Saundarya Lahari

SAUNDARYA LAHARI SHORT COMMENTS AND STRUCTURAL DIAGRAMS

SAUNDARYA LAHARI

A VERSE TRANSLATION WITH SHORT COMMENTARIES
AND NUMEROUS STRUCTURAL DIAGRAMS

BY NATARAJA GURU

We present here Nataraja Guru's translation of the Saundarya Lahari,
reproduced from three sources.
Source SLP7, in Patrick Misson's hand, dates from 1972-3, when it
was dictated by the Guru at Ootacamund, as was source SLP6, of which
it is a revised version, though continuing up to verse 71 inclusive .
It is accompanied by a partial word for word translation, dictated
by Nataraja Guru.
Source SLP8 is the continuation of source SLP7 (from verse 72
inclusive), and in conjunction with SLP6, must be considered as
the "finalized version" of the Guru's verse translation.
Probably no version can stand alone, and only a comparison of all
authentic sources can approach the convolutions and double
entendres of the original sanskrit.

We suggest you consult SAUNDARYA LAHARI VARIANTS to make this clearer.
There are gaps in the word-for-word, which we have not attempted to fill.
Other sources in NOTES have variant word-for-word translations.
The Guru used Monier-Williams' Sanskrit Dictionary as a reference,
but always stated that the Sanskrit language, especially in the poetic form
used in the Saundarya Lahari, is so ambiguous and given to double
or suggested meanings that any translation is approximate only.
The transliteration of Sanskrit which the editors customarily
use: (MacDonell's system, as used in his " Sanskrit Grammar for
Students" Oxon.1927) proves impossible to reproduce with the
software available at the moment. Until such time as means are
available, we have opted for transliteration without diacritical marks
etc., which can serve as an indication only of the correct pronunciation.
Ambiguities can be resolved by consulting the text in Devanagari script.
We have also preserved variant spellings of Sanskrit names:
e.g. "Shiva" for Siva as these were used indifferently in the
original documents. The Sanskrit letter is pronounced somewhere between
the english "s" and "sh" sounds.

VERSES 1 TO 10 - THE MAIN STRUCTURAL FEATURES
ARE INTRODUCED

VERSE 1
THE PARADOX IS POSED
Shiva, united with Shakti, becomes able to manifest,
If otherwise, this god knows not even how to pulsate,
How then could one of ungained merit be able to bow to, or even praise,
One, such as You, adored even by Vishnu, Shiva and Brahma.

Both Shiva and Shakti have equal importance.
Shiva is not active - only a catalyst, a parameter like the thread of a
pearl necklace - a correlating principle at the Omega Point.
Maya is spreading from the Alpha point at the bottom of the vertical
Axis to the virtual and actual sides.
The numerator is only a thin parameter and a crescent moon worn on
Shiva's forehead and cannot pulsate without the Devi.
Shiva is a catalyst - he does not change.
Shiva is a magnet
Shiva is a fire,which is not affected by heat, but heats an iron ball.

slp6-p2-v1.

STRUCTURE SLP6-P2-V1

slp6-p2-v1a.

STRUCTURE SLP6-P2-V1A

Kshetra , the Field, is horizontal - as is Shakti
Kshatrajna, the knower of the field, is vertical - as is Shiva.
The distinction between the field and the knower of the field is wisdom.

WORD-FOR-WORD TRANSLATION
sivah - Shiva
saktya - by Shakti, his horizontal counterpart
yukto yadi - if united
bhavati saktaha - becomes able
prabhavitum - to manifest
na ced evam devaha - if otherwise,this god
na khalu kusalaha - does indeed not know (khalu=indeed)
spanditum api - even to pulsate
ataha tvam - thus (one such as) you
aradhyam - adorable
hari hara virincadibhir api - even to V., Sh. and Br.
pranant hum stotum va - to bow down to or even to praise
katham akrta punya prabhavitum - how could one of ungained merit
be able


VERSE 2
THREE PHENOMENAL FUNCTIONS IN A "MONDE AFFINE"

The fine dust arising from Your lotus feet,
Brahma gathers up and the worlds creates,
Vishnu incessantly bears them up somehow with his thousand heads,
And Shiva, having shaken it up, accomplishes with it his ash-
wearing rite.

This is a particle world, a "monde affiné", as described by Henri Bergson.

WORD-FOR-WORD TRANSLATION
taniyamsam pamsum - the fine dust
tava carana pankeruha bhavam - arising out of Your lotus feet
virincih - Brahma
samcinvan viracayati - gathering up
lokan avikalam - the worlds creates
vahaty - incessantly he bears
enam - this same
saurih katham api - Vishnu somehow or other
sahasrena sirasam - by thousand heads
harah samksudyainam - Shiva, having shaken it up
bhajati - accomplishes religiously
bhasito viddhulana vidhim - (his) ash wearing rite.


VERSE 3
SWASTIKA
QUATERNION WITH ONE-ONE MATCHING OF
INTEREST IN 4 TYPES OF PERSON

To the uninstructed You are the light-city, inner darkness
banishing, mid-ocean placed;
To inert ones the ooze of sweetness within blossoms
celestial, having mind-expanding effect;
While for indigent spirits you become a brood of philosophers' stones,
And for those submerged in the ocean of birth and death, the very
tusk of Vishnu's boar.

Four types of personality as worshippers of the Goddess.

WORD-FOR-WORD TRANSLATION
avidyanam - for the uninstructed
antah stimira mihira - inner darkness banishing
dvipa nagari - light city, mid-ocean placed
jadanam - to inert ones
caitanya stabaka makaranda - the ooze of mind-expanding
sruti jharim - sweetness from within blossoms celestial
daridranam - for indigent spirits
cintamani gunanika - a brood of philosophers'stones
janma jaladhau - in the ocean of repeated birth and death
nimagnanam - for those submerged
damstra - the tusk
muraripu varahasya - of the boar of Vishnu (the enemy of Ripu)
bhavati - you become


VERSE 4
SQUARE-ROOT-OF-MINUS-ONE ONTOLOGY
SATKARANAVADA
PRIMACY OF CAUSE OVER EFFECT

Other arms than Yours can confer protection or boon;
You alone do not act overtly, by gesture, the promises of refuge
or boon.
What is more,Your feet, o sole refuge of the world of beings,
Are alone expert indeed in yielding boons more than asked for.

This describes the "prime potent power"

WORD-FOR-WORD TRANSLATION
tvad anyah - other than yours
panibhyam - by hands
abhaya varado - which give protection or boon
daivata ganah - classes of divinities
tvam eka naivasi - you alone are not thus
prakatita varabhity abhinaya - in not acting overtly, by gesture,
boon-granting or refuge
bhayat tratum - to save from fear
datum - to grant
phalam api ca vancha sam adhikam - more than asked for boon
saranye lokanam - o refuge of the worlds
tava hi caranav eva nipunau - your feet alone are expert


VERSE 5
REFLECTED GLORY COMING INDIRECTLY FROM
THE ABSOLUTE "SUB SPECIE AETERNITATIS"

Once Vishnu, having adored You, the bestower of blessings on Your
worshippers,
Taking womanly form, caused agitation even unto the City-Burner.
Eros, too, worshipping You with body licked into reality by the
glances of Rati,
Even to the minds of great recluses, confusion of values brings.


WORD-FOR-WORD TRANSLATION
haris tvam aradhya - once Vishnu having adored you
pranata jana saubhagya jananim - the mother that bestows
blessings on those that worship you
pura nari bhutva - taking womanly form
puraripum api - even to the City-Burner
ksobham anayat - caused agitation
smaro api - Eros too
tvam natva - on worshipping you
ratinayana lehyena vapusha - with body licked into reality by the
glances of Rati
muninam api antah - even to the minds of great recluses
prabhavati hi - is able indeed to bring
mohaya mahatam - for causing confusion of values


VERSE 6
OCCASIONALISM GIVES POWER TO EROS

O Daughter of the Snowy Peak,
just deriving from Your glance askance
Whatsoever grace he could; with flowery bow and bumble-bee
bowstring, and five-flowered dart and springtide for minister;
all these as one withal:
Mounting the chariot of the mountain breeze,
he victoriously reigns, that god of love.

The numerator and denominator must be ready for cancellation to occur..
Pure love comes from the Alpha Point and is irresistible
- no one is excepted.

WORD-FOR-WORD TRANSLATION
dhanuh paushpam - (with) flowery bow
maurvi madhukara mayi - bowstring of bumblebees
panca visikha - five-flowered dart
vasantah samanto - springtide for minister
malaya marud sayodhana rathah - southwest breeze for war chariot
tathapi - in spite of this
eka sarvam - all one
himagiri sute - o Daughter of the Himalayan Peak
kam api krpam - some little grace
apangat te - from your side-glance
labdhva - obtaining
jagad idam - this world
anango vijayate - Eros reigns supreme


VERSE 7
KEY VERSE
FOUR-FOLD SCHEMATIZATION

O let Her appear before us, that proud counterpart of the City-
Burner,
Resounding with waist-belt of jingle bells, recumbent by breasts
Like frontal bulge of a calf elephant, slim of waist,
With autumnal full-moon mature face,
Holding aloft bow and arrow, noose and goad!

Purushika. (a virago)

WORD-FOR-WORD TRANSLATION
kvanat kancidama - resounding with belt of jingle bells
kari kalabha kumba stananata - recumbent by bulging breasts like
the frontal bulges of a young elephant
pariksina madhye - slim of waist
parinata saraccandra vadana - with autumnal full moon face
dhanur banan pasam srnim api - holding aloft bow with arrow, noose
and goad
dadhana - bearing
karatalaih - within the grasp of hands
purasatad astam - let her appear
naha - for our sake
puram athitur - of the City-Burner
aho purushika - o wonder, the proud counterpart

 

VERSE 8
VERTICAL TRANSFORMATION
INNER BEAUTY UNIT INVERSION
Seated on a couch of Shiva-form and having the Supreme Shiva for
cushion;
Placed within a mansion wafted round by the perfume of blossoms
of Kadamba trees,
Located within a celestial grove on a pearly-gem island in the
midst of a nectar ocean,
Some fortunate ones contemplate You as the upsurging billow of
mental joy.

This is a Yogi's vision of beauty as an island.
The island is located in the yogi's mind .
The Bindhusthana or locus of meditation is seen here as an island.
The couch = Maithuna

WORD-FOR-WORD TRANSLATION
sudha sindhor madhye - in the midst of an ocean of nectar
suravit api vati pari vrte - surrounded by celestial trees
mani dvipe - on a pearly-gem island
nipopavana vati - having within her precincts a grove of Kadamba
trees
cintamani grhe - in a house made of contemplative gems
siva kare mance - on a couch of Shiva-form
paramasiva paryanka nilayam - with Supreme Shiva for cushion
bhajanti tvam dhanyaha - those rare fortunate ones worship you
kati ca na cidananda laharim - as the upsurging billow of mental joy.

VERSE 9
SERIES OF VERTICAL VALUE SYSTEMS
THE KULA PATH

The earth placed in the Muladhara, water in the Manipura,
Fire in the Swadhisthana, air in the heart, with space above;
And amid eyebrows placing the mind, and breaking through
the whole Kula path,
You do sport with your lord secretly in the thousand-petaled
lotus.

Here we have an ascending series of elementals.
Parvati ascends and meets Shiva in the Sahasrara.
This is like the comparison between digital and binary:
Analog is vertical,
Digital and binary are horizontal.
The action takes place inside the yogi.

WORD-FOR-WORD TRANSLATION
mahim muladhare - the earth placed in the Muladhara
kam api - the water also
manipure - in the Manipura
hutavaham - the fire principle (receptacle of sacrificial offerings)
sthitam svadhisthane - established in the Swadhisthana
hrdi - in the heart
marutam - the winds
akasam upari - the sky placed above
mano api - the mind also
bhru maddhye - between eyebrows
sakalam api bhittva kulapatham - breaking through the whole Kula path
sahasrare padme - in the thousand-petaled lotus
saha rahasi patya viharase - you do sport with your lord in secret


VERSE 10
THE ASCENT AND DESCENT OF VALUES
THE KUNDALINI SNAKE
TWO INVERTED TREES
THE MOVEMENT OF KUNDALINI AS A PARAMETER

With streaks of ambrosial essence streaming from between Your
twin feet,
Sprinkling blessings over the worlds and again from that point of
high intelligible values,
Turning Yourself into a snake form of three coils and a half,
You sleep in the hollow of he Kulakunda, Your proper ground
attaining.

This is a verticalized series ranging both upwards and downwards.
The Kundalini snake starts at the O Point in the middle, not at the
Alpha Point at the bottom.
It starts between the two feet at the middle and from there spread two
trees of ramified sets of lightning, ambrosia or value, spreading over
the three worlds.
The snake also goes upwards and downwards.
Khechari means "moving in the sky" - through the Brahmarandra
(the fontanella, or orifice at the top of the skull)
Kulakunda is the resting point at the bottom.
Rousing Kundalini is to rouse emotions - Yogis can make tastes, smells,
lights, that they experience by rousing Kundalini.
3 ½ + 3 ½ = 7
There are 6 Adharas, or stable nodes on the vertical axis, but in the
same way as the "Octave" (from "eight") has seven notes, or the
seven-day week from Sunday to Sunday is eight days, the number is
not fixed.
It is as when one pays a 100 rupee debt and adds one rupee as a gift.
Sankara has been revising the number of nodes or chakras or adharas in
this work: he talks of 5 elements, 6 seasons and here of 7 adharas.
If you cancel and focus completely, nothing is left.
Leave your ego uncancelled to report what is happening
- here it is the Devi who reports.
If you focus correctly, there is nothing left but blinding light.
The snake can pass through the hole of the Brahmarandra at the top
of the vertical axis, or through the Muladhara at the bottom.
It is a syndrome, as where a group of organs work together.
Here, a node of nerves acts together.
"Sprinkling" implies Praksharana, a Tantric rite.


WORD-FOR-WORD TRANSLATION
sudha dhara saraihi - with streaks of ambrosial essence
carana yugalantar vigalitaih - streaming from between your twin feet
prapancam sincantih - sprinkling blessings over the worlds
punar api rasamnaya mahasaha - and again from that point of high
intelligible values
avapya svam bhumim - attaining one's proper ground
bhujaganibham - taking serpent likeness
adhyusta valayam - having 3 1/2 coils
svam atmanam krtva - turning Yourself
svapisi kulakunde - you sleep in the hollow of the Kulakunda
kuharini - having a hollow therein

 

BEGINNING OF A NEW SECTION

VERSE 11
THE SRI CHAKRA - CROSS-SECTIONAL AND
LONGITUDINAL VIEWS
A CONIC SECTION
TOGETHERNESS - ANGLES AS 43 ELEMENTS

With the four of Shiva and of Shiva-maids five,
And severally the nine of prime nature, with eight and sixteen
petals,
Three circles and three lines, are thus complete,
The forty-three elements that make up Your angular refuge.

A spot of light represents the unknown self on the numerator side
cancel all the Chakras which condition you.
it is like a lotus floating in a well.

The complex geometric design of the Sri Chakra is like:
Riemannian space, which is geodesic, and
Lobachevskian space, which can be described as like 2 trumpet shapes.
Better still is the comparison with marbles in a bucket of water:
The marbles are Riemannian space,
The water is Lobachevskian space.
In the Sri Chakra the inside becomes outside and the right becomes left.
There is a parallel in the Kandukavati image in Kalidasa.
Mulaprakrti is the negative starting point.
The 4 petals are divided and subdivided into 8 and 16.
3 circles and 3 lines - sattva, rajas and tamas
- the three gunas (modalities of nature).
Also, three degrees of abstraction.
There is a parallel in Kalidasa's Raghuvamsa, where there is a reference
to the sea, a trench and a rampart as the triple border of the absolute
kingdom.
In the Raghuvamsa it says: "Rule until the result comes",
"Take taxes like a cloud taking rain." : this is vertical absolutism.
The 3-dimensional image of the Sri Chakra can be compared to
a bucket rising from a well with drops falling from a hole in it.
The angle is here seen as a refuge.
Trigonometry, logarithms, the sinus curve, all are based on triangles.
The dynamism here is all related to triangles.
The Devi, when structurally reduced to the limit is two triangles touching
at their apexes: "Mithya kalpita madhye" - her middle part is reduced
to almost nothing.
Chirality, ambivalence and polarity are structural elements here, as also
in modern mathematics.
Equations and graphs verify each other - geometry and algebra meet.

WORD-FOR-WORD TRANSLATION
caturbhih srikanthais - with four of Shiva
siva yuvatibhih pancabhir api - of Shiva-maids five
prabhinna bhihi sambhoho - and severally distinct from those of
Shiva
navabhir api mula prakrtir bhih - and those nine too of prime nature
trayes (in text catus) catvarimsad - making 43 in all (in text 44)
vasudala kalasra trivalaya trirekhabhis - with 3 circles and 3 lines
with 8 and 16 petals are thus complete
sardham - taken together
tava carana konaha parinatah - make upYour finalized
angular refuge


VERSE 12
CONCEPTUAL AND PERCEPTUAL BEAUTY MEET
TAUTOLOGY (GIRLS) AND CONTRADICTION (ASCETICS)
PURE VERTICALITY
EXISTENCE IS SUPERIOR TO ESSENCE

O Daughter of the High Peak, to estimate the equal of Your beauty,
The best among poets, exercising their fancy, somehow created
Brahma and others.
Eager Your beauty to see, heavenly damsels mentally attain to
What is hard even for ascetics to gain; the state of union with Shiva.

An innocent or pure girl is transparent verticality
Poets use conceptual words to try and explain the Devi,
young girls have identity with the Devi.

slp7-p24-v12

STRUCTURE SLP7 - P24 - V12

The snake and rope do not have equal status,
ontology is better than teleology: the rope is more real than the snake.
The ascetics are peripheral and horizontal,
The girls are negative vertical.
The girl just has to think of herself, she does not have to do penance.
She is promoted on a course natural to any woman,
Woman is naturally innocent.
Poets create demiurges to represent values which approximate the
beauty of the Goddess.
The girls are promoted "manasa" - through their minds, by themselves.
Tribal girls or heavenly damsels are the same, only one is more rarified.
A woman looking in the mirror and looking at the Goddess is the same thing.
See Tagore's "Kabuli Wallah", and the myth of Iole and Hercules.

WORD-FOR-WORD TRANSLATION
tvadiyam saundaryam - the beauty that is yours
tuhina giri kanye - o daughter of the high peak
tulayitum - to estimate the equal of
kavindraha - the best among poets
kalpante - they exercise their fancy
katham api virinci prabhrtaya - somehow what approximates to Br.
V. and others
yad alokaut sukyad - which beauty to see
amara lalanah - heavenly damsels
yanti manasa - mentally attain to
tapo bhih dusprapam api - what is hard even for ascetics to attain
girisa sayujya padavim - the state of union with Shiva


VERSE 13
AMBIVALENT COMPENSATION
UNDER THE AEGIS OF THE ABSOLUTE

A man overaged, uninteresting to the view, inert in sport;
Falling within the range of Your side-glance, they follow, running
in hundreds -
Young women , with hair disheveled, their rounded, shapely
breasts revealed,
Their waist-bands bursting and silk garments in disarray.

Ugliness is normal on the Numerator side of the situation,
Beauty is normal on the Denominator side.
Even an old man can become beautiful,
beauty is just some light playing on the face.
This verse is complementary to the previous verse
- it has the same structure.
Shiva is beautiful because of meditation.
Faust is beautiful because of his studies.
"Trasat" is the startled movement of a fawn.

WORD-FOR-WORD TRANSLATION
naram varsiyamsam - a man overaged
nayana virasam - uninteresting to the view
narmasu jadam - inert in sport
tava apanga loke patitam - falling within the range
of your side-glance
anudhavante - they follow running
satasaha - in hundreds
galad veni bandhaha - with hair disheveled
kuca kalasaha - their rounded pot-like breasts
visrasta sicaya - by blown off clothes revealed
hathat trutyat kancyo - with their waist bands bursting
vigalite dukulaihi - silk shawls (saris) in disarray
yuvatayaha - damsels


VERSE 14
A VERTICAL CONIC SECTION
NUMEROLOGICALLY ANALYZED

Fifty-six for earth; for water fifty-two;
Sixty two for fire; for air fifty-four;
Seventy-two for ether; for mind sixty-four;
Are the rays, even beyond these are Your twin feet.

This is similar to the Pythagorean tetraktys - a symmetrical picture.
It is cosmologically real here - not just imaginary.
Ontology is here related to teleology.

Water is less solid than earth - 56 - 52
Fire is less solid than air - 62 - 54
Mind is less solid than ether - 72 - 64
Altogether making more or less 360 days of the year.

What you gain in objectivity you lose in subjectivity.
What you gain in ontology you lose in teleology.

As with the chakras on the vertical axis, the vertebral column
is made up of nodes.
The nodes of a bamboo are stable states of mind of the
seasons, recorded in the nervous system.
This is the effect of the outside on the inside.
Stable points are the intersections between the practical and the
theoretical.
There is cancellation at different points, and a one-one
correspondence.
This is a secret of the universe.
The feet are above.
"Feet" means any point of intersection, a limit on the hypostatic side.
The Goddess is lifted from an ontological to a teleological
status.
The next verse has a hypostatic goddess.
The six seasons - nodes of experience of the seasons in the
memory: these are indeterminate, not exact numbers.
These are like the interpersonal and trans-subjective
variations between two people, they are not fixed.
The Shadadharas are six stable positions.
Subjected to critical evaluation = Mimamsa.
Advaita can put woman on top - Tantra cannot.

Panchikarana, or quintuplication can be "panchi krita tanmatra",
or cancelled or "apanchi krita tanmatra" - not cancelled
Numerator and Denominator must not be made to cancel and balance
too precisely.
The world is not rigid, it is dancing.
If it is fixed rigidly it is a bench or stool
- it is not dancing.

WORD-FOR-WORD TRANSLATION
ksitau - for earth
sat pancasad - 56
dvi samadhika pancasad - 52
udake - for water
hutase - for fire
dvasastih - 62
catur adhika pancasad - 54
anile - for air
divi - for sky
dvih sat trimsat - 72
manasi ca - for the mind
catur shasti iti ye - 64 and thus what
mayukhaha - rays (come out)
tesam api upari - above all these
tava - your
padam buja yugam - your twin feet (are placed)


VERSE 15
VEDIC WORD VALUE
COMPENSATED BY PERCEPTUAL VALUE
WORDS OF TWO DICTIONARIES
DISTINGUISHED AND CANCELLED OUT
VEDIC DEVI COMPENSATED BY INTENTIONALITY
(MATTED HAIR)
Clear as autumnal moonbeams, with matted hair-made diadem,
Attached with crescent and with hands bearing refuge or
boon-giving gesture,
Rosary made of crystal-clear beads and book: how could anyone,
worshipping You but once,
Not gain in flow of words somehow, the pleasing sweetness of
honey, milk and grapes?

Hedonistic beauty is without renunciation.
Here there is no colour, and matted hair, signifying renunciation.
She is Gauri, the wife of Shiva.
She is Saraswati modified by the ascetic matted hair.
This shows the sympathy of a wife for a husband, as she adopts his
ascetic traits ( matted hair), but she is still on the numerator side.
The previous verse travelled upward to the feet.
Now we have a descending movement.
Here there is a thin, mathematical vedic Devi, bathed in moonlight.
She is theoretical, but there is also a very thin perceptual experience
of moonlight.
She wears Shiva's moon in order to identify with him inside,
although She is not on the positive level of Shiva.
In the Mahabharata, Kunti Devi is blindfolded in sympathy with her
blind husband.
In verse 4, Shankara rejects hand gestures - here he accepts
them, but at a very high level.
The reward is the poetic gift - as desired by brahmins.
The crystal beads have no colour: pure intelligence is white.
Worshipping "but once" gives the power of words - not morality etc..
Honey, milk and grapes - not a theoretical value - we descend to the
ontological level of enjoyment, and cancel the conceptual side
of the rosary and book.
Even a vedic goddess can give actual results.
Beauty arises from the cancellation of the actual and the conceptual

WORD-FOR-WORD TRANSLATION
saraj jyotsna suddham - clear as autumnal moonbeams
sasi yuta jata juta makutam - with matted hair-made diadem
attached with crescent
vara trasat trana sphatika ghatika pustaka karam - with hands
bearing refuge or boon-giving gesture, rosary of crystal beads and
book
sakrt - once
natva na tva - worshipping you but once
katham eva satam - how long could a good man
samnidadhate - not attain the presence of
madhu - honey
kshira - milk
draksa - grapes
madhuri madhurina phanitayah - pleasing sweetness

 

VERSE 16
KEY VERSE
DIGNIFIED MYSTICAL EROTICISM (POETRY)
MAGENTA GLORY BY CANCELLATION OF THE DAWN
WITH THE LOTUS-COLOUR

That beauty residing within the minds of superior poets,
Resembling that of a forest of lotuses, when touched by the tender
light of dawn:
He who can thus adore You, who are so dear to Brahma as magenta
itself;
He, by profound words of of most tender erotic content, shall
please those same select ones.

The Saraswati of the previous verse is more near to the vedic
context, but here she is also the daughter of Brahma.
Brahma is denominator and gives a denominator touch.
Verse 15, 16, 17, 18 all go together, as they all deal with colour effects.
Verse 17 also deals with poetry and 18 with light effects.
Shift 45 degrees to the right or to the left and you get ultra-violet
and infra-red.
Here there are three Devis and three sets of poets appreciating
them in different ways.
Verse 17 deals with poetry and verse 18 with colour.
A "mahakavi" is a vedic appreciator.
The Devi of the previous verse was white - this one is coloured.
Two light effects from above and from below meet in an
actual lotus.

slp7-p32-v16

STRUCTURE P7 - P32 - V16

WORD-FOR-WORD TRANSLATION
kavindranam - in superior poets
cetah kamala vana balata parucim bhajante - who adore the sweetness
of the mental lotus forest, when touched by the tender rays of sunlight
bhajante ye santah katicit - such rare good souls
arunam eva as magenta itself
bhavatim - you become
virinci preyasyas - as one dear to Brahma
tarunatara srngaralahari gabhira bhih - by profound words of most
tender, yet overwhelming, erotic content
vagbhih vidadhati - by words he pleases
satam ranjanam ami - to those very good souls he affords pleasure


VERSE 17
SCINTILLATING AND FLUORESCENT LIGHT (LYRIC POETRY)
SEMANTIC BLENDING OF VERTICAL WITH HORIZONTAL
WORD-BEARING ELEMENTS

He who can contemplate those word-bearing elements of broken
moonstone lustre,
Joined with Vasinis, having an elusively fluid gleam;
He becomes, o Mother, the author of great poetic works,
Adding sweet charm to the lotus face of the Goddess of the Word.

Vasinis are word bearing elements - semiosis is horizontal.

Syntactics, semantics and semiotics are discussed here.
To produce beauty mix Sphota - scintillating light - with Vashinis
- the meaning is derived not from single words but from sentences.
Two rival theories of semantics - Karma Kanda - one.
The spread of meaning through the phrases.
Two qualities must blend, broken moonstone scintillation = sphota,
and a fluid gleam = Vashinis.
Savitri means coming from the sun, bright.
The root meaning of Sphota is to be born, to burst into meaning.

WORD-FOR-WORD TRANSLATION
savitri bhir vacam - those word-bearing elements
sasi mani silabhanga ruci bhih - of broken moonstone lustre
vasin yadya bhih - with her word vasinis
tvam saha - as associated with you
janani - o mother
samcintayati yah - he thus able to contemplate
saha - he
karta kavyanam - the author of (great ) poetic works
bhavati - he becomes
mahatam - great (poetic works - above)
bhangiruci bhihi - of scintillating sweetness
vaco bhih - by words
vak devi vadana kamala moda madhuraih - adding sweet charm to the
lotus face of the Goddess of the Word


VERSE 18
KEY VERSE
A COMPLETE AURORA
VITALITY VERSUS DELICACY
KIMPURUSHAS AND CELESTIAL MAIDS ARE CANCELLED
CANCELLABLE COUNTERPARTS

With shades of Your bodily form enriched by the tenderly sunlit dawn,
And the whole earth submerged within magenta glory;
That man, able to contemplate You thus, wins You over with Urvasi
and how many, how many other
Heavenly nymphs having gentle, startled, wild deer eyes.

The magenta in the sky invades the earth also.
Cancellation occurs above the O Point,
The girls come running below the O Point.

slp7-p36-v18

STRUCTURE SLP7 - P36 - V18

Here we have double refraction effects.
There are two clouds,
Two trees with ramified branches or streaks of lightning.
Between them, the Devi appears.
Girls or substitute Devis are running in a horizontal cloud.
There are two beauties, each at 45 degrees, producing a magenta sky
and a magenta earth.
The celestial damsels are numerator.
The startled eyes of a tribal girl are denominator.
The Devi is magenta and vertical.

slp6-p35-v18

STRUCTURE SLP6 - P35 - V18

slp6-p35-v18a

STRUCTURE SLP6 -P35 - V18A

The girls come running to him who sees the yogic vision of a
dappled dawn.
The man who is able to bring together the three grades of magenta
- corresponding to the brahmin girls, the Devi, and the wild tribal girls.
- his mind is neutralized.
A deer is neutralized eroticism, innocent and drunken.
Subrahmanya, the Devi's son, has two wives:
Devayani,who is white,
Valli, who is black.
There are "how many hundreds" of rays (running girls)
And one man - the yogi
The two cancel out: the girls are horizontal and many,
the yogi is vertical and one.

WORD-FOR-WORD TRANSLATION
Tannucchaya bhihi te - with shades of Your bodily form
Taruna tarani srisarani bhihi divam - the sky thus most tenderly
and totally overcovered by the dappled dawn
Sarvam urvim - as also the whole earth
Arunima nimagnam - as immersed in sheer magenta glory
Smarati yah - (word-for-word breaks off here)

 

VERSE 19
THE RELATIVISTIC EROTICISM OF KAULA AND
SAMAYA CULTS IS REVALUED
UNILATERAL AND REVISED SHAKTI WORSHIP
DIGNIFIED EROTICS

O Shiva Consort, making Your face the locus with twin breasts
below,
And below still, as the better half of Shiva; meditating on Your
erotic aspect,
Without delay he can stir the sentiments of women; this is but
slight -
And at once agitates even Her of the three worlds, when sun and
moon form Her twin breasts.

For the first time after the structure has been stated in eighteen verses,
medium and message come together in this verse, where Shankara
revises Tantra, stating the position of Advaita.
Women are attracted to you as you are to them.
Ritualism asks for benefits - you get what you deserve
- like attracts like - there is a law of togetherness or a binding force
in the universe, a cementing force.
The Goddess of the Three Worlds and the Goddess of This World.
The Goddess of This World is Kaula - asymetric worship - but it does
not attain cancellation.
Breasts below mean that the Bindhusthana or focal point is too low.
Sun and moon mean the breasts are above - asymetric and hypostatic.

The tiger is one breast, the snake the other.
Ida and Pingala - the yogi goes through the middle without going
to one side or the other.
The beauty of the three worlds is eternal.
The Kaulins and the Samayins want to taste sugar, not to be sugar.
Shankara accepts their position, but says it is "but slight" (atilaghu)
- "très ordinaire".
The girls' breasts have hair, except around the nipple, this is described as
a circle of light by Kalidasa in Meghaduta, as a hill with bamboos in
a circle that the gods look down upon.
This means that you must look at the breasts from above,
from the numerator side.
The brahmins say that women are sudras (low caste)
Here this view is corrected.
Just schematismus (structuralism, as in Kant) alone is Tantra, schematismus and cancellation is Advaita.

WORD-FOR-WORD TRANSLATION
Mukham bindum krtva - placing the face at the locus
Kuca yugam - the two breasts
Adhah tasya - below them
Tad adho - below them
Hara ardham - the (better) half of Shiva
Dhyayed yo - one who should contemplate.
Hara mahishi - o consort of Shiva
Te manmatha kalam - Your erotic aspect
Sa sadyah - he without delay
Samksobham nayati - can stir the sentiments
Vanita - of women
Iti ati laghu - this is but slight
Tri lokim api - even Her of the three worlds
Ashu bhramayati - at once agitates
Rav indu sthana yugam - when sun and moon both
form her twin breasts


VERSE 20
KEY VERSE
COMPLEMENTARITY OF PSYCHIC POWERS
He who can bring You, as emanating nectar out of Your limbs
all around,
Into his heart like a moonstone-made statue,
He can quell the pride of serpents like the King of Birds
And a fever patient cure by his very look of ambrosial streak.

Pratyahara is the centralization of tendencies
By Pratyahara here one gains two kinds of psychic powers.
The previous verse is not completely absolutist;
you have to supply the Numerator and cancel .
Consciousness is a circle, or a flower.
The yogi withdraws into it and restrains his outgoing impulses:
this is Pratyahara.
A statue is considered intersubjectively and transphysically by
the yogi inside himself - he centralizes himself and conserves his
dissipated interests.
Nectar = value = nervous energy.
A serpent crawling is in a dialectical relationship with the
hovering kite.
They are hereditary enemies - there is an accentuation of
polarity; as also with the fever-patient and the curing yogi.

WORD-FOR-WORD TRANSLATION
Kirantim ange bhyah - as emanating nectar out of your limbs all
around
Kirana nikurambo amrta rasam hrdi - gathered to his heart the
radiating essence of immortal bliss
Tvam addhatte - he who can bring You
Hima kara shila murtim eva yah- like a moonstone made image
Sa sarpanam darpam shamayati - can quell the pride of serpents
Shakunta dhipa iva - like the King of Birds
Jvara plushtan - a fever patient
Drshtya sukhayati - cures by very look
Sudha dhara siraya - of ambrosial streak


A NEW SECTION BEGINS HERE

VERSE 21
KEY VERSE
TRANSCENDENCE BY VERTICALIZATION
A THIN PARAMETER IS REVEALED

As lightning-streak-bodied, made of sun, moon and fire,
And as placed even above the six lotuses in a great lotus grove;
Those great ones, as seers of such,Your aspect free from dross and
ignorance,
They experience the upsurging billow of ultimate delight.

This is like the situation in Kalidasa's Megha Samdesha:
the wife is like lightning, never separated from the cloud, her husband.

slp7-p42-v21

STRUCTURE SLP7 - P42 - V21

The wife is like lightning,
Shiva is also like lightning, this is a reversible equation,
with equality of status between the two counterparts.


WORD-FOR-WORD TRANSLATION
Tatil lekha tanvim - as lightning-streak-bodied
Tapana sasi vaisva nara mayim - made of sun, moon and fire
Nishannam - as seated
Sannam api upari kamalanam - even above the six lotuses
Tava kalam maha padma tavyam - such Your aspect in a great lotus
Forest
Mrdita mala mayena manasa - having mind freed from dross and
ignorance
Mahantah - great minds
Pasyanto - seeing this
Dadhati - experience
Parama ahlada laharim - the upsurging billow of ultimate delight


VERSE 22
REVERSIBLE EQUATION

O Goddess, You, on this Your servant bestow a kind look:
Thus intending to adore, no sooner one begins saying:
"O Goddess, You…"; You grant him that state of identity with You,
The same as what Vishnu, Brahma and Indra accomplished by the
waving of lights on their diadems.

There is a word-play here:"Bhavani Tvam" means "Let me become You"
as well as : "O Goddess,You…"
Brahma, Vishnu and Shiva perform worship with their shining crowns
Advaita Vedanta is the cancellation of duality.
The intentionality of linking self and non-self is greater than prayer.
The intentionality of prayer is more important than the brute act
of prayer.
Worship is not necessary, even before the Goddess grants Sayujya
("that state of identity with You...") which is better than any grace she
might bestow.
In the relativistic vedic context, refined brahmins and gods are elevated
by their actions and made fit to worship the Devi.
Here, however, a lowly "dravidian child" without merit is the subject.
This transcends the vedic puja, or sacrifice, by Vedanta.
Even only desire to know Yoga and you go beyond the Sabda Brahman
of the Brahmins.
The diadems imply the numerator, positive side.


WORD-FOR-WORD TRANSLATION
Bhavani tvam - o Goddess, thou
Dase mayi - on this Your servant
Vitara - bestow
Drshtim sakarunam - a look of kindness
Iti stotum - thus to praise
Vanchan kathayati - desiring says
Bhavani tvam - o Goddess you
Iti yaha - he who
Tadaiva - at that same time
Tvam tasmai dishasi - You grant him
Nija sayujya padavim - that state of identity with You
Mukunda brahm endra sphuta makuta nirajita padam - the same state
as was gained by Vishnu, Brahma and Indra by the bright waving
lights of their diadems.

Partial stimulus, total response.


VERSE 23
ALL BUT THE OMEGA POINT IS COVERED BY MAGENTA
RELATIVITY IS REVISED TO YIELD
ABSOLUTE ORTHOGONALITY
RECIPROCITY WITHIN A QUATERNION

Absorbing the left half of the body of Shiva and unsatisfied in
mind still,
The other, I surmise, became absorbed also; therefore,
This Your form, having three eyes and bent by twin breasts,
Wearing crescent bedecked crown, became of magenta glory.


Magenta absorbs all but the Omega Point by stages.
She does not abolish, but cancels.
Magenta and the crescent have homogeneous status.

 

slp7-p46-v23a

STRUCTURE P7 - P46 - V23

WORD-FOR-WORD TRANSLATION
Tvaya hrtva vamam vapah - by You absorbing the left
(half) of the body
Aparitrptena manasa - unsatisfied in mind
Sharir ardham shamboh - the half of the body of Shiva
Aparam api - the other also
Shanke hrtam abhut - became absorbed
Yad etat tvad rupam - this which is Your form (resulting thus)
Sakalam aruna bham - wholly of magenta glory
Trinayanam - three-eyed
Kuchabhyam anamram - slightly bent, recumbent, by virtue of twin
breasts
Kutila shashi chudala makutam - wearing crescent-bedecked curved
crown

 

VERSE 24
PLUS AND MINUS COMPENSATION
DOWNWARD NORMALIZATION
TRANSCENDENCE OF PHENOMENAL FUNCTIONS
IN BRACKETS

Brahma creates the world, Vishnu protects, Shiva destroys:
Negating all this and his own body, the lord fades out.
Thus what results: Shiva who has eternity for prefix (Sadashiva)
He blesses, obeying the orders derived from Your instantly
vibrating eyebrow-twigs.

Obeying negates.
Shiva becomes too transcendental and removed from the situation.
Problems are real - accept your reality - go inside the problem
- see Bergson's image of entering Notre Dame rather than
observing it from the outside.
The Absolute is not an object, but the result of cancellation.
Items of value, endless series of items of value strung on a
string or parameter, are equal to God.
The Devi's beauty is a value here.
Whatever a yogi is doing, he sees the Absolute always.
The Absolute is a universal value, like magenta;
it is a universal concrete.

slp7-p48-v24

STRUCTURE P7 - P48 - V24

WORD-FOR-WORD TRANSLATION
Jagat sute dhata - Brahma creates the world
Harihi avati - Vishnu preserves
Rudra kshapayate - Shiva destroys
Tiras kurvan etat svam api vapur - negating this and even
his own body
Isah tirayati - the lord fades out
Sada purvaha - he who has eternity for prefix
Sarvam tad idam - all that results or remains here
Anugrhnati cha - he also blesses
Sivah tava jnam alambya - obeying Your order
Kshana chaliyator bhru lati kayoh - from Your instantly
vibrating pair of eyebrow-twigs


VERSE 25
ABSOLUTE NON-DUAL WORSHIP CANCELED
WITH DUAL VEDIC WORSHIP
THE ABSOLUTE, BOTH TRANSCENDENT AND IMMANENT
ALPHA AND OMEGA MODES REVERSIBLE
TRANSCENDING THE THREE MODES

Of the three gods, who are originated fromYour three nature
modalities,
Their worship of You, o consort of Shiva, would alone be worship
Offered toYour twin feet; it is indeed thus when they do so,
Standing eternally beside Your gem-decked footstsool,
Joining bud-like their hands well above, like crowns.

Absolute worship transcends both ontological and teleological
values.
The teleological side is the Goddess above,
The ontological side is the footstool.
The three gods, worshipping the Goddess, take three postures:
One with hands above the head, bending over the Goddess.
One with hands above the head, worshipping the footstool.
One standing eternally.
This means that the three Gunas are transcended.
The three Gunas are hedonistic or relativistic values.
The first position is Vedic - waving lights - she is higher than
them, a numerator value.
The second position is Kaula, etc - the footstool they worship is
on the negative side.
The third is Vedantic: he is standing eternally, there are no benefits.
The three Gunas are transcended by double negation
- the only way to abolish evil is to dive bomb through it.
The gods are the vertical principles of the horizontal Gunas.

slp7-p50-v25

STRUCTURE SLP7 - P50 - V25

WORD-FOR-WORD TRANSLATION
Trayanam devanam - of the three gods
Triguna janitanam - originated from the three nature modalities
Tava sive - of Yours, o consort of Shiva
Bhavat puja puja - their worship of You would alone be worship
Tava caranayor ya viracita - as offered to Your twin feet
Tatha hi - in spite of it being so
Tvad padodvahana mani pithasya nikate - standing beside Your
gem-bedecked footstool
Sthita hi - standing indeed
Ete sasvat - eternally these
Mukulita karottamsa makutah - joining bud-like their palms well
above their crowns


VERSE 26
NATARAJA
VERTICALIZED FUNCTIONS
NEGATIVE BECOMING
A FOURTH-DIMENSIONAL SHIVA

Brahma regains his pure quintuple nature; Vishnu becomes
passionless;
The God of Death destruction meets; the God of Wealth becomes
bankrupt; the great Indra becomes functionless, with half-shut
eyes;
In this great doom, he sports, o constant spouse,Your lord alone.

The quintuple functions are abolished vertically.
The vertical axis is not abolished.
Verses 26 to 29 or 30 have the same kind of structural implications:
two-sided cybernetics or the cybernetic retroaction of inner space.
Homeostasis - one-one correspondance and a parameter.
Conic space with two parameters.
Upward and downward logarithmic spirals - where the two spirals
cross are nodes = colour or sound.
Psychedelic space has a one-one correspondance with cybernetic
space.

WORD-FOR-WORD TRANSLATION
Virincih pancatvam vrajati - Brahma regains his pure quintuple nature
Harihi apnoti viratim - Vishnu becomes passionless
Vinasam kinaso bhajati - the God of Death destruction meets
Dhana daha yati nidhanam - the God of Wealth courts bankruptcy
Vitandri mahendri vitatir api - the great Indra becomes functionless
Sammilita drsha - with half-shut eyes
Maha samhare asmin - in this great doom
Viharati - he sports
Sati - o constant spouse
Tvat patihi asau - Your lord alone


VERSE 27
KEY VERSE
REVERSIBLE RITUALISM
ONE-ONE CANCELLATION OF RITUALISTIC ENSEMBLES
THE SUM AS CONCEPTUAL COUNTERPARTS
PHYSICAL AND METAPHYSICAL ADORATION
HOMOGENEITY BETWEEN BRUTE ACTIONS AND THEIR TOTAL

Incantations, mutterings, ritual acts, hand gestures, gait,
Circumambulations, food offerings, inclination, adoration by lying down;
All such enjoyments, as coming within the scope of self-surrender,
And thus synonymous with worship of You, let such be what from me
might shine forth.

Physical and metaphysical adoration are cancelled when treated as
one-one ensembles.
There is one-one correspondance between acts of worship and
cybernetic language.
Actions concentrate the mind and establish bipolarity between
subject and object: this is homeostasis.
Waving lights is a figure of eight - cancellation.
"From me..", "with you.." means cancellation of the self with the
non-self.
Ritual is intentionality.

WORD-FOR-WORD TRANSLATION
Japo jalpah - mutterings and incantations
Silpam sakalam api - ritual acts
Mudra viracana - hand gestures
Gatih - gait
Pradakshinya kramanam asana adyahuti vidhih -
circumambulation, burnt ritualistic food offerings
Pranamaha samveshaha - inclinations, prostrations
Sukham akhilam - all such preferences
Atma arpana drsha - treated as coming within the scope of
self-surrender
Saparya paryayaha tava bhavatu - let them be synonymous
with worship for You
Yanme vilasitam - what from me might shine forth


VERSE 28
THE NOUMENAL STATUS OF SHIVA
THE DIGNITY OF THE FOURTH DIMENSION
RENORMALISATION

Even on partaking of nectar, so potent against fear old age
and death;
They reach their doom, all such gods as Brahma or Indra;
On even swallowing that terrible super-poison, for Shiva,
time's becoming is not operative:
The source here being the power of Your marital string.

Woman's negative pull saves Shiva, he needs no nourishment.
This is like the process of soap manufacture, when a long flow
of soap is cut into separate bars.
The flow of soap is like Shiva
The cutting of the flow is like Shakti - a quantum is formed.
The half-life is the Devi's trick
The Devi does nothing, the string is a contract respected by Shiva.
The status of Shiva is the thinnest of parameters
Other gods have phenomenal status, nourished by negentropy (food).
Shiva is noumenal, he can feed on entropy.
Ambrosia >< poison
Negentropy >< entropy
Shiva transcends the duality between these two.
The light of Shiva shines by double negation (like shining black
polished shoes or a lump of coal).
Scientists seem to have discovered that time can be reversed.
Shiva can even immobilize a sense of duration.
The string is a contract - like Max Planck's "H":
it keeps the world together - it is the negative side of the parameter.
This is Brahman normalized - Sthanam.
Maya is no longer operative -
balance is the main teaching of this series of verses.
By "H" or by half-life, nature never allows complete evaporation,
A certain quantum is preserved - a regulating principle of nature.
The fire of doom is on the numerator, beyond the Devi,
it will descend to cancel with the highest denominator.

WORD-FOR-WORD TRANSLATION
Sudham api asvadya - even on partaking of nectar
Pratibhaya jara amrtyu harinim - so potent against fear, old age
and death
Vipadyante- they reach their doom
Visve - all
Vidhi satam akhadya - Brahma,Vishnu and others
Divishadaha - the gods
Karalam yat kshvelam - that fearful poison
Kabalitavataha - even on swallowing
Kala kalana na - time's becoming is not operative
Shambhoho - for Shiva
Tanmulam - the root of which
Tava janani tatanka mahima - (is ) Your marital string


VERSE 29
THE DEVI HAS ALSO A NOUMENAL STATUS,
THOUGH SHE IS FEMININE
ASCENDING TO OMEGA DIGNITY
POSITIVE CANCELLATION BY INTENTION ONLY

"Remove Brahma's crown from before, and of him called Vishnu;
You are going to hurt his hard headgear: bypass Indra's crown"
As inclining in front of You, they remain, at that very moment for
him at his homecoming,
You are about to rise. Such words of Your retinue, they do reign
supreme.

