yet totally ignored verse:

Yes He it is Who laughs and coughs and yawns

He, the ascetic naked all the year,

Who bathes in sacred pools in all the dawns

But recognize how He to you is near.

(Trs. Nila Cram Cook)

There are dimensions of Lal Ded's personality and creativity which have to be explored before we can understand the entire range of her attainments. So far not much has been done in this direction with most studies of the great mediaeval saint-poetess remaining hardly any thing more than clichéd statements full of oversimplifications, vague generalisations, contradictions or distortions that tend to strip her of her real glories. There are some who have tried to link her humanistic concerns and her acute social awareness with superficial issues of present day political debates. Looking for communitarian ideas in her verses, they have twisted her spiritual humanism and interpreted it in an arbitrary manner to suit their ideological predilections. Though she is deeply troubled by the sorrow and suffering that prevails as a part of the human condition, she sees its solution only in the realisation of man's essential divinity- 'Shivahood' to use the term of Kashmir Shaiva philosophy in which her worldview is anchored. Everything is Shiva and therefore Shiva is everything. Nothing is separate from the eternality of existence. Creation and dissolution, life and death are aspects of a process that never ceases. Human life is an eternal flow of consciousness, a stream that flows onwards and onwards:

We have been there in the past

And in the future we shall be

Forever the sun rises and sets

Forever Shiva creates and dissolves and

creates again.

It is this view of reality that is at the core of Lalla's mystic realisation.

Lal Ded's poetry continues to dazzle us with its million watt incandescence, its meaning unfolding at several levels. She started her spiritual journey as a tormented soul but attained a stage where self-realisation and self-awareness gave her inner strength and the confidence that derived from that strength. If Lal Ded's immense impact on the Kashmiri mind has practically remained undiminished despite the passage of almost seven centuries, it is essentially because of the fusion of the poet and the saint in her. Or, to borrow the words of Dileep Chitre, which he has used for the great Bhakti poet Tukaram, it is because of "a poet's vision of spirituality and a saint's vision of poetry" which she presents in her vaakhs.

(Concluded)

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Courtesy:- Dr S S Toshkhani and January 2009, Koshur Samachar