This is happening in an eternal present in which Shiva and Parvati
are equally dignified by cancellation in a world of intentionality
(he is about to come).
Both their dignities cancel out against each other.
The Goddess is here NOT mathematically thin,
there is a horizontal content also - soldiers, royal pomp, attendants.
Shiva is coming, She is about to rise.
Brahma, Vishnu etc. are existential gods - hence the hard crowns -
bypassed by verticalization from the negative side.
This is a moment of intentionality - the event takes place
above the horizontal in the world of concepts.
They are about to meet - intention -
Here there is vertical participation without carnality.
Ardhanarisvara (the form of Shiva as half-female)
- copulation is not necessary, he passes vertically
through the whole situation.

WORD-FOR-WORD TRANSLATION
Kiritam vairincam parihara purah - remove Brahma's crown from
before
Kaitabha bhidaha - of him who is called Vishnu
Kathore kotire - his hard headgear
Skhalasi jahi jambhari makutam - bypass Indra's crown
Pranam reshu eteshu - they remain as inclining in front of You
Prasabham - at that moment
Upayatasya bhavanam - for him, just then coming home
Bhavasya abhyuttane - as rising for Shiva's approach
Tava parijanoktihi - the words of Your retinue
Vijayate - they ring supreme.


VERSE 30
KEY VERSE
REVERSIBLE EQUATION BETWEEN
WORSHIPPER AND WORSHIPPED, SUPERCEDING HEDONISM
REVERSIBILITY OF PSYCHIC DIGNITY
RELATIVISTIC RITUALISM IS TRANSCENDED
VERSE 23 REVERSED

Out of the rays arising from Your proper body, representing
psychic powers such as atomicity (anima),
Attendant on You, o eternal one, one who contemplates these in
terms of oneself:
What wonder for him that all benefits from the three-eyed one
should only be worth rejection,
And that the fire of doom should perform for him in turn the
light-waving rite.

There is a reciprocity between the self and non-self in attaining
psychic powers - the worshipper is worshipped.
The situation here is fully advaitic, it transcends Tantra.
Psychic powers are relativistic and worth only rejection.
The Devi gives Sayujya - identity with Her.
The rays are powers that arise fom Her psycho-physical body.
These powers are accidental attributes - but She is "eternal" or
Absolute.
"In terms of oneself" - put yourself on the Denominator side and
the Devi on the Numerator.
The fire of doom is in the future, apocalyptic and numerator
- it will come to the Advaitin who cancels the self and the non-self.
Benefits are the result of worship - "Asuddha Nirvana":
"impure nirvana" which is "of this world".
The fire of doom is the Omega point - beyond the Goddess.

WORD-FOR-WORD TRANSLATION
Svadeho bhuta bhih - arising out of Your own body
Ghrni bhih - from the rays which are
Anima adhya bhih - psychic powers such as
Abhito nishevye - atomicity attendant on you
Nitye tvam - o eternal one
Aham iti sada - in terms of oneself eternally
Bhavayati yaha - one who contemplates
Virachayati - performs
Nirajana vidhim - by light waving rite


NEW SECTION: MONOMARKS FROM 31 ONWARDS

VERSE 31
TRANSCENDANCE BY IMMOBILITY
THE CROSS-SECTION OF A CONE
RIVAL COSMOLOGIES

By sixty-four know-how factors, each capable of generating
its own psychic power;
Transcending the whole world while remaining immobile,
The Lord of Beasts, again, by Your insistence by that free
expertness of Yours,
Caused to be brought down this firm earth for
the unified fulfilment of all life purposes.

In this verse we have upward and downward becoming.
The 64 know-how factors (Tantras) and their negative counterparts
for life fulfilment.
The 64 Tantras are technical know-how.
Mantras are the software.
Yantras are the hardware.

slp6-p61-v31

STRUCTURE SLP6 - P61 - V31A

Jnanam, Jneyam, Parijnata.
Aksharas are letters, Panjakshara Mantra,etc.
Each Tantra makes a Siddhi.

There are four Siddhis on Shiva's side
There are four Siddhis on the Devi's side

Two forces acting in contrary directions.
64 is 8 times 8 - the directions of the compass at 8 levels.

He is hot,
She is cool.

Sadhya, Sadhana, Siddhis.
End , Means , Result.

These are all part of a ritualistic, dualistic context, they are Triputi
(Tri-basic prejudice).
The world is evaporating upwards.
She brings it down like Max Planck's "H", as a constant.

Entropy - negentropy,
evolution - involution,
explosion - implosion
- the universe is in equilibrium - cybernetic feedback.
The Devi is entropy.
"Free expertness" means belonging to the self..
Paratantra is objective.
"Life purposes" means the "purusharthas"
- Artha, Kama, Dharma, Moksha.
(the traditional four goals of life: wealth, sensuous pleasure,
righteousness, emancipation)

WORD-FOR-WORD TRANSLATION
Catuh shashtya tantraih - by 64 know-how factors
Sakalam atisandhaya bhuvanam - transcending the whole world,
while remaining immobile
Sthitas tat tat siddhi prasava para tantraih - each capable
of overtly generating its own psychic powers
Pasupati - the Lord of Beasts
Punaha tvat nirbandhat - by your insistance
Akhila purushartaika ghatana svatantram - by that free expertness
of Yours.
Te tantram kshititalam avatitarad idam - caused to be brought down
this firm earth for the unified fulfilment of all life purposes


VERSE 32
STRUCTURAL UNITS AND MONOMARKS
WHICH ARE CHARACTERS AS WELL AS FIGURES

Shiva, Parvati, Eros and Earth;
Sun, Moon, God of Love, Swan and Indra;
Para, Mara and Hari;
With these three sets with their heart monomarks suffixed,
They adore Your letters, O Mother,
By way of naming Your component limbs.

Vak, Kama and Shakti - these are three sets of monomarks
with limbs related to the heart.
This stanza refers to a well-known sixteen-letter mantra
Mesure mesurée and mesure mesurante.
Visible geometry and invisible algebra.
Visible monomarks and letter monomarks.

slp6-p62-v32

STRUCTURE SLP6 - P62 - V32

slp6-p62-v32a

STRUCTURE SLP6 - P62 - V32A

slp6-p63-v32

STRUCTURE SLP6 - P63 - V32

slp6-p64-v32

STRUCTURE - SLP6 - P64 - V32

slp7-p65-v32a

STRUCTURE SLP7 - P65 - V32A

slp7-p65-v32b

STRUCTURE SLP7 - P65 - V32B

The first set is sublated or cancelled.
1) Set - Vakbhava - all prosperity at a hypostatic level.
2) Set - Kama - the horizontal level of desire.
3) Set - Shakti - brings into being.

Hrim, Srim, Klim and Aum: some worshippers (Kaulins) think of
three sets of Devatas and try to understand your limbs and
give them certain names: Hrim, Klim etc.they end in "M" and form a triangle.
"Limbs" means the total structure is important, the limbs are
given certain names.

The gods are used as monomarks (Devatas):
all are placed as small pictures on certain Chakras or Yantras:
they denote relationships - mesure mesurante and mesure mesurée.
They are not to be mixed - they are monomarks of something else
Names also are given, as in algebra and geometry; one is visible,
and one invisible or numerical - Kshara and Akshara .
You can use both, but do not mix substance with thinking -
Kshetra and Kshatrajna, as the Bhagavad Gita states.
Algebra and geometry are made to meet by Tantra - intuitive expertness.
The Samayins relate Tantra with Gayatri Mantra:
the Kaulins use other Mantras
Shiva, Shakti, Eros -
one is Brahmanical Vedism, the other is South Indian.
- both are Mahabhogis ("great enjoyers")
Each garland has "Hrim" ("heart") linked to it: it originates in the heart.
"Charm" = mantra
The charm can be the Absolute Principle of Beauty.
Lesser benefits are also conferred by the Devi.
The lesser benefit does not contradict the greater.

WORD-FOR-WORD TRANSLATION
shivah shaktih kamah - Shiva, Shakti and Eros
kshitih athah ravih - the Earth,then the Sun
shitakiranah smarah - cold-beamed Eros
hamsah shakrah - Swan and Indra
tad anu cha - after which also
paramaraharayah - Para, Mara and Hari
ami - these
hrllekabhih tishrbhih - with the three heart monomarks
avasaneshu - at their terminals
ghatita bhajante - they adore, as joined
varnas te - these letters (monomarks)
tava janani namavayavatam - as Yours, o Mother, they adore.

 

VERSES 33 TO 35
ADHARAS AS THE RESULT OF THE CANCELLATION OF
COUNTERPARTS

VERSE 33
SAMAYIN MONOMARKS
GARLANDS OF MONOMARKS
STRUCTURAL DYNAMISM STUDIED WITH MONOMARKS

Eros, Source, Wealth; this triplet placing first within Your charm,
O lone and eternal one; inumerable seekers of great enjoyment
Adore You, telling beads of philosopher's stone,
ever sacrificing into the fire of Shiva,
By hundreds of streaks of clarified butter oblations from the
celestial cow.

Cultivation of the same as verse 32
- now the modus operandi is given.
The dynamics of hedonistic ritual.

slp6-p65-v33

STRUCTURE P6 - P65 - V33D

slp6-p66-v33

STRUCTURE SLP6 - P66 - V33

slp7-p67-v33

STRUCTURE SLP7 - P67 - V33

There are two versions:
VERSE 32 - An Aryan stratification: joy (Bhoga) as well as
Vedism.
VERSE 33 - Maha Bhoga - acting under the aegis of the
Absolute, sacrificed into the fire.
The Samayins are ritualistic Vedic Brahmins; they use beads,
sacrificial fire, the Gayatri Mantra; and are based on the Shakta Upanishads.
Siddhis are by-products, they do not invalidate the main product,
which is salvation.
The rosary of philosophers' stone implies that these are intelligent people
who can read the Veda - the fire of Shiva is necessary
if Shakti is to be worshipped.
The beads mean: "a thousand times, like the beads on a rosary"
Kamadhenu, the cow which grants all wishes, is on the Numerator
- ghee drips like rosary beads - a comparison with a numerator reference.

A figure of eight is produced from the cow, denoting eternal enjoyment.
A charm is a Mantra.
The charm can be the absolute principle of beauty
The lesser benefits are also conferred by the Devi:
the lesser benefit does not contradict the greater.

WORD-FOR-WORD TRANSLATION
Smaram yonim lakshmim - Eros, Source, Wealth
Tritayam idam - this triplet
Adau tava mano nidhaya - placing first within Your charm
Eke nitye - o lone and eternal one
Niravadhi maha bhoga rasikah - innumerable seekers of great
enjoyment
Bhajanti tvam - they worship You
Chintamani gunani baddhaksha valayahi - telling rosaries of
philosophers' stone
Shiva agnau - into the fire of Shiva
Juhvantaha - ever sacrificing
Surabhi ghrta dhara ahuti shataih - by hundreds of streaks of
clarified butter oblations from the celestial cow (Surabhi)

 

VERSE 34
VERTICAL PARTICIPATION
CANCELLATION AT THE HYPOSTATIC LEVEL
CANCELLATION - RECIPROCITY OF BODIES

You, who are the body of Shiva, having sun and moon for
twin breasts;
Yourself, I surmise,o Goddess, as a new sinless self.
Therefore, by mutual complementarity, this relation remains one of
common reciprocity
Between You two, participating on equal terms of transcendent
bliss.

The new sinless body is on the numerator.
The Devi is the body of Shiva because he is purely mathematical.
Verses 32 and 33 revise Kaula and Samaya: here, Shankara states
his own position and links them.
The breasts are hypostatic - they are sweat glands that turn into
milk, which comes from the skin, not from the stomach, in a way
resembling photosynthesis, that is - derived from light
- hence the reference to the sun and moon.
"Sinless" - the breasts are numerator and of a pure order.

WORD-FOR-WORD TRANSLATION
Shariram tvam shambhoh - You are the body of Shiva
Shashi mihira vaksho ruha yugam - having sun and moon for twin
breasts, shoulder-borne
Tava atmanam manye bhagavati - Yourself, I surmise, o beneficient
goddess
Nava atmanam anagham - as a new and sinless self
Ataha - thus
Sheshah sheshi iti ayam - by mutual complementarity this
Ubhaya sadhara nataya - by common reciprocity
Sthitaha - they remain
Sambandho - the interrelation
Vam - of You two
Sama rasa para ananda parayoh - on equal terms of transcendent
bliss

 

VERSE 35*** (KEY VERSE)
DESCENDING SET OF VALUES
THE REVERSE OF VERSE 34
CANCELLATION AT A NEGATIVE LEVEL
DESCENDING TO THE FIRST DIMENSION
THE ALPHA - OMEGA LINK PRESERVED

The wind You are, as also the charioteer of the winds,
You are the water, as well as the earth; apart from Your manifest
form there is nought else indeed!
You, in order to manifest Your own self, by taking a universal form
Of mental bliss substantial, do assume the role of Shiva- bride,
and thus triumphant rule.

This is a descending series of manifested items.
There is a series of values representing chakras.

WORD-FOR-WORD TRANSLATION
Manas tvam - the mind You are
Vyomah tvam - the sky
Marut asi - the wind You are
Marut sarathir asi - the charioteer of the winds (You are)
Tvam apaha - (you are) the water
Tvam bhumihi - the earth
Tvayi parinamayitum na hi param - apart from Your manifest form
there is nought else indeed
Tvam eva sva atmanam - You, in respect of Your own self
Parinamayitum - in order to make manifest
Vishva vapusha - by means of a universal form
Chid ananda karam - of mental bliss substantial
Shiva yuvati bhavena - You assume the role of Shiva-bride
Bibhrse - and thus You triumphant rule.

 

VERSE 36
AJNA CHAKRA
(MEANS: COMMAND OR POWERS OF ABSTRACTION OR WILL)
THE SUMMIT OF MEDITATION
INTENSE INTELLECTUAL CANCELLATION

I adore that Shiva ultimate, as placed in Your willing
centre, shining with the brilliance
Of millions of suns and moons, whose flanks are illumined by the
light of the intelligibles beyond;
Whom, worshipping with devotion, lifted beyond the reach of
sun, moon and fire,
In that domain above all need, one lives indeed in that bright
world of light.

This is an upward tendency.

WORD-FOR-WORD TRANSLATION
Tava - Your
Ajna chakra stham - as placed in Your willing centre
Tapana shashi koti dyuti dharam - shining with the brilliance of
millions of suns and moons
Param shambhum vande - I adore the transcendant Shiva
Pari milita parshvam parachita - whose flanks are illumined by
the light of the intelligibles beyond
Yam aradhyan bhaktya - whom, worshipping with devotion
Ravi shashi suchinam avishaye - lifted beyond the reach of
sun, moon or fire
Niraloke loke - in that domain above all need
Hi bhaloka - in that bright domain of light
Bhuvane nivasati - indeed he dwells in that bright world as his
world.


VERSE 37
VISHUDDHI CHAKRA
VISUDDHI MEANS "VERY PURE"
SYMMETRY BETWEEN ALPHA AND OMEGA POINTS

In Your Vishuddhi Chakra, crystal-clear and sky-generating,
I adore Shiva and the Goddess also, with parity of status with
Shiva
By whose combined, streaming, moonbeam-like fluorescence,
With banished inner dross, like a female partridge, the world
hereunder shines.

WORD-FOR-WORD TRANSLATION
Vishuddhau te - Your Vishuddhi Chakra
Shuddha sphatika vishadam - crystal clear
Vyoma janakam - sky generating
Shivam seve devim api - I adore Shiva and the Goddess also
Shiva samana vyavasitam - with parity of status with Shiva
Yaya kantya yantya shashi kirana sarupya saranim - by whose
combined moonbeam-like fluorescence
Vidhuta antar dhvanta - with banished inner dross
Vilasati - it shines
Chakoriva - like a female partridge
Jagati - the world (hereunder).


VERSE 38
ANAHATA CHAKRA
MEANS "NEVER KILLED", OR A BELL NOT STRUCK,
OR "UNDISTURBED"

I adore those twin swans, intent on enjoying the nectar
Of the lotus blooming within the consciousness
of certain great ones,
Moving within whose minds as a result of their elaboration,
The maturation of the eighteen arts takes place freed from dross,
their goodness extracted as milk from water.

WORD-FOR-WORD TRANSLATION
Samun milat samvit kamala makaranda - (blooming) lotus in
consciousness enjoying the nectar
Ika rasikam bhaje - (I adore) intently
Hamsa dvandvm - the pair of swans
Kim api mahatam - of certain great ones
Manasa charam - moving within the mind
Yad alapat - as a result of whose elaboration
Ashtadasa gunita vidya parinatihi - the maturation of the
eighteen arts takes place
Yad adatte doshat - which extracts from dross
Gunam akhilam - all goodness (therefrom)
Adbhyah paya eva - like milk from water.

 

VERSE 39
SWADHISTHANA
(TRADITIONALLY "MANIPURA" IN THIS POSITION)
MEANS "BASED ON ONESELF"

O Mother, I praise, placing in Your Svadhisthana the fire of
sacrifice;
Ever looking upon it as the great fire of doom, and placing there
her also called Samaya,
So that when the worlds are burning due to his anger,
Her mercy-moist regard renders to it the cooling touch of early
spring.

WORD-FOR-WORD TRANSLATION
Tava svadhisthane - in Your Svadhisthana Chakra
Hutavaham - the sacrificial fire
Adhishthaya - placing
Niratam tam ide - ever I adore it
Samvartam - like the fire of doom
Janani - o Mother
Mahatim tam cha - as also that great one
Samayam - called Samaya
Yada loke lokan dahati - when, by His rage, the worlds burn
Mahati krodha kalite dayardra ya drshtih - Her mercy-moist regard
Shishiram upacharam racayati - renders to it the cooling touch
of early spring.


VERSE 40
MANIPURA - (literally "jewelled city")
REALISTIC CANCELLATION - TRAGEDY

As found in certain contemplatives who take full refuge in Your
Manipura,
I adore that dark cloud of Yours, as traversed by forceful
lightning,
Banishing darkness and shining with the varied gem-decked
brightness of Indra's bow,
While over the three worlds, agonized by the heat of Shiva-sun,
It sheds its showering waters.

WORD-FOR-WORD TRANSLATION
Tati tvantam shaktya - as traversed forcefully by lightning flash
Timira pari panthi sphuranaya - darkness banishing and bursting
into sparks
Sphuran nana ratna bharana - with bright-lit varied gem-set
jewels
Parinad dhendra dhanusham - matured into the form of Indra's bow
Tava shyamam megham - Your dark cloud
Kam api manipura ika sharanam - as found in certain
contemplatives who take full refuge in Your Manipura
Nisheve - I supplicate before
Varshantam - as it pours down in rain
Hara mihira tapatam tribhuvanam - while over the three worlds
agonized by the heat of Shiva-sun

VERSE 41
MULADHARA (MEANS "ROOT")

I meditate on Your new self, as placed at Your Muladhara, together
with Samaya,
Given to her light-step dance, as also that great bold-step
dancer;
Giving expression thereby to all nine aesthetic interests,
thus by their joint lordship,
By mercy ordaining the rebirth of the world, they confer on it
The renewed status of having both father and mother.


NEW SECTION
VERSES 42-49: COMPLEMENTARITY
OF BOWS AND CRESCENTS AT DIFFERENT LEVELS
OF HYPOSTASY - BRACKETING
VERSES 49-51: THE FACE AS DIAL OR INDICATOR

VERSE 42
KEY VERSE
THE OPPOSITE OF VERSE 48
VERTICALIZED ORBS
THE FUSING OF 12 SUNS AND ITS DUPLICATIONS

These sky orbs twelve attained to rubyhood and placed close
together,
He who can praise thusYour golden crown, o Daughter of the Snowy
peak,
Would he not have then in his mind the impression of the bow of
Indra
When, by reflected glory, a slender crescent is produced by gems
imbedded therein.
Ruby stands for twilight.

WORD-FOR-WORD TRANSLATION
Gataih manikyatvam - they attain to rubyhood
Gagana mani bhih - those sky orbs twelve
Sandra ghatitam kiritam - pressed close together
Te haimam - Your golden
Himagiri sute - o daughter of the snowy peak
Kirtayati yah - he who praises
Sa nideyacchaya churana shabalam chandra shakalam - when by
reflected glory have then in his mind a slender crescent
Dhanush shaunasiram - as Indra's bow
Kim iti - whether it is not
Na nibadhnati dhishanam - present to his mind.


VERSE 43
SHOWS THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN
SUBSTANCE AND ATTRIBUTE
ONTOLOGICAL RICHNESS AND TELEOLOGICAL INDIGENCE
THE OMEGA-POINT DARKNESS IS CANCELLED

Let the blooming blue-lotus forest growth of Your thick, glossy
and lustrous locks
O Shiva-consort, banish the darkness within us
To gain whose natural fragrance those other flowers of the garden
of Indra,
As I can guess, take their place within Your tresses.

Indigence = lack of fragrance

WORD-FOR-WORD TRANSLATION
Dhunotu dhvantam nah - let it banish the darkness within us
Tulita dalitendivara vanam - the blooming blue lotus forest
Ghana snigdhash lakshnam - thick, glossy and lustrous
Chikura nikurumbam - cluster of locks
Tava - Your
Shive - Shiva consort
Yadiyam saurabhyam sahajam - whose natural fragrance
Upalabdhum - to gain
Sumanasaha - flowers
Vasanti asmin - they live here
Manye - as I guess
Balama thana vati vitapinam - of the trees in Indra's garden.


VERSE 44
THE VERTICAL PARAMETER PRODUCED UPWARDS
THE INVASION OF RIVAL HORIZONTAL FORCES

May it bless us, the upsurging billow of the beauty of your face
Outflowing into a stream, to resemble Your parted hairline,
With vermilion dust bedecked, keeping apart the strong growth
Of tresses
As if in bondage held by anti-darkness gangs,
to reveal the tender rays of dawn.

The invasion of rival horizontal forces.


VERSE 45
BEES AROUND THE LOTUS FACE
CENTRAL AND PERIPHERAL AMBIVALENCE
COMPLEMENTARY COUNTERPARTS

Your face, exuding perfume, as it gently smiles,
HavingYour bright teeth for filament,
when surrounded by Your natural curls,
Like so many reveling, honey-licking bees;
Each the eye of the Eros-burner, puts to shame the beauty of the lotus.

Filament = inner parts of a flower.


VERSE 46
ABSOLUTE BEAUTY RESULTANT
OF TWO CRESCENT MOON BRACKETS
BEAUTY PRODUCED BY ONTOLOGY AND TELEOLOGY
COMING TOGETHER

I fain would treat Your forehead, shining with radiant beauty,
A second crescent to that other frail one fixed to Your crown,
So that reversed in position, both as knit one-to-one,
Results the form of a fully-matured moon, emanating soft ambrosial essence.

 

VERSE 47
THE TRAGIC CONTRADICTION BETWEEN THE BOWS
OF EROS AND GODDESS

O Uma, ever pained in concern for banishing the fear of all creatures,
And thus with eyebrows somewhat arched,
with eyes of bee-like beauty below,
I do surmise them as making up the bowstring for this bow
Of the God of love, held by his other hand,
His arm and fist hiding the middle part.

Eros wants to shoot arrows in opposite directions.
One arrow of sympathy, which is horizontal
One arrow upwards, to shoot Shiva, which is vertical.
The two bows are at right angles.


VERSE 48
KEY VERSE
THE VERTICALIZATION OF WHAT IS HORIZONTAL
OPPOSITE OF VERSE 42

That eye of Yours, in essence the same as the sun and other than the left,
It generates daytime; the left one, presiding over night,
creates its three vigils;
While the third eye, like a half-open golden lotus bud,
Ushers in the twilight time, moving between day and night.

Tilted at 90 degrees the sun and moon produce vertical twilight.


VERSE 49
EACH CITY HAS A PERSONALITY
REPRESENTING A VALUE FACTOR

Vishala the expansive, Kalyani the auspicious;
Sphutaruchi the clear of taste;
Ayodhya the invincible, by blue lotus bound;
Kripadharadhara, on mercy's fountain founded;
A certain Madhura, the sweet; Avanti, of saving power;
Bhogavatika, enjoyment affording;
All such names of various cities of lasting fame,
within Your total regard they do reign triumphant.

There is a play on words here: Vishala etc. are the names
of famous cities, also words meaning expansive, auspicious etc.,
used to describe the Devi's glance.
Vishala (the expansive) implies the horizontal.


VERSE 50
JEALOUSY AS A CONTRADICTION BETWEEN
HORIZONTAL AND VERTICAL

Seeing Your baby bumble-bee-like pair of eyes which,
while seeming to cast glances
Do not give up the bases of Your ears,
mellowed by the play of the nine aesthetic interests,
Remaining like aptness with poets,wholly absorbed in
drinking the honey within a spray of blooms;
Your mid - forehead lotus-bud eye,
by jealousy touched, seems magenta tinged


VERSE 51
7 OF THE NINE RASAS (SHADES OF AESHETIC INTEREST)
7 MOODS, EROTIC OR AESTHETIC INTERESTS,
SOMETIMES VERTICALLY NEUTRALIZED

Moved by sentimental love for Shiva,
resentful to any other person;
With anger of jealousy towards Ganges,
and with transports of wonder at Shiva's story;
With fearful surprise for the snakes of Hara,
and for friends a jestful smile;
As such a source of lotus-red grace, Your regard, o Mother,
for me will remain one of kindliness.

The Devi's interest is horizontal.
Shiva's interest is vertical.
The interaction is magenta.


SERIES 52 - 60
NEW SECTION
FOURFOLD STRUCTURES ON THE FACE OF THE DEVI
PSYCHO-PHYSICAL REACTION

VERSE 52
KARUNA KATAKSHA
NO SIN IN KINDNESS PUSHED TO THE HORIZONTAL LIMIT

Drawn fully to the ear-limits, like gleaming Eros arrows,
With lashes looking like
Arrow-base feathers; these Your eyes, having the effect
Of disturbing the complacent detachment of the City-Burner,
Make for Your glory as the highest clan of the Mountain King.
Fully horizontal means fully in love, sympathetic.
Jealousy is the result of a 90 degree deflection.
Karuna is horizontal - Her pride in Her family is denominator -
not directed up to Shiva.

 

VERSE 53
HORIZONTAL GUNAS

The tricolour distinctness of Your eyes,
O beloved of Ishana (Lord),
Presented in clear threefold relief by the use of collyrium,
Would seem to create afresh the gods Shiva,Vishnu and Indra,
Bereft of passion and having the qualities
of Rajas, Sattva and Tamas.

The red, white and black colours of her eyes are like the three Gunas,
or modalities of nature
The three Gunas are like a folded fan, absorbed into a horizontal
gleaming line.


VERSE 54
THE THREE GUNAS MERGE WHEN FOCUSED CENTRALLY

O one of kindly, sympathetic regard,
Your heart being given over to the Lord of Beasts:
of rivers such as Shona, Ganga andYamuna,
Coloured red, white and black:
Their sacred waters You do blend indeed
into sinless confluence for our purification.

Sankara is describing the purificatory bathing at the sacred meeting
of three rivers, as at Triveni at Allahabad. This is compared to the
inner corner of the eye of the Devi.
The eyes are focused on the centre in meditation.
The three modalities of nature, the gunas, are folded vertically.
Ritualistic bathing in the Ganges: you abstract and generalize
the river and yourself - cancellation occurs.
Your personality and the personality of all other bathers attains
to homogeneity.

 

VERSE 55
NEUTRALIZATION BETWEEN VERTICAL AND HORIZONTAL

With eyes open or shut, You can effect, as saints say,
The being or non-being of the world, o Daughter of the
Earth- Supporting Lord;
What thus came to be as you opened them,
this entire world, without anything left to save,
I now surmise, You remain now with eyes
Unwinkingly withdrawn.

Overt and innate aspects of creation are neutralized.
There is a neutral balance between noumenal and
phenomenal aspects of creation.

 

VERSE 56
PARTICIPATION OF EYE AND EAR
THE PLAY BETWEEN VERTICAL AND HORIZONTAL
FIGURES OF EIGHT

O Aparna, afraid of the gossip carried to Your ear bases
by Your lengthened eyes,
Surely they lie merged unwinking in water
Like the female Sapherika fish;
This Lakshmi too, leaves behind at dawn the closed petal doors
Of water lilies,
And at dusk, forcing them open, She re-enters therein.

Aparna, another name for the Devi, means without leaf .
Gossip at the foot of the ears means that the conceptual participates
with the perceptual by circulation.


VERSE 57
A SIDE GLANCE ACTING AT A DISTANCE
RECOGNITION WITHOUT FAVOURITISM

With Your long-extended regard having the beauty of water-lilies
just opening,
O Shiva-consort, do bathe with mercy even me
steeped in misery far off;
Thus shall I be blessed with no loss to You;
The moonbeams do fall on forest and mansion with equality.

The "long-extended regard" refers to a Kataksha,
or side-glance of the Devi.


VERSE 58
ENIGMATIC PARADOX OF PSYCHO-PHYSICAL DYNAMISM
STATED GLOBALLY

The two sets of curved limiting lines of Yours,
O Daughter of the King of Mountains,
Who is it that will not fancy them as the bow of the flower-
arrowed one;
Where, placed obliquely, and reaching beyond the path of hearing,
As it shines, adhering toYour side-glances, it gives the
impression of the fixing of the arrow.

Ear and eyebrow limits with Eros' arrow aimed at 90 degrees.


VERSE 59
MORE DIRECT VERTICO-HORIZONTAL INTERACTION
A VERTICALIZED VERSION OF SARASWATI - PARVATI
PARTICIPATION

This,Your face, I consider Kama's chariot with four wheels,
As seen when Your ear ornaments are reflected on Your shining cheeks;
Surmounting which that great hero Kama assails the Lord of Hosts,
Who, with sun and moon for foothold, mounting the globe
For chariot, is fully ready to give him battle.

Horizontal versus vertical chariots.


VERSE 60
PERCEPTUAL AND CONCEPTUAL VALUES
INTERACTION BETWEEN TWO DICTIONARIES
RECIPROCITY BETWEEN METALLIC SOUNDS AND WORDS

The good sayings of Saraswati, exuding nectar sweetness,
Ever absorbing as with slow interest, You bend Your ears to them,
O Blessed one;
Each bright wit therein approving with nods,
While Your series of earrings seem to applaud them
with their high pitched jinglings.


61 - 70 VERTICAL PARTICIPATION AT THREE LEVELS
INTIMATE PARTICIPATION AND ONE - ONE CORRESPONDENCE

VERSE 61
A HIERARCHY OF OVERGENEROUS VALUES

O banner of the dynasty of the Himalayas,
Your nose ridge, here as Your clan's flagstaff,
Let it ripen for us, standing so near below You, deserving fruit;
Inwardly wearing pearls as they do,
and dropped by cool moonbeam respiration,
It bears, even outside, pearls due to the plenitude of the same.


STRUCTURE P7 - P124 - V61

Inside and outside plenitude.

 

VERSE 62
THING AND THING SIGNIFIED HAVE A
DANCING PARITY BETWEEN THEM

O one of goodly teeth, of Your parted lips, naturally red,
I shall declare the similitude;
Let the coral reef bear fruit by reflection from its original
model,
With which desiring to climb to the point of mid-parity,
However could it avoid being abashed at least by a degree?


There is a figure 8 dance in search for parity between the reflected
redness of the teeth and the redness of the lips.


VERSE 63
PARTICIPATION IN TERMS OF ENJOYING MOONLIGHT

Your smile, like a moonbeam cluster out of Your moon-bright face,
Partridges, on drinking, by surfeit of sweetness
Numbness of tongue they got; thus presently
do they imbibe eagerly
The nectar thereof, treating it as sour brew, night by night.

Partridges, or Chakora birds, are supposed to live by drinking moonlight.

 

VERSE 64
PARTICIPATION AT THE TIP OF THE TONGUE (ADHYASA)

By incessant repetition of a muttered charm glorifying Your Lord;
As offering, the flower-red shade of Your tongue triumphs;
The pure, clear crystal outline image of Saraswati,
While seated at Your tongue-tip, o Mother,
In turn attains to rubyhood in its bodily form.

Constant repetition makes the tongue red,
which redness passes to the numerator side.


VERSE 65
POLYVALENT PARTICIPATION BY SKANDA

O Mother, they merge, those mouthfuls of betel-juice of Your face,
As Skhanda,Vishnu and Upendra,vanquishing demons in battle,
Taking their headgear and armour,
They return, discountenancing that Shiva's portion of offering
Meant for Chanda which are moon- bright bits of camphor.

VERSE 66
LINE OF SEPARATION
THE PRIMACY OF PARTICIPATION PASSES TO ONTOLOGY

Starting as You do to sing with Your vina, with head movements,
Of the varied exploits of the City-Burner,You,
as the Goddess of the Word,
The one of lovely speech,You promptly cover up to silence
Your instrument as mocking the sweetness thereof
by sounds of strings.

She is numerator.
The strings are denominator.

 

VERSE 67
THE FATHER'S TOUCH OF THE CHIN IS STATIC
THE HUSBAND'S TOUCH IS A DYNAMIC FIGURE 8

Affectionately touched by the tip of the hand
of the Mountain King,
And lifted again and again by that Shiva out of desire
To drink of the lips thereof, that which makes the handle
For Your face-mirror, how could we ever speak of it,
Your peerless chin.


VERSE 68
CONTRAST ENHANCES BEAUTY
MUDDY PUTS CLEAR IN RELIEF
THE MERGING OF THE TWO SIDES OF THE SITUATION

Incessantly embraced by the arms of the City-Burner,
And thrilled to thorny bristling of the hair of Your neck,
It shows the lotus-stalk grace, smudged by excess
of dark cosmetic paste,
By itself it retains beneath the creeper-tendril suppleness
Of the pearly necklace lotus core.

WORD-FOR-WORD TRANSLATION
Bhujashleshan - by being embraced by arms
Nityam pura damayituh - ever (incessantly) of the City-Burner
Kantakavati - thrilled to thorny bristling
Tava griva dhatte - Your neck shows
Mukha kamala nala shriyam - a lotus-stalk grace
Iyam svatah shveta - this, by itself white
Kala guru bahula jambala malina - smudged by excess of black
cosmetic paste
Mrnali lalityam vahati - the lotus creeper suppleness
Yad adhah - beneath the same
Hara latika - a garland of pearls.

 

VERSE 69
GOOD MUSIC IS BASED ON 3 SUBTLE LEVELS/VARIATIONS,
WHICH ARE VERTICAL

Those three lines on Your neck,
O One fully expert in time, syncope and melody;
They are the counter-grounds of Your marital thread
of strands and substrands,
As they do shine as the ground wherein is born many a melody;
Giving position, regulation and limitation
for the three groups of musical keys.

The auspicious three lines on the Devi's neck, like the three strands on
her marital thread, are compared to the three nature-modalities or Gunas,
as well as Gati, Gamaka and Gita: time, syncope and melody.
Three folds on the neck are existential.
Swaram, Layam, Ragam are also implied.
(see A.Daniélou on Indian musical theory)

WORD-FOR-WORD TRANSLATION
Gale rekhas tisrah - the three lines on Your neck
Gati gamaka gitaika nipune - o One fully expert in time,
syncopation and melody.
Viva havya anaddha praguna guna samkhya prati bhuvah - they are
the counterground of the marital thread of strands and substrands
Virajante - they shine in glory
Nana vidha madhura raga kara bhuvam - as the ground wherein is
born many a melody
Trayanam gramanam - of the three groups of musical keys
Sthiti niyama simana - as factors of position, regulation and
Limitation - Iva te - as they are

 

VERSE 70
FOURFOLD ONE-ONE CORRESPONDENCE AT TWO LEVELS

Of the lotus-core tender beauty of You fourfold hands,
He sings the praise, the lotus-born god, trembling the while
because of Shiva's nails
That once of yore nipped off his extra head,
He, (Brahma) intending now to pray for
Your refuge-granting hand- gesture for each of his remaining heads.

Brahma's building material is pollen dust -
finer than that is ashes which is used by Shiva to place
three ritual lines upon his forehead.

WORD-FOR-WORD TRANSLATION
Mrnali mrdvinam - of the lotus core tender
Tava bhuja latanam chatasrnam - of Your fourfold creeper-like arms
Chaturbhih - of the 4
Saundaryam - beauty
Sarasija bhavah stauti - he praises the lotus-born (Brahma)
Vadanaih - by means of his faces
Nakhe bhyah samtrasyan prathama mathanad andhaka ripuh -
By nails being ripped off once before by the enemy of death
(Shiva), fearing his nails
Chaturnam shirshanam - for the (remaining ) four heads
Samam abhaya hastarpana dhiya - with 1/1 correspondance now
intending to pray for refuge granting gestures (one for each head).

 

71 - 80 BRACKETING AND ONE/ONE CORRESPONDENCE
VERSE 71
UPPER AND LOWER LIMITS MARKED OUT

Shining by the play of Your fingernails that mock in colour
Just-opening lotus buds,
How could we speak of the beauty of Your hand?
Granted be, o Uma, that the lotus could have one shade less of
parity with it
If at all, and that, alas, only when touched by the magenta paste
of the sole of Lakshmi as she plays thereon.

WORD-FOR-WORD TRANSLATION
Nakhanam udyotaih - by the shining of Your fingernails
Nava nalina ragam vihasatam - that mock the colour of
just-opening lotus buds
Karanam te - of Your hands
Kantim kathaya - say the beauty
Kathaya mah katham - how could we
Ume - o Uma
Kaya cid va - somehow
Samyam bhajati - equality have
Kalaya - (at least) by a shade (of) difference only (e.g. one day
from full moon)
Hanta - alas
Kamalam yadi - if the lotus should
Kridat lakshmi charana tala - as Lakshmi sporting (thereon)
Laksha rasachanam - the sole of her feet with its magenta paste
of the sole of Lakshmi as she plays thereon.

 

VERSE 72
MUTUAL ERROR FROM TWO POINTS ON THE VERTICAL AXIS

Let it banish our misery, o Goddess, your twin breasts,
Ever being sucked equally by Skanda and Ganesha;
Of which, seeing their milk-spouting fronts, Ganesha causes
laughter
As he feels his own front with misgivings in his mind.

The mother sees the child as an elephant,
The child sees the mother as an elephan
Hallucination both ways.

WORD-FOR-WORD TRANSLATION
Samam devi - equally at once, o Goddess
Skanda dvipa vadana - (dvipa = twice drinking:
i.e. both by trunk and mouth)
pitam stanayugam - by Skanda and Ganesha sucked,
the twin breasts.
Tava idam - yours these here
Naha khedam haratu - let it banish our misery
(abolish our paradox)
Satatam - for ever
Prasnuta mukham - milk-spouting
Yad alokya - which, on seeing
Ashanka kulitah hrdayah - with misgivings in his heart
Hasa janakaha -
Svakhumbau herambah parimrshati - as he feels his own front
Hastena jhaditi - causes laughter ( in Skanda)


VERSE 73
COMPENSATION BETWEEN HIGHER NOURISHMENT,
GIVING PURER LIFE

O banner of the King of Peaks, Your breasts, shoulder-borne
Are nectar-bearing ruby pots indeed, without any trace of doubt
These two, Skanda and Ganesha, both innocent of the pleasures of
marital contact,
Drinking from them they remain thus child-like to the present day.

High, shoulder-borne breasts mean hypostatic nourishment.
A higher source of life results in innocence.

WORD-FOR-WORD TRANSLATION
Amu te vakshojau - these Your breasts, shoulder-borne
Amrta rasa manikya kutupau - are nectar-bearing ruby pots
Na sandeha spandaha - without any trace of doubt
Naga pati patake - o banner of the King of Peaks
Manasih nah - in our mind
Pibantau tau - drinking (thereof) the two (Skanda and Ganesha)
Yasmat - by reason of it
Avidita vadhusanga rasikau - innocent of conjugal joy
Kumarau adi api - even now, infant sons they remain.
Dvirada vadana kraunca dalanau - the elephant-faced and the
mountain-splitting Skanda.


VERSE 74
A PARAMETER DESCENDING FROM PEARL TO RUBY AND
BLACK (HAIR) FROM THE DIVING OF EROS
BELOW THE O POINT

Your mid-bust region, wearing a slender garland of pearly beads,
Derived and worked out by some elephant-demon
vanquished by Shiva,
The semblance bears of his reputation with added redness of lips
And an inner brightness presenting a picturesque charm.

WORD-FOR-WORD TRANSLATION
Vahati - it is wearing
Ambe - o Mother
Stambera madanuja kumbha prakrti bhih - derived from the frontal
knobs of the elephant demon
Sama rabdham mukta mani bhih - pearls fabricated
Amalam hara latikam - killed by Shiva
Kucha bhogam - the mid-bust region
Bimba adhara ruci bhih - with added lip-red sweetness
Antah shabalitam - made variegated from within (giving
irridescent glow to pearls)
Pratapa vyamishram - mixed with his exploits
Pura damayituh - of the controller of the cities
Kirtim iva - like the reputation
Te - for You


VERSE 75
THE MILK OF WISDOM EQUATED WITH WORDS OF WISDOM

Your breast milk, I consider, o maiden born to the
Earth-Supporting Lord,
As if it were word-wisdom's ocean of nectar,
Flooding from out of Your heart,
Offered by one who is kind, which, on tasting,
This dravidian child, amidst superior poets,
Is born a composer of charming verse.

WORD-FOR-WORD TRANSLATION
Tava stanyam manye - Your breast-milk, I consider
Dharani dhara kanye - o maiden born to the Earth-Supporting Lord
Hrdayatah - from the heart
Paya para varah - as an ocean of nectar
Parivahati - as flooding out
Sarasvatam iva - as pertaining to word wisdom
Daya vatya dattam - as offered by one of kindness
Dravida shishuh - this child of the dravidian context
Asvadya tava - Yours having tasted
Yat - by which reason
Kavinam praudhanam ajani - born amidst superior poets
Kamaniyah kavayita - a composer of charming verse


VERSE 76
THE PARAMETER CONTINUES BELOW THE O POINT

That mind-born god, once, on his body being engulfed
In the fire of Shiva's ire, into the deep lake of Your navel,
O Mountain Daughter, he dived, and on re-emerging,
The smoke thus raised, the people look upon as Your rows of hair.

slp8-p10-v76

STRUCTURE SLP8 - P10 - V76


WORD-FOR-WORD TRANSLATION
Hara krodha jvala vali bhih - by the encircling flames of the ire
of Shiva
Avalidhena vapusha - with body engulfed
Gabhire te nabhi sarasi - in the profound navel lake of Yours
Krtah sangah - having dived
Manasi jaha samuttasthau - the mind-born god eros emerged
therefrom
Tasmat - by that reason
Achala tanaye - daughter of the mountain
Dhuma latika - the creeper-like streaks of smoke
Janas tam - them, the people
Janite - they take to be
Janani tava roma valih iti - o Mother as Your rows of hairs


VERSE 77
FINE STRUCTURALIZED SPACE

O auspicious Mother, that something revealed
at Your slender waist,
Looking like ripples on the surface of the river Kalindi,
Looms in the mind of contemplatives as space
reduced to ethereal particles,
Entering into the cavity of Your navel,
and produced by the friction of Your pot-like breasts.
WORD-FOR-WORD TRANSLATION
Yad etat - this which is here seen
Kalindi tanu tara taranga krti - having the form of superfine
ripples on the river Kalindi
Shive - o Shiva Consort
Krshe madhye - at Your slender middle region
Kinchit - that something
Janani - o Mother
Tava yad - Yours which is
Bhati sudhiyam - looms inthe mind of contemplatives
Vimardat anyonyam kucha kala shayoh - reduced by the friction of
Your pot-like breasts
Antara gatam - entering inside (the cavity of the navel)
Tanu bhutam vyoma - pure space reduced to ethereal particles
Pravishad iva nabhim - as if entering into the cavity of the
navel
Kuharinim - which has a hollow cavity.


VERSE 78
THE O POINT WITH FOURFOLD POLYVALENCE

O mountain-born, your navel reigns supreme
As a stilled gangetic whirlpool,
as the fecund flowerbed of Your breast-bud-bearing creeper
As the sacrificial fire-pit for Kama,
and for Rati her pleasure-bower,
While to the eyes of the Mountain Lord,
The cavern mouth for his austerities.

WORD-FOR-WORD TRANSLATION
Sthiro ganga vartah - still gangetic whirlpool
Stana mukula roma vali lata kala valam - as the flower-bed for
the creeper of lines of hair for which Your breasts are buds
Kundam kusuma shara tejo huta bhujah - the sacrificial fire-pit
for receiving the offerings of the glory of Eros.
Rateh lila garam - for Rati her pleasure bower
Kim api - and as what not
Tava nabhir giri sute - o daughter of the peak,Your navel
Bilad varam siddheh girisha nayananam - to the eyes of
Shiva the cave for austerities to bear fruit
Vijayate - it reigns supreme


VERSE 79
PRECARIOUS VACUITY AT THE O POINT

For Your waist, naturally slim, fatigued by weight of bust form,
Bending by form and on the point of breaking,
Equal in state to a tree on a collapsing brook bank;
O mountain-born one, let there be security forever.

WORD-FOR-WORD TRANSLATION
Nisarga kshinasya - for what is naturally slim
Stana tata bharena klama jusho - fatigued by weight of bust form
Naman murteh - having the figure bent down
Nari tilaka - o best among women (tilaka = beauty spot on
forhead)
Shanakaih trutyta iva -
Chiram - forever
Te maddhyasya - for Your waist region
Trutita tatini tira taruna - the likeness of a tree on a
collapsing brook bank
Sama vasthah sthemnaha - equality of stable state
Bhavatu kushalam - let there be well-being (or security)
Shaila tanaye - o Daughter of the Mountain.


VERSE 80
FULL HORIZONTALITY WITH A THIN MIDDLE GROUND
RECIPROCITY BETWEEN HORIZONTAL DEVELOPMENT
AND VERTICAL THINNESS

O Goddess, having madeYour twin breasts gain the beauty of gold pots,
Rubbing at the upper arms, bursting the bodice and presently perspiring,
The God of Love, now wanting to save your threefold waist,
With three strands of a wild creeper, he presently binds.

Speed glows - time shrinks
There is reciprocity here between the horizontal and the vertical
The limit of horizontality implies the limit of verticality.

WORD-FOR-WORD TRANSLATION
Kuchau - the pair of breasts
Sadyah svidyat tata ghatita kurpasa bhidurau - bursting the
knotted bodice and presently perspiring
Kashantau dormule - rubbing at the upper arms
Kanaka kala shabau - having the brilliance of twin golden pots
Kalayata - he who makes
Tava tratum - these Yours to save
Bhangat - from breaking
Alam iti - saying enough
Valagnam - the mid region
Tanu bhuva tridha naddham - the god of love has bound by threefold
strands
Devi - Goddess
Triva lila vallibhih - by three strands of a wild creeper
Iva - it would seem


VERSE 81
SUMMARY OF STRUCTURAL DETAILS
ON THE ONTOLOGICAL LEVEL
PRIMACY FOR THE ONTOLOGICAL ABSOLUTE
FIGURE 8 CIRCULATION BETWEEN
EXISTENCE AND SUBSISTENCE

Ponderability and extensiveness Shiva once bestowed on You as dowry,
Cutting them off from his own hips; thus it is,
This Yours here, both weighty and expansive,
cancels out the whole world
And by prior substantiality confers lightness on it too.

WORD-FOR-WORD TRANSLATION
Gurutvam vistaram - ponderability and extensiveness
Kshiti dhara patih - the earth supporting Lord
Parvati - o Mountain Daughter
Nijat nitambat acchidya - cutting off from his own proper hips
Tvayi harana rupena - to You by way of dowry
Nidadhe - he bestows
Atah te - this it is (Your)
Vistirno gurur ayam - which is both weighty and expansive
Vishesham vasumatih - the whole earth
Nitamba pragbarah - by prior substantiality
Sthagayati - cancels
Laghu tvam nayati cha - confers lightness on it also


VERSE 82
BALANCE BETWEEN NUMERATOR AND DENOMINATOR

Beating both the best of elephant trunks,
and groups of golden banana stems,
By thighs and by knees having goodly callosities,
Due to daily devotions to Your lord,
Even the twin knobs of the heavenly elephant
You out-do, o Mountain Daughter triumphant.

VERSE 83
THE UNIVERSAL CONCRETE IS HERE RECOGNIZED

His quiver duplicating as Your twin legs, looking like pillars
Made by the God of Love, for giving battle to Shiva,
They show at their knees ten arrowheads, simulating nails,
Sharpened only on the whetstones which are the crowns of gods.

WORD-FOR-WORD TRANSLATION
Parajetum rudram - to give battle to Shiva
Dviguna shara garbhau giri sute - his quiver duplicated,
O Mountain Daughter
Nishangau - (they are) a pair of pillars
Janghe te - these legs of Yours
Vishama vishikoh - the one of keen arrows (Eros)
Badham akrta - he surely made
Yad agre - at their tips
Drshyante - they are seen
Dasha shara phalah - ten arrowheads
Pada yugali nakha agra cchadmanas - simulating the toenails
of the twin feet
Surama kuta sanaika nishitaha - sharpened solely on whetstones
which are the crowns of gods.


VERSE 84
THE CANCELLABILITY OF VERTICAL LIMITS

O Mother,Your twin feet, marking as they do
the crest-point of wisdom,
Wearable as head ornament by You as by me,
Kindly place both upon my head.
Water from their ablution comes from the stream
in Shiva's matted hair,
And the red paste on their sole comes from the magenta glory
of Vishnu's crown.

Top and bottom are interchangeable.

WORD-FOR-WORD TRANSLATION
Shrutinam murdhano - the crest point of scriptural wisdom
Dadhati - they indicate
Tava yau - those two of Yours
Shekha rataya mam api - by being crest jewels as for me also
Etau - such these (two)
Matah - o mother
Shirasi dayaya dhehi - kindly place upon my head
Charanau yayoh - the feet for which
Padyam pathah - ablution water
Pashu pati jata juta tatini - is the brook in Shiva's matted hair
Yayoh laksha lakshmir - for which too,the red paste glory
Aruna hari chudamani ruchih - is the magenta glory of Vishnu's
crown


VERSE 85
MYSTICAL THRILL

Spoken words of worship do we offer to those Your lotus feet,
Beauteous as they are to view, smeared over with paste of magenta glory;
Extremely jealous is he, the Lord of Beasts,
of that Ashoka tree in Your pleasure grove,
For desiring to be kicked by them.

WORD-FOR-WORD TRANSLATION
Namo vakam brumo - spoken words of worship do we offer
Nayana ramaniyaya - beauteous to view
Padayoh - to the twin feet
Tava asmai dvandvaya - for these your pair
Sphuta ruchi rasa lakta kava te - smeared over with brilliant
magenta glory (paste)
Asuyat yatyantam - extremely jealous
Yad abhi ananaya sprhayate - to contact them by being kicked
Pashunam ishanah pramada vana kankeli tarave - towards the Ashoka
tree of the pleasure grove (intoxication)


VERSE 86
ONTOLOGY MEETS TELEOLOGY RATHER ABRUPTLY
CONCEPTUALISM REDUCED STILL FURTHER IS NOMINALISM

On having inadvertently defaulted in respect of Your family name,
While stooping in shame, Your husband's forehead
as You kicked with Your lotus feet,
That enemy of Shiva, wholly giving up his rancour,
His victory celebrates with clamour of many jingle bells.

The Alpha point of one touches the Omega point of the other.
The family honour of Parvati is involved.
Nominalistic indifference of Shiva.

WORD-FOR-WORD TRANSLATION
Mrsha krtva gotra skhalanam - having inadvertently defaulted in
respect of Your family name
Atha vailakshya namitam - then stooping in shame
Lalata bhartaram - on Your husband's forhead
Charana kamale tadayati te - when the two lotus feet are kicking
Chirat - what is long standing
Antah shalyam - rancour
Dahana krtam - caused by the burning of Shiva
Unmulita vata - having wholly abandoned (plucked out) his rancour
Tula koti kvanaih - by sound rising from the end of ankle
Kilikilitam - with jingle bells
Ishana ripuna - by the enemy of Shiva


VERSE 87
FOURFOLD CIRCULATION OF VALUES BETWEEN
TWO PAIRS OF LOTUS FEET

Capable of being killed by snow, and fully at home on the snow peak;
Sleeping at night, and in bloom both at dusk and after;
Making Lakshmi's bowl overgenerous to Your vedic worshippers,
Such the twin lotus of Your foot, it triumphs:
What wonder herein?

There is a quaternion of lotuses, each with a different status of existence
"Sleeping at night" implies the right-hand side.
There are four epistemological types of existence:
Concrete, Virtual, Conceptual and Actual

WORD-FOR-WORD TRANSLATION
Himani hantavyam - capable of being killed by snow
Hima giri nivasaika chaturau - (Your twin feet) fully at home
on the snow peak
Nishayam nidranam - sleeping at night
Nishim charama bhage cha vishadau - and in bloom at dusk and day
Varam lakshmi patram - as a desirable seat for Lakshmi
Shriyam ati srjantau samayinam - overgenerous in gifts bestowed
on Your vedic worshippers called Samayins
Sarojam tvad padau - such Your twin lotus feet
Janani jayata - o Mother, they triumph
Chitram iha kim - what cause for wonder here?

 

VERSE 88
ABOLISH PARADOX BETWEEN ONTOLOGY AND TELEOLOGY
A PUN ON THE CONCEPTUAL AND PERCEPTUAL IMPORT OF VALUES

Your foot is the seat for good refuge, o Goddess;
How then from danger to safety did it come?
The wise treat it as of tortoise-shell hardness;
How then was it that Shiva,
At his wedding, could lift it with a tender mind
to place it on the ritual stone?

WORD-FOR-WORD TRANSLATION
Padam te kirtinam prapadam - Your foot is the supreme seat of
good repute
Apadam devi vipadam katham nitam - how then from danger it was
led to its denial
Sad bhih kathina kamathi karpara tula - by the good poets or
writers as equal in hardness to the tortoise shell
Katham va - however could it have been
Bahu bhyam - by both hands
Upaya mana kale - at his wedding time
Pura bhida - by the destroyer of cities
Yad adaya nyastam - the same was taken and placed
Drshadi - on the ritual stone block
Dayamanena manasa - with tender mind (or supple state of)


VERSE 89
BOTH HYPOSTATIC AND HIEROPHANTIC VALUES
REVIEWED UNDER THE ABSOLUTE

With fingernails like moons, putting to shame
The lotus hands of celestial damsels,
And feet that seem to mock celestial trees,
O tragic one, Chandi,Your twin feet offer fruit to heaven-dwellers
With leaf-tender finger-tips, and bring secure riches to the poor
instantly and incessantly.

 

VERSE 90
VERTICAL ABSORPTION IN ABSOLUTE VALUES

Giving riches to the needy as required, and of its store of honey
Distributing plentifully sweetness around; into such a beauty
Of the celestial blossom of Your feet, immersed altogether,
Let my life go merged with legs and inner organs into six-footed
beehood.
This is Vedantic salvation.
Vertical affiliation within a circle of horizontal interest.

WORD-FOR-WORD TRANSLATION
Dadane dine bhyah - giving to the needy
Shriyam anisham - wealth incessantly
Ashanu sadrshim - according to desire
Amandam - not slowly (plentifully and quickly)
Saundarya prakara makarandam - the honey of the celestial
blossoms of beauty
Vikirati tava - what distributes all around Your
Asmin mandara stabaka subhage - into such a beauty of the cluster
of celestial blooms
Yatu - let it attain
Charane nimajja - immersed into the feet
Maj jivah - my life
Karana charanah - the six organs (with mind) for feet
Shat charanatam - into six-footed beehood.


VERSE 91
LESSONS TO CYGNETS

Your young domesticated cygnets, intent on learning from You the
sportive pose of steps,
Practicing still with faults, o one of graceful gait, on their not
giving up,
With the sound of gem-filled anklets imitating,
It would seem now that You are teaching them.

WORD-FOR-WORD TRANSLATION
Padanyasya krida parichayam iva - as if practicing the sportive
pose of steps
Arabdhu manasah skhantalah - intending to begin, still making
mistakes
Te khelam - Your lovely gait
Bhavana kala hamsa - the domesticated cygnets
Na jahati - do not abandon
Atah tesham shiksham - thus their instructions
Subhaga mani manjira ranita acchalad - with the sound of gem-set
anklets imitating
Achakshanam - as if teaching
Charana kamalam - lotus feet
Charu charite - o one of graceful gait


VERSE 92
DOWNWARD NORMALIZATION OF DEVAS
FROM THE OMEGA POINT

Gone as they are to Your couchood, Brahma,Vishnu,
Ishvara, Rudra and others -
Shiva wearing a deceptive canopy derived from his crystal light;
By Your radiance projected on to it
and turned to a magenta shade,
As the very embodiment of erotic bliss, he charms the view.

WORD-FOR-WORD TRANSLATION
Gatah te mancha tvam - gone as they are to Your couchood
Druhina hari rudreshvara bhrtah - Brahma,Vishnu and Shiva,Your
functionaries
Shivah - Shiva the supreme
Svacchac chaya ghatita kapata pracchada patah - wearing a canopy
derived from crystal light


VERSE 93
TRANSPARENT BUT FIRM ONTOLOGICAL
INNOCENCE IN A GIRL

Curly in hair and naturally simple in smile,
with a magenta- flower-supple mind,
Bust firm like a kitchen mashing stone, extremely slender at waist,
With solid shoulders and hips, thus Shiva's world to save,
She reigns supreme, a certain kindliness called magenta.

WORD-FOR-WORD TRANSLATION
Arala kesheshu - curly of hair
Prakrti sarala manda hasite - with smile of natural simplicity
Shirishabha chitte - with a mind having the magenta-flower-
supple glory in Her mental state
Drshad upala shobha kuchatate - at the bust region like a kitchen
mashing stone
Bhrsham tanvi maddhye - extremely slender of waist
Prthur urasi jaroha vishaye - sleek in respect of Your bust and
hip, with solid shoulders and hips
Jagat tratum shambhohi - to save Shiva's world
Jayati - she triumphs
Kauna kachid - a certain kindliness
Aruna - (called) magenta


VERSE 94
CIRCULATION BETWEEN ESSENCE AND SUBTLE EXISTENCE
IN THE PHYSIOLOGICAL AND COSMOLOGICAL
BODY OF THE GODDESS

The dark zone of the moon it is musk; the moon's orb is water;
The moon's phases they are camphor bits filling a box of ebony,
Which, when emptied daily by Your joys,
For Your sake, Brahma fills again and again.

WORD-FOR-WORD TRANSLATION
Kalankah - the dark zone
Kasturi - is musk
Rajani kara bimbam jala mayam - the orb of the moon is watery
Kala bhih kapuraihi - the phases are camphor
Marataka karandam - the box (casket) made of ebony
Nibiditam atah - are only packed with these
Tvat bhogena - by Your joys
Pratidinam idam - daily this
Rikta kuharam - this, having empty space inside
Vidhir bhuyo bhuyo - Brahma again and again
Nibidayati nunam - fills up indeed
Tava krte - for Your sake


VERSE 95
DISINTERESTED WORSHIP VERSUS
WORSHIP FOR BENEFITS (SIDDHIS)

You being the consort of Shiva, it is difficult indeed
For unsettled minds to attain the equivalent
of the way of Your worship;
Whatever limitless gains they, the divinities
Such as Indra and others might have had,
Those psychic powers such as Anima,
From just outside Your door they got them.

WORD-FOR-WORD TRANSLATION
Pura ratah antah puram asi - You are the consort of Shiva,living
in the inner appartments
Tatah - by reason of this
Tvach charanayoh saparya maryada - as applied to Your feet the
equivalent for worship
Tarala karananam - for those with unstable inner faculties
Asulabha - not easy
Tatha hi - this is surely
Ete nita shata makha mukhah - these here such as Indra and
others
Nitah - they are led
Siddhim atulam - to unequalled psychic powers
Tava - (from) Your
Dvaropanta sthiti bhih - just outside Your door
Animadhya bhih - together with such as atomicity etc.
Amarah - those divinities

 

VERSE 96
THE ULTIMATE CONSTANCY OF PARVATI CAN KNOW
NO HORIZONTAL OR VERTICAL

The wife of Brahma, how many poets does she not woo?
How many are there not, who, by having some wealth ,
can claim Lakshmi's hand?
O constancy's ultimate meaning, outside Shiva
The contact with Your breasts is hard
even to a favourite garden tree.

No duality.

WORD-FOR-WORD TRANSLATION
Kalatram vaidhatram - wifehood in the context of Brahma
Kati kati bhajante na kavayah - how many poets do not pray for
Sriyo devyah ko va na bhavati patih - who is it that cannot
become the husband of the goddess of wealth (Sri = wealth)
Kair api dhanaih - by having some sort of wealth
Maha devam hitva - outside Shiva (omitting Shiva)
Tava - Your
Sati - o true wife
Satinam acharame - ultimate meaning of constancy
Kucha bhyam asangah - the contact with the breasts
Kuravaka taroh api - even for the Ashoka tree
Asulabhah - not easy

 

VERSE 97
THE MAYA VISION SUPERIOR TO THE
TURIYA (FOURTH STATE) VISION

As the Goddess of the Word, Veda-knowers speak of You
as Brahma's wife,
Lakshmi is Vishnu's wedded one,
and the Mountain Daughter is Shiva's consort;
Certain others as the unattainable and boundless fourth state
refer to You;
While you remain as the great Maya, making the universe go round,
As queen of the Ultimate Absolute.

WORD-FOR-WORD TRANSLATION
Giram aha devim - as the Goddess of the Word
Druhina grhinim - as Brahma's wife
Agama vidah - the knowers of Vedic wisdom
Hareh patnim padmam - as Vishnu's wedded one Lakshmi)
Hara saha charim adri tanayam - the consort of Shiva, daughter of
the high peak
Turiya kapi tvam duradhi gamanih sima - some as the fourth state
of boundless greatness, difficult to attain
Mahima maha maya - as the great Maya
Vishvam bhramayasi - You turn the world around
Para brahma mahishi - as Queen of the Ultimate Absolute

 

VERSE 98
THE FINAL SURRENDER OF THE VIDYARTHI

When, o Mother, tell me, shall thus thy supplicant drink
Of the ablution water of Your magenta sap-smeared feet?
As causing even one dumb born to be a poet,
When will he enjoy within the flavour of the betel juice
in the lotus mouth of the Word-Goddess?

WORD-FOR-WORD TRANSLATION
Kada kale matah - when o mother
Kathaya - tell me
Kalita laktaka rasam - mixed with magenta sap
Pibeyam vidyarthi - shall he drink,this wisdom-seeker
Tava charana nirne jana jalam - the ablution water of Your foot
Prakrtya mukanam api cha - even for one dumb born also
Kavita karanataya - as the cause of becoming a poet
Kada dhatte - when will he enjoy
Vani mukha kamala tambula rasatam - the flavour of the betel
juice in the lotus mouth of the Word-Goddess

 

VERSE 99
CENTRALIZED FOURFOLD NORMALIZATION
OR CANCELLATION IN THE ABSOLUTE
Sporting with Saraswati and with Lakshmi as co-consort with
Brahma and with Vishnu,
While disrupting with his charming body the constancy of Rati to
her lord,
With banished animality and bondage, living long,
He enjoys what is known as ultimate bliss, your supplicant.

WORD-FOR-WORD TRANSLATION
Sarasvatya lakshmya - in the company of Saraswati and Lakshmi
Vidhi hari sapatnah - co-consort with Brahma and Vishnu
Viharate - sports
Rateh pativratyam sthilayati - he disrupts the constancy of
Rati to her lord
Ramyena vapusha - by a pleasing body
Chiram jivan iva - even living thus long
Kshapita pashu pasha vyati karah - with banished animality and
bondage
Para ananda bhikhyam - of what is known as ultimate bliss
Rasayati - he enjoys
Rasam - the taste
Tvad bhajanavan - Your worshipper

slp8-p55-v99.

STRUCTURE P8 - P55 - V99

See Kumarasmbhava, Chapters 1 and 2; Rati weeps for Kama (Eros).
Kama has no limbs on the Denominator
Kama has limbs on the Numerator - and gets burned by Shiva.


VERSE 100
ALL ACTION ABOLISHED IN FAVOUR
OF UNITIVE UNDERSTANDING

To carry out the ritual propitiation of the sun
by waving of flames,
To offer oblations to the moon, the source of nectar,
by particles of moonstone water,
To appease the deep with offerings of water its own,
Such, o Mother is this wordy praise with words Your own.

END

Saundarya Lahari Variants

 

SAUNDARYA LAHARI


VARIANT VERSE TRANSLATIONS

This file is intended to reproduce as closely as possible the
finalized text of the translation of the verses of the Saundarya
Lahari (SL) of Shankara by Nataraja Guru.

 

A NOTE ON "FINALIZED" VERSIONS

 The Guru's work on the Saundarya Lahari was interrupted in
1972 by his hospitalisation and subsequent death.
At that time he had written the film treatment, reproduced in the
SL NOTES series of files, and was about to leave for the USA with
a putative director and a group of student assistants to begin work
on the actual film.
After his death, the project collapsed, although study of the
Saundarya Lahari was continued by his students.
There are several tentative and incomplete versions of the
translation of the verses in the SL series of files.

In 1972,the Guru dictated a final version, contained in files SLP6
(up to verse 51, inclusive), SLP7 (up to verse 71, inclusive) and
SLP8 (verse 71 to 100), all from notes by ED. There is a further
source R, which is a mimeographed text probably originating from
Curran de Bruler's notes, which are believed to be lost. We are
attempting to ascertain its exact date and source,but it diverges
only slightly from the other two, and has to be considered as an
authentic variant of the finalized version.
It is probable that the Guru intended yet a further polishing and
finalisation, but the divergences in these "finalized" texts are
minimal,and we can be fairly certain that he intended something
very close to the text we present here.
The translation is from SLP7 and SLP8, which also contain various
comments, short titles etc., not reproduced here, with variants
indicated with "R" for the mimeographed text, "P6" for SLP6.
Obvious errors and omissions on the part of the copyist have been
corrected by Ed: the interested student can refer to the SL files
to verify the accuracy of this correction.


VERSE 1

*Shiva, united with Shakti, becomes able to manifest,
R(IF)
If otherwise, this god *knows not even how to pulsate,
* R(does not know)
How then could one of ungained merit be able to bow to, or even praise,

One, such as You, adored even by Vishnu, Shiva and Brahma.

 

VERSE 2

The fine dust arising *from Your lotus feet,
*R(out of)
Brahma *gathers up * the world* creates,
*R(gathering up)*P6(and) * P5(worlds)
Vishnu incessantly bears them up somehow with *his thousand heads,
*R(omitted)
And Shiva, having shaken it up, accomplishes with it his ash-wearing rite.



VERSE 3

To the uninstructed You are the light-city,inner darkness banishing , mid-ocean placed

To inert ones the *ooze of sweetness *within blossoms
*R(mind-expanding ooze)*R(from within
celestial,*having mind-expanding effect;
* R(omits the end of this line)
While for *indigent spirits you become a brood of philosophers' stones
*R(the)
And for those submerged in *the ocean of birth and death, the very tusk of Vishnu's boar
*R(birth-cycle ocean)


VERSE 4

Other arms *than Yours can confer protection or boon;
*R(of classes of divinities)
You alone *do not act overtly , by gesture, the *promises of refuge or boon
*R(are unique in not acting) *R(promise)
What is more,Your feet,o sole refuge of the *world of beings,
*R(worlds)
Are alone expert indeed in yielding *boons more than asked for.
*R(more than asked for boon)

 

VERSE 5
Once Vishnu, having adored You, the *bestower of blessings on
*R(the mother that bestows)
*Your worshippers,
*R(those who worship you)
Taking womanly form,*caused agitation even unto the City-Burner.
*R(even to the City-Burner (Shiva) caused agitation)
Eros, too, *worshipping You with body licked into reality by the glances of Rati
*R(on worshipping)
Even to the minds of great recluses, confusion of values *brings.
*R(he is indeed able to bring)

 

VERSE 6

O Daughter of the Snowy Peak, just deriving from Your glance askance
Whatsoever grace he could; with *flowery bow,*bumble-bee bowstring,
*R(flower) *P6(and)
And five-flowered dart and springtide for minister; all these as one withal:
Mounting the chariot of the mountain breeze , he victoriously reigns, that god of
love.


VERSE 7

*O let Her appear before us, that proud counterpart of the City-Burner
*R(this line goes to end of verse)
Resounding with waist-belt of jingle bells, recumbent by breasts

Like frontal bulges of a calf elephant, slim of waist, with autumnal full-moon mature face,

*Holding aloft bow *and arrow, noose and goad!
*R(by hands) *R(with arrow)

 

VERSE 8

Seated on a couch of Shiva-form and having the Supreme Shiva for cushion;

Placed within a mansion wafted round by the perfume of blossoms of Kadamba trees,

Located within a celestial grove on a pearly-gem island in the midst of a nectar ocean,

Some fortunate ones contemplate You as the upsurging billow of mental joy.

 

VERSE 9


The earth placed in the Muladhara, water in the Manipura,

Fire in the Swadhisthana, air in the heart, with space above;

And amid eyebrows placing the mind, and breaking through the whole Kula path,

You do sport with your lord secretly in the thousand-petaled lotus.

 


VERSE 10

With streaks of ambrosial essence streaming from between Your twin feet,

Sprinkling blessings over the worlds and again from that point of high intelligible values,

Turning Yourself into a snake form of three coils and a half,

You sleep in the hollow of he Kulakunda, Your proper ground attaining.

 

VERSE 11

With the four of Shiva and of Shiva-maids five,

And severally *the nine of prime nature, with eight and sixteen petals
*R(distinct from those of Shiva, those nine too of prime nature)

Three circles and three lines, *are thus complete,
*R(thus are)
The forty-three elements *that make up Your *angular refuge.
*P6(making up) *R(finalized)


VERSE 12

O Daughter of the High Peak, to estimate the equal of Your beauty,

The best among poets, exercising their fancy, somehow created Brahma and others.

Eager Your beauty to see, heavenly damsels mentally attain to

What is hard even for ascetics to *attain; the state of union with Shiva
*R and P6 (gain)


VERSE 13

A man overaged, uninteresting to the view, inert in sport;

Falling within the range of Your side-glance, they follow, running in hundreds -

Young women, with hair dishevelled, their *rounded shapely breasts by blown-off clothes revealed
*R(pot-shaped)
*Their waistbands bursting and *silk garments in disarray.
*R(By their) *R(with their silk shawls in disarray)

 

VERSE 14

Fifty-six for earth; for water fifty-two;

Sixty two for fire; for air fifty-four;

Seventy-two for ether; for mind sixty-four;

Are the rays, even beyond these are Your twin feet.

 

VERSE 15

Clear as autumnal moonbeams, with matted hair-made diadem,

Attached with crescent and with hands bearing refuge or boon-giving

*gesture, Rosary made of crystal-clear beads and book:
*R(geste)
How could anyone, worshipping You but once,

Not gain in flow of words somehow, the pleasing sweetness of honey, milk and grapes?

 

VERSE 16

That beauty residing within the minds of superior poets,

Resembling that of a forest of lotuses, when touched by the tender light of dawn:

He who can thus adore You, who are so dear to Brahma as magenta itself;

He, by profound words of most tender *erotic content, shall please the same select ones
*R(yet erotic)

 

VERSE 17

He who can contemplate those word-bearing elements of broken moonstone lustre,*
*R(lustre, with you)
Joined with vasinis, having an elusively fluid gleam;

He becomes, o Mother, the author of great poetic works,

Adding sweet charm to the lotus face of the Goddess of the Word.

 

VERSE 18

With shades of Your bodily form enriched by the tenderly sunlit *dawn,
*R(sky of a dappled dawn)
*And the whole earth submerged within magenta glory;
*R(submerging the whole earth within its sheer magenta glory)

*That man, able to contemplate You thus, wins You over with Urvasi
*R(Able to contemplate thus, he wins over maids with startled, gentle, wild deer eyes)

*and how many,how many other
* R(together with Urvasi and how many,how many other such celestial damsels)
Heavenly nymphs having gentle, startled, wild deer eyes.



VERSE 19

O Shiva Consort, making Your face the locus with twin breasts below,

And below still,as the better half of Shiva; meditating on Your erotic aspect,

Without delay he can stir the *sentiments of women; this is but slight
*R(hearts)
And at once agitates even Her of the three worlds,when sun and moon form Her twin breasts.


VERSE 20

He who can bring You,as emanating nectar out of Your limbs all around,

Into his heart like a moonstone- made statue,

He can quell the pride of serpents like the King of Birds

And a fever patient cure by his very look of ambrosial streak.

 

VERSE 21

As lightning-streak-bodied,made of sun,moon and fire,

And as placed even above the six lotuses in a great lotus grove;

Those great ones,as seers of such,Your aspect *free from dross and ignorance
*R(having mind free)
They experience the upsurging billow of ultimate delight.

 

VERSE 22

O Goddess,You,on this Your servant bestow a kind look:

Thus intending to adore,no sooner one begins saying:

"O Goddess, You.."; You grant him that state of identity with You

The same as what Vishnu,Brahma and Indra accomplished by the waving of *lights on their diadems.
*R(the bright lights)


VERSE 23

Absorbing the left half of the body of Shiva and unsatisfied in mind still,

The other,I surmise,became absorbed also; therefore,

This Your form,having three eyes and bent by twin breasts,

Wearing *crescent bedecked crown,became of magenta glory.
*R(a curved crescent)


VERSE 24

Brahma creates the world,Vishnu protects,Shiva destroys:

Negating all this and his own body,the lord fades out.

Thus what results: Shiva who has eternity for prefix (Sadashiva)

He blesses*,obeying the *orders derived from Your instantly vibrating eyebrow-twigs
*R(too,obeying)*R(order)

 

VERSE 25

Of the three gods,who are originated from Your three nature modalities,

Their worship of You,o consort of Shiva,would alone be worship

Offered to Your twin feet; it is indeed *thus when they do so,
*R(so, despite this, when)
Standing eternally beside Your gem-decked footstsool,joining bud-like their hands well above

*like crowns.
*R(their crowns)

 

VERSE 26

Brahma regains his pure quintuple nature; Vishnu becomes passionless;

The God of Death destruction meets; the God of Wealth becomes bankrupt;

the great Indra becomes functionless,with half-shut eyes;

In this great doom,he sports,o constant spouse,Your lord alone.


VERSE 27

Incantations,mutterings,ritual acts,hand gestures,gait,

Circumambulations, food offerings,inclination,*adoration by lying down*
*PS(inclination, prostration)
*P6(omits" adoration by lying down")
All such enjoyments, as coming within the scope of self-surrender,

And thus synonymous *with worship of You, let such be what from me might shine forth
*R(synonymous for)


VERSE 28

Even *on partaking of nectar,so potent against fear old age and death;
*P6 (as)
They reach their doom,all such gods as Brahma or Indra;

On even swallowing that terrible super-poison,for Shiva,time's *becoming is not operative:
*R and P6(function)
The source here being the power of Your marital string.


VERSE 29

" Remove Brahma's crown from before,and of him called Vishnu;

You are going to hurt his hard headgear: bypass Indra's crown"

As inclining in front of You,they remain,at that very moment for him *at his homecoming,
*R(on his)
You are about to rise.Such words of Your retinue , they do *reign supreme.
*R(ring)


VERSE 30

Out of the rays arising from Your proper body,representing psychic powers such as atomicity *(anima),
*R(omits)
Attendant on You, o eternal one, one who contemplates these in terms of oneself:

What wonder for him that all benefits from the three-eyed one should only be worth rejection,

And that the fire of doom should perform for him in turn the light-waving rite.

 

VERSE 31

By sixty-four know-how factors,each capable of generating its own psychic power;

Transcending the whole world while remaining immobile,

The Lord of Beasts,again,by Your insistence by that free expertness of Yours,

Caused to be brought down this firm earth for the unified fulfilment of all life purposes.

 

VERSE 32

Shiva, Parvati, Eros and earth; sun,moon,

God of Love, swan and Indra; Para, Mara and Hari;

With these three sets,with their heart monomarks suffixed,

They adore Your letters,o Mother,by way of naming Your component limbs.


VERSE 33

Eros,source,wealth; this triplet placing *first within Your charm
*P6 (omits "first")
O lone and eternal one, innumerable seekers of great enjoyment

Adore You,telling beads of philosopher's stone,ever *sacrificing into the fire of Shiva
*R(sacrifices)
By hundreds of streaks of clarified butter oblations from the celestial cow.

 

VERSE 34

You *are the body of Shiva,having sun and moon for twin breasts
*R and P6(you who are)
Yourself,I surmise,o Goddess,as a new sinless self.

Therefore,by mutual complementarity,this relation remains one of common reciprocity

Between You two,participating on equal terms of transcendant bliss.

 

VERSE 35

The mind You are,the sky,the wind too, also the charioteer of the winds

You are the water,as well as the earth; apart from Your manifest form there is nought else indeed!

You,in order to manifest *Your own self, *by taking a universal form
*R(by Your) *R(omits"by")
Of mental bliss substantial,do assume the role of Shiva-bride,and thus triumphant rule.

 

VERSE 36

I adore that Shiva ultimate,as placed in Your willing centre*,shining with the brilliance
*R(centre,(Ajna))
Of millions of suns and moons,whose flanks are illumined by the light of the intelligibles beyond;

Whom,worshipping with devotion,lifted beyond the reach of sun,moon *and fire,
*(or)
In that *domain above all need,one lives indeed in that bright world of light
*R(shining domain)

 

VERSE 37
In Your Vishudhi Chakra,crystal-clear and sky-generating,

I adore Shiva and the Goddess also,with *parity of status *with Shiva
*R(a parity) *P6(omits "with Shiva")
By whose combined,streaming,moonbeam-like fluorescence,

With banished inner dross,like a female partridge,the world hereunder shines.


VERSE 38

I adore those twin swans,intent on enjoying the nectar

Of the lotus blooming within the consciousness of certain great ones,

Moving within whose minds as a result of their elaboration,the maturation

Of the eighteen arts takes place freed from dross,their goodness extracted as milk from water.


VERSE 39

O Mother,I praise,placing in Your Svadhisthana the fire of sacrifice

Ever looking upon it as the great fire of doom,and placing there her also called Samaya,

So that when the worlds are burning due to his anger,

Her mercy-moist regard renders to it the cooling touch of early spring.


VERSE 40

As found in certain contemplatives who take full refuge in Your Manipura,

I adore that dark cloud of Yours,as traversed by forceful lightning,

Banishing darkness and shining,bursting into sparks with the varied gem-decked *brightness of Indra's bow,
*R and P6(gem-decked maturity)
While over the three worlds,agonized by the heat of Shiva-sun,it sheds its showering waters.

 

VERSE 41

I meditate on Your new self,as placed at Your Muladhara,together with Samaya,

Given to her light-step dance,as also that great bold-step dancer;

Giving expression thereby to all nine aesthetic interests,thus by their joint lordship,

By mercy *ordaining the rebirth of the world,they confer on it the
*R(intending)
renewed status of having both father and mother.


VERSE 42

These sky orbs twelve attained to rubyhood and placed close together

He who can praise thus Your golden crown,o Daughter of the Snowy peak

Would he not have then in his mind the impression of the bow of Indra

When, by reflected glory, a slender crescent is produced by *gems imbedded therein.
*P6(the gems)


VERSE 43

Let the blooming blue-lotus forest growth of Your thick,glossy and lustrous *locks
*R(cluster of locks)
O Shiva-consort,banish the darkness within us

To gain whose natural fragrance those other flowers of the garden of Indra,

As I can guess,take their place within Your tresses.


VERSE 44

May it bless us,the upsurging billow of the beauty of your face

Outflowing *into a stream,to resemble Your parted hairline,
*R(like unto a stream)

With vermilion dust bedecked,keeping apart the strong growth of tresses

As if in bondage held by *anti-darkness gangs,to reveal the tender rays of dawn
*R(an anti-darkness gang)


VERSE 45

Your face,exuding perfume,as it gently smiles,

Having Your bright teeth for filament,when surrounded by Your natural curls

Like so many reveling,honey-licking bees; each the eye

Of the Eros-burner,puts to shame the beauty of the lotus.


VERSE 46

I fain would treat Your forehead, shining with *radiant beauty,
*R(a pure beauty)
A second crescent to that other frail one fixed to Your crown,

So that reversed in position,both as knit one-to-one,

Results the form of a fully-matured moon,emanating soft ambrosial essence.



VERSE 47

O Uma,ever pained in concern for banishing the fear of all creatures

And thus with eyebrows somewhat arched,with eyes of bee-like beauty below

I do surmise them as making up the bowstring for this bow

Of the *lord of love,held by his other hand,his arm and fist hiding the middle part
*P6(god)


VERSE 48

That eye of Yours,in essence the same as the sun and other than the left,

It generates daytime; the left one,presiding over night,creates its three vigils;

While the third eye,*like a half-open golden lotus bud,
*R(sweet like)
Ushers in the twilight time,moving between day and night.


VERSE 49

Vishala the expansive, Kalyani the auspicious; Sphutaruchi the clear of taste

Ayodhya the invincible,by blue lotus bound; Kripadharadhara, on mercy's fountain founded;

A certain Madhura, the sweet; Avanti, of saving power; Bhogavatika, enjoyment affording;

All such names of various cities of lasting fame, *within Your total regard they do reign triumphant
*R(fame, each fit to be called by its own name)

 

VERSE 50

Seeing Your baby bumble-bee-like pair of eyes which, while seeming to cast *glances
*R(side- glances)
Do not give up the bases of Your ears, mellowed by the play of the nine aesthetic interests,

Remaining like aptness with poets, wholly absorbed in drinking the honey within

a spray of *blooms;
*R(blossoms)

Your mid - forehead lotus-bud eye, by jealousy touched, seems magenta tinged


VERSE 51

Moved by sentimental love for Shiva, resentful to any other person;

With anger of jealousy towards Ganges, and with transports of wonder at Shiva's story;

With fearful surprise for the snakes of Hara, and for friends a jestful smile;

As such a source of lotus-red grace, Your regard, o Mother, for me will remain one of kindliness.


VERSE 52

Drawn fully to the ear-limits, like gleaming Eros arrows, with lashes looking like

Arrow-base feathers; these Your eyes, having the effect

Of *disturbing the complacent detachment of the City-Burner,
*R(disrupting)
Make for Your glory as the highest clan of the Mountain King.


VERSE 53

The tricolour distinctness of Your eyes, o beloved of Ishana (Lord)

Presented in clear threefold relief by the use of collyrium,

Would seem to create afresh the gods *Shiva,Vishnu and Indra,
*R(Brahma,Vishnu and Shiva)
Bereft of passion and having the qualities of *Rajas, Sattva and Tamas
*R(rajas (active) , sattva (pure) and tamas (dark)


VERSE 54

O one of kindly, sympathetic regard, Your heart being

Given over to the Lord of Beasts: of rivers such as Shona, Ganga and Yamuna,

Coloured red, white and black:

Their sacred waters You do blend indeed into sinless confluence for our purification.


VERSE 55

With eyes open or shut, You can effect, as saints say,

The being or non-being of the world, o Daughter of the Earth- Supporting Lord;

What thus came to be as you opened them, this entire world, without anything left,

To save*, I now surmise, You remain now with eyes unwinkingly withdrawn
*R(from dissolution)

 

VERSE 56

O *Aparna, afraid of the gossip carried to Your ear bases by Your lengthened eyes
*R(O Aparna(Parvati))

Surely they lie merged unwinking *in water like the female Sapherika fish
*R(within)
This Lakshmi too, leaves behind at dawn the closed petal doors of *water lilies,
*R(blue water lilies)
And at dusk, forcing them open, She re-enters therein.


VERSE 57

With Your long-extended regard having the beauty of water-lilies just opening,

O Shiva-consort, do bathe with mercy *even me steeped in misery far off
*R(me too)
Thus shall I be blessed with no loss *to You;
*R(either for You)
The moonbeams do fall on forest and mansion with equality.


VERSE 58

The two sets of curved limiting lines of Yours, o Daughter of the King of Mountains,

Who is it that will not fancy them as the bow of the flower- arrowed one;

Where, placed obliquely, and reaching beyond the path of hearing,

As it shines, adhering to Your side-glances, it gives the impression of the fixing of the arrow.

 

VERSE 59

This, Your face, I consider Kama's chariot with four wheels,

As seen when Your ear ornaments are reflected on Your shining cheeks;

Surmounting which that great hero Kama assails the Lord of Hosts,

Who, with sun and moon for *foothold, mounting the globe for chariot, is fully ready to give him battle
*R(wheels)

 

VERSE 60

The good sayings of Saraswati, exuding nectar sweetness,

Ever absorbing as with slow interest, *You bend Your ears to them, o blessed one
*R(by Your ears, o)
Each bright wit therein *approving with nods,
*R(while approving)
*While Your series of earrings seem to applaud them with their high pitch jinglings
*R(omits "while")

 

VERSE 61

O banner of the dynasty of the Himalayas, Your nose ridge, here as Your clan's flagstaff,

Let it ripen for us, standing so near *below You, deserving fruit;
*R(omits "below")
Inwardly wearing pearls as they do, and dropped by cool moonbeam respiration,

It bears, even outside, pearls due to the plenitude of the same.

 

VERSE 62

O one of goodly teeth, of Your parted lips naturally red I shall declare the similitude;

Let the coral reef bear fruit *by reflection *from its original model
*R(fruit, not the fruit but by)
*R(reddened from)
With which desiring to climb to *the point of mid-parity,
*R(a state of)
However could *it avoid being abashed at least by a *degree?
*R(could they, the teeth, avoid) *R(a shade)


VERSE 63

Your smile, like a moonbeam cluster out of Your moon-bright face,

Partridges, on drinking, by surfeit of sweetness

Numbness of tongue they got; thus presently do they imbibe eagerly

The nectar thereof, treating it as sour brew, night by night.


VERSE 64

By incessant repetition of a muttered charm glorifying Your Lord;

As offering the flower-red shade of Your tongue triumphs;

The pure ,clear crystal outline image of Saraswati,

While seated at Your tongue-tip, o Mother, in turn attains to rubyhood in its bodily form.


VERSE 65

O Mother, they merge, those mouthfuls of betel-juice of Your face,

As Skhanda, Vishnu and Upendra, *vanquishing demons in battle,
*R(returning from vanquishing the)
Taking off their headgear and *armour, they *return discountenancing
*R(still in their) *R(they discountenance that Shiva's)
That Shiva's portion of offering meant for Chanda which are moon-bright bits of camphor.

 

VERSE 66

Starting as You do to sing with Your vina*, with head movements,
*R(vina and with)
Of the varied exploits of the Lord of Beasts, You, as the Goddess of the Word

The one of lovely speech, You promptly cover up to silence

Your instrument as mocking the sweetness thereof by sounds of strings.

 

VERSE 67

Affectionately touched by the tip of the hand of the Mountain king,

And lifted *again and again by that Shiva out of desire
*R(lifted up again)
To drink of the lips thereof, that which makes the handle

For Your face-mirror, how could we ever speak of it, Your peerless chin.


VERSE 68

Incessantly embraced by the arms of the City-Burner,

And thrilled to *thorny bristling of the hair of Your neck,
*R(to a thorny)
It shows *the lotus-stalk grace ,smudged by excess of dark cosmetic paste
*R(a)
By itself *it retains beneath the *creeper-tendril suppleness of * the pearly necklace lotus core
*R(retaining) *R(lotus creeper) *R(of a pearly necklace)

 

VERSE 69

Those three lines on Your neck, o One fully expert in time, syncope and melody;

They are the counter-grounds of Your marital thread of strands and substrands,

As they do shine as the ground wherein is born many a melody;

Giving position, regulation and limitation for the three groups of musical keys.


VERSE 70

Of the lotus-core tender beauty of You fourfold *hands,
*R(creeper-like arms)
He sings the praise, the lotus-born god, trembling the while because of Shiva's nails

That once of yore nipped off his extra head, he (Brahma) intending now to pray for

Your refuge-granting hand- gesture for each of his remaining heads


VERSE 71

Shining by the *play of Your fingernails that mock *in colour
*R(brilliance) *R(the colour of)
Just-opening lotus buds, how could we speak of the beauty of Your hand?

Granted be, o Uma, that the lotus could have one shade less of parity with it

If at all, and that , alas, only when touched by the magenta paste of the sole of Lakshmi as she plays thereon.


VERSE 72

Let it banish our misery, o Goddess, your twin breasts,

Ever being sucked equally by Skanda and Ganesha;

Of which, seeing their milk-spouting fronts, Ganesha causes laughter

As he feels his own front with misgivings in his *mind.
*R(heart)


VERSE 73

O banner of the King of Peaks, Your breasts, shoulder-borne

Are nectar-bearing ruby pots indeed, without any trace of doubt:

These two, Skanda and Ganesha, both innocent of *the pleasures of marital contact
*R(conjugal joy)
*Drinking from them they remain thus child-like to the present day
*R(By reason of drinking)


VERSE 74

Your mid-bust region, wearing a* slender garland of pearly beads,
*R(pure and slender streak of a garland)

Derived and worked out *by some elephant-demon vanquished by Shiva
*R(out of the frontal knobs of some)
The semblance bears of his *reputation with added redness of lips
*R(very reputation, mixed with his exploits with added)
And an inner brightness presenting a *picturesque charm.
*R(a variegated picturesque)

 

VERSE 75

Your breast milk, I consider, o maiden born to the Earth- Supporting Lord,

As if it were word-wisdom's ocean of nectar, flooding *from out of Your heart
*R(out from)
Offered by one who is kind, which, on tasting,

This dravidian child, amidst superior poets, is born a composer of charming verse.


VERSE 76

That mind-born god,once,on his body being engulfed

In the *fire of Shiva's ire,into the deep lake of Your navel,
*R(encircling flames of)
O Mountain Daughter,he dived, and on re-emerging,

The *smoke thus raised,the people look upon as Your rows of hair.
*R(creeper-like streaks of smoke)

 

VERSE 77

O auspicious Mother,that something revealed at Your slender waist

Looking like *ripples on the surface of the river Kalindi,
*R(superfine ripples)
Looms in the mind of contemplatives as space reduced to ethereal particles

Entering into the cavity of Your navel, and produced by the friction of Your pot-like breasts.

 

VERSE 78

O* mountain-born, your navel reigns supreme
*R(O Daughter of the peak)

As a stilled gangetic whirlpool, as the fecund flowerbed of Your breast-bud-bearing creeper

As the sacrificial fire-pit for *Kama, and for Rati *her pleasure- bower
*R(for receiving Kama's glory)*R(as her)
While to the eyes of the Mountain Lord the cavern mouth for *his austerities
*R(the fruition of his austerities)


VERSE 79

For Your waist*, naturally slim, fatigued by weight of *bust form,
*R(o best of women) *R(Your)

*Bending by form and on the point of breaking,
*R(With a figure bent down and)

*Equal in state to a tree on a collapsing brook bank;
*R(Having the equality of the state of a tree)

O mountain-born one let there be security forever.


VERSE 80

O Goddess, having made Your twin breasts gain the beauty of gold pots,

Rubbing at the upper arms, bursting the bodice and presently perspiring,

*The God of Love, now wanting to save your threefold waist from breaking, saying : "enough"
*R(The maker thereof, the God)

With *three strands of a wild creeper, he presently binds.
*R(with threefold strands of a wild creeper, he has now bound)


VERSE 81

Ponderability and extensiveness *Shiva once bestowed on You as dowry
*R(o Parvati, the earth-supporting lord)
Cutting them off from his own hips; thus *it is this
*R(omits "it is")
Yours here, both weighty and expansive, cancels out the whole world

And by prior substantiality confers lightness on it too.


VERSE 82

Beating both the best of elephant trunks, and groups of golden banana stems,

By *thighs and by knees having goodly *callosities, due to daily devotions
*R(two) *R(rounded callosities)
To Your lord, even the twin *knobs of the heavenly elephant
*R(frontal knobs)
You out-do, *o Mountain Daughter triumphant.
*R(fully aware of right obligations, o)


VERSE 83

His quiver duplicating as Your twin legs, looking like pillars

Made *by the God of Love, for giving battle to Shiva,
*R(surely by)
They show at their *knees ten arrowheads, simulating nails,
*R(bases)
Sharpened *only on the whetstones which are the crowns of gods.
*R(solely on)


VERSE 84

Mother, Your twin feet, marking as they do the crest point of *wisdom,
*R(scriptural wisdom)
*Wearable as head ornament by You as by me ,kindly place both upon my head
*R(worn)

Water *from their ablution comes *from the stream in Shiva's matted hair
*R(for) *R(is the brook in)
*And the red paste on their sole comes from the magenta glory of Vishnu's crown
*R( and the auspicious beauty of their red paste is the magenta)


VERSE 85

Spoken words of worship do we offer to these Your lotus feet,

Beauteous as they are to view, smeared over with paste of *magenta glory
*R(brilliant magenta)
Extremely jealous is he, the Lord of Beasts, of that Ashoka tree

In Your pleasure grove, for desiring to be kicked by them.


VERSE 86

On having inadvertently defaulted in respect of Your family name,

While stooping in shame, Your husband's forehead as You kicked with Your lotus feet,

That enemy of Shiva, wholly giving up his *rancour ,his victory
*R(long-standing rancour, caused by the heat(of Shiva)
*celebrates with clamour of many jingle bells.
*R(celebrated)


VERSE 87

Capable of being killed by snow, and fully at home on *snow peak;
*R(the)
Sleeping at night, and in bloom both at *dusk and after;
*R(dawn)
Making Lakshmi's bowl overgenerous to Your vedic worshippers,

Such the twin lotus of Your foot, it triumphs* : what wonder herein?
*R(o Mother)


VERSE 88

Your foot is the *seat for good repute, o Goddess;
*R(supreme)
How then from danger to safety did it come? The wise treat it as of tortoise-shell hardness;

How then was it that Shiva,

At his wedding, could lift it with a tender mind to place it on the ritual stone?


VERSE 89

*With fingernails like moons, putting to shame
*R(With fingernails of the lotus hands of celestial damsels, putting to shame the moon)
The lotus hands of celestial damsels, and feet that seem to mock celestial trees,

O tragic one, Chandi, Your twin feet offer fruit to heaven dwellers

With leaf-tender finger-tips, and bring secure riches to the poor instantly and incessantly.


VERSE 90

Giving riches *to the needy as required, and of *its store of honey
*R(incessantly) *R(the)
*Distributing plentifully sweetness around; into such a beauty
*R(Of the celestial blossoms of beauty distributing plentifully all around; into such a beauty)

Of the celestial *blossom of Your feet, immersed altogether,
*R(blooms of Your feet, let my life go immersed with legs and)
Let my life go merged with legs and inner organs into six-footed beehood.


VERSE 91

Your young domesticated cygnets ,intent on learning from You the sportive pose of steps,

Practising still with faults, o one of graceful gait, on their not giving up,

With the sound of *gem-filled anklets imitating,
*R(gem-set)
It would seem now that You are *teaching them.
*R(instructing)


VERSE 92

Gone as they are to Your couch-hood, Brahma, Vishnu, Ishvara, Rudra and others

Shiva wearing a deceptive canopy derived from his crystal light;

By Your radiance projected on to it and turned to a magenta shade,

As the very embodiment of erotic bliss, he charms the view.

 

VERSE 93

Curly in hair *and naturally simple in smile, with a magenta-flower-supple mind
*R(and with a smile of natural simplicity)
Bust firm like a kitchen mashing stone, extremely slender at waist,

With solid shoulders and hips, thus Shiva's world to save,

She reigns supreme, a certain kindliness called magenta.

 

VERSE 94

The dark zone of the moon *it is musk; the *moon's orb is water*;
*R(omits "it") *R(orb of the moon) *R(watery)
The moon's phases they are camphor bits filling a box of ebony,

Which, hen emptied daily by Your joys,

For Your sake, Brahma fills it *again and again.
*R(it up again and again)


VERSE 95

You being the consort of Shiva, it is difficult indeed

For unsettled minds to attain the equivalent of the way of Your worship;

Whatever limitless gains they, the divinities such as Indra and others might have had,

Those psychic powers such as Anima, from just outside Your door they got them.


VERSE 96

The wife of Brahma,* how many poets does she not woo?
*R(how many ,how many poets do they not woo)
*How many are there not, who, by having some wealth, can claim Lakshmi's hand?
*R(Or by having some wealth, whoever is it that cannot claim to be husband to Lakshmi)

*O constancy's ultimate meaning, outside Shiva
*R(O constant wife, of the term constancy the ultimate meaning)
The contact with Your breasts is hard even to *a favourite garden tree
*R(ordinary garden)


VERSE 97

As *the Goddess of the Word, Veda-knowers speak of You as Brahma's wife
*R(As Goddess)
Lakshmi is Vishnu's wedded one, and the Mountain Daughter is Shiva's consort;

Certain others as the unattainable and boundless fourth state refer to You;

While you remain as the great Maya, making the universe go round, as queen of the Ultimate Absolute.


VERSE 98

When, o Mother, tell me ,shall this thy *supplicant drink
*R(wisdom-seeker)
Of the ablution water of Your magenta sap-smeared feet?

As causing even one dumb born to be a poet,

When *will he enjoy within the flavour of the betel juice in the lotus mouth of the Word-Goddess
*R(shall I enjoy)


VERSE 99

Sporting with Saraswati and with Lakshmi as *co-consort with Brahma and Vishnu
*R(co-consorts)
While disrupting with his charming body the constancy of Rati to her lord,

With banished animality and bondage, living long,

He enjoys *what is known as ultimate bliss, your supplicant.
*R(the taste of what)


VERSE 100

To carry out the ritual propitiation of the sun by waving of *flames,
*R(lighted flames)
To offer oblations to the moon, the source of nectar, by particles of moonstone water,

To appease the deep with offerings of water its own,

Such ,o Mother is this wordy praise with words Your own.

 

 

 

 


INTRODUCTION TO THE SAUNDARYA LAHARI

"The Upsurging Billow of Beauty"
By

SANKARACHARYA

English Translation and Commentary
By
NATARAJA GURU


.

PRELIMINARIES

In the autumn of the year 1968 I was preparing for a long voyage round the world. As a first step towards this adventurous project, I had booked a passage to Singapore by the British steamer S.S. Rajula. This date remains a memorable landmark in my mind because I had by that time finished all the series of major items of a dedicated life-work, projected by me, having bearing on the teaching of my teacher Narayana Guru, to which I had devoted more than four decades already.

I thought I had no more ambition in that same direction when I found myself sitting in front of a bookshelf of the library that was just being started at the Gurukula Island Home, bordering on the sea in the Cannanore District of Kerala, on the west coast of India. Two volumes of the works of a Malayalam poet called Kumaran Asan attracted my attention, almost as if by the promptings of some vague principle of chance. I glanced at the volumes listlessly and without purpose for some time. Before long my attention seemed to linger browsingly over the pages at the end of one of the volumes which happened to be the translation of the "Saundarya Lahari" into Malayalam. It was attributed to Sankaracharya and from the introductory remarks of Kumaran Asan I found that the date of the translation coincided with the time when he had returned from his training in Calcutta to become the first disciple and successor to Narayana Guru himself. At that time they were living together as Guru and most favoured sisya (disciple) in a riverside ashram at a place called Aruvippuram, about fifteen miles south of Trivandrum, the capital of Kerala.

2

The initial scrutiny of the contents of the translation, each verse of which was printed side by side with the original Sanskrit of Sankara, intrigued me and stimulated my curiosity to such an extent that I began to become more and more seriously engrossed and involved in its study. In spite of not being a Sanskrit scholar of any standing whatsoever, I could discover slight discrepancies here and there between the intentions of the original author and the understanding of the translator. It seemed to me that he was evidently engaged in an almost impossible task, as a result of which all his efforts seemed to be repeatedly frustrated or compromised, often with meanings miscarried. This was sufficiently evidenced by the fact that even the barest of a sequential, consistent or common-sense meaning did not result, in spite of the tremendous efforts that seemed to have been lavished on the subject matter. Neither the content, context, purpose nor the person kept in mind as the proper student for these verses could even be roughly guessed at. The more I read these verses and tried to make at least some bare meaning out of them, the more enigmatic each verse seemed to become to my eyes. Strangely too, my understanding seemed to progress inversely to the increased effort that I tried wholeheartedly to apply to this strange text. When I also remembered in these circumstances that Kumaran Asan might have undertaken this impossible task at the instance of Narayana Guru himself, which belief was gaining ground with me, my interest in this enigmatic work became all the more heightened.

It seemed to question challengingly my critical understanding of a text from a philosopher like Sankara, whose other writings were already somewhat sufficiently familiar to me. Furthermore, in the short introduction by the author of the Malayalam translation, given to justify his understanding, he referred to a group of religious people in Kerala, the "Kerala Kaulins" as he calls them, for whose benefit, according to him, the great philosopher Sankara undertook this apparently onerous task.

My self-respect, not to say pride, in considering myself a person sufficiently capable of understanding a philosophical text in the ordinary course, became stung, as it were, to the quick. And this is how I became personally involved in the work which now remains, even after three and a half years, a major challenge to my common sense or to that degree of average intelligence with which a man of my generation could be expected normally to credit himself.

3

Even at the moment of writing this (8th January 1972) the enigmatic nature of this work of great absorbing interest still stares me in the face. And it is with certain apologies to many worthy scholars anterior to me and with some hesitations that I enter now on this task of presenting to the modern world the one hundred verses of the "Saundarya Lahari".

THE ORIGINAL TEXT AND ITS COMMENTATORS

The first forty-one verses have to be distinguished, evidently according to the author himself, as the "Ananda Lahari", within the totality meant to be entitled more generally the "Saundarya Lahari". In Sanskrit, lahari means "intoxication" or "overwhelming subjective or objective experience of an item of intelligence or of beauty upsurging in the mind of man" The word saundarya refers to aesthetic value appreciation. Such an appreciation of beauty must necessarily belong to the context of the Absolute, if the name of Sankara, the great Advaitic commentator, is to be associated at all with this work, however indirectly it may be, on which point we shall presently have more to say.

Absolute value appreciation, which could be ananda (delight) subjectively, is saundarya (beauty), when understood objectively. These are two possible perspectives of the same absolute value factor. Through the centuries this work has puzzled pundits such as Lakshmidhara, Kaivalyasrama and Kameswara Soori of India; and professors such as Sir John Woodroffe and Norman Brown in the West, and continues to do so to the present.

It cannot be said, however, that interest in it has flagged even for a moment, since it saw the light of day. On the contrary, it has spread far and wide, as evidenced by the various editions of different dates and regions, some of them containing elaborate Persian, Mogul and Rajput paintings, and the increasing number of modern editions, mainly nurtured and nourished by a great revival of interest in that strange form of Indian spirituality known as Tantra.

There is every indication at present that such an interest is still on the increase. Any light, however feeble, that I might be able to throw on such a subject will not, therefore, be out of place.

4

MY INVOLVEMENT AND CONFRONTATIONS

Between the date of my first involvement in this interesting text and the present date, I have travelled as much by inner exploration as perhaps to the extent that my wanderings were widely distributed. The intensity of my involvement with this text became more and more absorbing to me.

My first plan was to go around the world by ship. The first lap of my journey was accomplished accordingly, and I found myself travelling in Southeast Asia, giving lectures on the "Saundarya Lahari" in out of the way places, both in Singapore and various parts of Malaysia. During this period, when I found myself moving from place to place, I did not relax even one day from the uniform and sustained pressure which I applied to the study of the text. Each morning exactly between half-past five and seven o'clock I kept up the habit of sitting around with interested listeners, with cups of black coffee and biscuits, trying to delve deeper into the meanings of each verse. I have done so for three and a half years and in the meantime I had to change the course of my world tour. Instead of crossing the Indian Ocean and trying to go towards Honolulu, where a friend was supposed to be awaiting me, I was suddenly attracted by an advertised offer of Air India which made it possible for me to come back to India once again and adopt a revised itinerary by which I could include Moscow, Gent, Luxembourg, Iceland, New York, Chicago, San Francisco, Honolulu, Fiji and Sydney, and be back in India through Malaysia once again, thus spending nearly a year in all my wanderings.

Wherever I had a fairly long stopover my coffee classes continued and, what was even more strange, I could notice that my lessons were evidently of greater attraction to others than to myself. Crowds gathered round me even at this unearthly hour and listened to me with remarkable avidity of interest. I could not solve many of the problems that seemed to crop up one after another as the studies continued. I began to differ from almost every book that I came across. The whole subject bristled with endless controversial questions and there were moments of despair in which I felt that I was hopelessly involved in some vain task.

Some of the questions that came to the surface could be initially and summarily stated as follows:

1. How could Sankara, who is known to be an Advaita philosopher, be credited with the authorship of this text which is evidently of the form belonging to the context of Tantra Shastra?

2. Why should he have written these verses after his great commentaries, which are by themselves sufficiently monumental to support his fame as a Vedantic philosopher?

3. If Sankara gave primacy to wisdom, as is well known, how is it that he seems to have come down to the vulgar or popular level of a worshipper of the beauty of a goddess?

4. The Sri Chakra, which figures in the text very prominently, seems to be the hallmark by which Tantra texts are recognisable. What has this geometrical design to do with Advaita Vedanta, which believes in the purest form of reason only?

5. What is the place of eroticism in the context of the austere Sannyasa (renunciation) which Sankara stood for so uncompromisingly?

6. Was Sankara interested in Yoga Shastra (the science of yoga) also?

7. If not, why does he take the trouble of describing the various details of Chakras (synergic centres) as seen in the verses of this text?

8. If non-duality is the teaching of Sankara, how is it that he postulates Shiva and Shakti as two distinct factors, principles or entities?

9. Is Sankara a religious man at all?

10. How far are the verses compatible with the doctrines developed in his other works?

11. Did his followers give any importance to this work so as to adopt its teaching in any way in their lives as inmates of various ashrams in which they practised their spiritual disciplines?

12. Why does he employ a Puranic and mythological language here?

6

CONVENTIONAL TRADITIONAL APPROACH

Because of these and various other miscellaneous difficulties even highly painstaking and correctly critical scholars like Professor W. Norman Brown of Harvard University have doubted even the authorship of these verses. He has gone into the reasons for doing so in very great detail in Volume 43 of the Harvard Oriental Series, and takes care to indicate on the title page of the work, in all academic cautiousness, that the "Saundarya Lahari" is only "traditionally ascribed to Sankaracarya". If we turn to the other great authority on Tantra literature, Sir John Woodroffe, these points are not clarified any better. Even a strict word-by-word translation of this work is not so far available, not to speak of a satisfactory versification. Every translation or commentary that I have examined so far, whether in Malayalam, English or in the original Sanskrit, has not failed to reveal here or there some appalling state of ignorance in respect of the main intent and purpose of these verses. Except for borrowing rather light-heartedly the Sri Chakra, which is described in minute geometrical detail in Verse 11 of this work, the whole work seems to be otherwise treated with scant and stepmotherly respect, both by tantrically minded pundits and professors alike. When I allude to pundits and professors at one and the same time, I am not unconscious of the fact that there are present in Bengal and in South India, especially in Kerala, many who claim to be authorities on Tantra generally, not excluding the "Saundarya Lahari" in particular. I have had occasion to consult quite a few of these authorities and I can assert with a certain pleasure that they have tried their best to clarify their respective positions in a conventional and traditional manner proper to punditry and pedantry in India. I must at least mention four names : Pundit S.Subrahmanya Sastri, T.R.Srinivasa Ayyengar of the Theosophical Society, Kandiyoor Mahadeva Sastri, and E.P. Subrahmanya Sastri, besides the three more ancient scholars already mentioned.

The greater part of Sir John Woodroffe's prolific volumes themselves is based directly or indirectly on what some pundits gave him to understand. It would not be wrong to say that they are directly based on hearsay, and therefore lack that direct appeal or apodictic certitude necessary to make us treat them with the seriousness which the subject deserves.

7

The interest of the present writer is not the same as that of a pundit or professor. Even the question of Sankara's authorship of the work would take at least as much trouble to prove as to disprove. I therefore do not wish to enter into any polemical dispute with anybody, and would content myself with taking a position by which I could say that all the great scholars who have devoted their energies to clarifying this text, though they are right only as far as they go, do deserve our gratitude.

My own personal interest in this subject is based on two considerations only. Firstly, it is a unique work in which, for the first time, Sankara is seen to adopt a non-verbal protolinguistic approach to philosophy, as when Marshall McLuhan would say, "the medium is the message." Secondly, believe that most of the controversies referred to above could be seen to arise from the fact that the text is usually looked upon as if it were a statically given doctrinal statement, instead of being considered as the dialectical revaluation of some anterior position prevailing at the time the author wrote it. The history of religion, as Professor Mircea Eliade of Princeton University has succeeded in proving in his monumental work on the subject, "Patterns of Comparative Religion", is a series of dialectical revaluations of anterior positions in terms of posterior doctrines. Viewed in the light of such a dialectical revaluation, it is not difficult, at least for me to see that here Sankara adopts a non-verbal or protolinguistic medium instead of a metalinguistic one, to restate the message of Advaita Vedanta, for which he has always stood, here as well as in his great commentaries.

When these two features are fully understood by the modern reader, it will be seen that most of the controversial problems that have puzzled both pundits and professors melt away altogether. The authorship of Sankara could then be easily proved by a certain type of logic acceptable to Buddhism and Vedanta alike, which is called "the argument by impossibility of being otherwise", known as anupalabdhi. This kind of logic belongs to the order of axiomatic thinking, and therefore is still understood even by phenomenological philosophers like Edmund Husserl, only with a certain degree of mistrust. No wonder, therefore, that the world of modern thought is involved in a characteristic puzzlement belonging to the same general intellectual and cultural malaise, the growing evidence of which is beginning to be recognisable wherever we turn, more especially when modern youth express dissatisfaction because of a general gap that they feel existing between themselves and their elders.

8

This brings us to the next most important consideration that has made me all the more interested in this strange and almost impossible text that I have been trying to understand with all earnestness. There is an unconventional new generation of young people with generally free ideas about sex, variously influenced by Eastern religions. They believe in miracles and the supernatural powers. Inner space is more important to them than outer space. Mind-expanding drugs are every day luring them deeper into themselves. Yoga and discipleship to a guru are taken for granted by them. Besides Yoga, they are also interested in the secrets of what is called Tantra.

Most of them are genuine seekers for a new way of life, although some of them are seen to be freaks or misfits. Whatever explanation of such a widespread social disadoption might be, it is clear that the movement requires sympathetic understanding and guidance. What they call "institutional life" is their common enemy, and clashing with it produces various forms of bad blood, repression or discontent which is at present becoming a problem to all concerned, most especially to themselves.

A revision and rearrangement of basic values in life seems to be what they are asking for. Discoveries in science have disrupted conventional standards in ethics, aesthetics, economics and even in education. Human ecology itself has to be reconsidered and revised.

The Saundarya Lahari, as I soon discovered, lent itself readily to the basic ground on which human values could be rediscovered, rearranged, revalued and restated more normally and normatively. It is this discovery that dawned on me more clearly each day as I taught in my global travels, that made this work all the more dear to me.

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Side by side with this it also dawned on me with equal force that this mainly non-verbally conceived text was just the one that suited the most modern means of communication. Video and computerisation have been so fast and spectacular in their development that now it is possible to say that this mass medium has inaugurated what is beginning to be known as a Paleocybernetic Age, which can be expected to revolutionise the whole of individual and collective life of humanity within a few years. There is little that could not be accomplished through new technology to bypass the confusion of tongues non-verbally.

We can examine the workings of our own mind, not to say self, through the intermediary of this wonderful new medium where line, light, colourful vision and audition could help in the process of the marriage of sheer entertainment with the highest form of so-called spiritual education. The availability of such a medium could be said to be just around the corner. The only snag in this matter is that we need a new kind of literature that could be most advantageously fed into the machine when it becomes available. The answer to this kind of demand is already found in the "Saundarya Lahari".

This is the second discovery that came to me by chance. The possible appeal of the "Saundarya Lahari", more especially to the modern generation, became immediately evident to me. My ambition, therefore, was not primarily to write a new and more learned book on this work, but rather to avail myself of the wonderful possibilities of modern video technology to put across to the new generation the valuable contents of this rare book, where the message and the medium already co-exist without any contradiction between them.

The highest purpose of life, by which man is made to live more than merely by bread alone, which it was the privilege hitherto of religious bodies to cater to the public by way of spiritual nourishment, thus comes into the hands of every true educator.

What is more, "education" and "entertainment" become interchangeable terms. The success of the "Saundarya Lahari" could be expected to open the way to many other possibilities of the same kind. What is called Self- Realisation and the truth of the dictum that the proper study of mankind is man himself, can be made possible, as it were, by a strange irony of fate through startling advances in the world of mechanistic technology itself. Evil shall thus be cured in and through itself by its own cause.

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What is called "salvation" results from the cancellation of the self by the non-self. Beauty is a visible value in which line, light and colour can cooperate to reveal our true nature to ourselves. When thus revealed, that final cancellation of counterparts can take place which is capable of removing the last impediment to what we might soberly call "unitive understanding". This is none other than emancipation, or final Freedom with a capital F. This is the promise that the wisdom of the Upanishads has always held out as the highest hope of humanity. There is both inner beauty as well as beauty "out there" as it were. The former is that of the yogi and the latter of the speculative philosopher. Both are capable of effecting cancellation of counterparts between the Self and the Non-Self resulting in that Samadhi or Satori which marks the term and goal of intelligent humanity.

MAIN QUESTIONS

Having stated now the nature of my main interest , let me take one by one the questions that I have raised above and answer them as shortly as I can, without getting lost in too many unnecessary by-paths.

1. How could Sankara, who is known to be an Advaita philosopher, be credited with the authorship of this text which is evidently of the form belonging to the context of Tantra Shastra?

Sankara's great commentaries are primarily metalinguistic while this work is protolinguistic. Tantra is only a structural, protolinguistic, non-verbal approach to Indian spirituality at its best, when taken as a whole. We have to think of Mantra, Yantra and Tantra at once as presupposing one another, if we are to enter into a sympathetic and intuitive understanding of the dynamism that Tantra essentially represents. This dynamism is none other than mutual participation of the two other aspects which go with it, which are Yantra on the one side and Mantra on the other. Thus, Tantra is the "know-how" or savoir - faire by which Yantra and Mantra could interact mutually and produce what we call the fully real experience of unitive understanding, by a double correction. Yantra is associated with a wheel or machine, while Mantra evidently stands for uttered syllables or sounds. Each Mantra involves a devata, which term has to be distinguished from just a deva, or god.

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All the gods of the Hindu pantheon can be given their correct positions as monomarks in the context of the Yantra, which is essentially a geometrical figure called the Sri Chakra. Letters of the Sanskrit alphabet could be used in the place of monomarks to indicate structural aspects of the Absolute within the context of erotic mysticism, where beauty is the most prominent prevailing value.

In the erotic context of Tantra there are four functional monomarks commonly used which are the goad and noose, referring to the spatial dynamism applicable to an elephant, together with the sugar-cane bow and five flower-tipped arrows which indicate the limits of the horizontal world of erotic pleasure or enjoyment. Many of the Tantra texts quoted or alluded to in the writings of Sir John Woodroffe make profuse use of these monomarks and protolinguistic devices to such a point of intricacy that the modern reader could easily get lost in their ramifications and further complicated implications. For a clear statement we have to go to the "Mahanirvana Tantra", which perhaps owes its inspiration to Buddhistic as well as proto-Aryan Tantric sources. One sees very clearly from this particular Tantra how the colour of the dark monsoon cloud which hangs over the whole west coast of India, from Ujjain to Kanyakumari, has a place within the context of Tantrism. Moreover, the best palm-leaf manuscripts preserved to this day bearing on Tantra, are found in the collections of some Maharajas of this area. There is also a temple situated on the West Coast, half way between Gujarat and the Cape, which could be considered as the most ancient of the epicentres from which this kind of influence could be imagined to have spread far and wide, through the Mahayana Buddhism of Central and North India, reaching Tibet and finally nourishing the roots of the Shakti cult of present-day Bengal.

Tantra is a discipline which combines the secrets of Yoga side by side with other esoteric teachings, the greater part of which is a contribution by the lower strata of society, to whom the five Tattvas proper to its practice - matsya (fish), mamsa (meat), madya (liquor), maithuna (copulation) and mudra (gesture) - are to be considered both natural and normal. When this lower form of Tantra was subjected to revaluation and restatement in the light of Veda and Vedanta, it gave rise to further subdivisions and graded stratifications, such as the Purva Kaula, Uttara Kaula, Samayin and fully Vedantic versions of Tantrism. Thus Tantra is a complex growth in the spiritual soil of India.

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Sankara, as a great dialectical revaluator of the Hindu spirituality of his time, could easily be imagined to have attempted a final revaluation of the same body of spiritual wisdom which he proposed to clothe in a special kind of non- verbose language. As a result, there are two texts from his pen, the twin complementary works named "Saundarya Lahari" and "Shivananda Lahari", respectively. The former presupposes a negative ascending dialectical perspective, while the latter presupposes the same Absolute Value when viewed from a more positive position in terms of a descending dialectic. The final content of both remains the same, although the starting postulates might seem diametrically opposed to each other.

Beauty, especially when it is colourful and full of significant lights and lines, lends itself to be considered the most tangible content of the otherwise empty or merely mathematical notion called the Absolute. Truth and value thus are made to fulfil the same function: to give full tangible content to the Absolute. In short, metalinguistically stated Advaita coincides here with what is protolinguistically understood.

2. Why should he have written these verses after his great commentaries, which are by themselves sufficiently monumental to support his fame as a Vedantic philosopher?

As Sankara himself states in Verse 59 of the "Vivekacudamani", verbosity is a bane which could even cause mental derangement.

3. If Sankara gave primacy to wisdom, as is well known, how is it that he seems to have come down to the vulgar or popular level of a worshipper of the beauty of a goddess?

The simple answer is that no visible goddess is directly envisaged in any of the verses in the present series. Certain picturesque situations are, of course, presented here and there in such a way that when the numerator and the denominator aspects of the same are cancelled out we are left with an overwhelming sense of sheer absolute Beauty, independently of any anthropomorphically conceived goddess. The first and the last verses of the series, when read together, absolve Sankara completely of any possible charge of being a theist, deist or even a ritualist in the ordinary religious sense.

4. The Sri Chakra, which figures in the text very prominently, seems to be the hallmark by which Tantra texts are recognisable. What has this geometrical design to do with Advaita Vedanta, which believes in the purest form of reason only?

The Sri Chakra is a structurally conceived linguistic device. Just as a graph can verify an algebraic formula, there is no contradiction between the Advaita as Sankara has stated metalinguistically in his Bhasyas (commentaries) and that which the same Advaita represents in the form of a schema here.

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5. What is the place of eroticism in the context of the austere sannyasa (renunciation) which Sankara stood for so uncompromisingly?

The proper theme of all poetry or even art could be said to be love. No lover, no art. One cannot think of beauty without the form of woman coming into it. Thus the relevancy of erotic mysticism stands self-explained. The best proof in this matter is the high place that Kalidasa's poetry occupies to the present day.

6. Was Sankara interested in Yoga Sastra (the science of yoga) also?

7. If not, why does he take the trouble of describing the various details of Chakras (synergic centres) as seen in the verses of this text?

Yoga properly pertains to a dualistic school called Samkhya. When revised in the light of Advaita Vedanta, the abstractions and generalisations of the various stable syndromes and synergisms proper to the dynamism of Yoga discipline refuse to resemble other texts on Yoga such as "Kheranda Samhita", "Hathayoga Pradipika" or even the "Astanga Yoga" of Pantanjali. Thus it is that Sankara's treatment of Yoga seems different from other Yoga disciplines. He merely restates it in a more respectable form acceptable to an Advaita Vedantin. The "Vyasa Bhasya" and "Bhoja Thika" applied to Patanjali Yoga, are supposed to effect the same corrections and revaluations. Careful scrutiny of the Shakta Upanishads and the Yoga Upanishads will clarify any further doubt that might linger in the minds of keen and critical students in respect of the purport of these verses.

8. If non-duality is the teaching of Sankara, how is it that he postulates Shiva and Shakti as two distinct factors, principles or entities?

In the Samkhya philosophy there are the concepts of prakrti and purusa, the former being not imbued with intelligence, while the latter is the fully intelligent principle. Thus we find a heterogeneity between the two categories, which it is the purpose of the revised epistemology and methodology of Advaita to abolish effectively. Shiva and Shakti, as meant to be united in the present work, are to be understood as belonging together to the same neutral epistemological grade of the non-dual Absolute. They must lose their distinctness and, when generalised and abstracted to the culminating point, they could be treated as two perimeters or parameters to be cancelled out by their mutual intersection or participation. One has a vertical reference and the other a horizontal reference, while both exist at the core of the Absolute. When abstraction and generalisation are thus pushed together to their utmost limit, the paradox is transcended or dissolved into the unity of one and the same Absolute Value which is here referred to as Beauty or Bliss. Thus duality, accepted only for methodological purposes, is to be abolished at each step by unitive understanding.

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9. Is Sankara a religious man at all?

To this question, an unequivocal answer is to be found in the last verses of the series It is not difficult to see that Sankara's Advaita transcends all ideas of holiness or ritualistic merits altogether. He seems clearly to wash his hands of any such derogatory blemish.

The very beginning of the "Vivekucadamani" of Sankara contains other similar unmistakable indications which tend to show that sacred and holy religious values are repugnant and altogether outside the scope of the uncompromising spirit of Advaita that he has always represented.

10. How far are the verses compatible with the doctrines developed in his other works?

Sankara's other works, such as his great bhasyas (commentaries), are conceived on the basis of demolishing polemically a series of purvapaksins (sceptics) taken in graded and methodical order, in favour of a posteriorly finalized position called siddhanta. A careful scrutiny of each of the verses here will reveal that the same finalized doctrines are enshrined and clearly presented in almost every one of them, though clothed in a realistically non-verbal and visualizable form based on the value of beauty that could be experienced by anyone, whether they are a learned philosopher or not. Just to give one example, we could say that the second verse corresponds to the second sutra of the Brahmasutras, where creation, preservation and resolution form the subject matter, as phenomenal aspects born out of the same Absolute. Examples could be multiplied indefinitely.

11. Did his followers give any importance to this work so as to adopt its teaching in any way in their lives as inmates of various ashrams in which they practised their spiritual disciplines?

It is well known that almost all the existing ashrams or maths claiming allegiance to the teaching of Sankaracarya, such as that of Sringeri or Conjivaram, still speak in terms of worshipping a Wisdom Goddess, such as found in the Sarada Pith. The tradition started by Sankara is tacitly or overtly adhered to by his followers, although the critical understanding in respect of such worship still remains questionable with most of them.

12. Why does he employ a Puranic (legendary) and mythological language here? Letters of the Greek alphabet are advantageously used in scientific language. The large quantity of Puranic literature found in Hinduism affords a veritable never-expended mine from which an intelligent philosopher like Sankara could derive monomarks and divinities which could serve the same purpose as the Greek letters in the language of mathematics.

Thus, he merely uses them as the available linguistic elements derived from mythology instead of from mathematics as modern scientists would do.

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From the Upanishads through Kalidasa's poems, such as the "Shyamala Dandakam" and his various larger poems such as the "Kumarasambhava", there is to be discerned a definite lingua mystica using its own clichés and ideograms through the centuries down to our own time. After Kalidasa, Sankara used it most effectively, and it was given to Narayana Guru to be the continuator of the same tradition in modern times.

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GENERALITIES

It is a hard task to give a real or tangible content to the notion of the Absolute. All disciplines, whether cosmological, theological or psychological, imply a notion of the Absolute without which, at least as a reference, all philosophy or science tends to become incoherent, purposeless and inconsequential. Ethical, aesthetic or even economic values also require a normative regulating principle, which can be no other than the Absolute, presupposed tacitly or overtly for ordering and regulating these disciplines. Over-specialisation of science leads to compartmentalisation of branches of knowledge, each tending thus to be a domain proper only to an expert or specialist. The integration of all knowledge is beginning to be recognized as important for the progress of human thought at the present moment.


There is a hoary tradition in India which refers to a Science of the Absolute, which is called
Brahmavidya. It belongs to the context of Vedanta, which has attracted the attention of modern scientists in the West, such as Erwin Schrödinger and others. There is at present a large body of thinkers which believes that a rapprochement between physical science and metaphysics - which is independent of the senses - is possible, and that a Unified Science can thus be ushered into existence.

Attempts have been made along these lines, especially in Vienna, Paris, Chicago and Princeton. What is called the philosophy of science and the science of philosophy could be put together into the science of all sciences, in which many leading thinkers are interested. It is the central normative notion of the Absolute wherein lies the basis of any such possible integration. To give precise content to the Absolute is therefore an important problem engaging the attention of all thinking persons. The new physics of the West is tending to become more and more mathematical and theoretical.

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What is equally interesting is that Eastern disciplines, such as Zen Buddhism, Yoga and Vedanta hold at present a new interest for the western scientist.

The present work is meant to insert itself in between these two trends in modern thought. The large number of people now breaking away from conventional standards and patterns of behaviour, both in the East as well as in the West, not to speak of the polarity between northern and southern temperaments, are now trying to discover themselves anew. Humanity has to find its own proper bearings and gather up loose ends from time to time as "civilisation" takes forward steps. We are now caught in the throes of just such an agonising process. New horizons and more extensive frontiers have to be included within a vision of the world of tomorrow. Myths have to be revised and new idioms discovered, so that fact and fable can tally to verify each other and life can be more intelligent, consequential and consistent.

An integrated or unified science must fulfil the functions hitherto seen as proper only to religion or to metaphysical speculation. Educated people are called upon to take a position more intelligent than hitherto vis-à-vis the great quantity of discoveries being made in both inner and outer space.

This notion of inner space brings us to just that new factor which has recently entered the creative imagination of the present generation. Thermodynamics, electromagnetics, cybernetics semantics and logistics, aided by newer and newer mathematics, are bringing into view vistas unfamiliar hitherto, in which the student feels more at home than the professional teacher whose main interest is often merely to keep his job or shape his career.

The best of the students and the most original of the young professors feel that there is a widening gap between their own ambitions or legitimate urges and the prevailing standards, and have reason to complain that they are often obstructed in the name of out-dated precedents or rules. Co-education has abolished much of the distance between the sexes. Girls need no chaperones, and the university undergraduate does not have to live up to any Victorian form of respectability or even to the chivalry of days gone by.

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Adam prefers to keep the forbidden fruit in his hand, and naturally begins to treat the earth as a planet over which he must pass freely. Linguistic or racial frontiers as well as dinner jackets and wine glasses are being left behind in favour of more individualistic patterns of dress or group conduct. Parisian fashions do not impress youth any more, and mind-expanding drugs are beginning to replace those other poisons like champagne that induce merely a feeling of lazy comfort. Public standards are floundering because of this accentuation of inner space, which is holding out new interests to allure the imagination of adolescents.

INNER SPACE AND STRUCTURALISM

LSD and allied drugs, which have what they call a mind-expanding effect, have opened up a new world that could be called pagan as opposed to prophetic. Sensuousness is no sin to Bacchus, while to Jeremiah, prostitutes and idolatry and all the existential values belonging to animism and hylozoism are highly repugnant.


The golden calf had to be replaced by the table of commandments that Moses and Aaron held up before their chosen followers. The waters of the Ganges are sacred to the Shiva-worshippers of India, and this is why they are spat upon as idolaters and infidels, fit to be trampled by the elephants of the emperor Aurangzeb.


As between the logos of the Platonic world of the intelligibles and the nous of the pre-Socratic Eleatics, two rival philosophies emerge in modern times, giving superiority to existence over essence or vice versa.


Psychedelics reveal a new vision of the negative aspect of consciousness where what is called the subconscious and all its contents become magnified and revealed to inner experience.


There are thus at present two rival minds to deal with: one that is interested primarily in percepts, and the other in concepts. Both of these have to be accommodated together in an integrated picture of absolute consciousness. A lopsided vision can spell nuisible consequences.


It is this discovery of inner space that is upsetting and disrupting the scheme of values of the individualistic dropouts of the present day. Values do not all hang together with reference to the same point anymore, and the double or multiple standards thus emerging must necessarily confuse people in the domain of ethics, aesthetics and economics, not to mention those of education and religion or spirituality.


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Values, both positive and negative, have to be fitted into a fourfold structure, the limbs of which could be summarily indicated in advance as representing the conceptual, the perceptual, the actual and the virtual. This fourfold structure has been known to poets in the West since the time of Milton, and in India since the time of Kalidasa. The lingua mystica of every part of the world seems to have had this mathematical secret hiding within its semantic or semiotic structuralism - sometimes referred to as "semantic polyvalence".


The Upanishads contain many passages that reveal unequivocally the fourfold structure mentioned so directly in the Mandukya Upanishad, which states ayam atma catuspad, (this Self is four-limbed). The schematismus of Kant and structuralism as understood by post-Einsteinian scientists like Eddington, have brought this notion once again to the forefront, and it is offered as a kind of challenge for modern man to accept or reject. Bergson, while remaining essentially an instrumentalist, is also most certainly a structuralist, as is evident to anyone making a careful scrutiny of the following paragraphs:


"But it is a far cry from such examples of equilibrium, arrived at mechanically and invariably unstable, like that of the scales held by the justice of yore, to a justice such as ours, the justice of the rights of man, which no longer evokes ideas of relativity and proportion, but, on the contrary, of the incommensurable and the absolute."


(H. Bergson, "The Two Sources of Morality and Religion", Doubleday,1954, P74)


"Across time and space which we have always known to be separate, and for that very reason, structureless, we shall see, as through a transparency, an articulated space-time structure. The mathematical notation of these articulations, carried out upon the virtual, and brought to its highest level of generality, will give us an unexpected grip on the real. We shall have a powerful means of investigation at hand; a principle of research, which, we can predict, will no henceforth be renounced by the mind of man, even if experiment should impose a new form upon the theory of relativity."


(H.Bergson, "Duration and Simultaneity", Bobbs-Merrill & Co.,1965, P150)


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SANKARA'S "SAUNDARYA LAHARI"

Sankara's "Saundarya Lahari", when examined verse by verse, reveals many enigmas which come to light only when a structural analysis is applied to each of them. Otherwise it remains a closed book to punditry which has beaten its wings in vain trying to make the great poet-philosopher's words have even a mere semblance of coherent meaning.


The "Saundarya Lahari" (The Upsurging Billow of Beauty), together with Sankara's other century of verse called "Shivananda Lahari", treats, we could say, of the same absolute value from perspectives tilted 180 degrees from each other. The mythological elements that enter into the fabric of this composition and its large array of Hindu gods and goddesses, are pressed into service by Sankara to give a precise philosophical context to the supreme value called Absolute Beauty, the subject-matter of these verses. This same subject can be looked at in the more positive or modern light of a structural and mathematical language where geometric or algebraic signs and symbols can verify a formula. This is the basis of the protolinguistic approach that we have adopted in conceiving this work.


Line, light or colour, also biological, crystalline or radiated structures, can all be made to speak a non-verbal language with at least as much precision as in the case of essentially verbose commentaries, such as those of Sankara himself. How successfully this series of verses can be treated as a sequence of visions is a matter that the success of the present work alone must prove hereafter.


Meanwhile, it is not wrong to state that modern technical discoveries, such as the stroboscope, laser holograms and computer graphics , animation and devices such as collage, montage, mixing , merging and filtering of colours, could together open up a new age for visual education as well as entertainment through the most popular medium of modern times: the film.


Large and verbose treatments of such subjects are likely to go into cold storage in the future, because the output of printed matter is too much for the busy person of the present to cope with. This work is meant, as we have just indicated, to be educational as well as entertaining. Its appeal is not therefore primarily to box-office patrons who might wish to pass an easy or comfortable evening of relaxation after a hard day's work; but to a more elite audience which wishes to learn while looking for visual enjoyment. There are thus many features that are not conventional in the film world which have to be taken into account even now by the reader, anticipating its fuller film version.


The first 41 verses of the "Saundarya Lahari" are distinguishable by their content as pertaining to the world of inner Yoga. Mandalas, Chakras, Yantras, Mantras and Tantras, representing stable psychic states or experiences of the Yogi, figure here to the exclusion of beauty as seen objectively outside. Global perspectives of objective beauty are presented in the latter section of the "Saundarya Lahari", this name being more directly applicable to Verses 42 - 100 inclusive.


As against this second part of the work, we have the first 41 verses which are distinguishable by the name "Ananda Lahari", Ananda (bliss) being a factor experienced within, rather than from any outer vision. "Saundarya Lahari" as the title of the total work of one hundred verses is justified in spite of this inner division, because it is still the absolute value of Beauty, upsurging or overwhelming in its wholesale appeal, which is the subjective or objective value-content of this entire work of Sankara's. This is a value which humankind needs to be able to give tangible content to the otherwise empty notion of the Absolute.


Sankara is well known in the context of Advaita Vedanta for his great bhasyas (commentaries) on the three canonical texts of Vedanta: the Upanishads, the Brahma Sutras and the Bhagavad Gita. Although some scholars still doubt the authorship of the present sequence of verses and tend to attribute it to others than Sankara, anyone familiar with the doctrinal delicacies and particularities of the Advaita that Sankara has always stood for, cannot for one moment doubt the hallmark that has always unequivocally distinguished his philosophy .


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The internal evidence available from almost every verse in this text, as well as in the "Shivananda Lahari", can, in our opinion at least, leave no doubt about Sankara's authorship of these two exceedingly interesting and intelligent works. Moreover, Sankara is unmistakably the correct continuator of the Vedic or Upanishadic tradition that has come down to us through the works of Kalidasa to the present day.


There is an unmistakable family resemblance here which, when viewed in its proper vertical hierarchical perspective, exists between ideograms, imagery and other peculiarities of the mystical language. One can recognise this masterpiece as representing the best of the heritage of the ancient wisdom of India preserved through the ages, and of which Sankara is one of the more modern continuators.


SANKARA AS A DIALECTICAL REVALUATOR
Sankara is a great dialectical revaluator of all aspects of ancient Indian wisdom. Nothing of Sanskritic cultural importance has been lost sight of by him, including factors of semantic, logistic or merely ritualistic (Tantric) importance. Sankara's authorship of these hundred verses need not be doubted if only for the final reason that we cannot think of any other poet-philosopher or critic attaining to the high quality of this work and its sister-work, the "Shivananda Lahari".


The history of religion is nothing other than the history of dialectical revaluations of prior positions in terms of posterior doctrines. These two positions could be treated as complementary to each other. In the Biblical context, this same transition from the old to the new, as from the Mosaic Law to the Law of Jesus, is invariably marked with the words: "You have heard it said, but verily, verily I say unto you". It is not unreasonable to think that Sankara here takes up what until then was known as esoterics such as Tantra, Yantra and Mantra, especially in the Kaula and Samaya traditions, both of Bengal and of South India, and subjects them to his own critical and dialectical revaluation.


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Sankara restates those esoteric doctrines in a fully exoteric form, in keeping, above all, with his own avowed position as an Advaita Vedantin. This view must suffice to show that all those who hitherto treated the "Saundarya Lahari" as some kind of text belonging to the Shaktya mother-worship cult, would be guilty of a great inconsistency which they could not themselves explain, in thinking that an avowed Advaita Vedantin could ever write a text that did not support his own philosophy. It is strange that even Sir John Woodroffe, who treats of the "Saundarya Lahari", tends to belong to this category. Professor Norman Brown of Harvard has the same misgivings as revealed in the very subtitle of his work where the authorship is dubiously stated as "attributed to Sankara".


Modern man is interested both in post-Einsteinian physics, as well as in the discipline of Yoga. Zen Buddhism opens up a world in which both meditation and contemplative experience from within the self have an important place. The Upanishads and Vedanta too, are based on inner as well as outer experiences proper to the contemplative. When we write of inner experiences, we are in reality referring to the mystical experiences of the yogi within himself.


THE NATURE OF THE TEXT
The Saundarya Lahari consists of a sequence of one hundred verses of Sanskrit poetry written in a heavy and dignified metrical form. The syntax and inflections of Sanskrit are especially suited to the use of highly figurative language, and there are often layers of more and more profound suggestions as one meaning gives place to others implied below or above it, in ascending or descending semiotic series.


We are here in the domain where meanings have their own meanings hidden behind each other, and the mind sinks backward or progresses forward, upward or downward, within the world of poetic imagination or expression. A sort of meditation and free fancy are presupposed in compositions of this kind, heavy-laden with suggestibility or auto-suggestibility. There is always a subjectivity, a selectivity and a structuralism implied.


The conventional film world treats of a series of horizontal events that the camera can register in a fluid or living form. Every day new techniques are being developed, bringing into play more of what is called "inner space".


The present work is an attempt to follow up these new trends so that the film projected on the basis of this work could be the means for modern knowledge of a new and unified variety to be put across from the side of the savant to the so-called man on the street. While relating outer space with inner space, we also necessarily bring together East and West, besides unifying science and metaphysics.


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FURTHER IMPLICATIONS OF STRUCTURAL LANGUAGE
With reference to this work, it is necessary to clarify the implications of what we call structural analysis.


Poetry has the primary function of being pleasing or beautiful. Literary critics in the West tend to condemn metaphysical or moralistic poetry as inferior to pure poetry where enjoyability is the only desirable quality. In the world of Sanskrit literature, however, mysticism and the wisdom that goes with it have never been divorced from the function of poetic art. Aesthetics, ethics and even economics can legitimately blend together into a pleasing confection that can console or satisfy the love of bliss or joy that good poetry can give, without the compartmentalisation of such branches into separate disciplines of literature. Moralist maxims such as found in Aesop's Fables or in Alexander Pope's writings have been condemned by critics in the West as being didactic in character and thus detracting from the pure function of poetry as such. We do not look for morals or precepts any more; much less do we expect, according to western norms of literary criticism, to learn metaphysical truths from poems. We feel that poetry must necessarily suffer because didactic tendencies can never be reconciled with the proper function of poetry, which is mainly lyrical or just pleasing. Metaphysical poetry in the West tends to be artificial or forced. The Upanishadic tradition has, however, quite a different history. It has always had the serious purpose of revealing the Truth through its analogies and figures of speech. The one Absolute Value that wise people have always sought has been the single purpose of the innocent, transparent and detached way of high thinking exhibited through the simple lives of the Upanishadic rishis (sages).


The degree of certitude that they possessed about this value content of the Absolute reached a very high point in their pure contemplative literature. They had no private axes to grind. Thus, the wisdom that refers to all significant life interests taken as a whole entered into the varied texture of these mystical and mathematically precise writings. Poetry and science were treated unitively here, as perhaps nowhere else in the world's literature, with a few exceptions perhaps as attempted in Dante's "Divine Comedy", Milton's "Paradise Lost", or Goethe's "Faust". The Upanishadic tradition has been compared to the Himalayas as the high source of the three great rivers of India; the Indus, the Ganges and the Brahmaputra.


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Like the Nile for the Egyptians, the snowy peak of Gaurisankara and the waters of the Ganges have provided idioms, ideograms analogies and figures of speech that have perennially nourished Sanskrit literature. Without the Himalayas and the figurative language in which the family of Shiva is represented, living on Mount Kailasa, Kalidasa's poetry would be reduced to some kind of insipid babble. Shiva is the positive principle of which the Himalayas are the negative counterpart. Parvati is sitting on his lap and his twin children represent between them the striking ambivalence of personal types. The white bull, Nandi, the good and faithful servant and vehicle to the principle which Shiva represents, reclines nearby. This family can be seen by any imaginative or intuitive person to be a replica of the grand scene of the Himalayas as revised and raised to the dignity of divinity. When an absolutist touch is added to this implied quaternion structure of a Shiva family, with the bull representing the foothills of the central mass and the peak structurally recognisable as dominating the total content of the Absolute, we come to have a close and correct perspective by which we may examine this century of verses.


Each verse leaps into meaning only when the underlying structural features are revealed and brought into view; otherwise these hundred verses remain as they have remained through the thousand years or more of their history; a challenge to vain pedantry or punditry.


In other words, structuralism is the key that can make this work understandable, a scientifically valid work with a fresh appeal to all advanced modern thinking persons of East or West. It will be our task within the scope of the work itself to introduce the reader, as occasion permits, to further implications and intricacies of this structural approach, which perhaps is the one feature on which rests the value and success of this work.


Theology permits man to say that he is created in the image of God. This is only a polite way of stating that "The Kingdom of God is within you" or "The Word was with God and the Word was God". The bolder Vedantic tradition, however, asserts the same verity when it says: "Thou art That" or "I am Brahman" ( I am the Absolute).


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A subtle equation is implied here between the relativistic perspective of the content of Brahman and the more conceptual or Absolutist aspect of the pure notion itself, so that the word "Absolute" could have a tangible content. Such a content cannot be other than a high value because without value it cannot be significant or purposeful in terms of human life. When Keats says "A thing of beauty is a joy forever", we recognise a similar Platonic thought repeated on English soil after the European Renaissance. To treat of Absolute Beauty as the content of the Absolute is fully normal to Vedantic or Advaitic thought, and what is existent (sat) and subsistent (cit) must both be covered in their turn by ananda (bliss or value factor), which in turn could be easily equated to the high value of absolute Beauty. Thus we see unmistakably the sequence of reasoning justifying the title of the "Saundarya Lahari". It becomes not only justified but lifted above all lower ritualistic or Tantric contexts to the pure and exalted philosophical domain of a fully Advaitic text, in keeping with the dignity of a scientific philosopher like Sankara . The pure and the practical, the noumenal and the phenomenal, the absolute and the relative, the transcendental and the immanent, res cogitans and res extensa, and all such other conjugates whether in philosophy or science, could only refer to what is distinguished in Vedanta as para and apara Brahman. Different schools might have differing terms for the same two intersecting parameters which they have as their common reference.

Each of the hundred verses with which we are concerned here, when scrutinised in the light of the structuralism that we have just alluded to, as also in the light of the equation implied in the para and apara (i.e. the vertical and the horizontal) aspects of the same Absolute, will bring to view as far as possible in non-verbose language, the content of the Absolute seen from the negative perspective of Absolute Beauty as viewed sub specie aeternitatis. Thus a book that has remained closed to punditry all these years will come to have a significant and practical bearing even on our modern life.


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YANTRA, MANTRA AND TANTRA
The word "Tantra" has to be understood with its other associated terms, which belong together to a certain type of esoterics found in India, independently of formulated philosophical systems or doctrines. Just as the bed of a river contains some precious deposits mixed with its sand at the bottom, cultures that have flowed down the ages over valleys or plains such as that of the Ganges or the Nile have often deposited rich sediments of esoteric wisdom value.


The Hermetics, the Kabala and the Tarot represent such deposits near the Mediterranean cities of antiquity. As in the case of the "I Ching" of China, fortune telling and astrology have their own vague contributions to add to this body of esoteric wisdom found in different parts of the globe. To change esoterics and present it in a more critically revised form as exoterics is impossible without a normative reference. Tantra, Yantra and Mantra are three of the fundamental notions connected with a certain type of esoterics found particularly in Tibet and also in India along the Malabar Coast and Bengal. The central idea of Mother-Worship and erotic mysticism has nourished this school of thought known as the Shakti Cult, and kept it alive through the ages without being subjected to the corrections of either Vedism or proto-Aryan Shaivite philosophy.


Thaumaturgists made use of the vague twilight, full of secret mystery, in which its teachings flourished - mainly in basements and cellars hidden under old temples and shrines - to participate in certain kinds of orgies where wine, women and flesh-eating figured to support a pattern of behaviour known as vamachara ( a left-handed way of life) which the more learned Brahmins would not recognise. These practitioners went under the general name of Shaktyas, which came to include two sections, the more ancient and cruder section being called Kaulins, and the other branch which received at least some recognition from the Vedic priesthood, being called Samayins. These schools indulge in exorcising evil spirits and in correcting psychological maladjustments by preparing amulets or talismans, the word for which in Sanskrit is yantra. It often consists of a scroll of thin metal, which is tied around the neck. Because of the lucrative value of such a profession, priestcraft, as anywhere in the world, gave this school its patronage, allowing it to persist on the Indian soil for ages, independent of the prevailing religious authority at any given time in history. The Yantras invariably contain geometric figures with magic letters marking angles, points, lines or circles.


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The letters would correspond to the notion of mantra, which depends on a symbolic chant or incantation. The figures themselves are attempted protolinguistic representations of the same mystery, the technique of which is to be distinguished as Tantra. It is thus that the terms Yantra, Mantra and Tantra belong together to a certain form of esoteric mystery still attracting the attention of many people, both intelligent and commonplace, where mysteries naturally thrive on a sort of vague twilight background of human thought.


Since Sankara was a Guru who wanted to revise dialectically the whole range of the spirituality of his time and restate it in a proper critically revised form he did not overlook the claim of this particular form of esoterics. He wanted to salvage whatever was precious in it and bring it into line with the Upanishadic tradition. He had himself the model of the great Kalidasa, whose writings, as his very name suggests, belonged to the same context of Mother-worship. Although Kalidasa's works have largely become a closed book to even the best pundits of present-day India, it is still possible to see through a structural analysis of his works the common lineage between Sankara and his forerunner Kalidasa and thus take our mind backwards to the great source of wisdom contained in the Upanishads.


Speculation scaled very high in India at the time of the Upanishads, which centred around one main notion - the Absolute (Brahman). The structural implications of the Absolute found in the mystical language of the Upanishads has served as a reference and nourished subsequent thought down to our own times. In the light of the structuralism that has come into modern thought through the back door of science, as it were, and through the precise disciplines of mathematics going hand in hand with the progress of experimental scientific findings, it now becomes possible to see these ancient writings as consistent with a fully scientific modern outlook. It is this discovery, if we may call it so, that encourages us to present the "Saundarya Lahari" through the visual language of film or video.


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THE MEANING OF "LAHARI"
The title of this century of verses itself underlines its unique characteristic. Each verse when properly understood will be seen to contain two distinct sets of value counterparts. If one of them can be called "physical", the other could be called "metaphysical". When they cancel out against each other through a complementarity, compensation or reciprocity which could be recognized as implied between these two counterparts, the resultant is always the upsurge of an experience which could come from either the inner or the outer pole of the total absolute self.


This resultant could even be called a constant, and thus an absolute belonging to a particular discipline and department of life. To give a familiar example, when heat and cold cancel out climatic conditions can yield the possible absolute constant of that particular context. When heavenly values and earthly values cancel out by a complementarity, alternation or split-second cancellation, we can also experience another kind of beauty, bliss or high value factor. When viewed in its proper absolutist perspective, such a constant amounts to attaining the Absolute. Such an attainment of the Absolute would be tantamount to the merging of the Self with the Absolute in Upanishadic parlance, and even to becoming the Absolute itself.


Sankara has named his work a "Lahari", which suggests an upsurging or overwhelming billow of beauty experienced at the neutral meeting point of the inner sense of beauty with its outer counterpart. We always have to conceive the whole subject-matter in its four-fold polyvalence to be able to experience this overwhelming joy or bliss, to produce which, each word, phrase or image of these verses consistently strives in its attempt to give a high value content to the Absolute. There is no mistaking that the present work is perfectly in keeping with the same Advaitic doctrine that Sankara has laboriously stood for in all his other writings.


Cancellation of counterparts is therefore one of the main features of this work. It is neither a god nor a goddess that is given unilateral importance here. It is an absolute neutral or normative value emerging from the cancellation or neutralisation of two factors, named Shiva and Shakti respectively, that is noticeable consistently throughout this composition. If Shiva is the vertical reference, Shakti is the horizontal referent.


Understood in the light of each other, the non-dual in the form of beauty becomes experienced.


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Next to the principle of the quaternion referred to above, there are two parameters of reference, the vertical and the horizontal, which have to be clearly distinguished within the structure of the Absolute, which latter would otherwise be merely conceptual or empty of content. The phenomenal and the noumenal have to verify each other for the absolute value to emerge into view. It is the absolutist character of the value of beauty as understood here that justifies Sankara's use of the term "Lahari".


THE ALPHABET OF THE WORLD OF BEAUTY
All philosophy consists of generalisation and abstraction in order to give meaning to the Absolute. This meaning must have human value significance. "Beauty" or "Bliss" is the final term of speculation bringing us to the very door which opens onto the Absolute. Thus, there is the world of beauty in aesthetics just as there is the world of discourse to which logic belongs, or the world of calculables of mathematics . Mathematics has its elements which can be algebraic or geometric in status.


Similarly linguistics can use either signs or symbols. A red light is a signal or sign, while the word "stop" is a symbol, but both of these have the same meaning. In the same sense, percepts meet concepts and cancel out into one value factor. Beauty can be analysed structurally to reveal its relational aspects, i.e., through geometric figures it could be given monomarks which might belong to any alphabet. The world of beauty has its alphabets or its lines or angles. It is in this sense that for the Pythagoreans the numerological triangle called the tetraktys became a divine symbol still worshipped in their temples. The alphabets understood as belonging to metalanguage and geometrical elements such as angles, points, lines or concentric circles can be used protolinguistically to reveal the content of the Absolute in universally concrete terms. This is the truth that Kant mentions in one of the footnotes in his work on pure reason by which he means to state that schematismus can verify philosophical categories and vice-versa. Thus corrected both ways, in a back-to-back structural relationship contained within the paradox of the two parameters (vertical and horizontal) these could verify between them various algebraic formulae. Thus we have in our hands a rare instrument of research, about which Bergson writes in the quotation already cited on pages 19 and 20.


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What we are concerned with is not only the alphabet of the world of beauty, which belongs to the metalinguistic or conceptual side, but also with its schematic counterpart, which is of a more perceptual order. If the alphabet of the world of beauty, as monomarks or letters which are essentially symbolic in status, is metalinguistic; elements not of algebra but of geometry, such as the triangle, the circle, the line or the point, together with the vertical core, will be protolinguistic, and will be able to give a dynamism to the total static structure.


The various limits within which the structure lives could be named algebraically by letters of the alphabet as monomarks. Thus, elements of the world of beauty could belong together to the context of absolute Beauty, conceived neutrally or normatively. We arrive in this manner not only at alphabets, but at elements about which we will speak in the next section. It could be said that the alphabets themselves have a taxonomic value, helping us to name and recognise unitive factors in the context of absolute Beauty. Further implications of such an alphabet of the world of beauty will become evident when we treat of the actual verses of the present work in their proper places, such as in Verse 32. There letters are linked with elements so as to verify each other and lead us to the certitude about the content of Beauty which the interaction of these verses reveals, and which justifies the use of this kind of double-sided language of signs as well as symbols. All alphabets, however analytically understood, have still to be held together at the core of consciousness, as they are in the esoterics dealt with here, by the unifying letter hri which is the first letter of the word for "heart" in Sanskrit. However varied the alphabets might be, they have to have the heart at the core of consciousness to hold them together like the spokes of a wheel.


Thus structuralism and its own nomenclature belong together. While watching the kind of film proposed here, one would have to be familiar both with alphabets of beauty as well as with elements of Beauty, each from its own side of the total situation. Alphabets could be as many as contained in any language and could include vowels as well as consonants. Each letter could be made to represent a certain characteristic, forming a component unit or part of the total content of the Absolute. The rays radiating from a certain point of light could thus have a letter attributed to them for purposes of recognition or nomenclature. Thus, these letters belong to the Mantra aspect, while the Yantra aspect is the structure itself.


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The savoir faire or "know-how" aspect of imparting the knowledge about beauty could be called the Tantra aspect of the same. Thus Tantra, Yantra and Mantra belong together and verify one another to make this experience of beauty surge up within one's consciousness with an overwhelming force. A sense of beauty overpowers that person who is able to enter into the meaning of each verse both analytically and synthetically at one and the same time.


ELEMENTS OF THE PERCEPTUAL COMPONENTS OF THE WORLD OF BEAUTY
Crystal-clear gems, when they reflect, refract or diffract light, represent beauty in the most evident sense. They have angles, points, lines and colours, and they make various beautiful combinations. Next to gem-beauty comes flower-beauty. The lotus has been the flower dear to the heart of the contemplative Indian mind throughout the ages. Thus God is praised as having lotus feet, lotus eyes, a lotus mouth, a lotus in the heart and at the various psycho-physical centres called Chakras or Adharas. When structural features belonging to the biological world are abstracted and generalised, we enter the three-dimensional world of conics. Conic sections can be related at various levels to a vertical parameter running through the base of two cones, placed base to base. The triangle is only a particular two-dimensional instance comprised within the solid geometry of conics. The apex of each triangle could be inverted and a series of interpenetrating triangles could be placed within the cones for purposes of structurally analysing the total relation-relata complex in the light of which we are to examine the beauty contained in the Absolute.


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A vertical symmetry and a horizontal symmetry, the former with a complementarity, the latter with a parity, could be included within the total possible structural perceptual patterns that emerge to view. Parity could imply a right-handed and a left-handed spin, twist or mirror asymmetry, and complementarity could imply ambivalence, reciprocity or compensation of various intensities.


The vertical axis is purely mathematical or logical in status in which degrees of contradiction could be admitted. Time can absorb space and space time; this dynamism which is at the basis of modern physics and the very essence of Cartesianism is to be kept in mind here by us.


To use our own terminology, there is always to be attributed a polarity, an ambivalence, a reciprocity, a compensatory principle, a complementarity and finally a cancellability between the limbs of the quaternion structure here postulated.


At its core there is a vertical back-to-back relation and horizontally there is what might be called a belly-to-belly relation. The latter admits contradiction and is the basis of all conflict in life. Vertically, however, all shocks and stresses are absorbed and abolished by mutual cancellation at whatever level of this two-sided parameter. There is a dialectical descent and ascent between the positive and negative poles of the total situation.


Structure has thus to be conceived statically first, and then to have its own proper dynamism introduced or attributed to it so that we get a global view of all the perceptual component factors that make up the total picture in which the high value called beauty is to be examined by us in each of the hundred verses. There are subtler factors which enter into the dynamism which we cannot enumerate exhaustively here. They will enter into our interest normally as we focus our attention on the representations implied in each verse.


A flashlight held in our hand when walking through misty darkness can only light a circle within our visible area at a given time, although mist and darkness are not limited to what we can see. Contemplative minds, especially as understood in the logic-tradition of India, thus justifiably think in terms of circular or global units of consciousness placed in a vertical series beginning from the bottom pole of the vertical axis and ending at the top pole. Although its physiological position may not correspond to psychological units in terms of consciousness, the vertebral column with a central strand of nervous energy called susumna nadi, together with two other psycho-physical strands, at the left and right respectively, called ida and pingala, are generally taken for granted in yogic literature. If we now imagine six zones of consciousness ranging from bottom to top, we get the Adharas or Chakras, sometimes described and elaborated in detail by geometrical and biological analogies such as triangles and coloured petals in Yoga books.


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There are various schools of Yoga, the most important one being that of Patanjali, which uses eight such centres. In the present work, however, we find six centres prominently mentioned, each representing a point where horizontal and vertical factors cancel out to reveal a stable neutral or normal aspect of the Absolute proper to that particular level. The ambivalent factors always cancel out to reveal the same constant Absolute, however varied the pictorial content of the beauty to be appreciated might happen to be. The Tarot cards consist of pictorial representations supposed to represent the alphabet of a kind of mysterious schematism of thought. Yoga books also indulge in a similar pictorial language, but on Indian soil such pictures are mostly nourished by the mythology or analogies proper to the long Vedic or Sanskrit tradition. This is to be treated as only incidental by modern persons who can understand the same without mythology through a revised protolanguage such as that which we adopt and recommend here. The various gods of the Hindu pantheon happen to be themselves structural or functional components to be fitted together, giving us a content for the totality called Absolute Value which is always the object of any speculation, independent of time or clime. Sankara can be seen to have taken full advantage of the implications of this mythological language, not because he is religious himself, but because it lends itself admirably to the problem of giving beauty-content and full significance to the otherwise empty notion of the Absolute.


We shall try in the preliminary part of the projected Saundarya Lahari film to present certain of the mythological components used by Sankara, together with their proper background. In this way, the modern filmgoer, especially outside India, may be helped to see how the mythological language, together with a strict protolinguistic structuralism and the dynamism proper to it helps us to experience the essence of Absolute Beauty which is overwhelming in its total appeal.


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A WORD ABOUT THE BINDUSTHANA, OR LOCUS OF PARTICIPATION
The first 41 verses of the Saundarya Lahari presupposed a contemplative yogi, seated with eyes shut, representing an introspective withdrawal into the world of inner consciousness. The objective or positive side of consciousness in relation to the self will be the "object matter" proper to the rest of the composition. When a person meditates properly, his mind attains one-pointedness. This very term presupposes a point, not necessarily on a blackboard, but at a locus within one's self, which is referred to in Tantric literature as bindusthana. This focal point is where the global drop or essence of existence resides. When we think of a drop-like bindu, we could think of it as being made of an Absolute Substance, described also by Spinoza as a "thinking substance". We could visualise the same Absolute Substance with its own vertical reference when we add to it the dimension of res cogitans as used by Descartes. This vertical element is often referred to in Yogic or Tantric literature as nada, the essence of sound. Nada and bindu participate vertico-horizontally in terms of a thinking substance known as nadabindu, which is supposed to be the ontological starting point - the source or place of origin and dissolution - of all that comes to be or become in the mental or material world.


It is usual in contemplative Sanskrit literature to refer to nadabindu in terms of the tender lotus feet of the god or goddess. Only the tenderest part of our mind can participate with an equally tender part of that which we meditate upon, because any participation between subject and object, even in meditation, has to presuppose the principle of homogeneity, which is called samana adhikaranatva. The soldering together of two metals presupposes this principle; the base metal and the noble metal can be made to participate intimately only when there is an equality of status between them. The tenderest devotion thus meets on equal terms the tender petals of the lotus feet of the god. It is therefore usual to put the two feet of the god that you are meditating upon at the focal point where mind and matter cancel out at the neutral point of the thinking substance. The two feet within a lotus could be placed at any point on the vertical parameter, which is cut at right angles by an implied horizontal forest of lotuses, independent of the bindusthana (locus) of meditation. Thus a vertical series and a horizontal series of lotuses is presupposed for structural purposes in each of these verses. The horizontal dimension is incidental only, whereas the vertical reference is the essential parameter that links essence with existence - existence marking the lower (hierophantic) Alpha Point, and essence marking the highest (hypostatic) Omega Point. The point of intersection represents the normative bindusthana proper, but at whatever positive or negative point in the vertical series the feet of the Adorable One might be placed by the contemplative, there is a value regulated by the central normative lotus which is always the constant reference.


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These are some of the characteristics of the structural language adhered to by classical convention through a tacitly understood lingua mystica, coming down to us from pre-Vedic times through the Upanishads, through Kalidasa and through Sankara. It is impossible for us not to recognise the two sets of lotuses radiating from the central lotus at the bindusthana, as suggested in Verse 21. A justification for all we have said above is found in this verse.


STRUCTURAL DYNAMISM
It is one thing to visualise the alphabets of the elements of structuralism in situ, as it were, and quite another to visualise this structuralism in living or dynamic terms. Yogic meditation is not a static fixation of the attention on objects such as a bindu (central locus), which is mere hypnotism or crystal-gazing. The bindu must be thought of as a target to be reached by the mind, as with a bow fitted with an arrow directed vertically upwards towards the Omega Point. In order for this arrow to have the maximum momentum the bowstring would have to be pulled intently towards the Alpha Point.


The bowstring, when thus pulled, would tend to make its own hyperbolic triangular shape, with an apex pointing toward the base of the lower cone as implied in the suggested static structural figure of two cones placed base to base. The flying arrow reaches the target at the apex of the top cone, while its reciprocal dynamism is implied in the tension of the bowstring trying to attain the limit at the Alpha Point.


The Alpha Point thus has a negative psycho-dynamic content in the form of an introspective or introverted mystical or emotional state of mind, full of tender feelings such as between mother and child, shepherd and sheep, etc. This is the domain of the weeping philosopher and the agony of the mystic.


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The stages marked on the plus side of the vertical axis represent brighter and more intelligent states of the psycho-physical or psycho-somatic self. The coloration tends to be brighter and whiter as the emotional content transforms itself in its ascent by stages into fully emancipated states free from the weight of emotional content . A rich magenta glory might thus be said to be present even to the normative or centralised psychosomatic vision, though this is only subjectively experienced by the Yogi. The arrow flying upwards at right angles with a momentum proportionate to the tension of the horizontal bowstring pulled toward the negative pole of the vertical axis, attains its maximum limit the more it approximates to the Alpha Point, when released with maximum tension. The speed and power of penetration of the arrowhead breaks through all barriers, cancelling out the arithmetic difference that might persist between the arrow and the target.


It is usual to refer to a Chakra as a ganglion or plexus, such as the solar plexus, but psycho-physics properly understood has to reject all partial pictures slanted in favour of physiology and find a point that is correctly and neutrally placed psychosomatically perhaps between mind and matter.


The notion of syndromes and synergisms treated together with different electrical potentiality comes nearer to what is represented by the Chakras, which are not to be thought of partially as either mind or matter, but neutrally, as pertaining to the context of an Absolute Thinking Substance.


Thus there is a cancellation of counterparts along a vertical parameter to be understood with its negative and positive content, but always having a central normative magenta glory for reference. Such are some of the dynamic features of the structuralism which we have to insert correctly into the same context when we have visualised its static structural features. Psycho-statics and psycho-dynamics have thus to belong together when we try to understand the value that each verse reveals. Each of the six or eight positions usually distinguished as Adharas or Chakras is to be looked on as a stable cross-sectional point of equilibrium between counterparts which are always cancellable to normality or neutrality - just as a numerator number of whatever value could be cancelled out against a denominator value of the same set or category, yielding a constant that remains uniform at any position along the vertical parameter. It is always the neutrality of the magenta glory that is revealed when vertical and horizontal factors cancel out within the core of the Absolute. This aspect of subjective psycho-dynamism must be kept in the mind of the spectator, at least in regard to the first 41 verses distinguished as the "Ananda Lahari".


OTHER MISCELLANEOUS IDEOGRAMS
There are many other ideograms besides the bow and arrow which bring into the picture the dynamic aspect of structuralism. We have seen how the lotus flower and the feet figuratively represent ideograms. Now we find a number of secondary ideograms which are consistently used as alphabets or elements or both, within the scope of the lingua mystica which is the language employed in this work.


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The bee drinking honey from the lotus always implies the bhokta or enjoyer, as the honey implies the side of the bhogya, or enjoyable. There is a subtle dialectical interaction between these two sets of values; one referring to the subjective world, and therefore vertical; the other to the objective world, and therefore horizontal. At the point of separation between the vertical and horizontal we could imagine a row of bees sucking honey, with a corresponding flower for each bee. The horizontal parameter would be the line separating the row of bees each from the flower or the drop of honey it seeks. Instead of a row of bees, sometimes we find a rows of cranes, or rows of elephants, which refer to the four quarters of the compass in a sort of vectorial space within consciousness. Thus the Dig Ganas, the four or eight elephants representing points of the compass, are to be imagined as playing havoc or pushing their trunks into a central pole or axis.


The crystal imagery, resembling that of a colour solid, properly belongs to the base of the vertical axis, while at the neutral O Point, this same crystalline form would resemble a maze or lattice or matrix of vertico-horizontal lines, looking like a cage. Above the central O Point, when we think in terms of a radiating light going from a point to some universal here or elsewhere, the colour solid gives place to its counterpart, to be visualised as two cones, placed not base to base, but apex to apex. Thus crystals, conic sections, radial arrangements in flowers, logarithmic spirals with complementary spins, inversions and transformations, both vertical and horizontal; all enter into the complex fabric of the dynamics of the structural language employed here.


Petals, like the apexes of triangles, together with rays of light radiating outwards, can represent elements of various abstractions or generalisations within the scope or content of the absolute value of beauty here. The letters of the alphabet could be applied preferably to conceptual rays, while lines standing for relations of a here-and-now ontological character are proper to the crystal which serves to explain more ontological relation-relata complexes.


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The matrix of the centre of the axes serves to clarify the four-fold quaternion aspect. The most central dynamism could be represented by a figure-eight, exemplified by the familiar pulsations in electromagnetic interference figures, and also by the systole-diastole function of the heartbeat.


Every pulsation in its double aspect could be biologically reduced to conformity with this figure-eight which depends on the sine function of waves or frequencies. Wave lengths are horizontal, while frequencies are vertical, or vice-versa, as the case may be. When inserted together into the same space, they make this figure-eight structurally valid in terms of cross-polarized light.


All these figures trace their courses within the grand flux of universal becoming which is the most basic phenomenal manifestation of the neutral Absolute. The universe becomes experienced in most general terms as a process of flux or becoming. This is what Heraclitus meant when he said that one cannot enter into the same river twice. Bergson's philosophy supports the same flux in terms of the élan vital. Vedanta also thinks of the universe in terms of a process of flux or becoming when it refers to Maya as anadhir bhava rupa (of the form of a beginningless becoming), itself having an absolute status. Maya, as the negative aspect of the Absolute, however, could yield a normative Absolute which would cancel out this flux, but viewed from the side of relativity to which a living person naturally must belong, the universal flux of becoming is a reality which could be abolished only when the total paradox implied between physics and metaphysics is also finally abolished. In this grand flux of becoming, structuralism enters as naturally as it does in modern physics, where space and time belong together as conjugates and can be treated as Cartesian correlates. The articulation of space and time gives us the vertical parameter.


Thus we have referred to some further aspects of the peculiar visual language which will help the viewing audience to follow intelligently the content of this film. Indications of a more detailed order will be given in the film itself.


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FUNCTIONAL MONOMARKS OF GRADED AND DUPLICATE DIVINITIES OR PRESENCES
Before actually witnessing the film, some of the more hidden technicalities involved here will have to be explained.


Dynamism presupposes functions. Eros is the god of love who has the function of sending arrows to smite the hearts of lovers. Eros thus is a demigod or demiurge who is often symbolised by the bow and arrow held by him. The bow and arrow represent in visual language the monomarks belonging to his function. The three divinities, Brahma, Vishnu and Shiva, have their respective functions of creation, preservation and destruction within the total scope of cosmological phenomena comprised in the pure notion of the Absolute.


Thus Vishnu's function lies structurally in the middle zone, while Brahma brings up the rear and Shiva functions as the destroyer of everything at the Omega Point of nominalistic over-conceptualisation. Upward and downward logarithmic lines between the lower and higher limits would indicate the ambivalence between the function of Brahma and that of Shiva.


Eros, or Kamadeva, must have his counterpart Rati as his virtual companion. Shiva can destroy Eros only when Eros' presence falls outside the vertical negative parameter: but when occasionalism favours him as he takes refuge within the vertical negativity of the Absolute, he reigns invulnerably supreme in his own right, as in Verse 6.


The divinities can be either hypostatic or hierophantic in their significance. Where they have a numerator value, they are represented as gods or demigods, but when they have a denominator value, they are spoken of as "presences" with an ontological or an existential status, as in Verse 8.


The devotee, as Sankara himself indicates in the first verse, is placed outside the scope of the holy or the sacred at the bottom of the vertical axis and beyond Shiva, who normally marks the Omega Point at the top. Paramesvara (supreme Shiva), who has a more thin and mathematical status, is to be presupposed as the counterpart of the devotee as his saviour. As prayer or worship always implies a benefit between the worshipper and the worshipped, we could imagine an endless series of devotees praying for benefits compatible with themselves, each placed in duplicate at points marking hypostatic or hierophantic values within the total amplitude of the two-sided vertical parameter. Each of the divinities involved could confer its benefit on the believer or worshipper who constantly meditates on it. All prayers correctly made from the denominator side must necessarily find their compatible response from the numerator side. Such is the time-honoured presupposition in all prayer.


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Thus a mathematical Paramashiva (supreme Shiva) beyond the Omega Point on the thin vertical parameter has his counterpart in a footstool or cushion on the negative vertical side, either for the Devi or himself indifferently. From her toes to the top of her tresses there are subtler values to be placed back-to-back. Nothing can be omitted because the universal concrete that the Absolute represents enters even into the essence or existence of the toenails and the hair. Flowers could be hypostatic or hierophantic in their origin, or both, according to the circumstances. The waters of the Ganges, representing high value, can pour down to purify or bless a total situation, from the head of Shiva to his feet. When originating at the O Point in a lake represented by the navel of the Goddess, this water flows horizontally like an actual or geographical river conferring benefits on cultivators.


These suggestions must be kept in mind as the audience watches the unfolding of absolute Beauty in terms of magenta glory. The seventh verse, when scrutinized, will reveal how these levels and dimensions are woven into the structural dynamism adopted by Sankara.


A DRAMA UNFOLDING WITHIN THE SELF AS IN THE NON-SELF
The present series of verses could be viewed statically as representing Chakras or Mandalas. The Yantra could provide a dynamism because it suggests a wheel always going around. A picture as well as a drama may be said to be unravelling itself before our vision as the poem reveals to our view various aspects of absolute Beauty. The dynamism thus superimposed on the structuralism makes the whole series resemble the scenes of a dramatic universe to be thought of both subjectively and objectively at once. All drama involves personages or characters. Besides the hero and heroine, who represent the vertical and horizontal references, there is a villain responsible for bringing in the complications to be resolved during the action of the drama.


When the classical rule of the unity of time, place and action is fully respected, as it used to be before the time of the romanticism of Victor Hugo, we get a more global perspective of a comedy or tragedy with many stratifications of paradises gained or lost, infernos and purgatories, incorporated into the picture of Dante and Beatrice, God and Satan, Faust or Mephistopheles as the main personages involved. A clown and a chorus can be used to add a touch of levity to the scene.


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All the nine emotional attitudes known to Sanskrit aesthetics, ranging from masculine passion to the tenderest emotions of motherhood, could enter into the total picture that the drama presents to our view. In Aeschylus' play, the bound Prometheus supplies the central locus round which action develops, radiating polyvalently in all directions. A clown could be an interloper functioning both as a villain as well as a tale-bearer. A strong man could add a herculean touch in which hierophany prevails over hypostasy. In the present composition, all corresponding personages of Indian mythology can easily be distinguished. Eros is recognized as a complicating character. The presentation and resolution aspects of the drama have the same Eros involved in them in milder or modified forms as occasion demands. The antinomy between Zeus and Demeter is resolved in the present work by the attempt made in every verse to resolve the paradox involved between them, rather than to enhance the element of contradiction, as in classical Greek literature. Shiva and Shakti participate in a gentle dialectical way so that a normative cancellation without conflict takes us beyond the contradiction of paradox. Such is the interplay of the functions of the various characters which are enumerated in Verse 32 by the author himself.

INTRODUCTION TO THE SAUNDARYA LAHARI

"The Upsurging Billow of Beauty"
By

SANKARACARYA

English Translation and Commentary
By
NATARAJA GURU

PRELIMINARIES

In the autumn of the year 1968 I was preparing for a long voyage round the world. As a first step towards this adventurous project, I had booked a passage to Singapore by the British steamer S.S. Rajula. This date remains a memorable landmark in my mind because I had by that time finished all the series of major items of a dedicated life-work, projected by me, having bearing on the teaching of my teacher Narayana Guru, to which I had devoted more than four decades already.

I thought I had no more ambition in that same direction when I found myself sitting in front of a bookshelf of the library that was just being started at the Gurukula Island Home, bordering on the sea in the Cannanore District of Kerala, on the west coast of India. Two volumes of the works of a Malayalam poet called Kumaran Asan attracted my attention, almost as if by the promptings of some vague principle of chance. I glanced at the volumes listlessly and without purpose for some time. Before long my attention seemed to linger browsingly over the pages at the end of one of the volumes which happened to be the translation of the "Saundarya Lahari" into Malayalam. It was attributed to Sankaracharya and from the introductory remarks of Kumaran Asan I found that the date of the translation coincided with the time when he had returned from his training in Calcutta to become the first disciple and successor to Narayana Guru himself. At that time they were living together as Guru and most favoured sisya (disciple) in a riverside ashram at a place called Aruvippuram, about fifteen miles south of Trivandrum, the capital of Kerala.

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The initial scrutiny of the contents of the translation, each verse of which was printed side by side with the original Sanskrit of Sankara, intrigued me and stimulated my curiosity to such an extent that I began to become more and more seriously engrossed and involved in its study. In spite of not being a Sanskrit scholar of any standing whatsoever, I could discover slight discrepancies here and there between the intentions of the original author and the understanding of the translator. It seemed to me that he was evidently engaged in an almost impossible task, as a result of which all his efforts seemed to be repeatedly frustrated or compromised, often with meanings miscarried. This was sufficiently evidenced by the fact that even the barest of a sequential, consistent or common-sense meaning did not result, in spite of the tremendous efforts that seemed to have been lavished on the subject matter. Neither the content, context, purpose nor the person kept in mind as the proper student for these verses could even be roughly guessed at. The more I read these verses and tried to make at least some bare meaning out of them, the more enigmatic each verse seemed to become to my eyes. Strangely too, my understanding seemed to progress inversely to the increased effort that I tried wholeheartedly to apply to this strange text. When I also remembered in these circumstances that Kumaran Asan might have undertaken this impossible task at the instance of Narayana Guru himself, which belief was gaining ground with me, my interest in this enigmatic work became all the more heightened.

It seemed to question challengingly my critical understanding of a text from a philosopher like Sankara, whose other writings were already somewhat sufficiently familiar to me. Furthermore, in the short introduction by the author of the Malayalam translation, given to justify his understanding, he referred to a group of religious people in Kerala, the "Kerala Kaulins" as he calls them, for whose benefit, according to him, the great philosopher Sankara undertook this apparently onerous task.

My self-respect, not to say pride, in considering myself a person sufficiently capable of understanding a philosophical text in the ordinary course, became stung, as it were, to the quick. And this is how I became personally involved in the work which now remains, even after three and a half years, a major challenge to my common sense or to that degree of average intelligence with which a man of my generation could be expected normally to credit himself.

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Even at the moment of writing this (8th January 1972) the enigmatic nature of this work of great absorbing interest still stares me in the face. And it is with certain apologies to many worthy scholars anterior to me and with some hesitations that I enter now on this task of presenting to the modern world the one hundred verses of the "Saundarya Lahari".

THE ORIGINAL TEXT AND ITS COMMENTATORS

The first forty-one verses have to be distinguished, evidently according to the author himself, as the "Ananda Lahari", within the totality meant to be entitled more generally the "Saundarya Lahari". In Sanskrit, lahari means "intoxication" or "overwhelming subjective or objective experience of an item of intelligence or of beauty upsurging in the mind of man" The word saundarya refers to aesthetic value appreciation. Such an appreciation of beauty must necessarily belong to the context of the Absolute, if the name of Sankara, the great Advaitic commentator, is to be associated at all with this work, however indirectly it may be, on which point we shall presently have more to say.

Absolute value appreciation, which could be ananda (delight) subjectively, is saundarya (beauty), when understood objectively. These are two possible perspectives of the same absolute value factor. Through the centuries this work has puzzled pundits such as Lakshmidhara, Kaivalyasrama and Kameswara Soori of India; and professors such as Sir John Woodroffe and Norman Brown in the West, and continues to do so to the present.

It cannot be said, however, that interest in it has flagged even for a moment, since it saw the light of day. On the contrary, it has spread far and wide, as evidenced by the various editions of different dates and regions, some of them containing elaborate Persian, Mogul and Rajput paintings, and the increasing number of modern editions, mainly nurtured and nourished by a great revival of interest in that strange form of Indian spirituality known as Tantra.

There is every indication at present that such an interest is still on the increase. Any light, however feeble, that I might be able to throw on such a subject will not, therefore, be out of place.

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MY INVOLVEMENT AND CONFRONTATIONS

Between the date of my first involvement in this interesting text and the present date, I have travelled as much by inner exploration as perhaps to the extent that my wanderings were widely distributed. The intensity of my involvement with this text became more and more absorbing to me.

My first plan was to go around the world by ship. The first lap of my journey was accomplished accordingly, and I found myself travelling in Southeast Asia, giving lectures on the "Saundarya Lahari" in out of the way places, both in Singapore and various parts of Malaysia. During this period, when I found myself moving from place to place, I did not relax even one day from the uniform and sustained pressure which I applied to the study of the text. Each morning exactly between half-past five and seven o'clock I kept up the habit of sitting around with interested listeners, with cups of black coffee and biscuits, trying to delve deeper into the meanings of each verse. I have done so for three and a half years and in the meantime I had to change the course of my world tour. Instead of crossing the Indian Ocean and trying to go towards Honolulu, where a friend was supposed to be awaiting me, I was suddenly attracted by an advertised offer of Air India which made it possible for me to come back to India once again and adopt a revised itinerary by which I could include Moscow, Gent, Luxembourg, Iceland, New York, Chicago, San Francisco, Honolulu, Fiji and Sydney, and be back in India through Malaysia once again, thus spending nearly a year in all my wanderings.

Wherever I had a fairly long stopover my coffee classes continued and, what was even more strange, I could notice that my lessons were evidently of greater attraction to others than to myself. Crowds gathered round me even at this unearthly hour and listened to me with remarkable avidity of interest. I could not solve many of the problems that seemed to crop up one after another as the studies continued. I began to differ from almost every book that I came across. The whole subject bristled with endless controversial questions and there were moments of despair in which I felt that I was hopelessly involved in some vain task.

Some of the questions that came to the surface could be initially and summarily stated as follows:

1. How could Sankara, who is known to be an Advaita philosopher, be credited with the authorship of this text which is evidently of the form belonging to the context of Tantra Shastra?

2. Why should he have written these verses after his great commentaries, which are by themselves sufficiently monumental to support his fame as a Vedantic philosopher?

3. If Sankara gave primacy to wisdom, as is well known, how is it that he seems to have come down to the vulgar or popular level of a worshipper of the beauty of a goddess?

4. The Sri Chakra, which figures in the text very prominently, seems to be the hallmark by which Tantra texts are recognisable. What has this geometrical design to do with Advaita Vedanta, which believes in the purest form of reason only?

5. What is the place of eroticism in the context of the austere Sannyasa (renunciation) which Sankara stood for so uncompromisingly?

6. Was Sankara interested in Yoga Shastra (the science of yoga) also?

7. If not, why does he take the trouble of describing the various details of Chakras (synergic centres) as seen in the verses of this text?

8. If non-duality is the teaching of Sankara, how is it that he postulates Shiva and Shakti as two distinct factors, principles or entities?

9. Is Sankara a religious man at all?

10. How far are the verses compatible with the doctrines developed in his other works?

11. Did his followers give any importance to this work so as to adopt its teaching in any way in their lives as inmates of various ashrams in which they practised their spiritual disciplines?

12. Why does he employ a Puranic and mythological language here?

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CONVENTIONAL TRADITIONAL APPROACH

Because of these and various other miscellaneous difficulties even highly painstaking and correctly critical scholars like Professor W. Norman Brown of Harvard University have doubted even the authorship of these verses. He has gone into the reasons for doing so in very great detail in Volume 43 of the Harvard Oriental Series, and takes care to indicate on the title page of the work, in all academic cautiousness, that the "Saundarya Lahari" is only "traditionally ascribed to Sankaracarya". If we turn to the other great authority on Tantra literature, Sir John Woodroffe, these points are not clarified any better. Even a strict word-by-word translation of this work is not so far available, not to speak of a satisfactory versification. Every translation or commentary that I have examined so far, whether in Malayalam, English or in the original Sanskrit, has not failed to reveal here or there some appalling state of ignorance in respect of the main intent and purpose of these verses. Except for borrowing rather light-heartedly the Sri Chakra, which is described in minute geometrical detail in Verse 11 of this work, the whole work seems to be otherwise treated with scant and stepmotherly respect, both by tantrically minded pundits and professors alike. When I allude to pundits and professors at one and the same time, I am not unconscious of the fact that there are present in Bengal and in South India, especially in Kerala, many who claim to be authorities on Tantra generally, not excluding the "Saundarya Lahari" in particular. I have had occasion to consult quite a few of these authorities and I can assert with a certain pleasure that they have tried their best to clarify their respective positions in a conventional and traditional manner proper to punditry and pedantry in India. I must at least mention four names : Pundit S.Subrahmanya Sastri, T.R.Srinivasa Ayyengar of the Theosophical Society, Kandiyoor Mahadeva Sastri, and E.P. Subrahmanya Sastri, besides the three more ancient scholars already mentioned.

The greater part of Sir John Woodroffe's prolific volumes themselves is based directly or indirectly on what some pundits gave him to understand. It would not be wrong to say that they are directly based on hearsay, and therefore lack that direct appeal or apodictic certitude necessary to make us treat them with the seriousness which the subject deserves.

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The interest of the present writer is not the same as that of a pundit or professor. Even the question of Sankara's authorship of the work would take at least as much trouble to prove as to disprove. I therefore do not wish to enter into any polemical dispute with anybody, and would content myself with taking a position by which I could say that all the great scholars who have devoted their energies to clarifying this text, though they are right only as far as they go, do deserve our gratitude.

My own personal interest in this subject is based on two considerations only. Firstly, it is a unique work in which, for the first time, Sankara is seen to adopt a non-verbal protolinguistic approach to philosophy, as when Marshall McLuhan would say, "the medium is the message." Secondly, believe that most of the controversies referred to above could be seen to arise from the fact that the text is usually looked upon as if it were a statically given doctrinal statement, instead of being considered as the dialectical revaluation of some anterior position prevailing at the time the author wrote it. The history of religion, as Professor Mircea Eliade of Princeton University has succeeded in proving in his monumental work on the subject, "Patterns of Comparative Religion", is a series of dialectical revaluations of anterior positions in terms of posterior doctrines. Viewed in the light of such a dialectical revaluation, it is not difficult, at least for me to see that here Sankara adopts a non-verbal or protolinguistic medium instead of a metalinguistic one, to restate the message of Advaita Vedanta, for which he has always stood, here as well as in his great commentaries.

When these two features are fully understood by the modern reader, it will be seen that most of the controversial problems that have puzzled both pundits and professors melt away altogether. The authorship of Sankara could then be easily proved by a certain type of logic acceptable to Buddhism and Vedanta alike, which is called "the argument by impossibility of being otherwise", known as anupalabdhi. This kind of logic belongs to the order of axiomatic thinking, and therefore is still understood even by phenomenological philosophers like Edmund Husserl, only with a certain degree of mistrust. No wonder, therefore, that the world of modern thought is involved in a characteristic puzzlement belonging to the same general intellectual and cultural malaise, the growing evidence of which is beginning to be recognisable wherever we turn, more especially when modern youth express dissatisfaction because of a general gap that they feel existing between themselves and their elders.

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This brings us to the next most important consideration that has made me all the more interested in this strange and almost impossible text that I have been trying to understand with all earnestness. There is an unconventional new generation of young people with generally free ideas about sex, variously influenced by Eastern religions. They believe in miracles and the supernatural powers. Inner space is more important to them than outer space. Mind-expanding drugs are every day luring them deeper into themselves. Yoga and discipleship to a guru are taken for granted by them. Besides Yoga, they are also interested in the secrets of what is called Tantra.

Most of them are genuine seekers for a new way of life, although some of them are seen to be freaks or misfits. Whatever explanation of such a widespread social disadoption might be, it is clear that the movement requires sympathetic understanding and guidance. What they call "institutional life" is their common enemy, and clashing with it produces various forms of bad blood, repression or discontent which is at present becoming a problem to all concerned, most especially to themselves.

A revision and rearrangement of basic values in life seems to be what they are asking for. Discoveries in science have disrupted conventional standards in ethics, aesthetics, economics and even in education. Human ecology itself has to be reconsidered and revised.

The Saundarya Lahari, as I soon discovered, lent itself readily to the basic ground on which human values could be rediscovered, rearranged, revalued and restated more normally and normatively. It is this discovery that dawned on me more clearly each day as I taught in my global travels, that made this work all the more dear to me.

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Side by side with this it also dawned on me with equal force that this mainly non-verbally conceived text was just the one that suited the most modern means of communication. Video and computerisation have been so fast and spectacular in their development that now it is possible to say that this mass medium has inaugurated what is beginning to be known as a Paleocybernetic Age, which can be expected to revolutionise the whole of individual and collective life of humanity within a few years. There is little that could not be accomplished through new technology to bypass the confusion of tongues non-verbally.

We can examine the workings of our own mind, not to say self, through the intermediary of this wonderful new medium where line, light, colourful vision and audition could help in the process of the marriage of sheer entertainment with the highest form of so-called spiritual education. The availability of such a medium could be said to be just around the corner. The only snag in this matter is that we need a new kind of literature that could be most advantageously fed into the machine when it becomes available. The answer to this kind of demand is already found in the "Saundarya Lahari".

This is the second discovery that came to me by chance. The possible appeal of the "Saundarya Lahari", more especially to the modern generation, became immediately evident to me. My ambition, therefore, was not primarily to write a new and more learned book on this work, but rather to avail myself of the wonderful possibilities of modern video technology to put across to the new generation the valuable contents of this rare book, where the message and the medium already co-exist without any contradiction between them.

The highest purpose of life, by which man is made to live more than merely by bread alone, which it was the privilege hitherto of religious bodies to cater to the public by way of spiritual nourishment, thus comes into the hands of every true educator.

What is more, "education" and "entertainment" become interchangeable terms. The success of the "Saundarya Lahari" could be expected to open the way to many other possibilities of the same kind. What is called Self- Realisation and the truth of the dictum that the proper study of mankind is man himself, can be made possible, as it were, by a strange irony of fate through startling advances in the world of mechanistic technology itself. Evil shall thus be cured in and through itself by its own cause.

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What is called "salvation" results from the cancellation of the self by the non-self. Beauty is a visible value in which line, light and colour can cooperate to reveal our true nature to ourselves. When thus revealed, that final cancellation of counterparts can take place which is capable of removing the last impediment to what we might soberly call "unitive understanding". This is none other than emancipation, or final Freedom with a capital F. This is the promise that the wisdom of the Upanishads has always held out as the highest hope of humanity. There is both inner beauty as well as beauty "out there" as it were. The former is that of the yogi and the latter of the speculative philosopher. Both are capable of effecting cancellation of counterparts between the Self and the Non-Self resulting in that Samadhi or Satori which marks the term and goal of intelligent humanity.

MAIN QUESTIONS

Having stated now the nature of my main interest , let me take one by one the questions that I have raised above and answer them as shortly as I can, without getting lost in too many unnecessary by-paths.

1. How could Sankara, who is known to be an Advaita philosopher, be credited with the authorship of this text which is evidently of the form belonging to the context of Tantra Shastra?

Sankara's great commentaries are primarily metalinguistic while this work is protolinguistic. Tantra is only a structural, protolinguistic, non-verbal approach to Indian spirituality at its best, when taken as a whole. We have to think of Mantra, Yantra and Tantra at once as presupposing one another, if we are to enter into a sympathetic and intuitive understanding of the dynamism that Tantra essentially represents. This dynamism is none other than mutual participation of the two other aspects which go with it, which are Yantra on the one side and Mantra on the other. Thus, Tantra is the "know-how" or savoir - faire by which Yantra and Mantra could interact mutually and produce what we call the fully real experience of unitive understanding, by a double correction. Yantra is associated with a wheel or machine, while Mantra evidently stands for uttered syllables or sounds. Each Mantra involves a devata, which term has to be distinguished from just a deva, or god.

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All the gods of the Hindu pantheon can be given their correct positions as monomarks in the context of the Yantra, which is essentially a geometrical figure called the Sri Chakra. Letters of the Sanskrit alphabet could be used in the place of monomarks to indicate structural aspects of the Absolute within the context of erotic mysticism, where beauty is the most prominent prevailing value.

In the erotic context of Tantra there are four functional monomarks commonly used which are the goad and noose, referring to the spatial dynamism applicable to an elephant, together with the sugar-cane bow and five flower-tipped arrows which indicate the limits of the horizontal world of erotic pleasure or enjoyment. Many of the Tantra texts quoted or alluded to in the writings of Sir John Woodroffe make profuse use of these monomarks and protolinguistic devices to such a point of intricacy that the modern reader could easily get lost in their ramifications and further complicated implications. For a clear statement we have to go to the "Mahanirvana Tantra", which perhaps owes its inspiration to Buddhistic as well as proto-Aryan Tantric sources. One sees very clearly from this particular Tantra how the colour of the dark monsoon cloud which hangs over the whole west coast of India, from Ujjain to Kanyakumari, has a place within the context of Tantrism. Moreover, the best palm-leaf manuscripts preserved to this day bearing on Tantra, are found in the collections of some Maharajas of this area. There is also a temple situated on the West Coast, half way between Gujarat and the Cape, which could be considered as the most ancient of the epicentres from which this kind of influence could be imagined to have spread far and wide, through the Mahayana Buddhism of Central and North India, reaching Tibet and finally nourishing the roots of the Shakti cult of present-day Bengal.

Tantra is a discipline which combines the secrets of Yoga side by side with other esoteric teachings, the greater part of which is a contribution by the lower strata of society, to whom the five Tattvas proper to its practice - matsya (fish), mamsa (meat), madya (liquor), maithuna (copulation) and mudra (gesture) - are to be considered both natural and normal. When this lower form of Tantra was subjected to revaluation and restatement in the light of Veda and Vedanta, it gave rise to further subdivisions and graded stratifications, such as the Purva Kaula, Uttara Kaula, Samayin and fully Vedantic versions of Tantrism. Thus Tantra is a complex growth in the spiritual soil of India.

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Sankara, as a great dialectical revaluator of the Hindu spirituality of his time, could easily be imagined to have attempted a final revaluation of the same body of spiritual wisdom which he proposed to clothe in a special kind of non- verbose language. As a result, there are two texts from his pen, the twin complementary works named "Saundarya Lahari" and "Shivananda Lahari", respectively. The former presupposes a negative ascending dialectical perspective, while the latter presupposes the same Absolute Value when viewed from a more positive position in terms of a descending dialectic. The final content of both remains the same, although the starting postulates might seem diametrically opposed to each other.

Beauty, especially when it is colourful and full of significant lights and lines, lends itself to be considered the most tangible content of the otherwise empty or merely mathematical notion called the Absolute. Truth and value thus are made to fulfil the same function: to give full tangible content to the Absolute. In short, metalinguistically stated Advaita coincides here with what is protolinguistically understood.

2. Why should he have written these verses after his great commentaries, which are by themselves sufficiently monumental to support his fame as a Vedantic philosopher?

As Sankara himself states in Verse 59 of the "Vivekacudamani", verbosity is a bane which could even cause mental derangement.

3. If Sankara gave primacy to wisdom, as is well known, how is it that he seems to have come down to the vulgar or popular level of a worshipper of the beauty of a goddess?

The simple answer is that no visible goddess is directly envisaged in any of the verses in the present series. Certain picturesque situations are, of course, presented here and there in such a way that when the numerator and the denominator aspects of the same are cancelled out we are left with an overwhelming sense of sheer absolute Beauty, independently of any anthropomorphically conceived goddess. The first and the last verses of the series, when read together, absolve Sankara completely of any possible charge of being a theist, deist or even a ritualist in the ordinary religious sense.

4. The Sri Chakra, which figures in the text very prominently, seems to be the hallmark by which Tantra texts are recognisable. What has this geometrical design to do with Advaita Vedanta, which believes in the purest form of reason only?

The Sri Chakra is a structurally conceived linguistic device. Just as a graph can verify an algebraic formula, there is no contradiction between the Advaita as Sankara has stated metalinguistically in his Bhasyas (commentaries) and that which the same Advaita represents in the form of a schema here.

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5. What is the place of eroticism in the context of the austere sannyasa (renunciation) which Sankara stood for so uncompromisingly?

The proper theme of all poetry or even art could be said to be love. No lover, no art. One cannot think of beauty without the form of woman coming into it. Thus the relevancy of erotic mysticism stands self-explained. The best proof in this matter is the high place that Kalidasa's poetry occupies to the present day.

6. Was Sankara interested in Yoga Sastra (the science of yoga) also?

7. If not, why does he take the trouble of describing the various details of Chakras (synergic centres) as seen in the verses of this text?

Yoga properly pertains to a dualistic school called Samkhya. When revised in the light of Advaita Vedanta, the abstractions and generalisations of the various stable syndromes and synergisms proper to the dynamism of Yoga discipline refuse to resemble other texts on Yoga such as "Kheranda Samhita", "Hathayoga Pradipika" or even the "Astanga Yoga" of Pantanjali. Thus it is that Sankara's treatment of Yoga seems different from other Yoga disciplines. He merely restates it in a more respectable form acceptable to an Advaita Vedantin. The "Vyasa Bhasya" and "Bhoja Thika" applied to Patanjali Yoga, are supposed to effect the same corrections and revaluations. Careful scrutiny of the Shakta Upanishads and the Yoga Upanishads will clarify any further doubt that might linger in the minds of keen and critical students in respect of the purport of these verses.

8. If non-duality is the teaching of Sankara, how is it that he postulates Shiva and Shakti as two distinct factors, principles or entities?

In the Samkhya philosophy there are the concepts of prakrti and purusa, the former being not imbued with intelligence, while the latter is the fully intelligent principle. Thus we find a heterogeneity between the two categories, which it is the purpose of the revised epistemology and methodology of Advaita to abolish effectively. Shiva and Shakti, as meant to be united in the present work, are to be understood as belonging together to the same neutral epistemological grade of the non-dual Absolute. They must lose their distinctness and, when generalised and abstracted to the culminating point, they could be treated as two perimeters or parameters to be cancelled out by their mutual intersection or participation. One has a vertical reference and the other a horizontal reference, while both exist at the core of the Absolute. When abstraction and generalisation are thus pushed together to their utmost limit, the paradox is transcended or dissolved into the unity of one and the same Absolute Value which is here referred to as Beauty or Bliss. Thus duality, accepted only for methodological purposes, is to be abolished at each step by unitive understanding.

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9. Is Sankara a religious man at all?

To this question, an unequivocal answer is to be found in the last verses of the series It is not difficult to see that Sankara's Advaita transcends all ideas of holiness or ritualistic merits altogether. He seems clearly to wash his hands of any such derogatory blemish.

The very beginning of the "Vivekucadamani" of Sankara contains other similar unmistakable indications which tend to show that sacred and holy religious values are repugnant and altogether outside the scope of the uncompromising spirit of Advaita that he has always represented.

10. How far are the verses compatible with the doctrines developed in his other works?

Sankara's other works, such as his great bhasyas (commentaries), are conceived on the basis of demolishing polemically a series of purvapaksins (sceptics) taken in graded and methodical order, in favour of a posteriorly finalized position called siddhanta. A careful scrutiny of each of the verses here will reveal that the same finalized doctrines are enshrined and clearly presented in almost every one of them, though clothed in a realistically non-verbal and visualizable form based on the value of beauty that could be experienced by anyone, whether they are a learned philosopher or not. Just to give one example, we could say that the second verse corresponds to the second sutra of the Brahmasutras, where creation, preservation and resolution form the subject matter, as phenomenal aspects born out of the same Absolute. Examples could be multiplied indefinitely.

11. Did his followers give any importance to this work so as to adopt its teaching in any way in their lives as inmates of various ashrams in which they practised their spiritual disciplines?

It is well known that almost all the existing ashrams or maths claiming allegiance to the teaching of Sankaracarya, such as that of Sringeri or Conjivaram, still speak in terms of worshipping a Wisdom Goddess, such as found in the Sarada Pith. The tradition started by Sankara is tacitly or overtly adhered to by his followers, although the critical understanding in respect of such worship still remains questionable with most of them.

12. Why does he employ a Puranic (legendary) and mythological language here? Letters of the Greek alphabet are advantageously used in scientific language. The large quantity of Puranic literature found in Hinduism affords a veritable never-expended mine from which an intelligent philosopher like Sankara could derive monomarks and divinities which could serve the same purpose as the Greek letters in the language of mathematics.

Thus, he merely uses them as the available linguistic elements derived from mythology instead of from mathematics as modern scientists would do.

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From the Upanishads through Kalidasa's poems, such as the "Shyamala Dandakam" and his various larger poems such as the "Kumarasambhava", there is to be discerned a definite lingua mystica using its own clichés and ideograms through the centuries down to our own time. After Kalidasa, Sankara used it most effectively, and it was given to Narayana Guru to be the continuator of the same tradition in modern times.

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GENERALITIES

It is a hard task to give a real or tangible content to the notion of the Absolute. All disciplines, whether cosmological, theological or psychological, imply a notion of the Absolute without which, at least as a reference, all philosophy or science tends to become incoherent, purposeless and inconsequential. Ethical, aesthetic or even economic values also require a normative regulating principle, which can be no other than the Absolute, presupposed tacitly or overtly for ordering and regulating these disciplines. Over-specialisation of science leads to compartmentalisation of branches of knowledge, each tending thus to be a domain proper only to an expert or specialist. The integration of all knowledge is beginning to be recognized as important for the progress of human thought at the present moment.


There is a hoary tradition in India which refers to a Science of the Absolute, which is called
Brahmavidya. It belongs to the context of Vedanta, which has attracted the attention of modern scientists in the West, such as Erwin Schrödinger and others. There is at present a large body of thinkers which believes that a rapprochement between physical science and metaphysics - which is independent of the senses - is possible, and that a Unified Science can thus be ushered into existence.

Attempts have been made along these lines, especially in Vienna, Paris, Chicago and Princeton. What is called the philosophy of science and the science of philosophy could be put together into the science of all sciences, in which many leading thinkers are interested. It is the central normative notion of the Absolute wherein lies the basis of any such possible integration. To give precise content to the Absolute is therefore an important problem engaging the attention of all thinking persons. The new physics of the West is tending to become more and more mathematical and theoretical.

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What is equally interesting is that Eastern disciplines, such as Zen Buddhism, Yoga and Vedanta hold at present a new interest for the western scientist.

The present work is meant to insert itself in between these two trends in modern thought. The large number of people now breaking away from conventional standards and patterns of behaviour, both in the East as well as in the West, not to speak of the polarity between northern and southern temperaments, are now trying to discover themselves anew. Humanity has to find its own proper bearings and gather up loose ends from time to time as "civilisation" takes forward steps. We are now caught in the throes of just such an agonising process. New horizons and more extensive frontiers have to be included within a vision of the world of tomorrow. Myths have to be revised and new idioms discovered, so that fact and fable can tally to verify each other and life can be more intelligent, consequential and consistent.

An integrated or unified science must fulfil the functions hitherto seen as proper only to religion or to metaphysical speculation. Educated people are called upon to take a position more intelligent than hitherto vis-à-vis the great quantity of discoveries being made in both inner and outer space.

This notion of inner space brings us to just that new factor which has recently entered the creative imagination of the present generation. Thermodynamics, electromagnetics, cybernetics semantics and logistics, aided by newer and newer mathematics, are bringing into view vistas unfamiliar hitherto, in which the student feels more at home than the professional teacher whose main interest is often merely to keep his job or shape his career.

The best of the students and the most original of the young professors feel that there is a widening gap between their own ambitions or legitimate urges and the prevailing standards, and have reason to complain that they are often obstructed in the name of out-dated precedents or rules. Co-education has abolished much of the distance between the sexes. Girls need no chaperones, and the university undergraduate does not have to live up to any Victorian form of respectability or even to the chivalry of days gone by.

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Adam prefers to keep the forbidden fruit in his hand, and naturally begins to treat the earth as a planet over which he must pass freely. Linguistic or racial frontiers as well as dinner jackets and wine glasses are being left behind in favour of more individualistic patterns of dress or group conduct. Parisian fashions do not impress youth any more, and mind-expanding drugs are beginning to replace those other poisons like champagne that induce merely a feeling of lazy comfort. Public standards are floundering because of this accentuation of inner space, which is holding out new interests to allure the imagination of adolescents.

INNER SPACE AND STRUCTURALISM

LSD and allied drugs, which have what they call a mind-expanding effect, have opened up a new world that could be called pagan as opposed to prophetic. Sensuousness is no sin to Bacchus, while to Jeremiah, prostitutes and idolatry and all the existential values belonging to animism and hylozoism are highly repugnant.


The golden calf had to be replaced by the table of commandments that Moses and Aaron held up before their chosen followers. The waters of the Ganges are sacred to the Shiva-worshippers of India, and this is why they are spat upon as idolaters and infidels, fit to be trampled by the elephants of the emperor Aurangzeb.


As between the logos of the Platonic world of the intelligibles and the nous of the pre-Socratic Eleatics, two rival philosophies emerge in modern times, giving superiority to existence over essence or vice versa.


Psychedelics reveal a new vision of the negative aspect of consciousness where what is called the subconscious and all its contents become magnified and revealed to inner experience.


There are thus at present two rival minds to deal with: one that is interested primarily in percepts, and the other in concepts. Both of these have to be accommodated together in an integrated picture of absolute consciousness. A lopsided vision can spell nuisible consequences.


It is this discovery of inner space that is upsetting and disrupting the scheme of values of the individualistic dropouts of the present day. Values do not all hang together with reference to the same point anymore, and the double or multiple standards thus emerging must necessarily confuse people in the domain of ethics, aesthetics and economics, not to mention those of education and religion or spirituality.


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Values, both positive and negative, have to be fitted into a fourfold structure, the limbs of which could be summarily indicated in advance as representing the conceptual, the perceptual, the actual and the virtual. This fourfold structure has been known to poets in the West since the time of Milton, and in India since the time of Kalidasa. The lingua mystica of every part of the world seems to have had this mathematical secret hiding within its semantic or semiotic structuralism - sometimes referred to as "semantic polyvalence".


The Upanishads contain many passages that reveal unequivocally the fourfold structure mentioned so directly in the Mandukya Upanishad, which states ayam atma catuspad, (this Self is four-limbed). The schematismus of Kant and structuralism as understood by post-Einsteinian scientists like Eddington, have brought this notion once again to the forefront, and it is offered as a kind of challenge for modern man to accept or reject. Bergson, while remaining essentially an instrumentalist, is also most certainly a structuralist, as is evident to anyone making a careful scrutiny of the following paragraphs:


"But it is a far cry from such examples of equilibrium, arrived at mechanically and invariably unstable, like that of the scales held by the justice of yore, to a justice such as ours, the justice of the rights of man, which no longer evokes ideas of relativity and proportion, but, on the contrary, of the incommensurable and the absolute."


(H. Bergson, "The Two Sources of Morality and Religion", Doubleday,1954, P74)


"Across time and space which we have always known to be separate, and for that very reason, structureless, we shall see, as through a transparency, an articulated space-time structure. The mathematical notation of these articulations, carried out upon the virtual, and brought to its highest level of generality, will give us an unexpected grip on the real. We shall have a powerful means of investigation at hand; a principle of research, which, we can predict, will no henceforth be renounced by the mind of man, even if experiment should impose a new form upon the theory of relativity."


(H.Bergson, "Duration and Simultaneity", Bobbs-Merrill & Co.,1965, P150)


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SANKARA'S "SAUNDARYA LAHARI"

Sankara's "Saundarya Lahari", when examined verse by verse, reveals many enigmas which come to light only when a structural analysis is applied to each of them. Otherwise it remains a closed book to punditry which has beaten its wings in vain trying to make the great poet-philosopher's words have even a mere semblance of coherent meaning.


The "Saundarya Lahari" (The Upsurging Billow of Beauty), together with Sankara's other century of verse called "Shivananda Lahari", treats, we could say, of the same absolute value from perspectives tilted 180 degrees from each other. The mythological elements that enter into the fabric of this composition and its large array of Hindu gods and goddesses, are pressed into service by Sankara to give a precise philosophical context to the supreme value called Absolute Beauty, the subject-matter of these verses. This same subject can be looked at in the more positive or modern light of a structural and mathematical language where geometric or algebraic signs and symbols can verify a formula. This is the basis of the protolinguistic approach that we have adopted in conceiving this work.


Line, light or colour, also biological, crystalline or radiated structures, can all be made to speak a non-verbal language with at least as much precision as in the case of essentially verbose commentaries, such as those of Sankara himself. How successfully this series of verses can be treated as a sequence of visions is a matter that the success of the present work alone must prove hereafter.


Meanwhile, it is not wrong to state that modern technical discoveries, such as the stroboscope, laser holograms and computer graphics , animation and devices such as collage, montage, mixing , merging and filtering of colours, could together open up a new age for visual education as well as entertainment through the most popular medium of modern times: the film.


Large and verbose treatments of such subjects are likely to go into cold storage in the future, because the output of printed matter is too much for the busy person of the present to cope with. This work is meant, as we have just indicated, to be educational as well as entertaining. Its appeal is not therefore primarily to box-office patrons who might wish to pass an easy or comfortable evening of relaxation after a hard day's work; but to a more elite audience which wishes to learn while looking for visual enjoyment. There are thus many features that are not conventional in the film world which have to be taken into account even now by the reader, anticipating its fuller film version.


The first 41 verses of the "Saundarya Lahari" are distinguishable by their content as pertaining to the world of inner Yoga. Mandalas, Chakras, Yantras, Mantras and Tantras, representing stable psychic states or experiences of the Yogi, figure here to the exclusion of beauty as seen objectively outside. Global perspectives of objective beauty are presented in the latter section of the "Saundarya Lahari", this name being more directly applicable to Verses 42 - 100 inclusive.


As against this second part of the work, we have the first 41 verses which are distinguishable by the name "Ananda Lahari", Ananda (bliss) being a factor experienced within, rather than from any outer vision. "Saundarya Lahari" as the title of the total work of one hundred verses is justified in spite of this inner division, because it is still the absolute value of Beauty, upsurging or overwhelming in its wholesale appeal, which is the subjective or objective value-content of this entire work of Sankara's. This is a value which humankind needs to be able to give tangible content to the otherwise empty notion of the Absolute.


Sankara is well known in the context of Advaita Vedanta for his great bhasyas (commentaries) on the three canonical texts of Vedanta: the Upanishads, the Brahma Sutras and the Bhagavad Gita. Although some scholars still doubt the authorship of the present sequence of verses and tend to attribute it to others than Sankara, anyone familiar with the doctrinal delicacies and particularities of the Advaita that Sankara has always stood for, cannot for one moment doubt the hallmark that has always unequivocally distinguished his philosophy .


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The internal evidence available from almost every verse in this text, as well as in the "Shivananda Lahari", can, in our opinion at least, leave no doubt about Sankara's authorship of these two exceedingly interesting and intelligent works. Moreover, Sankara is unmistakably the correct continuator of the Vedic or Upanishadic tradition that has come down to us through the works of Kalidasa to the present day.


There is an unmistakable family resemblance here which, when viewed in its proper vertical hierarchical perspective, exists between ideograms, imagery and other peculiarities of the mystical language. One can recognise this masterpiece as representing the best of the heritage of the ancient wisdom of India preserved through the ages, and of which Sankara is one of the more modern continuators.


SANKARA AS A DIALECTICAL REVALUATOR
Sankara is a great dialectical revaluator of all aspects of ancient Indian wisdom. Nothing of Sanskritic cultural importance has been lost sight of by him, including factors of semantic, logistic or merely ritualistic (Tantric) importance. Sankara's authorship of these hundred verses need not be doubted if only for the final reason that we cannot think of any other poet-philosopher or critic attaining to the high quality of this work and its sister-work, the "Shivananda Lahari".


The history of religion is nothing other than the history of dialectical revaluations of prior positions in terms of posterior doctrines. These two positions could be treated as complementary to each other. In the Biblical context, this same transition from the old to the new, as from the Mosaic Law to the Law of Jesus, is invariably marked with the words: "You have heard it said, but verily, verily I say unto you". It is not unreasonable to think that Sankara here takes up what until then was known as esoterics such as Tantra, Yantra and Mantra, especially in the Kaula and Samaya traditions, both of Bengal and of South India, and subjects them to his own critical and dialectical revaluation.


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Sankara restates those esoteric doctrines in a fully exoteric form, in keeping, above all, with his own avowed position as an Advaita Vedantin. This view must suffice to show that all those who hitherto treated the "Saundarya Lahari" as some kind of text belonging to the Shaktya mother-worship cult, would be guilty of a great inconsistency which they could not themselves explain, in thinking that an avowed Advaita Vedantin could ever write a text that did not support his own philosophy. It is strange that even Sir John Woodroffe, who treats of the "Saundarya Lahari", tends to belong to this category. Professor Norman Brown of Harvard has the same misgivings as revealed in the very subtitle of his work where the authorship is dubiously stated as "attributed to Sankara".


Modern man is interested both in post-Einsteinian physics, as well as in the discipline of Yoga. Zen Buddhism opens up a world in which both meditation and contemplative experience from within the self have an important place. The Upanishads and Vedanta too, are based on inner as well as outer experiences proper to the contemplative. When we write of inner experiences, we are in reality referring to the mystical experiences of the yogi within himself.


THE NATURE OF THE TEXT
The Saundarya Lahari consists of a sequence of one hundred verses of Sanskrit poetry written in a heavy and dignified metrical form. The syntax and inflections of Sanskrit are especially suited to the use of highly figurative language, and there are often layers of more and more profound suggestions as one meaning gives place to others implied below or above it, in ascending or descending semiotic series.


We are here in the domain where meanings have their own meanings hidden behind each other, and the mind sinks backward or progresses forward, upward or downward, within the world of poetic imagination or expression. A sort of meditation and free fancy are presupposed in compositions of this kind, heavy-laden with suggestibility or auto-suggestibility. There is always a subjectivity, a selectivity and a structuralism implied.


The conventional film world treats of a series of horizontal events that the camera can register in a fluid or living form. Every day new techniques are being developed, bringing into play more of what is called "inner space".


The present work is an attempt to follow up these new trends so that the film projected on the basis of this work could be the means for modern knowledge of a new and unified variety to be put across from the side of the savant to the so-called man on the street. While relating outer space with inner space, we also necessarily bring together East and West, besides unifying science and metaphysics.


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FURTHER IMPLICATIONS OF STRUCTURAL LANGUAGE
With reference to this work, it is necessary to clarify the implications of what we call structural analysis.


Poetry has the primary function of being pleasing or beautiful. Literary critics in the West tend to condemn metaphysical or moralistic poetry as inferior to pure poetry where enjoyability is the only desirable quality. In the world of Sanskrit literature, however, mysticism and the wisdom that goes with it have never been divorced from the function of poetic art. Aesthetics, ethics and even economics can legitimately blend together into a pleasing confection that can console or satisfy the love of bliss or joy that good poetry can give, without the compartmentalisation of such branches into separate disciplines of literature. Moralist maxims such as found in Aesop's Fables or in Alexander Pope's writings have been condemned by critics in the West as being didactic in character and thus detracting from the pure function of poetry as such. We do not look for morals or precepts any more; much less do we expect, according to western norms of literary criticism, to learn metaphysical truths from poems. We feel that poetry must necessarily suffer because didactic tendencies can never be reconciled with the proper function of poetry, which is mainly lyrical or just pleasing. Metaphysical poetry in the West tends to be artificial or forced. The Upanishadic tradition has, however, quite a different history. It has always had the serious purpose of revealing the Truth through its analogies and figures of speech. The one Absolute Value that wise people have always sought has been the single purpose of the innocent, transparent and detached way of high thinking exhibited through the simple lives of the Upanishadic rishis (sages).


The degree of certitude that they possessed about this value content of the Absolute reached a very high point in their pure contemplative literature. They had no private axes to grind. Thus, the wisdom that refers to all significant life interests taken as a whole entered into the varied texture of these mystical and mathematically precise writings. Poetry and science were treated unitively here, as perhaps nowhere else in the world's literature, with a few exceptions perhaps as attempted in Dante's "Divine Comedy", Milton's "Paradise Lost", or Goethe's "Faust". The Upanishadic tradition has been compared to the Himalayas as the high source of the three great rivers of India; the Indus, the Ganges and the Brahmaputra.


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Like the Nile for the Egyptians, the snowy peak of Gaurisankara and the waters of the Ganges have provided idioms, ideograms analogies and figures of speech that have perennially nourished Sanskrit literature. Without the Himalayas and the figurative language in which the family of Shiva is represented, living on Mount Kailasa, Kalidasa's poetry would be reduced to some kind of insipid babble. Shiva is the positive principle of which the Himalayas are the negative counterpart. Parvati is sitting on his lap and his twin children represent between them the striking ambivalence of personal types. The white bull, Nandi, the good and faithful servant and vehicle to the principle which Shiva represents, reclines nearby. This family can be seen by any imaginative or intuitive person to be a replica of the grand scene of the Himalayas as revised and raised to the dignity of divinity. When an absolutist touch is added to this implied quaternion structure of a Shiva family, with the bull representing the foothills of the central mass and the peak structurally recognisable as dominating the total content of the Absolute, we come to have a close and correct perspective by which we may examine this century of verses.


Each verse leaps into meaning only when the underlying structural features are revealed and brought into view; otherwise these hundred verses remain as they have remained through the thousand years or more of their history; a challenge to vain pedantry or punditry.


In other words, structuralism is the key that can make this work understandable, a scientifically valid work with a fresh appeal to all advanced modern thinking persons of East or West. It will be our task within the scope of the work itself to introduce the reader, as occasion permits, to further implications and intricacies of this structural approach, which perhaps is the one feature on which rests the value and success of this work.


Theology permits man to say that he is created in the image of God. This is only a polite way of stating that "The Kingdom of God is within you" or "The Word was with God and the Word was God". The bolder Vedantic tradition, however, asserts the same verity when it says: "Thou art That" or "I am Brahman" ( I am the Absolute).


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A subtle equation is implied here between the relativistic perspective of the content of Brahman and the more conceptual or Absolutist aspect of the pure notion itself, so that the word "Absolute" could have a tangible content. Such a content cannot be other than a high value because without value it cannot be significant or purposeful in terms of human life. When Keats says "A thing of beauty is a joy forever", we recognise a similar Platonic thought repeated on English soil after the European Renaissance. To treat of Absolute Beauty as the content of the Absolute is fully normal to Vedantic or Advaitic thought, and what is existent (sat) and subsistent (cit) must both be covered in their turn by ananda (bliss or value factor), which in turn could be easily equated to the high value of absolute Beauty. Thus we see unmistakably the sequence of reasoning justifying the title of the "Saundarya Lahari". It becomes not only justified but lifted above all lower ritualistic or Tantric contexts to the pure and exalted philosophical domain of a fully Advaitic text, in keeping with the dignity of a scientific philosopher like Sankara . The pure and the practical, the noumenal and the phenomenal, the absolute and the relative, the transcendental and the immanent, res cogitans and res extensa, and all such other conjugates whether in philosophy or science, could only refer to what is distinguished in Vedanta as para and apara Brahman. Different schools might have differing terms for the same two intersecting parameters which they have as their common reference.

Each of the hundred verses with which we are concerned here, when scrutinised in the light of the structuralism that we have just alluded to, as also in the light of the equation implied in the para and apara (i.e. the vertical and the horizontal) aspects of the same Absolute, will bring to view as far as possible in non-verbose language, the content of the Absolute seen from the negative perspective of Absolute Beauty as viewed sub specie aeternitatis. Thus a book that has remained closed to punditry all these years will come to have a significant and practical bearing even on our modern life.


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YANTRA, MANTRA AND TANTRA
The word "Tantra" has to be understood with its other associated terms, which belong together to a certain type of esoterics found in India, independently of formulated philosophical systems or doctrines. Just as the bed of a river contains some precious deposits mixed with its sand at the bottom, cultures that have flowed down the ages over valleys or plains such as that of the Ganges or the Nile have often deposited rich sediments of esoteric wisdom value.


The Hermetics, the Kabala and the Tarot represent such deposits near the Mediterranean cities of antiquity. As in the case of the "I Ching" of China, fortune telling and astrology have their own vague contributions to add to this body of esoteric wisdom found in different parts of the globe. To change esoterics and present it in a more critically revised form as exoterics is impossible without a normative reference. Tantra, Yantra and Mantra are three of the fundamental notions connected with a certain type of esoterics found particularly in Tibet and also in India along the Malabar Coast and Bengal. The central idea of Mother-Worship and erotic mysticism has nourished this school of thought known as the Shakti Cult, and kept it alive through the ages without being subjected to the corrections of either Vedism or proto-Aryan Shaivite philosophy.


Thaumaturgists made use of the vague twilight, full of secret mystery, in which its teachings flourished - mainly in basements and cellars hidden under old temples and shrines - to participate in certain kinds of orgies where wine, women and flesh-eating figured to support a pattern of behaviour known as vamachara ( a left-handed way of life) which the more learned Brahmins would not recognise. These practitioners went under the general name of Shaktyas, which came to include two sections, the more ancient and cruder section being called Kaulins, and the other branch which received at least some recognition from the Vedic priesthood, being called Samayins. These schools indulge in exorcising evil spirits and in correcting psychological maladjustments by preparing amulets or talismans, the word for which in Sanskrit is yantra. It often consists of a scroll of thin metal, which is tied around the neck. Because of the lucrative value of such a profession, priestcraft, as anywhere in the world, gave this school its patronage, allowing it to persist on the Indian soil for ages, independent of the prevailing religious authority at any given time in history. The Yantras invariably contain geometric figures with magic letters marking angles, points, lines or circles.


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The letters would correspond to the notion of mantra, which depends on a symbolic chant or incantation. The figures themselves are attempted protolinguistic representations of the same mystery, the technique of which is to be distinguished as Tantra. It is thus that the terms Yantra, Mantra and Tantra belong together to a certain form of esoteric mystery still attracting the attention of many people, both intelligent and commonplace, where mysteries naturally thrive on a sort of vague twilight background of human thought.


Since Sankara was a Guru who wanted to revise dialectically the whole range of the spirituality of his time and restate it in a proper critically revised form he did not overlook the claim of this particular form of esoterics. He wanted to salvage whatever was precious in it and bring it into line with the Upanishadic tradition. He had himself the model of the great Kalidasa, whose writings, as his very name suggests, belonged to the same context of Mother-worship. Although Kalidasa's works have largely become a closed book to even the best pundits of present-day India, it is still possible to see through a structural analysis of his works the common lineage between Sankara and his forerunner Kalidasa and thus take our mind backwards to the great source of wisdom contained in the Upanishads.


Speculation scaled very high in India at the time of the Upanishads, which centred around one main notion - the Absolute (Brahman). The structural implications of the Absolute found in the mystical language of the Upanishads has served as a reference and nourished subsequent thought down to our own times. In the light of the structuralism that has come into modern thought through the back door of science, as it were, and through the precise disciplines of mathematics going hand in hand with the progress of experimental scientific findings, it now becomes possible to see these ancient writings as consistent with a fully scientific modern outlook. It is this discovery, if we may call it so, that encourages us to present the "Saundarya Lahari" through the visual language of film or video.


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THE MEANING OF "LAHARI"
The title of this century of verses itself underlines its unique characteristic. Each verse when properly understood will be seen to contain two distinct sets of value counterparts. If one of them can be called "physical", the other could be called "metaphysical". When they cancel out against each other through a complementarity, compensation or reciprocity which could be recognized as implied between these two counterparts, the resultant is always the upsurge of an experience which could come from either the inner or the outer pole of the total absolute self.


This resultant could even be called a constant, and thus an absolute belonging to a particular discipline and department of life. To give a familiar example, when heat and cold cancel out climatic conditions can yield the possible absolute constant of that particular context. When heavenly values and earthly values cancel out by a complementarity, alternation or split-second cancellation, we can also experience another kind of beauty, bliss or high value factor. When viewed in its proper absolutist perspective, such a constant amounts to attaining the Absolute. Such an attainment of the Absolute would be tantamount to the merging of the Self with the Absolute in Upanishadic parlance, and even to becoming the Absolute itself.


Sankara has named his work a "Lahari", which suggests an upsurging or overwhelming billow of beauty experienced at the neutral meeting point of the inner sense of beauty with its outer counterpart. We always have to conceive the whole subject-matter in its four-fold polyvalence to be able to experience this overwhelming joy or bliss, to produce which, each word, phrase or image of these verses consistently strives in its attempt to give a high value content to the Absolute. There is no mistaking that the present work is perfectly in keeping with the same Advaitic doctrine that Sankara has laboriously stood for in all his other writings.


Cancellation of counterparts is therefore one of the main features of this work. It is neither a god nor a goddess that is given unilateral importance here. It is an absolute neutral or normative value emerging from the cancellation or neutralisation of two factors, named Shiva and Shakti respectively, that is noticeable consistently throughout this composition. If Shiva is the vertical reference, Shakti is the horizontal referent.


Understood in the light of each other, the non-dual in the form of beauty becomes experienced.


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Next to the principle of the quaternion referred to above, there are two parameters of reference, the vertical and the horizontal, which have to be clearly distinguished within the structure of the Absolute, which latter would otherwise be merely conceptual or empty of content. The phenomenal and the noumenal have to verify each other for the absolute value to emerge into view. It is the absolutist character of the value of beauty as understood here that justifies Sankara's use of the term "Lahari".


THE ALPHABET OF THE WORLD OF BEAUTY
All philosophy consists of generalisation and abstraction in order to give meaning to the Absolute. This meaning must have human value significance. "Beauty" or "Bliss" is the final term of speculation bringing us to the very door which opens onto the Absolute. Thus, there is the world of beauty in aesthetics just as there is the world of discourse to which logic belongs, or the world of calculables of mathematics . Mathematics has its elements which can be algebraic or geometric in status.


Similarly linguistics can use either signs or symbols. A red light is a signal or sign, while the word "stop" is a symbol, but both of these have the same meaning. In the same sense, percepts meet concepts and cancel out into one value factor. Beauty can be analysed structurally to reveal its relational aspects, i.e., through geometric figures it could be given monomarks which might belong to any alphabet. The world of beauty has its alphabets or its lines or angles. It is in this sense that for the Pythagoreans the numerological triangle called the tetraktys became a divine symbol still worshipped in their temples. The alphabets understood as belonging to metalanguage and geometrical elements such as angles, points, lines or concentric circles can be used protolinguistically to reveal the content of the Absolute in universally concrete terms. This is the truth that Kant mentions in one of the footnotes in his work on pure reason by which he means to state that schematismus can verify philosophical categories and vice-versa. Thus corrected both ways, in a back-to-back structural relationship contained within the paradox of the two parameters (vertical and horizontal) these could verify between them various algebraic formulae. Thus we have in our hands a rare instrument of research, about which Bergson writes in the quotation already cited on pages 19 and 20.


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What we are concerned with is not only the alphabet of the world of beauty, which belongs to the metalinguistic or conceptual side, but also with its schematic counterpart, which is of a more perceptual order. If the alphabet of the world of beauty, as monomarks or letters which are essentially symbolic in status, is metalinguistic; elements not of algebra but of geometry, such as the triangle, the circle, the line or the point, together with the vertical core, will be protolinguistic, and will be able to give a dynamism to the total static structure.


The various limits within which the structure lives could be named algebraically by letters of the alphabet as monomarks. Thus, elements of the world of beauty could belong together to the context of absolute Beauty, conceived neutrally or normatively. We arrive in this manner not only at alphabets, but at elements about which we will speak in the next section. It could be said that the alphabets themselves have a taxonomic value, helping us to name and recognise unitive factors in the context of absolute Beauty. Further implications of such an alphabet of the world of beauty will become evident when we treat of the actual verses of the present work in their proper places, such as in Verse 32. There letters are linked with elements so as to verify each other and lead us to the certitude about the content of Beauty which the interaction of these verses reveals, and which justifies the use of this kind of double-sided language of signs as well as symbols. All alphabets, however analytically understood, have still to be held together at the core of consciousness, as they are in the esoterics dealt with here, by the unifying letter hri which is the first letter of the word for "heart" in Sanskrit. However varied the alphabets might be, they have to have the heart at the core of consciousness to hold them together like the spokes of a wheel.


Thus structuralism and its own nomenclature belong together. While watching the kind of film proposed here, one would have to be familiar both with alphabets of beauty as well as with elements of Beauty, each from its own side of the total situation. Alphabets could be as many as contained in any language and could include vowels as well as consonants. Each letter could be made to represent a certain characteristic, forming a component unit or part of the total content of the Absolute. The rays radiating from a certain point of light could thus have a letter attributed to them for purposes of recognition or nomenclature. Thus, these letters belong to the Mantra aspect, while the Yantra aspect is the structure itself.


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The savoir faire or "know-how" aspect of imparting the knowledge about beauty could be called the Tantra aspect of the same. Thus Tantra, Yantra and Mantra belong together and verify one another to make this experience of beauty surge up within one's consciousness with an overwhelming force. A sense of beauty overpowers that person who is able to enter into the meaning of each verse both analytically and synthetically at one and the same time.


ELEMENTS OF THE PERCEPTUAL COMPONENTS OF THE WORLD OF BEAUTY
Crystal-clear gems, when they reflect, refract or diffract light, represent beauty in the most evident sense. They have angles, points, lines and colours, and they make various beautiful combinations. Next to gem-beauty comes flower-beauty. The lotus has been the flower dear to the heart of the contemplative Indian mind throughout the ages. Thus God is praised as having lotus feet, lotus eyes, a lotus mouth, a lotus in the heart and at the various psycho-physical centres called Chakras or Adharas. When structural features belonging to the biological world are abstracted and generalised, we enter the three-dimensional world of conics. Conic sections can be related at various levels to a vertical parameter running through the base of two cones, placed base to base. The triangle is only a particular two-dimensional instance comprised within the solid geometry of conics. The apex of each triangle could be inverted and a series of interpenetrating triangles could be placed within the cones for purposes of structurally analysing the total relation-relata complex in the light of which we are to examine the beauty contained in the Absolute.


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A vertical symmetry and a horizontal symmetry, the former with a complementarity, the latter with a parity, could be included within the total possible structural perceptual patterns that emerge to view. Parity could imply a right-handed and a left-handed spin, twist or mirror asymmetry, and complementarity could imply ambivalence, reciprocity or compensation of various intensities.


The vertical axis is purely mathematical or logical in status in which degrees of contradiction could be admitted. Time can absorb space and space time; this dynamism which is at the basis of modern physics and the very essence of Cartesianism is to be kept in mind here by us.


To use our own terminology, there is always to be attributed a polarity, an ambivalence, a reciprocity, a compensatory principle, a complementarity and finally a cancellability between the limbs of the quaternion structure here postulated.


At its core there is a vertical back-to-back relation and horizontally there is what might be called a belly-to-belly relation. The latter admits contradiction and is the basis of all conflict in life. Vertically, however, all shocks and stresses are absorbed and abolished by mutual cancellation at whatever level of this two-sided parameter. There is a dialectical descent and ascent between the positive and negative poles of the total situation.


Structure has thus to be conceived statically first, and then to have its own proper dynamism introduced or attributed to it so that we get a global view of all the perceptual component factors that make up the total picture in which the high value called beauty is to be examined by us in each of the hundred verses. There are subtler factors which enter into the dynamism which we cannot enumerate exhaustively here. They will enter into our interest normally as we focus our attention on the representations implied in each verse.


A flashlight held in our hand when walking through misty darkness can only light a circle within our visible area at a given time, although mist and darkness are not limited to what we can see. Contemplative minds, especially as understood in the logic-tradition of India, thus justifiably think in terms of circular or global units of consciousness placed in a vertical series beginning from the bottom pole of the vertical axis and ending at the top pole. Although its physiological position may not correspond to psychological units in terms of consciousness, the vertebral column with a central strand of nervous energy called susumna nadi, together with two other psycho-physical strands, at the left and right respectively, called ida and pingala, are generally taken for granted in yogic literature. If we now imagine six zones of consciousness ranging from bottom to top, we get the Adharas or Chakras, sometimes described and elaborated in detail by geometrical and biological analogies such as triangles and coloured petals in Yoga books.


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There are various schools of Yoga, the most important one being that of Patanjali, which uses eight such centres. In the present work, however, we find six centres prominently mentioned, each representing a point where horizontal and vertical factors cancel out to reveal a stable neutral or normal aspect of the Absolute proper to that particular level. The ambivalent factors always cancel out to reveal the same constant Absolute, however varied the pictorial content of the beauty to be appreciated might happen to be. The Tarot cards consist of pictorial representations supposed to represent the alphabet of a kind of mysterious schematism of thought. Yoga books also indulge in a similar pictorial language, but on Indian soil such pictures are mostly nourished by the mythology or analogies proper to the long Vedic or Sanskrit tradition. This is to be treated as only incidental by modern persons who can understand the same without mythology through a revised protolanguage such as that which we adopt and recommend here. The various gods of the Hindu pantheon happen to be themselves structural or functional components to be fitted together, giving us a content for the totality called Absolute Value which is always the object of any speculation, independent of time or clime. Sankara can be seen to have taken full advantage of the implications of this mythological language, not because he is religious himself, but because it lends itself admirably to the problem of giving beauty-content and full significance to the otherwise empty notion of the Absolute.


We shall try in the preliminary part of the projected Saundarya Lahari film to present certain of the mythological components used by Sankara, together with their proper background. In this way, the modern filmgoer, especially outside India, may be helped to see how the mythological language, together with a strict protolinguistic structuralism and the dynamism proper to it helps us to experience the essence of Absolute Beauty which is overwhelming in its total appeal.


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A WORD ABOUT THE BINDUSTHANA, OR LOCUS OF PARTICIPATION
The first 41 verses of the Saundarya Lahari presupposed a contemplative yogi, seated with eyes shut, representing an introspective withdrawal into the world of inner consciousness. The objective or positive side of consciousness in relation to the self will be the "object matter" proper to the rest of the composition. When a person meditates properly, his mind attains one-pointedness. This very term presupposes a point, not necessarily on a blackboard, but at a locus within one's self, which is referred to in Tantric literature as bindusthana. This focal point is where the global drop or essence of existence resides. When we think of a drop-like bindu, we could think of it as being made of an Absolute Substance, described also by Spinoza as a "thinking substance". We could visualise the same Absolute Substance with its own vertical reference when we add to it the dimension of res cogitans as used by Descartes. This vertical element is often referred to in Yogic or Tantric literature as nada, the essence of sound. Nada and bindu participate vertico-horizontally in terms of a thinking substance known as nadabindu, which is supposed to be the ontological starting point - the source or place of origin and dissolution - of all that comes to be or become in the mental or material world.


It is usual in contemplative Sanskrit literature to refer to nadabindu in terms of the tender lotus feet of the god or goddess. Only the tenderest part of our mind can participate with an equally tender part of that which we meditate upon, because any participation between subject and object, even in meditation, has to presuppose the principle of homogeneity, which is called samana adhikaranatva. The soldering together of two metals presupposes this principle; the base metal and the noble metal can be made to participate intimately only when there is an equality of status between them. The tenderest devotion thus meets on equal terms the tender petals of the lotus feet of the god. It is therefore usual to put the two feet of the god that you are meditating upon at the focal point where mind and matter cancel out at the neutral point of the thinking substance. The two feet within a lotus could be placed at any point on the vertical parameter, which is cut at right angles by an implied horizontal forest of lotuses, independent of the bindusthana (locus) of meditation. Thus a vertical series and a horizontal series of lotuses is presupposed for structural purposes in each of these verses. The horizontal dimension is incidental only, whereas the vertical reference is the essential parameter that links essence with existence - existence marking the lower (hierophantic) Alpha Point, and essence marking the highest (hypostatic) Omega Point. The point of intersection represents the normative bindusthana proper, but at whatever positive or negative point in the vertical series the feet of the Adorable One might be placed by the contemplative, there is a value regulated by the central normative lotus which is always the constant reference.


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These are some of the characteristics of the structural language adhered to by classical convention through a tacitly understood lingua mystica, coming down to us from pre-Vedic times through the Upanishads, through Kalidasa and through Sankara. It is impossible for us not to recognise the two sets of lotuses radiating from the central lotus at the bindusthana, as suggested in Verse 21. A justification for all we have said above is found in this verse.


STRUCTURAL DYNAMISM
It is one thing to visualise the alphabets of the elements of structuralism in situ, as it were, and quite another to visualise this structuralism in living or dynamic terms. Yogic meditation is not a static fixation of the attention on objects such as a bindu (central locus), which is mere hypnotism or crystal-gazing. The bindu must be thought of as a target to be reached by the mind, as with a bow fitted with an arrow directed vertically upwards towards the Omega Point. In order for this arrow to have the maximum momentum the bowstring would have to be pulled intently towards the Alpha Point.


The bowstring, when thus pulled, would tend to make its own hyperbolic triangular shape, with an apex pointing toward the base of the lower cone as implied in the suggested static structural figure of two cones placed base to base. The flying arrow reaches the target at the apex of the top cone, while its reciprocal dynamism is implied in the tension of the bowstring trying to attain the limit at the Alpha Point.


The Alpha Point thus has a negative psycho-dynamic content in the form of an introspective or introverted mystical or emotional state of mind, full of tender feelings such as between mother and child, shepherd and sheep, etc. This is the domain of the weeping philosopher and the agony of the mystic.


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The stages marked on the plus side of the vertical axis represent brighter and more intelligent states of the psycho-physical or psycho-somatic self. The coloration tends to be brighter and whiter as the emotional content transforms itself in its ascent by stages into fully emancipated states free from the weight of emotional content . A rich magenta glory might thus be said to be present even to the normative or centralised psychosomatic vision, though this is only subjectively experienced by the Yogi. The arrow flying upwards at right angles with a momentum proportionate to the tension of the horizontal bowstring pulled toward the negative pole of the vertical axis, attains its maximum limit the more it approximates to the Alpha Point, when released with maximum tension. The speed and power of penetration of the arrowhead breaks through all barriers, cancelling out the arithmetic difference that might persist between the arrow and the target.


It is usual to refer to a Chakra as a ganglion or plexus, such as the solar plexus, but psycho-physics properly understood has to reject all partial pictures slanted in favour of physiology and find a point that is correctly and neutrally placed psychosomatically perhaps between mind and matter.


The notion of syndromes and synergisms treated together with different electrical potentiality comes nearer to what is represented by the Chakras, which are not to be thought of partially as either mind or matter, but neutrally, as pertaining to the context of an Absolute Thinking Substance.


Thus there is a cancellation of counterparts along a vertical parameter to be understood with its negative and positive content, but always having a central normative magenta glory for reference. Such are some of the dynamic features of the structuralism which we have to insert correctly into the same context when we have visualised its static structural features. Psycho-statics and psycho-dynamics have thus to belong together when we try to understand the value that each verse reveals. Each of the six or eight positions usually distinguished as Adharas or Chakras is to be looked on as a stable cross-sectional point of equilibrium between counterparts which are always cancellable to normality or neutrality - just as a numerator number of whatever value could be cancelled out against a denominator value of the same set or category, yielding a constant that remains uniform at any position along the vertical parameter. It is always the neutrality of the magenta glory that is revealed when vertical and horizontal factors cancel out within the core of the Absolute. This aspect of subjective psycho-dynamism must be kept in the mind of the spectator, at least in regard to the first 41 verses distinguished as the "Ananda Lahari".


OTHER MISCELLANEOUS IDEOGRAMS
There are many other ideograms besides the bow and arrow which bring into the picture the dynamic aspect of structuralism. We have seen how the lotus flower and the feet figuratively represent ideograms. Now we find a number of secondary ideograms which are consistently used as alphabets or elements or both, within the scope of the lingua mystica which is the language employed in this work.


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The bee drinking honey from the lotus always implies the bhokta or enjoyer, as the honey implies the side of the bhogya, or enjoyable. There is a subtle dialectical interaction between these two sets of values; one referring to the subjective world, and therefore vertical; the other to the objective world, and therefore horizontal. At the point of separation between the vertical and horizontal we could imagine a row of bees sucking honey, with a corresponding flower for each bee. The horizontal parameter would be the line separating the row of bees each from the flower or the drop of honey it seeks. Instead of a row of bees, sometimes we find a rows of cranes, or rows of elephants, which refer to the four quarters of the compass in a sort of vectorial space within consciousness. Thus the Dig Ganas, the four or eight elephants representing points of the compass, are to be imagined as playing havoc or pushing their trunks into a central pole or axis.


The crystal imagery, resembling that of a colour solid, properly belongs to the base of the vertical axis, while at the neutral O Point, this same crystalline form would resemble a maze or lattice or matrix of vertico-horizontal lines, looking like a cage. Above the central O Point, when we think in terms of a radiating light going from a point to some universal here or elsewhere, the colour solid gives place to its counterpart, to be visualised as two cones, placed not base to base, but apex to apex. Thus crystals, conic sections, radial arrangements in flowers, logarithmic spirals with complementary spins, inversions and transformations, both vertical and horizontal; all enter into the complex fabric of the dynamics of the structural language employed here.


Petals, like the apexes of triangles, together with rays of light radiating outwards, can represent elements of various abstractions or generalisations within the scope or content of the absolute value of beauty here. The letters of the alphabet could be applied preferably to conceptual rays, while lines standing for relations of a here-and-now ontological character are proper to the crystal which serves to explain more ontological relation-relata complexes.


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The matrix of the centre of the axes serves to clarify the four-fold quaternion aspect. The most central dynamism could be represented by a figure-eight, exemplified by the familiar pulsations in electromagnetic interference figures, and also by the systole-diastole function of the heartbeat.


Every pulsation in its double aspect could be biologically reduced to conformity with this figure-eight which depends on the sine function of waves or frequencies. Wave lengths are horizontal, while frequencies are vertical, or vice-versa, as the case may be. When inserted together into the same space, they make this figure-eight structurally valid in terms of cross-polarized light.


All these figures trace their courses within the grand flux of universal becoming which is the most basic phenomenal manifestation of the neutral Absolute. The universe becomes experienced in most general terms as a process of flux or becoming. This is what Heraclitus meant when he said that one cannot enter into the same river twice. Bergson's philosophy supports the same flux in terms of the élan vital. Vedanta also thinks of the universe in terms of a process of flux or becoming when it refers to Maya as anadhir bhava rupa (of the form of a beginningless becoming), itself having an absolute status. Maya, as the negative aspect of the Absolute, however, could yield a normative Absolute which would cancel out this flux, but viewed from the side of relativity to which a living person naturally must belong, the universal flux of becoming is a reality which could be abolished only when the total paradox implied between physics and metaphysics is also finally abolished. In this grand flux of becoming, structuralism enters as naturally as it does in modern physics, where space and time belong together as conjugates and can be treated as Cartesian correlates. The articulation of space and time gives us the vertical parameter.


Thus we have referred to some further aspects of the peculiar visual language which will help the viewing audience to follow intelligently the content of this film. Indications of a more detailed order will be given in the film itself.


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FUNCTIONAL MONOMARKS OF GRADED AND DUPLICATE DIVINITIES OR PRESENCES
Before actually witnessing the film, some of the more hidden technicalities involved here will have to be explained.


Dynamism presupposes functions. Eros is the god of love who has the function of sending arrows to smite the hearts of lovers. Eros thus is a demigod or demiurge who is often symbolised by the bow and arrow held by him. The bow and arrow represent in visual language the monomarks belonging to his function. The three divinities, Brahma, Vishnu and Shiva, have their respective functions of creation, preservation and destruction within the total scope of cosmological phenomena comprised in the pure notion of the Absolute.


Thus Vishnu's function lies structurally in the middle zone, while Brahma brings up the rear and Shiva functions as the destroyer of everything at the Omega Point of nominalistic over-conceptualisation. Upward and downward logarithmic lines between the lower and higher limits would indicate the ambivalence between the function of Brahma and that of Shiva.


Eros, or Kamadeva, must have his counterpart Rati as his virtual companion. Shiva can destroy Eros only when Eros' presence falls outside the vertical negative parameter: but when occasionalism favours him as he takes refuge within the vertical negativity of the Absolute, he reigns invulnerably supreme in his own right, as in Verse 6.


The divinities can be either hypostatic or hierophantic in their significance. Where they have a numerator value, they are represented as gods or demigods, but when they have a denominator value, they are spoken of as "presences" with an ontological or an existential status, as in Verse 8.


The devotee, as Sankara himself indicates in the first verse, is placed outside the scope of the holy or the sacred at the bottom of the vertical axis and beyond Shiva, who normally marks the Omega Point at the top. Paramesvara (supreme Shiva), who has a more thin and mathematical status, is to be presupposed as the counterpart of the devotee as his saviour. As prayer or worship always implies a benefit between the worshipper and the worshipped, we could imagine an endless series of devotees praying for benefits compatible with themselves, each placed in duplicate at points marking hypostatic or hierophantic values within the total amplitude of the two-sided vertical parameter. Each of the divinities involved could confer its benefit on the believer or worshipper who constantly meditates on it. All prayers correctly made from the denominator side must necessarily find their compatible response from the numerator side. Such is the time-honoured presupposition in all prayer.


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Thus a mathematical Paramashiva (supreme Shiva) beyond the Omega Point on the thin vertical parameter has his counterpart in a footstool or cushion on the negative vertical side, either for the Devi or himself indifferently. From her toes to the top of her tresses there are subtler values to be placed back-to-back. Nothing can be omitted because the universal concrete that the Absolute represents enters even into the essence or existence of the toenails and the hair. Flowers could be hypostatic or hierophantic in their origin, or both, according to the circumstances. The waters of the Ganges, representing high value, can pour down to purify or bless a total situation, from the head of Shiva to his feet. When originating at the O Point in a lake represented by the navel of the Goddess, this water flows horizontally like an actual or geographical river conferring benefits on cultivators.


These suggestions must be kept in mind as the audience watches the unfolding of absolute Beauty in terms of magenta glory. The seventh verse, when scrutinized, will reveal how these levels and dimensions are woven into the structural dynamism adopted by Sankara.


A DRAMA UNFOLDING WITHIN THE SELF AS IN THE NON-SELF
The present series of verses could be viewed statically as representing Chakras or Mandalas. The Yantra could provide a dynamism because it suggests a wheel always going around. A picture as well as a drama may be said to be unravelling itself before our vision as the poem reveals to our view various aspects of absolute Beauty. The dynamism thus superimposed on the structuralism makes the whole series resemble the scenes of a dramatic universe to be thought of both subjectively and objectively at once. All drama involves personages or characters. Besides the hero and heroine, who represent the vertical and horizontal references, there is a villain responsible for bringing in the complications to be resolved during the action of the drama.


When the classical rule of the unity of time, place and action is fully respected, as it used to be before the time of the romanticism of Victor Hugo, we get a more global perspective of a comedy or tragedy with many stratifications of paradises gained or lost, infernos and purgatories, incorporated into the picture of Dante and Beatrice, God and Satan, Faust or Mephistopheles as the main personages involved. A clown and a chorus can be used to add a touch of levity to the scene.


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All the nine emotional attitudes known to Sanskrit aesthetics, ranging from masculine passion to the tenderest emotions of motherhood, could enter into the total picture that the drama presents to our view. In Aeschylus' play, the bound Prometheus supplies the central locus round which action develops, radiating polyvalently in all directions. A clown could be an interloper functioning both as a villain as well as a tale-bearer. A strong man could add a herculean touch in which hierophany prevails over hypostasy. In the present composition, all corresponding personages of Indian mythology can easily be distinguished. Eros is recognized as a complicating character. The presentation and resolution aspects of the drama have the same Eros involved in them in milder or modified forms as occasion demands. The antinomy between Zeus and Demeter is resolved in the present work by the attempt made in every verse to resolve the paradox involved between them, rather than to enhance the element of contradiction, as in classical Greek literature. Shiva and Shakti participate in a gentle dialectical way so that a normative cancellation without conflict takes us beyond the contradiction of paradox. Such is the interplay of the functions of the various characters which are enumerated in Verse 32 by the author himself.

INTRODUCTION TO THE SAUNDARYA LAHARI

"The Upsurging Billow of Beauty"
By

SANKARACARYA

English Translation and Commentary
By
NATARAJA GURU

PRELIMINARIES

In the autumn of the year 1968 I was preparing for a long voyage round the world. As a first step towards this adventurous project, I had booked a passage to Singapore by the British steamer S.S. Rajula. This date remains a memorable landmark in my mind because I had by that time finished all the series of major items of a dedicated life-work, projected by me, having bearing on the teaching of my teacher Narayana Guru, to which I had devoted more than four decades already.

I thought I had no more ambition in that same direction when I found myself sitting in front of a bookshelf of the library that was just being started at the Gurukula Island Home, bordering on the sea in the Cannanore District of Kerala, on the west coast of India. Two volumes of the works of a Malayalam poet called Kumaran Asan attracted my attention, almost as if by the promptings of some vague principle of chance. I glanced at the volumes listlessly and without purpose for some time. Before long my attention seemed to linger browsingly over the pages at the end of one of the volumes which happened to be the translation of the "Saundarya Lahari" into Malayalam. It was attributed to Sankaracharya and from the introductory remarks of Kumaran Asan I found that the date of the translation coincided with the time when he had returned from his training in Calcutta to become the first disciple and successor to Narayana Guru himself. At that time they were living together as Guru and most favoured sisya (disciple) in a riverside ashram at a place called Aruvippuram, about fifteen miles south of Trivandrum, the capital of Kerala.

2

The initial scrutiny of the contents of the translation, each verse of which was printed side by side with the original Sanskrit of Sankara, intrigued me and stimulated my curiosity to such an extent that I began to become more and more seriously engrossed and involved in its study. In spite of not being a Sanskrit scholar of any standing whatsoever, I could discover slight discrepancies here and there between the intentions of the original author and the understanding of the translator. It seemed to me that he was evidently engaged in an almost impossible task, as a result of which all his efforts seemed to be repeatedly frustrated or compromised, often with meanings miscarried. This was sufficiently evidenced by the fact that even the barest of a sequential, consistent or common-sense meaning did not result, in spite of the tremendous efforts that seemed to have been lavished on the subject matter. Neither the content, context, purpose nor the person kept in mind as the proper student for these verses could even be roughly guessed at. The more I read these verses and tried to make at least some bare meaning out of them, the more enigmatic each verse seemed to become to my eyes. Strangely too, my understanding seemed to progress inversely to the increased effort that I tried wholeheartedly to apply to this strange text. When I also remembered in these circumstances that Kumaran Asan might have undertaken this impossible task at the instance of Narayana Guru himself, which belief was gaining ground with me, my interest in this enigmatic work became all the more heightened.

It seemed to question challengingly my critical understanding of a text from a philosopher like Sankara, whose other writings were already somewhat sufficiently familiar to me. Furthermore, in the short introduction by the author of the Malayalam translation, given to justify his understanding, he referred to a group of religious people in Kerala, the "Kerala Kaulins" as he calls them, for whose benefit, according to him, the great philosopher Sankara undertook this apparently onerous task.

My self-respect, not to say pride, in considering myself a person sufficiently capable of understanding a philosophical text in the ordinary course, became stung, as it were, to the quick. And this is how I became personally involved in the work which now remains, even after three and a half years, a major challenge to my common sense or to that degree of average intelligence with which a man of my generation could be expected normally to credit himself.

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Even at the moment of writing this (8th January 1972) the enigmatic nature of this work of great absorbing interest still stares me in the face. And it is with certain apologies to many worthy scholars anterior to me and with some hesitations that I enter now on this task of presenting to the modern world the one hundred verses of the "Saundarya Lahari".

THE ORIGINAL TEXT AND ITS COMMENTATORS

The first forty-one verses have to be distinguished, evidently according to the author himself, as the "Ananda Lahari", within the totality meant to be entitled more generally the "Saundarya Lahari". In Sanskrit, lahari means "intoxication" or "overwhelming subjective or objective experience of an item of intelligence or of beauty upsurging in the mind of man" The word saundarya refers to aesthetic value appreciation. Such an appreciation of beauty must necessarily belong to the context of the Absolute, if the name of Sankara, the great Advaitic commentator, is to be associated at all with this work, however indirectly it may be, on which point we shall presently have more to say.

Absolute value appreciation, which could be ananda (delight) subjectively, is saundarya (beauty), when understood objectively. These are two possible perspectives of the same absolute value factor. Through the centuries this work has puzzled pundits such as Lakshmidhara, Kaivalyasrama and Kameswara Soori of India; and professors such as Sir John Woodroffe and Norman Brown in the West, and continues to do so to the present.

It cannot be said, however, that interest in it has flagged even for a moment, since it saw the light of day. On the contrary, it has spread far and wide, as evidenced by the various editions of different dates and regions, some of them containing elaborate Persian, Mogul and Rajput paintings, and the increasing number of modern editions, mainly nurtured and nourished by a great revival of interest in that strange form of Indian spirituality known as Tantra.

There is every indication at present that such an interest is still on the increase. Any light, however feeble, that I might be able to throw on such a subject will not, therefore, be out of place.

4

MY INVOLVEMENT AND CONFRONTATIONS

Between the date of my first involvement in this interesting text and the present date, I have travelled as much by inner exploration as perhaps to the extent that my wanderings were widely distributed. The intensity of my involvement with this text became more and more absorbing to me.

My first plan was to go around the world by ship. The first lap of my journey was accomplished accordingly, and I found myself travelling in Southeast Asia, giving lectures on the "Saundarya Lahari" in out of the way places, both in Singapore and various parts of Malaysia. During this period, when I found myself moving from place to place, I did not relax even one day from the uniform and sustained pressure which I applied to the study of the text. Each morning exactly between half-past five and seven o'clock I kept up the habit of sitting around with interested listeners, with cups of black coffee and biscuits, trying to delve deeper into the meanings of each verse. I have done so for three and a half years and in the meantime I had to change the course of my world tour. Instead of crossing the Indian Ocean and trying to go towards Honolulu, where a friend was supposed to be awaiting me, I was suddenly attracted by an advertised offer of Air India which made it possible for me to come back to India once again and adopt a revised itinerary by which I could include Moscow, Gent, Luxembourg, Iceland, New York, Chicago, San Francisco, Honolulu, Fiji and Sydney, and be back in India through Malaysia once again, thus spending nearly a year in all my wanderings.

Wherever I had a fairly long stopover my coffee classes continued and, what was even more strange, I could notice that my lessons were evidently of greater attraction to others than to myself. Crowds gathered round me even at this unearthly hour and listened to me with remarkable avidity of interest. I could not solve many of the problems that seemed to crop up one after another as the studies continued. I began to differ from almost every book that I came across. The whole subject bristled with endless controversial questions and there were moments of despair in which I felt that I was hopelessly involved in some vain task.

Some of the questions that came to the surface could be initially and summarily stated as follows:

1. How could Sankara, who is known to be an Advaita philosopher, be credited with the authorship of this text which is evidently of the form belonging to the context of Tantra Shastra?

2. Why should he have written these verses after his great commentaries, which are by themselves sufficiently monumental to support his fame as a Vedantic philosopher?

3. If Sankara gave primacy to wisdom, as is well known, how is it that he seems to have come down to the vulgar or popular level of a worshipper of the beauty of a goddess?

4. The Sri Chakra, which figures in the text very prominently, seems to be the hallmark by which Tantra texts are recognisable. What has this geometrical design to do with Advaita Vedanta, which believes in the purest form of reason only?

5. What is the place of eroticism in the context of the austere Sannyasa (renunciation) which Sankara stood for so uncompromisingly?

6. Was Sankara interested in Yoga Shastra (the science of yoga) also?

7. If not, why does he take the trouble of describing the various details of Chakras (synergic centres) as seen in the verses of this text?

8. If non-duality is the teaching of Sankara, how is it that he postulates Shiva and Shakti as two distinct factors, principles or entities?

9. Is Sankara a religious man at all?

10. How far are the verses compatible with the doctrines developed in his other works?

11. Did his followers give any importance to this work so as to adopt its teaching in any way in their lives as inmates of various ashrams in which they practised their spiritual disciplines?

12. Why does he employ a Puranic and mythological language here?

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CONVENTIONAL TRADITIONAL APPROACH

Because of these and various other miscellaneous difficulties even highly painstaking and correctly critical scholars like Professor W. Norman Brown of Harvard University have doubted even the authorship of these verses. He has gone into the reasons for doing so in very great detail in Volume 43 of the Harvard Oriental Series, and takes care to indicate on the title page of the work, in all academic cautiousness, that the "Saundarya Lahari" is only "traditionally ascribed to Sankaracarya". If we turn to the other great authority on Tantra literature, Sir John Woodroffe, these points are not clarified any better. Even a strict word-by-word translation of this work is not so far available, not to speak of a satisfactory versification. Every translation or commentary that I have examined so far, whether in Malayalam, English or in the original Sanskrit, has not failed to reveal here or there some appalling state of ignorance in respect of the main intent and purpose of these verses. Except for borrowing rather light-heartedly the Sri Chakra, which is described in minute geometrical detail in Verse 11 of this work, the whole work seems to be otherwise treated with scant and stepmotherly respect, both by tantrically minded pundits and professors alike. When I allude to pundits and professors at one and the same time, I am not unconscious of the fact that there are present in Bengal and in South India, especially in Kerala, many who claim to be authorities on Tantra generally, not excluding the "Saundarya Lahari" in particular. I have had occasion to consult quite a few of these authorities and I can assert with a certain pleasure that they have tried their best to clarify their respective positions in a conventional and traditional manner proper to punditry and pedantry in India. I must at least mention four names : Pundit S.Subrahmanya Sastri, T.R.Srinivasa Ayyengar of the Theosophical Society, Kandiyoor Mahadeva Sastri, and E.P. Subrahmanya Sastri, besides the three more ancient scholars already mentioned.

The greater part of Sir John Woodroffe's prolific volumes themselves is based directly or indirectly on what some pundits gave him to understand. It would not be wrong to say that they are directly based on hearsay, and therefore lack that direct appeal or apodictic certitude necessary to make us treat them with the seriousness which the subject deserves.

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The interest of the present writer is not the same as that of a pundit or professor. Even the question of Sankara's authorship of the work would take at least as much trouble to prove as to disprove. I therefore do not wish to enter into any polemical dispute with anybody, and would content myself with taking a position by which I could say that all the great scholars who have devoted their energies to clarifying this text, though they are right only as far as they go, do deserve our gratitude.

My own personal interest in this subject is based on two considerations only. Firstly, it is a unique work in which, for the first time, Sankara is seen to adopt a non-verbal protolinguistic approach to philosophy, as when Marshall McLuhan would say, "the medium is the message." Secondly, believe that most of the controversies referred to above could be seen to arise from the fact that the text is usually looked upon as if it were a statically given doctrinal statement, instead of being considered as the dialectical revaluation of some anterior position prevailing at the time the author wrote it. The history of religion, as Professor Mircea Eliade of Princeton University has succeeded in proving in his monumental work on the subject, "Patterns of Comparative Religion", is a series of dialectical revaluations of anterior positions in terms of posterior doctrines. Viewed in the light of such a dialectical revaluation, it is not difficult, at least for me to see that here Sankara adopts a non-verbal or protolinguistic medium instead of a metalinguistic one, to restate the message of Advaita Vedanta, for which he has always stood, here as well as in his great commentaries.

When these two features are fully understood by the modern reader, it will be seen that most of the controversial problems that have puzzled both pundits and professors melt away altogether. The authorship of Sankara could then be easily proved by a certain type of logic acceptable to Buddhism and Vedanta alike, which is called "the argument by impossibility of being otherwise", known as anupalabdhi. This kind of logic belongs to the order of axiomatic thinking, and therefore is still understood even by phenomenological philosophers like Edmund Husserl, only with a certain degree of mistrust. No wonder, therefore, that the world of modern thought is involved in a characteristic puzzlement belonging to the same general intellectual and cultural malaise, the growing evidence of which is beginning to be recognisable wherever we turn, more especially when modern youth express dissatisfaction because of a general gap that they feel existing between themselves and their elders.

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This brings us to the next most important consideration that has made me all the more interested in this strange and almost impossible text that I have been trying to understand with all earnestness. There is an unconventional new generation of young people with generally free ideas about sex, variously influenced by Eastern religions. They believe in miracles and the supernatural powers. Inner space is more important to them than outer space. Mind-expanding drugs are every day luring them deeper into themselves. Yoga and discipleship to a guru are taken for granted by them. Besides Yoga, they are also interested in the secrets of what is called Tantra.

Most of them are genuine seekers for a new way of life, although some of them are seen to be freaks or misfits. Whatever explanation of such a widespread social disadoption might be, it is clear that the movement requires sympathetic understanding and guidance. What they call "institutional life" is their common enemy, and clashing with it produces various forms of bad blood, repression or discontent which is at present becoming a problem to all concerned, most especially to themselves.

A revision and rearrangement of basic values in life seems to be what they are asking for. Discoveries in science have disrupted conventional standards in ethics, aesthetics, economics and even in education. Human ecology itself has to be reconsidered and revised.

The Saundarya Lahari, as I soon discovered, lent itself readily to the basic ground on which human values could be rediscovered, rearranged, revalued and restated more normally and normatively. It is this discovery that dawned on me more clearly each day as I taught in my global travels, that made this work all the more dear to me.

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Side by side with this it also dawned on me with equal force that this mainly non-verbally conceived text was just the one that suited the most modern means of communication. Video and computerisation have been so fast and spectacular in their development that now it is possible to say that this mass medium has inaugurated what is beginning to be known as a Paleocybernetic Age, which can be expected to revolutionise the whole of individual and collective life of humanity within a few years. There is little that could not be accomplished through new technology to bypass the confusion of tongues non-verbally.

We can examine the workings of our own mind, not to say self, through the intermediary of this wonderful new medium where line, light, colourful vision and audition could help in the process of the marriage of sheer entertainment with the highest form of so-called spiritual education. The availability of such a medium could be said to be just around the corner. The only snag in this matter is that we need a new kind of literature that could be most advantageously fed into the machine when it becomes available. The answer to this kind of demand is already found in the "Saundarya Lahari".

This is the second discovery that came to me by chance. The possible appeal of the "Saundarya Lahari", more especially to the modern generation, became immediately evident to me. My ambition, therefore, was not primarily to write a new and more learned book on this work, but rather to avail myself of the wonderful possibilities of modern video technology to put across to the new generation the valuable contents of this rare book, where the message and the medium already co-exist without any contradiction between them.

The highest purpose of life, by which man is made to live more than merely by bread alone, which it was the privilege hitherto of religious bodies to cater to the public by way of spiritual nourishment, thus comes into the hands of every true educator.

What is more, "education" and "entertainment" become interchangeable terms. The success of the "Saundarya Lahari" could be expected to open the way to many other possibilities of the same kind. What is called Self- Realisation and the truth of the dictum that the proper study of mankind is man himself, can be made possible, as it were, by a strange irony of fate through startling advances in the world of mechanistic technology itself. Evil shall thus be cured in and through itself by its own cause.

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What is called "salvation" results from the cancellation of the self by the non-self. Beauty is a visible value in which line, light and colour can cooperate to reveal our true nature to ourselves. When thus revealed, that final cancellation of counterparts can take place which is capable of removing the last impediment to what we might soberly call "unitive understanding". This is none other than emancipation, or final Freedom with a capital F. This is the promise that the wisdom of the Upanishads has always held out as the highest hope of humanity. There is both inner beauty as well as beauty "out there" as it were. The former is that of the yogi and the latter of the speculative philosopher. Both are capable of effecting cancellation of counterparts between the Self and the Non-Self resulting in that Samadhi or Satori which marks the term and goal of intelligent humanity.

MAIN QUESTIONS

Having stated now the nature of my main interest , let me take one by one the questions that I have raised above and answer them as shortly as I can, without getting lost in too many unnecessary by-paths.

1. How could Sankara, who is known to be an Advaita philosopher, be credited with the authorship of this text which is evidently of the form belonging to the context of Tantra Shastra?

Sankara's great commentaries are primarily metalinguistic while this work is protolinguistic. Tantra is only a structural, protolinguistic, non-verbal approach to Indian spirituality at its best, when taken as a whole. We have to think of Mantra, Yantra and Tantra at once as presupposing one another, if we are to enter into a sympathetic and intuitive understanding of the dynamism that Tantra essentially represents. This dynamism is none other than mutual participation of the two other aspects which go with it, which are Yantra on the one side and Mantra on the other. Thus, Tantra is the "know-how" or savoir - faire by which Yantra and Mantra could interact mutually and produce what we call the fully real experience of unitive understanding, by a double correction. Yantra is associated with a wheel or machine, while Mantra evidently stands for uttered syllables or sounds. Each Mantra involves a devata, which term has to be distinguished from just a deva, or god.

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All the gods of the Hindu pantheon can be given their correct positions as monomarks in the context of the Yantra, which is essentially a geometrical figure called the Sri Chakra. Letters of the Sanskrit alphabet could be used in the place of monomarks to indicate structural aspects of the Absolute within the context of erotic mysticism, where beauty is the most prominent prevailing value.

In the erotic context of Tantra there are four functional monomarks commonly used which are the goad and noose, referring to the spatial dynamism applicable to an elephant, together with the sugar-cane bow and five flower-tipped arrows which indicate the limits of the horizontal world of erotic pleasure or enjoyment. Many of the Tantra texts quoted or alluded to in the writings of Sir John Woodroffe make profuse use of these monomarks and protolinguistic devices to such a point of intricacy that the modern reader could easily get lost in their ramifications and further complicated implications. For a clear statement we have to go to the "Mahanirvana Tantra", which perhaps owes its inspiration to Buddhistic as well as proto-Aryan Tantric sources. One sees very clearly from this particular Tantra how the colour of the dark monsoon cloud which hangs over the whole west coast of India, from Ujjain to Kanyakumari, has a place within the context of Tantrism. Moreover, the best palm-leaf manuscripts preserved to this day bearing on Tantra, are found in the collections of some Maharajas of this area. There is also a temple situated on the West Coast, half way between Gujarat and the Cape, which could be considered as the most ancient of the epicentres from which this kind of influence could be imagined to have spread far and wide, through the Mahayana Buddhism of Central and North India, reaching Tibet and finally nourishing the roots of the Shakti cult of present-day Bengal.

Tantra is a discipline which combines the secrets of Yoga side by side with other esoteric teachings, the greater part of which is a contribution by the lower strata of society, to whom the five Tattvas proper to its practice - matsya (fish), mamsa (meat), madya (liquor), maithuna (copulation) and mudra (gesture) - are to be considered both natural and normal. When this lower form of Tantra was subjected to revaluation and restatement in the light of Veda and Vedanta, it gave rise to further subdivisions and graded stratifications, such as the Purva Kaula, Uttara Kaula, Samayin and fully Vedantic versions of Tantrism. Thus Tantra is a complex growth in the spiritual soil of India.

12

Sankara, as a great dialectical revaluator of the Hindu spirituality of his time, could easily be imagined to have attempted a final revaluation of the same body of spiritual wisdom which he proposed to clothe in a special kind of non- verbose language. As a result, there are two texts from his pen, the twin complementary works named "Saundarya Lahari" and "Shivananda Lahari", respectively. The former presupposes a negative ascending dialectical perspective, while the latter presupposes the same Absolute Value when viewed from a more positive position in terms of a descending dialectic. The final content of both remains the same, although the starting postulates might seem diametrically opposed to each other.

Beauty, especially when it is colourful and full of significant lights and lines, lends itself to be considered the most tangible content of the otherwise empty or merely mathematical notion called the Absolute. Truth and value thus are made to fulfil the same function: to give full tangible content to the Absolute. In short, metalinguistically stated Advaita coincides here with what is protolinguistically understood.

2. Why should he have written these verses after his great commentaries, which are by themselves sufficiently monumental to support his fame as a Vedantic philosopher?

As Sankara himself states in Verse 59 of the "Vivekacudamani", verbosity is a bane which could even cause mental derangement.

3. If Sankara gave primacy to wisdom, as is well known, how is it that he seems to have come down to the vulgar or popular level of a worshipper of the beauty of a goddess?

The simple answer is that no visible goddess is directly envisaged in any of the verses in the present series. Certain picturesque situations are, of course, presented here and there in such a way that when the numerator and the denominator aspects of the same are cancelled out we are left with an overwhelming sense of sheer absolute Beauty, independently of any anthropomorphically conceived goddess. The first and the last verses of the series, when read together, absolve Sankara completely of any possible charge of being a theist, deist or even a ritualist in the ordinary religious sense.

4. The Sri Chakra, which figures in the text very prominently, seems to be the hallmark by which Tantra texts are recognisable. What has this geometrical design to do with Advaita Vedanta, which believes in the purest form of reason only?

The Sri Chakra is a structurally conceived linguistic device. Just as a graph can verify an algebraic formula, there is no contradiction between the Advaita as Sankara has stated metalinguistically in his Bhasyas (commentaries) and that which the same Advaita represents in the form of a schema here.

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5. What is the place of eroticism in the context of the austere sannyasa (renunciation) which Sankara stood for so uncompromisingly?

The proper theme of all poetry or even art could be said to be love. No lover, no art. One cannot think of beauty without the form of woman coming into it. Thus the relevancy of erotic mysticism stands self-explained. The best proof in this matter is the high place that Kalidasa's poetry occupies to the present day.

6. Was Sankara interested in Yoga Sastra (the science of yoga) also?

7. If not, why does he take the trouble of describing the various details of Chakras (synergic centres) as seen in the verses of this text?

Yoga properly pertains to a dualistic school called Samkhya. When revised in the light of Advaita Vedanta, the abstractions and generalisations of the various stable syndromes and synergisms proper to the dynamism of Yoga discipline refuse to resemble other texts on Yoga such as "Kheranda Samhita", "Hathayoga Pradipika" or even the "Astanga Yoga" of Pantanjali. Thus it is that Sankara's treatment of Yoga seems different from other Yoga disciplines. He merely restates it in a more respectable form acceptable to an Advaita Vedantin. The "Vyasa Bhasya" and "Bhoja Thika" applied to Patanjali Yoga, are supposed to effect the same corrections and revaluations. Careful scrutiny of the Shakta Upanishads and the Yoga Upanishads will clarify any further doubt that might linger in the minds of keen and critical students in respect of the purport of these verses.

8. If non-duality is the teaching of Sankara, how is it that he postulates Shiva and Shakti as two distinct factors, principles or entities?

In the Samkhya philosophy there are the concepts of prakrti and purusa, the former being not imbued with intelligence, while the latter is the fully intelligent principle. Thus we find a heterogeneity between the two categories, which it is the purpose of the revised epistemology and methodology of Advaita to abolish effectively. Shiva and Shakti, as meant to be united in the present work, are to be understood as belonging together to the same neutral epistemological grade of the non-dual Absolute. They must lose their distinctness and, when generalised and abstracted to the culminating point, they could be treated as two perimeters or parameters to be cancelled out by their mutual intersection or participation. One has a vertical reference and the other a horizontal reference, while both exist at the core of the Absolute. When abstraction and generalisation are thus pushed together to their utmost limit, the paradox is transcended or dissolved into the unity of one and the same Absolute Value which is here referred to as Beauty or Bliss. Thus duality, accepted only for methodological purposes, is to be abolished at each step by unitive understanding.

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9. Is Sankara a religious man at all?

To this question, an unequivocal answer is to be found in the last verses of the series It is not difficult to see that Sankara's Advaita transcends all ideas of holiness or ritualistic merits altogether. He seems clearly to wash his hands of any such derogatory blemish.

The very beginning of the "Vivekucadamani" of Sankara contains other similar unmistakable indications which tend to show that sacred and holy religious values are repugnant and altogether outside the scope of the uncompromising spirit of Advaita that he has always represented.

10. How far are the verses compatible with the doctrines developed in his other works?

Sankara's other works, such as his great bhasyas (commentaries), are conceived on the basis of demolishing polemically a series of purvapaksins (sceptics) taken in graded and methodical order, in favour of a posteriorly finalized position called siddhanta. A careful scrutiny of each of the verses here will reveal that the same finalized doctrines are enshrined and clearly presented in almost every one of them, though clothed in a realistically non-verbal and visualizable form based on the value of beauty that could be experienced by anyone, whether they are a learned philosopher or not. Just to give one example, we could say that the second verse corresponds to the second sutra of the Brahmasutras, where creation, preservation and resolution form the subject matter, as phenomenal aspects born out of the same Absolute. Examples could be multiplied indefinitely.

11. Did his followers give any importance to this work so as to adopt its teaching in any way in their lives as inmates of various ashrams in which they practised their spiritual disciplines?

It is well known that almost all the existing ashrams or maths claiming allegiance to the teaching of Sankaracarya, such as that of Sringeri or Conjivaram, still speak in terms of worshipping a Wisdom Goddess, such as found in the Sarada Pith. The tradition started by Sankara is tacitly or overtly adhered to by his followers, although the critical understanding in respect of such worship still remains questionable with most of them.

12. Why does he employ a Puranic (legendary) and mythological language here? Letters of the Greek alphabet are advantageously used in scientific language. The large quantity of Puranic literature found in Hinduism affords a veritable never-expended mine from which an intelligent philosopher like Sankara could derive monomarks and divinities which could serve the same purpose as the Greek letters in the language of mathematics.

Thus, he merely uses them as the available linguistic elements derived from mythology instead of from mathematics as modern scientists would do.

15

From the Upanishads through Kalidasa's poems, such as the "Shyamala Dandakam" and his various larger poems such as the "Kumarasambhava", there is to be discerned a definite lingua mystica using its own clichés and ideograms through the centuries down to our own time. After Kalidasa, Sankara used it most effectively, and it was given to Narayana Guru to be the continuator of the same tradition in modern times.

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GENERALITIES

It is a hard task to give a real or tangible content to the notion of the Absolute. All disciplines, whether cosmological, theological or psychological, imply a notion of the Absolute without which, at least as a reference, all philosophy or science tends to become incoherent, purposeless and inconsequential. Ethical, aesthetic or even economic values also require a normative regulating principle, which can be no other than the Absolute, presupposed tacitly or overtly for ordering and regulating these disciplines. Over-specialisation of science leads to compartmentalisation of branches of knowledge, each tending thus to be a domain proper only to an expert or specialist. The integration of all knowledge is beginning to be recognized as important for the progress of human thought at the present moment.


There is a hoary tradition in India which refers to a Science of the Absolute, which is called
Brahmavidya. It belongs to the context of Vedanta, which has attracted the attention of modern scientists in the West, such as Erwin Schrödinger and others. There is at present a large body of thinkers which believes that a rapprochement between physical science and metaphysics - which is independent of the senses - is possible, and that a Unified Science can thus be ushered into existence.

Attempts have been made along these lines, especially in Vienna, Paris, Chicago and Princeton. What is called the philosophy of science and the science of philosophy could be put together into the science of all sciences, in which many leading thinkers are interested. It is the central normative notion of the Absolute wherein lies the basis of any such possible integration. To give precise content to the Absolute is therefore an important problem engaging the attention of all thinking persons. The new physics of the West is tending to become more and more mathematical and theoretical.

17

What is equally interesting is that Eastern disciplines, such as Zen Buddhism, Yoga and Vedanta hold at present a new interest for the western scientist.

The present work is meant to insert itself in between these two trends in modern thought. The large number of people now breaking away from conventional standards and patterns of behaviour, both in the East as well as in the West, not to speak of the polarity between northern and southern temperaments, are now trying to discover themselves anew. Humanity has to find its own proper bearings and gather up loose ends from time to time as "civilisation" takes forward steps. We are now caught in the throes of just such an agonising process. New horizons and more extensive frontiers have to be included within a vision of the world of tomorrow. Myths have to be revised and new idioms discovered, so that fact and fable can tally to verify each other and life can be more intelligent, consequential and consistent.

An integrated or unified science must fulfil the functions hitherto seen as proper only to religion or to metaphysical speculation. Educated people are called upon to take a position more intelligent than hitherto vis-à-vis the great quantity of discoveries being made in both inner and outer space.

This notion of inner space brings us to just that new factor which has recently entered the creative imagination of the present generation. Thermodynamics, electromagnetics, cybernetics semantics and logistics, aided by newer and newer mathematics, are bringing into view vistas unfamiliar hitherto, in which the student feels more at home than the professional teacher whose main interest is often merely to keep his job or shape his career.

The best of the students and the most original of the young professors feel that there is a widening gap between their own ambitions or legitimate urges and the prevailing standards, and have reason to complain that they are often obstructed in the name of out-dated precedents or rules. Co-education has abolished much of the distance between the sexes. Girls need no chaperones, and the university undergraduate does not have to live up to any Victorian form of respectability or even to the chivalry of days gone by.

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Adam prefers to keep the forbidden fruit in his hand, and naturally begins to treat the earth as a planet over which he must pass freely. Linguistic or racial frontiers as well as dinner jackets and wine glasses are being left behind in favour of more individualistic patterns of dress or group conduct. Parisian fashions do not impress youth any more, and mind-expanding drugs are beginning to replace those other poisons like champagne that induce merely a feeling of lazy comfort. Public standards are floundering because of this accentuation of inner space, which is holding out new interests to allure the imagination of adolescents.

INNER SPACE AND STRUCTURALISM

LSD and allied drugs, which have what they call a mind-expanding effect, have opened up a new world that could be called pagan as opposed to prophetic. Sensuousness is no sin to Bacchus, while to Jeremiah, prostitutes and idolatry and all the existential values belonging to animism and hylozoism are highly repugnant.


The golden calf had to be replaced by the table of commandments that Moses and Aaron held up before their chosen followers. The waters of the Ganges are sacred to the Shiva-worshippers of India, and this is why they are spat upon as idolaters and infidels, fit to be trampled by the elephants of the emperor Aurangzeb.


As between the logos of the Platonic world of the intelligibles and the nous of the pre-Socratic Eleatics, two rival philosophies emerge in modern times, giving superiority to existence over essence or vice versa.


Psychedelics reveal a new vision of the negative aspect of consciousness where what is called the subconscious and all its contents become magnified and revealed to inner experience.


There are thus at present two rival minds to deal with: one that is interested primarily in percepts, and the other in concepts. Both of these have to be accommodated together in an integrated picture of absolute consciousness. A lopsided vision can spell nuisible consequences.


It is this discovery of inner space that is upsetting and disrupting the scheme of values of the individualistic dropouts of the present day. Values do not all hang together with reference to the same point anymore, and the double or multiple standards thus emerging must necessarily confuse people in the domain of ethics, aesthetics and economics, not to mention those of education and religion or spirituality.


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Values, both positive and negative, have to be fitted into a fourfold structure, the limbs of which could be summarily indicated in advance as representing the conceptual, the perceptual, the actual and the virtual. This fourfold structure has been known to poets in the West since the time of Milton, and in India since the time of Kalidasa. The lingua mystica of every part of the world seems to have had this mathematical secret hiding within its semantic or semiotic structuralism - sometimes referred to as "semantic polyvalence".


The Upanishads contain many passages that reveal unequivocally the fourfold structure mentioned so directly in the Mandukya Upanishad, which states ayam atma catuspad, (this Self is four-limbed). The schematismus of Kant and structuralism as understood by post-Einsteinian scientists like Eddington, have brought this notion once again to the forefront, and it is offered as a kind of challenge for modern man to accept or reject. Bergson, while remaining essentially an instrumentalist, is also most certainly a structuralist, as is evident to anyone making a careful scrutiny of the following paragraphs:


"But it is a far cry from such examples of equilibrium, arrived at mechanically and invariably unstable, like that of the scales held by the justice of yore, to a justice such as ours, the justice of the rights of man, which no longer evokes ideas of relativity and proportion, but, on the contrary, of the incommensurable and the absolute."


(H. Bergson, "The Two Sources of Morality and Religion", Doubleday,1954, P74)


"Across time and space which we have always known to be separate, and for that very reason, structureless, we shall see, as through a transparency, an articulated space-time structure. The mathematical notation of these articulations, carried out upon the virtual, and brought to its highest level of generality, will give us an unexpected grip on the real. We shall have a powerful means of investigation at hand; a principle of research, which, we can predict, will no henceforth be renounced by the mind of man, even if experiment should impose a new form upon the theory of relativity."


(H.Bergson, "Duration and Simultaneity", Bobbs-Merrill & Co.,1965, P150)


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SANKARA'S "SAUNDARYA LAHARI"

Sankara's "Saundarya Lahari", when examined verse by verse, reveals many enigmas which come to light only when a structural analysis is applied to each of them. Otherwise it remains a closed book to punditry which has beaten its wings in vain trying to make the great poet-philosopher's words have even a mere semblance of coherent meaning.


The "Saundarya Lahari" (The Upsurging Billow of Beauty), together with Sankara's other century of verse called "Shivananda Lahari", treats, we could say, of the same absolute value from perspectives tilted 180 degrees from each other. The mythological elements that enter into the fabric of this composition and its large array of Hindu gods and goddesses, are pressed into service by Sankara to give a precise philosophical context to the supreme value called Absolute Beauty, the subject-matter of these verses. This same subject can be looked at in the more positive or modern light of a structural and mathematical language where geometric or algebraic signs and symbols can verify a formula. This is the basis of the protolinguistic approach that we have adopted in conceiving this work.


Line, light or colour, also biological, crystalline or radiated structures, can all be made to speak a non-verbal language with at least as much precision as in the case of essentially verbose commentaries, such as those of Sankara himself. How successfully this series of verses can be treated as a sequence of visions is a matter that the success of the present work alone must prove hereafter.


Meanwhile, it is not wrong to state that modern technical discoveries, such as the stroboscope, laser holograms and computer graphics , animation and devices such as collage, montage, mixing , merging and filtering of colours, could together open up a new age for visual education as well as entertainment through the most popular medium of modern times: the film.


Large and verbose treatments of such subjects are likely to go into cold storage in the future, because the output of printed matter is too much for the busy person of the present to cope with. This work is meant, as we have just indicated, to be educational as well as entertaining. Its appeal is not therefore primarily to box-office patrons who might wish to pass an easy or comfortable evening of relaxation after a hard day's work; but to a more elite audience which wishes to learn while looking for visual enjoyment. There are thus many features that are not conventional in the film world which have to be taken into account even now by the reader, anticipating its fuller film version.


The first 41 verses of the "Saundarya Lahari" are distinguishable by their content as pertaining to the world of inner Yoga. Mandalas, Chakras, Yantras, Mantras and Tantras, representing stable psychic states or experiences of the Yogi, figure here to the exclusion of beauty as seen objectively outside. Global perspectives of objective beauty are presented in the latter section of the "Saundarya Lahari", this name being more directly applicable to Verses 42 - 100 inclusive.


As against this second part of the work, we have the first 41 verses which are distinguishable by the name "Ananda Lahari", Ananda (bliss) being a factor experienced within, rather than from any outer vision. "Saundarya Lahari" as the title of the total work of one hundred verses is justified in spite of this inner division, because it is still the absolute value of Beauty, upsurging or overwhelming in its wholesale appeal, which is the subjective or objective value-content of this entire work of Sankara's. This is a value which humankind needs to be able to give tangible content to the otherwise empty notion of the Absolute.


Sankara is well known in the context of Advaita Vedanta for his great bhasyas (commentaries) on the three canonical texts of Vedanta: the Upanishads, the Brahma Sutras and the Bhagavad Gita. Although some scholars still doubt the authorship of the present sequence of verses and tend to attribute it to others than Sankara, anyone familiar with the doctrinal delicacies and particularities of the Advaita that Sankara has always stood for, cannot for one moment doubt the hallmark that has always unequivocally distinguished his philosophy .


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The internal evidence available from almost every verse in this text, as well as in the "Shivananda Lahari", can, in our opinion at least, leave no doubt about Sankara's authorship of these two exceedingly interesting and intelligent works. Moreover, Sankara is unmistakably the correct continuator of the Vedic or Upanishadic tradition that has come down to us through the works of Kalidasa to the present day.


There is an unmistakable family resemblance here which, when viewed in its proper vertical hierarchical perspective, exists between ideograms, imagery and other peculiarities of the mystical language. One can recognise this masterpiece as representing the best of the heritage of the ancient wisdom of India preserved through the ages, and of which Sankara is one of the more modern continuators.


SANKARA AS A DIALECTICAL REVALUATOR
Sankara is a great dialectical revaluator of all aspects of ancient Indian wisdom. Nothing of Sanskritic cultural importance has been lost sight of by him, including factors of semantic, logistic or merely ritualistic (Tantric) importance. Sankara's authorship of these hundred verses need not be doubted if only for the final reason that we cannot think of any other poet-philosopher or critic attaining to the high quality of this work and its sister-work, the "Shivananda Lahari".


The history of religion is nothing other than the history of dialectical revaluations of prior positions in terms of posterior doctrines. These two positions could be treated as complementary to each other. In the Biblical context, this same transition from the old to the new, as from the Mosaic Law to the Law of Jesus, is invariably marked with the words: "You have heard it said, but verily, verily I say unto you". It is not unreasonable to think that Sankara here takes up what until then was known as esoterics such as Tantra, Yantra and Mantra, especially in the Kaula and Samaya traditions, both of Bengal and of South India, and subjects them to his own critical and dialectical revaluation.


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Sankara restates those esoteric doctrines in a fully exoteric form, in keeping, above all, with his own avowed position as an Advaita Vedantin. This view must suffice to show that all those who hitherto treated the "Saundarya Lahari" as some kind of text belonging to the Shaktya mother-worship cult, would be guilty of a great inconsistency which they could not themselves explain, in thinking that an avowed Advaita Vedantin could ever write a text that did not support his own philosophy. It is strange that even Sir John Woodroffe, who treats of the "Saundarya Lahari", tends to belong to this category. Professor Norman Brown of Harvard has the same misgivings as revealed in the very subtitle of his work where the authorship is dubiously stated as "attributed to Sankara".


Modern man is interested both in post-Einsteinian physics, as well as in the discipline of Yoga. Zen Buddhism opens up a world in which both meditation and contemplative experience from within the self have an important place. The Upanishads and Vedanta too, are based on inner as well as outer experiences proper to the contemplative. When we write of inner experiences, we are in reality referring to the mystical experiences of the yogi within himself.


THE NATURE OF THE TEXT
The Saundarya Lahari consists of a sequence of one hundred verses of Sanskrit poetry written in a heavy and dignified metrical form. The syntax and inflections of Sanskrit are especially suited to the use of highly figurative language, and there are often layers of more and more profound suggestions as one meaning gives place to others implied below or above it, in ascending or descending semiotic series.


We are here in the domain where meanings have their own meanings hidden behind each other, and the mind sinks backward or progresses forward, upward or downward, within the world of poetic imagination or expression. A sort of meditation and free fancy are presupposed in compositions of this kind, heavy-laden with suggestibility or auto-suggestibility. There is always a subjectivity, a selectivity and a structuralism implied.


The conventional film world treats of a series of horizontal events that the camera can register in a fluid or living form. Every day new techniques are being developed, bringing into play more of what is called "inner space".


The present work is an attempt to follow up these new trends so that the film projected on the basis of this work could be the means for modern knowledge of a new and unified variety to be put across from the side of the savant to the so-called man on the street. While relating outer space with inner space, we also necessarily bring together East and West, besides unifying science and metaphysics.


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FURTHER IMPLICATIONS OF STRUCTURAL LANGUAGE
With reference to this work, it is necessary to clarify the implications of what we call structural analysis.


Poetry has the primary function of being pleasing or beautiful. Literary critics in the West tend to condemn metaphysical or moralistic poetry as inferior to pure poetry where enjoyability is the only desirable quality. In the world of Sanskrit literature, however, mysticism and the wisdom that goes with it have never been divorced from the function of poetic art. Aesthetics, ethics and even economics can legitimately blend together into a pleasing confection that can console or satisfy the love of bliss or joy that good poetry can give, without the compartmentalisation of such branches into separate disciplines of literature. Moralist maxims such as found in Aesop's Fables or in Alexander Pope's writings have been condemned by critics in the West as being didactic in character and thus detracting from the pure function of poetry as such. We do not look for morals or precepts any more; much less do we expect, according to western norms of literary criticism, to learn metaphysical truths from poems. We feel that poetry must necessarily suffer because didactic tendencies can never be reconciled with the proper function of poetry, which is mainly lyrical or just pleasing. Metaphysical poetry in the West tends to be artificial or forced. The Upanishadic tradition has, however, quite a different history. It has always had the serious purpose of revealing the Truth through its analogies and figures of speech. The one Absolute Value that wise people have always sought has been the single purpose of the innocent, transparent and detached way of high thinking exhibited through the simple lives of the Upanishadic rishis (sages).


The degree of certitude that they possessed about this value content of the Absolute reached a very high point in their pure contemplative literature. They had no private axes to grind. Thus, the wisdom that refers to all significant life interests taken as a whole entered into the varied texture of these mystical and mathematically precise writings. Poetry and science were treated unitively here, as perhaps nowhere else in the world's literature, with a few exceptions perhaps as attempted in Dante's "Divine Comedy", Milton's "Paradise Lost", or Goethe's "Faust". The Upanishadic tradition has been compared to the Himalayas as the high source of the three great rivers of India; the Indus, the Ganges and the Brahmaputra.


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Like the Nile for the Egyptians, the snowy peak of Gaurisankara and the waters of the Ganges have provided idioms, ideograms analogies and figures of speech that have perennially nourished Sanskrit literature. Without the Himalayas and the figurative language in which the family of Shiva is represented, living on Mount Kailasa, Kalidasa's poetry would be reduced to some kind of insipid babble. Shiva is the positive principle of which the Himalayas are the negative counterpart. Parvati is sitting on his lap and his twin children represent between them the striking ambivalence of personal types. The white bull, Nandi, the good and faithful servant and vehicle to the principle which Shiva represents, reclines nearby. This family can be seen by any imaginative or intuitive person to be a replica of the grand scene of the Himalayas as revised and raised to the dignity of divinity. When an absolutist touch is added to this implied quaternion structure of a Shiva family, with the bull representing the foothills of the central mass and the peak structurally recognisable as dominating the total content of the Absolute, we come to have a close and correct perspective by which we may examine this century of verses.


Each verse leaps into meaning only when the underlying structural features are revealed and brought into view; otherwise these hundred verses remain as they have remained through the thousand years or more of their history; a challenge to vain pedantry or punditry.


In other words, structuralism is the key that can make this work understandable, a scientifically valid work with a fresh appeal to all advanced modern thinking persons of East or West. It will be our task within the scope of the work itself to introduce the reader, as occasion permits, to further implications and intricacies of this structural approach, which perhaps is the one feature on which rests the value and success of this work.


Theology permits man to say that he is created in the image of God. This is only a polite way of stating that "The Kingdom of God is within you" or "The Word was with God and the Word was God". The bolder Vedantic tradition, however, asserts the same verity when it says: "Thou art That" or "I am Brahman" ( I am the Absolute).


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A subtle equation is implied here between the relativistic perspective of the content of Brahman and the more conceptual or Absolutist aspect of the pure notion itself, so that the word "Absolute" could have a tangible content. Such a content cannot be other than a high value because without value it cannot be significant or purposeful in terms of human life. When Keats says "A thing of beauty is a joy forever", we recognise a similar Platonic thought repeated on English soil after the European Renaissance. To treat of Absolute Beauty as the content of the Absolute is fully normal to Vedantic or Advaitic thought, and what is existent (sat) and subsistent (cit) must both be covered in their turn by ananda (bliss or value factor), which in turn could be easily equated to the high value of absolute Beauty. Thus we see unmistakably the sequence of reasoning justifying the title of the "Saundarya Lahari". It becomes not only justified but lifted above all lower ritualistic or Tantric contexts to the pure and exalted philosophical domain of a fully Advaitic text, in keeping with the dignity of a scientific philosopher like Sankara . The pure and the practical, the noumenal and the phenomenal, the absolute and the relative, the transcendental and the immanent, res cogitans and res extensa, and all such other conjugates whether in philosophy or science, could only refer to what is distinguished in Vedanta as para and apara Brahman. Different schools might have differing terms for the same two intersecting parameters which they have as their common reference.

Each of the hundred verses with which we are concerned here, when scrutinised in the light of the structuralism that we have just alluded to, as also in the light of the equation implied in the para and apara (i.e. the vertical and the horizontal) aspects of the same Absolute, will bring to view as far as possible in non-verbose language, the content of the Absolute seen from the negative perspective of Absolute Beauty as viewed sub specie aeternitatis. Thus a book that has remained closed to punditry all these years will come to have a significant and practical bearing even on our modern life.


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YANTRA, MANTRA AND TANTRA
The word "Tantra" has to be understood with its other associated terms, which belong together to a certain type of esoterics found in India, independently of formulated philosophical systems or doctrines. Just as the bed of a river contains some precious deposits mixed with its sand at the bottom, cultures that have flowed down the ages over valleys or plains such as that of the Ganges or the Nile have often deposited rich sediments of esoteric wisdom value.


The Hermetics, the Kabala and the Tarot represent such deposits near the Mediterranean cities of antiquity. As in the case of the "I Ching" of China, fortune telling and astrology have their own vague contributions to add to this body of esoteric wisdom found in different parts of the globe. To change esoterics and present it in a more critically revised form as exoterics is impossible without a normative reference. Tantra, Yantra and Mantra are three of the fundamental notions connected with a certain type of esoterics found particularly in Tibet and also in India along the Malabar Coast and Bengal. The central idea of Mother-Worship and erotic mysticism has nourished this school of thought known as the Shakti Cult, and kept it alive through the ages without being subjected to the corrections of either Vedism or proto-Aryan Shaivite philosophy.


Thaumaturgists made use of the vague twilight, full of secret mystery, in which its teachings flourished - mainly in basements and cellars hidden under old temples and shrines - to participate in certain kinds of orgies where wine, women and flesh-eating figured to support a pattern of behaviour known as vamachara ( a left-handed way of life) which the more learned Brahmins would not recognise. These practitioners went under the general name of Shaktyas, which came to include two sections, the more ancient and cruder section being called Kaulins, and the other branch which received at least some recognition from the Vedic priesthood, being called Samayins. These schools indulge in exorcising evil spirits and in correcting psychological maladjustments by preparing amulets or talismans, the word for which in Sanskrit is yantra. It often consists of a scroll of thin metal, which is tied around the neck. Because of the lucrative value of such a profession, priestcraft, as anywhere in the world, gave this school its patronage, allowing it to persist on the Indian soil for ages, independent of the prevailing religious authority at any given time in history. The Yantras invariably contain geometric figures with magic letters marking angles, points, lines or circles.


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The letters would correspond to the notion of mantra, which depends on a symbolic chant or incantation. The figures themselves are attempted protolinguistic representations of the same mystery, the technique of which is to be distinguished as Tantra. It is thus that the terms Yantra, Mantra and Tantra belong together to a certain form of esoteric mystery still attracting the attention of many people, both intelligent and commonplace, where mysteries naturally thrive on a sort of vague twilight background of human thought.


Since Sankara was a Guru who wanted to revise dialectically the whole range of the spirituality of his time and restate it in a proper critically revised form he did not overlook the claim of this particular form of esoterics. He wanted to salvage whatever was precious in it and bring it into line with the Upanishadic tradition. He had himself the model of the great Kalidasa, whose writings, as his very name suggests, belonged to the same context of Mother-worship. Although Kalidasa's works have largely become a closed book to even the best pundits of present-day India, it is still possible to see through a structural analysis of his works the common lineage between Sankara and his forerunner Kalidasa and thus take our mind backwards to the great source of wisdom contained in the Upanishads.


Speculation scaled very high in India at the time of the Upanishads, which centred around one main notion - the Absolute (Brahman). The structural implications of the Absolute found in the mystical language of the Upanishads has served as a reference and nourished subsequent thought down to our own times. In the light of the structuralism that has come into modern thought through the back door of science, as it were, and through the precise disciplines of mathematics going hand in hand with the progress of experimental scientific findings, it now becomes possible to see these ancient writings as consistent with a fully scientific modern outlook. It is this discovery, if we may call it so, that encourages us to present the "Saundarya Lahari" through the visual language of film or video.


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THE MEANING OF "LAHARI"
The title of this century of verses itself underlines its unique characteristic. Each verse when properly understood will be seen to contain two distinct sets of value counterparts. If one of them can be called "physical", the other could be called "metaphysical". When they cancel out against each other through a complementarity, compensation or reciprocity which could be recognized as implied between these two counterparts, the resultant is always the upsurge of an experience which could come from either the inner or the outer pole of the total absolute self.


This resultant could even be called a constant, and thus an absolute belonging to a particular discipline and department of life. To give a familiar example, when heat and cold cancel out climatic conditions can yield the possible absolute constant of that particular context. When heavenly values and earthly values cancel out by a complementarity, alternation or split-second cancellation, we can also experience another kind of beauty, bliss or high value factor. When viewed in its proper absolutist perspective, such a constant amounts to attaining the Absolute. Such an attainment of the Absolute would be tantamount to the merging of the Self with the Absolute in Upanishadic parlance, and even to becoming the Absolute itself.


Sankara has named his work a "Lahari", which suggests an upsurging or overwhelming billow of beauty experienced at the neutral meeting point of the inner sense of beauty with its outer counterpart. We always have to conceive the whole subject-matter in its four-fold polyvalence to be able to experience this overwhelming joy or bliss, to produce which, each word, phrase or image of these verses consistently strives in its attempt to give a high value content to the Absolute. There is no mistaking that the present work is perfectly in keeping with the same Advaitic doctrine that Sankara has laboriously stood for in all his other writings.


Cancellation of counterparts is therefore one of the main features of this work. It is neither a god nor a goddess that is given unilateral importance here. It is an absolute neutral or normative value emerging from the cancellation or neutralisation of two factors, named Shiva and Shakti respectively, that is noticeable consistently throughout this composition. If Shiva is the vertical reference, Shakti is the horizontal referent.


Understood in the light of each other, the non-dual in the form of beauty becomes experienced.


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Next to the principle of the quaternion referred to above, there are two parameters of reference, the vertical and the horizontal, which have to be clearly distinguished within the structure of the Absolute, which latter would otherwise be merely conceptual or empty of content. The phenomenal and the noumenal have to verify each other for the absolute value to emerge into view. It is the absolutist character of the value of beauty as understood here that justifies Sankara's use of the term "Lahari".


THE ALPHABET OF THE WORLD OF BEAUTY
All philosophy consists of generalisation and abstraction in order to give meaning to the Absolute. This meaning must have human value significance. "Beauty" or "Bliss" is the final term of speculation bringing us to the very door which opens onto the Absolute. Thus, there is the world of beauty in aesthetics just as there is the world of discourse to which logic belongs, or the world of calculables of mathematics . Mathematics has its elements which can be algebraic or geometric in status.


Similarly linguistics can use either signs or symbols. A red light is a signal or sign, while the word "stop" is a symbol, but both of these have the same meaning. In the same sense, percepts meet concepts and cancel out into one value factor. Beauty can be analysed structurally to reveal its relational aspects, i.e., through geometric figures it could be given monomarks which might belong to any alphabet. The world of beauty has its alphabets or its lines or angles. It is in this sense that for the Pythagoreans the numerological triangle called the tetraktys became a divine symbol still worshipped in their temples. The alphabets understood as belonging to metalanguage and geometrical elements such as angles, points, lines or concentric circles can be used protolinguistically to reveal the content of the Absolute in universally concrete terms. This is the truth that Kant mentions in one of the footnotes in his work on pure reason by which he means to state that schematismus can verify philosophical categories and vice-versa. Thus corrected both ways, in a back-to-back structural relationship contained within the paradox of the two parameters (vertical and horizontal) these could verify between them various algebraic formulae. Thus we have in our hands a rare instrument of research, about which Bergson writes in the quotation already cited on pages 19 and 20.


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What we are concerned with is not only the alphabet of the world of beauty, which belongs to the metalinguistic or conceptual side, but also with its schematic counterpart, which is of a more perceptual order. If the alphabet of the world of beauty, as monomarks or letters which are essentially symbolic in status, is metalinguistic; elements not of algebra but of geometry, such as the triangle, the circle, the line or the point, together with the vertical core, will be protolinguistic, and will be able to give a dynamism to the total static structure.


The various limits within which the structure lives could be named algebraically by letters of the alphabet as monomarks. Thus, elements of the world of beauty could belong together to the context of absolute Beauty, conceived neutrally or normatively. We arrive in this manner not only at alphabets, but at elements about which we will speak in the next section. It could be said that the alphabets themselves have a taxonomic value, helping us to name and recognise unitive factors in the context of absolute Beauty. Further implications of such an alphabet of the world of beauty will become evident when we treat of the actual verses of the present work in their proper places, such as in Verse 32. There letters are linked with elements so as to verify each other and lead us to the certitude about the content of Beauty which the interaction of these verses reveals, and which justifies the use of this kind of double-sided language of signs as well as symbols. All alphabets, however analytically understood, have still to be held together at the core of consciousness, as they are in the esoterics dealt with here, by the unifying letter hri which is the first letter of the word for "heart" in Sanskrit. However varied the alphabets might be, they have to have the heart at the core of consciousness to hold them together like the spokes of a wheel.


Thus structuralism and its own nomenclature belong together. While watching the kind of film proposed here, one would have to be familiar both with alphabets of beauty as well as with elements of Beauty, each from its own side of the total situation. Alphabets could be as many as contained in any language and could include vowels as well as consonants. Each letter could be made to represent a certain characteristic, forming a component unit or part of the total content of the Absolute. The rays radiating from a certain point of light could thus have a letter attributed to them for purposes of recognition or nomenclature. Thus, these letters belong to the Mantra aspect, while the Yantra aspect is the structure itself.


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The savoir faire or "know-how" aspect of imparting the knowledge about beauty could be called the Tantra aspect of the same. Thus Tantra, Yantra and Mantra belong together and verify one another to make this experience of beauty surge up within one's consciousness with an overwhelming force. A sense of beauty overpowers that person who is able to enter into the meaning of each verse both analytically and synthetically at one and the same time.


ELEMENTS OF THE PERCEPTUAL COMPONENTS OF THE WORLD OF BEAUTY
Crystal-clear gems, when they reflect, refract or diffract light, represent beauty in the most evident sense. They have angles, points, lines and colours, and they make various beautiful combinations. Next to gem-beauty comes flower-beauty. The lotus has been the flower dear to the heart of the contemplative Indian mind throughout the ages. Thus God is praised as having lotus feet, lotus eyes, a lotus mouth, a lotus in the heart and at the various psycho-physical centres called Chakras or Adharas. When structural features belonging to the biological world are abstracted and generalised, we enter the three-dimensional world of conics. Conic sections can be related at various levels to a vertical parameter running through the base of two cones, placed base to base. The triangle is only a particular two-dimensional instance comprised within the solid geometry of conics. The apex of each triangle could be inverted and a series of interpenetrating triangles could be placed within the cones for purposes of structurally analysing the total relation-relata complex in the light of which we are to examine the beauty contained in the Absolute.


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A vertical symmetry and a horizontal symmetry, the former with a complementarity, the latter with a parity, could be included within the total possible structural perceptual patterns that emerge to view. Parity could imply a right-handed and a left-handed spin, twist or mirror asymmetry, and complementarity could imply ambivalence, reciprocity or compensation of various intensities.


The vertical axis is purely mathematical or logical in status in which degrees of contradiction could be admitted. Time can absorb space and space time; this dynamism which is at the basis of modern physics and the very essence of Cartesianism is to be kept in mind here by us.


To use our own terminology, there is always to be attributed a polarity, an ambivalence, a reciprocity, a compensatory principle, a complementarity and finally a cancellability between the limbs of the quaternion structure here postulated.


At its core there is a vertical back-to-back relation and horizontally there is what might be called a belly-to-belly relation. The latter admits contradiction and is the basis of all conflict in life. Vertically, however, all shocks and stresses are absorbed and abolished by mutual cancellation at whatever level of this two-sided parameter. There is a dialectical descent and ascent between the positive and negative poles of the total situation.


Structure has thus to be conceived statically first, and then to have its own proper dynamism introduced or attributed to it so that we get a global view of all the perceptual component factors that make up the total picture in which the high value called beauty is to be examined by us in each of the hundred verses. There are subtler factors which enter into the dynamism which we cannot enumerate exhaustively here. They will enter into our interest normally as we focus our attention on the representations implied in each verse.


A flashlight held in our hand when walking through misty darkness can only light a circle within our visible area at a given time, although mist and darkness are not limited to what we can see. Contemplative minds, especially as understood in the logic-tradition of India, thus justifiably think in terms of circular or global units of consciousness placed in a vertical series beginning from the bottom pole of the vertical axis and ending at the top pole. Although its physiological position may not correspond to psychological units in terms of consciousness, the vertebral column with a central strand of nervous energy called susumna nadi, together with two other psycho-physical strands, at the left and right respectively, called ida and pingala, are generally taken for granted in yogic literature. If we now imagine six zones of consciousness ranging from bottom to top, we get the Adharas or Chakras, sometimes described and elaborated in detail by geometrical and biological analogies such as triangles and coloured petals in Yoga books.


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There are various schools of Yoga, the most important one being that of Patanjali, which uses eight such centres. In the present work, however, we find six centres prominently mentioned, each representing a point where horizontal and vertical factors cancel out to reveal a stable neutral or normal aspect of the Absolute proper to that particular level. The ambivalent factors always cancel out to reveal the same constant Absolute, however varied the pictorial content of the beauty to be appreciated might happen to be. The Tarot cards consist of pictorial representations supposed to represent the alphabet of a kind of mysterious schematism of thought. Yoga books also indulge in a similar pictorial language, but on Indian soil such pictures are mostly nourished by the mythology or analogies proper to the long Vedic or Sanskrit tradition. This is to be treated as only incidental by modern persons who can understand the same without mythology through a revised protolanguage such as that which we adopt and recommend here. The various gods of the Hindu pantheon happen to be themselves structural or functional components to be fitted together, giving us a content for the totality called Absolute Value which is always the object of any speculation, independent of time or clime. Sankara can be seen to have taken full advantage of the implications of this mythological language, not because he is religious himself, but because it lends itself admirably to the problem of giving beauty-content and full significance to the otherwise empty notion of the Absolute.


We shall try in the preliminary part of the projected Saundarya Lahari film to present certain of the mythological components used by Sankara, together with their proper background. In this way, the modern filmgoer, especially outside India, may be helped to see how the mythological language, together with a strict protolinguistic structuralism and the dynamism proper to it helps us to experience the essence of Absolute Beauty which is overwhelming in its total appeal.


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A WORD ABOUT THE BINDUSTHANA, OR LOCUS OF PARTICIPATION
The first 41 verses of the Saundarya Lahari presupposed a contemplative yogi, seated with eyes shut, representing an introspective withdrawal into the world of inner consciousness. The objective or positive side of consciousness in relation to the self will be the "object matter" proper to the rest of the composition. When a person meditates properly, his mind attains one-pointedness. This very term presupposes a point, not necessarily on a blackboard, but at a locus within one's self, which is referred to in Tantric literature as bindusthana. This focal point is where the global drop or essence of existence resides. When we think of a drop-like bindu, we could think of it as being made of an Absolute Substance, described also by Spinoza as a "thinking substance". We could visualise the same Absolute Substance with its own vertical reference when we add to it the dimension of res cogitans as used by Descartes. This vertical element is often referred to in Yogic or Tantric literature as nada, the essence of sound. Nada and bindu participate vertico-horizontally in terms of a thinking substance known as nadabindu, which is supposed to be the ontological starting point - the source or place of origin and dissolution - of all that comes to be or become in the mental or material world.


It is usual in contemplative Sanskrit literature to refer to nadabindu in terms of the tender lotus feet of the god or goddess. Only the tenderest part of our mind can participate with an equally tender part of that which we meditate upon, because any participation between subject and object, even in meditation, has to presuppose the principle of homogeneity, which is called samana adhikaranatva. The soldering together of two metals presupposes this principle; the base metal and the noble metal can be made to participate intimately only when there is an equality of status between them. The tenderest devotion thus meets on equal terms the tender petals of the lotus feet of the god. It is therefore usual to put the two feet of the god that you are meditating upon at the focal point where mind and matter cancel out at the neutral point of the thinking substance. The two feet within a lotus could be placed at any point on the vertical parameter, which is cut at right angles by an implied horizontal forest of lotuses, independent of the bindusthana (locus) of meditation. Thus a vertical series and a horizontal series of lotuses is presupposed for structural purposes in each of these verses. The horizontal dimension is incidental only, whereas the vertical reference is the essential parameter that links essence with existence - existence marking the lower (hierophantic) Alpha Point, and essence marking the highest (hypostatic) Omega Point. The point of intersection represents the normative bindusthana proper, but at whatever positive or negative point in the vertical series the feet of the Adorable One might be placed by the contemplative, there is a value regulated by the central normative lotus which is always the constant reference.


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These are some of the characteristics of the structural language adhered to by classical convention through a tacitly understood lingua mystica, coming down to us from pre-Vedic times through the Upanishads, through Kalidasa and through Sankara. It is impossible for us not to recognise the two sets of lotuses radiating from the central lotus at the bindusthana, as suggested in Verse 21. A justification for all we have said above is found in this verse.


STRUCTURAL DYNAMISM
It is one thing to visualise the alphabets of the elements of structuralism in situ, as it were, and quite another to visualise this structuralism in living or dynamic terms. Yogic meditation is not a static fixation of the attention on objects such as a bindu (central locus), which is mere hypnotism or crystal-gazing. The bindu must be thought of as a target to be reached by the mind, as with a bow fitted with an arrow directed vertically upwards towards the Omega Point. In order for this arrow to have the maximum momentum the bowstring would have to be pulled intently towards the Alpha Point.


The bowstring, when thus pulled, would tend to make its own hyperbolic triangular shape, with an apex pointing toward the base of the lower cone as implied in the suggested static structural figure of two cones placed base to base. The flying arrow reaches the target at the apex of the top cone, while its reciprocal dynamism is implied in the tension of the bowstring trying to attain the limit at the Alpha Point.


The Alpha Point thus has a negative psycho-dynamic content in the form of an introspective or introverted mystical or emotional state of mind, full of tender feelings such as between mother and child, shepherd and sheep, etc. This is the domain of the weeping philosopher and the agony of the mystic.


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The stages marked on the plus side of the vertical axis represent brighter and more intelligent states of the psycho-physical or psycho-somatic self. The coloration tends to be brighter and whiter as the emotional content transforms itself in its ascent by stages into fully emancipated states free from the weight of emotional content . A rich magenta glory might thus be said to be present even to the normative or centralised psychosomatic vision, though this is only subjectively experienced by the Yogi. The arrow flying upwards at right angles with a momentum proportionate to the tension of the horizontal bowstring pulled toward the negative pole of the vertical axis, attains its maximum limit the more it approximates to the Alpha Point, when released with maximum tension. The speed and power of penetration of the arrowhead breaks through all barriers, cancelling out the arithmetic difference that might persist between the arrow and the target.


It is usual to refer to a Chakra as a ganglion or plexus, such as the solar plexus, but psycho-physics properly understood has to reject all partial pictures slanted in favour of physiology and find a point that is correctly and neutrally placed psychosomatically perhaps between mind and matter.


The notion of syndromes and synergisms treated together with different electrical potentiality comes nearer to what is represented by the Chakras, which are not to be thought of partially as either mind or matter, but neutrally, as pertaining to the context of an Absolute Thinking Substance.


Thus there is a cancellation of counterparts along a vertical parameter to be understood with its negative and positive content, but always having a central normative magenta glory for reference. Such are some of the dynamic features of the structuralism which we have to insert correctly into the same context when we have visualised its static structural features. Psycho-statics and psycho-dynamics have thus to belong together when we try to understand the value that each verse reveals. Each of the six or eight positions usually distinguished as Adharas or Chakras is to be looked on as a stable cross-sectional point of equilibrium between counterparts which are always cancellable to normality or neutrality - just as a numerator number of whatever value could be cancelled out against a denominator value of the same set or category, yielding a constant that remains uniform at any position along the vertical parameter. It is always the neutrality of the magenta glory that is revealed when vertical and horizontal factors cancel out within the core of the Absolute. This aspect of subjective psycho-dynamism must be kept in the mind of the spectator, at least in regard to the first 41 verses distinguished as the "Ananda Lahari".


OTHER MISCELLANEOUS IDEOGRAMS
There are many other ideograms besides the bow and arrow which bring into the picture the dynamic aspect of structuralism. We have seen how the lotus flower and the feet figuratively represent ideograms. Now we find a number of secondary ideograms which are consistently used as alphabets or elements or both, within the scope of the lingua mystica which is the language employed in this work.


37


The bee drinking honey from the lotus always implies the bhokta or enjoyer, as the honey implies the side of the bhogya, or enjoyable. There is a subtle dialectical interaction between these two sets of values; one referring to the subjective world, and therefore vertical; the other to the objective world, and therefore horizontal. At the point of separation between the vertical and horizontal we could imagine a row of bees sucking honey, with a corresponding flower for each bee. The horizontal parameter would be the line separating the row of bees each from the flower or the drop of honey it seeks. Instead of a row of bees, sometimes we find a rows of cranes, or rows of elephants, which refer to the four quarters of the compass in a sort of vectorial space within consciousness. Thus the Dig Ganas, the four or eight elephants representing points of the compass, are to be imagined as playing havoc or pushing their trunks into a central pole or axis.


The crystal imagery, resembling that of a colour solid, properly belongs to the base of the vertical axis, while at the neutral O Point, this same crystalline form would resemble a maze or lattice or matrix of vertico-horizontal lines, looking like a cage. Above the central O Point, when we think in terms of a radiating light going from a point to some universal here or elsewhere, the colour solid gives place to its counterpart, to be visualised as two cones, placed not base to base, but apex to apex. Thus crystals, conic sections, radial arrangements in flowers, logarithmic spirals with complementary spins, inversions and transformations, both vertical and horizontal; all enter into the complex fabric of the dynamics of the structural language employed here.


Petals, like the apexes of triangles, together with rays of light radiating outwards, can represent elements of various abstractions or generalisations within the scope or content of the absolute value of beauty here. The letters of the alphabet could be applied preferably to conceptual rays, while lines standing for relations of a here-and-now ontological character are proper to the crystal which serves to explain more ontological relation-relata complexes.


38


The matrix of the centre of the axes serves to clarify the four-fold quaternion aspect. The most central dynamism could be represented by a figure-eight, exemplified by the familiar pulsations in electromagnetic interference figures, and also by the systole-diastole function of the heartbeat.


Every pulsation in its double aspect could be biologically reduced to conformity with this figure-eight which depends on the sine function of waves or frequencies. Wave lengths are horizontal, while frequencies are vertical, or vice-versa, as the case may be. When inserted together into the same space, they make this figure-eight structurally valid in terms of cross-polarized light.


All these figures trace their courses within the grand flux of universal becoming which is the most basic phenomenal manifestation of the neutral Absolute. The universe becomes experienced in most general terms as a process of flux or becoming. This is what Heraclitus meant when he said that one cannot enter into the same river twice. Bergson's philosophy supports the same flux in terms of the élan vital. Vedanta also thinks of the universe in terms of a process of flux or becoming when it refers to Maya as anadhir bhava rupa (of the form of a beginningless becoming), itself having an absolute status. Maya, as the negative aspect of the Absolute, however, could yield a normative Absolute which would cancel out this flux, but viewed from the side of relativity to which a living person naturally must belong, the universal flux of becoming is a reality which could be abolished only when the total paradox implied between physics and metaphysics is also finally abolished. In this grand flux of becoming, structuralism enters as naturally as it does in modern physics, where space and time belong together as conjugates and can be treated as Cartesian correlates. The articulation of space and time gives us the vertical parameter.


Thus we have referred to some further aspects of the peculiar visual language which will help the viewing audience to follow intelligently the content of this film. Indications of a more detailed order will be given in the film itself.


39


FUNCTIONAL MONOMARKS OF GRADED AND DUPLICATE DIVINITIES OR PRESENCES
Before actually witnessing the film, some of the more hidden technicalities involved here will have to be explained.


Dynamism presupposes functions. Eros is the god of love who has the function of sending arrows to smite the hearts of lovers. Eros thus is a demigod or demiurge who is often symbolised by the bow and arrow held by him. The bow and arrow represent in visual language the monomarks belonging to his function. The three divinities, Brahma, Vishnu and Shiva, have their respective functions of creation, preservation and destruction within the total scope of cosmological phenomena comprised in the pure notion of the Absolute.


Thus Vishnu's function lies structurally in the middle zone, while Brahma brings up the rear and Shiva functions as the destroyer of everything at the Omega Point of nominalistic over-conceptualisation. Upward and downward logarithmic lines between the lower and higher limits would indicate the ambivalence between the function of Brahma and that of Shiva.


Eros, or Kamadeva, must have his counterpart Rati as his virtual companion. Shiva can destroy Eros only when Eros' presence falls outside the vertical negative parameter: but when occasionalism favours him as he takes refuge within the vertical negativity of the Absolute, he reigns invulnerably supreme in his own right, as in Verse 6.


The divinities can be either hypostatic or hierophantic in their significance. Where they have a numerator value, they are represented as gods or demigods, but when they have a denominator value, they are spoken of as "presences" with an ontological or an existential status, as in Verse 8.


The devotee, as Sankara himself indicates in the first verse, is placed outside the scope of the holy or the sacred at the bottom of the vertical axis and beyond Shiva, who normally marks the Omega Point at the top. Paramesvara (supreme Shiva), who has a more thin and mathematical status, is to be presupposed as the counterpart of the devotee as his saviour. As prayer or worship always implies a benefit between the worshipper and the worshipped, we could imagine an endless series of devotees praying for benefits compatible with themselves, each placed in duplicate at points marking hypostatic or hierophantic values within the total amplitude of the two-sided vertical parameter. Each of the divinities involved could confer its benefit on the believer or worshipper who constantly meditates on it. All prayers correctly made from the denominator side must necessarily find their compatible response from the numerator side. Such is the time-honoured presupposition in all prayer.


40


Thus a mathematical Paramashiva (supreme Shiva) beyond the Omega Point on the thin vertical parameter has his counterpart in a footstool or cushion on the negative vertical side, either for the Devi or himself indifferently. From her toes to the top of her tresses there are subtler values to be placed back-to-back. Nothing can be omitted because the universal concrete that the Absolute represents enters even into the essence or existence of the toenails and the hair. Flowers could be hypostatic or hierophantic in their origin, or both, according to the circumstances. The waters of the Ganges, representing high value, can pour down to purify or bless a total situation, from the head of Shiva to his feet. When originating at the O Point in a lake represented by the navel of the Goddess, this water flows horizontally like an actual or geographical river conferring benefits on cultivators.


These suggestions must be kept in mind as the audience watches the unfolding of absolute Beauty in terms of magenta glory. The seventh verse, when scrutinized, will reveal how these levels and dimensions are woven into the structural dynamism adopted by Sankara.


A DRAMA UNFOLDING WITHIN THE SELF AS IN THE NON-SELF
The present series of verses could be viewed statically as representing Chakras or Mandalas. The Yantra could provide a dynamism because it suggests a wheel always going around. A picture as well as a drama may be said to be unravelling itself before our vision as the poem reveals to our view various aspects of absolute Beauty. The dynamism thus superimposed on the structuralism makes the whole series resemble the scenes of a dramatic universe to be thought of both subjectively and objectively at once. All drama involves personages or characters. Besides the hero and heroine, who represent the vertical and horizontal references, there is a villain responsible for bringing in the complications to be resolved during the action of the drama.


When the classical rule of the unity of time, place and action is fully respected, as it used to be before the time of the romanticism of Victor Hugo, we get a more global perspective of a comedy or tragedy with many stratifications of paradises gained or lost, infernos and purgatories, incorporated into the picture of Dante and Beatrice, God and Satan, Faust or Mephistopheles as the main personages involved. A clown and a chorus can be used to add a touch of levity to the scene.


41


All the nine emotional attitudes known to Sanskrit aesthetics, ranging from masculine passion to the tenderest emotions of motherhood, could enter into the total picture that the drama presents to our view. In Aeschylus' play, the bound Prometheus supplies the central locus round which action develops, radiating polyvalently in all directions. A clown could be an interloper functioning both as a villain as well as a tale-bearer. A strong man could add a herculean touch in which hierophany prevails over hypostasy. In the present composition, all corresponding personages of Indian mythology can easily be distinguished. Eros is recognized as a complicating character. The presentation and resolution aspects of the drama have the same Eros involved in them in milder or modified forms as occasion demands. The antinomy between Zeus and Demeter is resolved in the present work by the attempt made in every verse to resolve the paradox involved between them, rather than to enhance the element of contradiction, as in classical Greek literature. Shiva and Shakti participate in a gentle dialectical way so that a normative cancellation without conflict takes us beyond the contradiction of paradox. Such is the interplay of the functions of the various characters which are enumerated in Verse 32 by the author himself.

INTRODUCTION TO THE SAUNDARYA LAHARI

"The Upsurging Billow of Beauty"
By

SANKARACARYA

English Translation and Commentary
By
NATARAJA GURU

PRELIMINARIES

In the autumn of the year 1968 I was preparing for a long voyage round the world. As a first step towards this adventurous project, I had booked a passage to Singapore by the British steamer S.S. Rajula. This date remains a memorable landmark in my mind because I had by that time finished all the series of major items of a dedicated life-work, projected by me, having bearing on the teaching of my teacher Narayana Guru, to which I had devoted more than four decades already.

I thought I had no more ambition in that same direction when I found myself sitting in front of a bookshelf of the library that was just being started at the Gurukula Island Home, bordering on the sea in the Cannanore District of Kerala, on the west coast of India. Two volumes of the works of a Malayalam poet called Kumaran Asan attracted my attention, almost as if by the promptings of some vague principle of chance. I glanced at the volumes listlessly and without purpose for some time. Before long my attention seemed to linger browsingly over the pages at the end of one of the volumes which happened to be the translation of the "Saundarya Lahari" into Malayalam. It was attributed to Sankaracharya and from the introductory remarks of Kumaran Asan I found that the date of the translation coincided with the time when he had returned from his training in Calcutta to become the first disciple and successor to Narayana Guru himself. At that time they were living together as Guru and most favoured sisya (disciple) in a riverside ashram at a place called Aruvippuram, about fifteen miles south of Trivandrum, the capital of Kerala.

2

The initial scrutiny of the contents of the translation, each verse of which was printed side by side with the original Sanskrit of Sankara, intrigued me and stimulated my curiosity to such an extent that I began to become more and more seriously engrossed and involved in its study. In spite of not being a Sanskrit scholar of any standing whatsoever, I could discover slight discrepancies here and there between the intentions of the original author and the understanding of the translator. It seemed to me that he was evidently engaged in an almost impossible task, as a result of which all his efforts seemed to be repeatedly frustrated or compromised, often with meanings miscarried. This was sufficiently evidenced by the fact that even the barest of a sequential, consistent or common-sense meaning did not result, in spite of the tremendous efforts that seemed to have been lavished on the subject matter. Neither the content, context, purpose nor the person kept in mind as the proper student for these verses could even be roughly guessed at. The more I read these verses and tried to make at least some bare meaning out of them, the more enigmatic each verse seemed to become to my eyes. Strangely too, my understanding seemed to progress inversely to the increased effort that I tried wholeheartedly to apply to this strange text. When I also remembered in these circumstances that Kumaran Asan might have undertaken this impossible task at the instance of Narayana Guru himself, which belief was gaining ground with me, my interest in this enigmatic work became all the more heightened.

It seemed to question challengingly my critical understanding of a text from a philosopher like Sankara, whose other writings were already somewhat sufficiently familiar to me. Furthermore, in the short introduction by the author of the Malayalam translation, given to justify his understanding, he referred to a group of religious people in Kerala, the "Kerala Kaulins" as he calls them, for whose benefit, according to him, the great philosopher Sankara undertook this apparently onerous task.

My self-respect, not to say pride, in considering myself a person sufficiently capable of understanding a philosophical text in the ordinary course, became stung, as it were, to the quick. And this is how I became personally involved in the work which now remains, even after three and a half years, a major challenge to my common sense or to that degree of average intelligence with which a man of my generation could be expected normally to credit himself.

3

INTRODUCTION TO THE SAUNDARYA LAHARI

"The Upsurging Billow of Beauty"
By

SANKARACARYA

English Translation and Commentary
By
NATARAJA GURU

PRELIMINARIES

In the autumn of the year 1968 I was preparing for a long voyage round the world. As a first step towards this adventurous project, I had booked a passage to Singapore by the British steamer S.S. Rajula. This date remains a memorable landmark in my mind because I had by that time finished all the series of major items of a dedicated life-work, projected by me, having bearing on the teaching of my teacher Narayana Guru, to which I had devoted more than four decades already.

I thought I had no more ambition in that same direction when I found myself sitting in front of a bookshelf of the library that was just being started at the Gurukula Island Home, bordering on the sea in the Cannanore District of Kerala, on the west coast of India. Two volumes of the works of a Malayalam poet called Kumaran Asan attracted my attention, almost as if by the promptings of some vague principle of chance. I glanced at the volumes listlessly and without purpose for some time. Before long my attention seemed to linger browsingly over the pages at the end of one of the volumes which happened to be the translation of the "Saundarya Lahari" into Malayalam. It was attributed to Sankaracharya and from the introductory remarks of Kumaran Asan I found that the date of the translation coincided with the time when he had returned from his training in Calcutta to become the first disciple and successor to Narayana Guru himself. At that time they were living together as Guru and most favoured sisya (disciple) in a riverside ashram at a place called Aruvippuram, about fifteen miles south of Trivandrum, the capital of Kerala.

2

The initial scrutiny of the contents of the translation, each verse of which was printed side by side with the original Sanskrit of Sankara, intrigued me and stimulated my curiosity to such an extent that I began to become more and more seriously engrossed and involved in its study. In spite of not being a Sanskrit scholar of any standing whatsoever, I could discover slight discrepancies here and there between the intentions of the original author and the understanding of the translator. It seemed to me that he was evidently engaged in an almost impossible task, as a result of which all his efforts seemed to be repeatedly frustrated or compromised, often with meanings miscarried. This was sufficiently evidenced by the fact that even the barest of a sequential, consistent or common-sense meaning did not result, in spite of the tremendous efforts that seemed to have been lavished on the subject matter. Neither the content, context, purpose nor the person kept in mind as the proper student for these verses could even be roughly guessed at. The more I read these verses and tried to make at least some bare meaning out of them, the more enigmatic each verse seemed to become to my eyes. Strangely too, my understanding seemed to progress inversely to the increased effort that I tried wholeheartedly to apply to this strange text. When I also remembered in these circumstances that Kumaran Asan might have undertaken this impossible task at the instance of Narayana Guru himself, which belief was gaining ground with me, my interest in this enigmatic work became all the more heightened.

It seemed to question challengingly my critical understanding of a text from a philosopher like Sankara, whose other writings were already somewhat sufficiently familiar to me. Furthermore, in the short introduction by the author of the Malayalam translation, given to justify his understanding, he referred to a group of religious people in Kerala, the "Kerala Kaulins" as he calls them, for whose benefit, according to him, the great philosopher Sankara undertook this apparently onerous task.

My self-respect, not to say pride, in considering myself a person sufficiently capable of understanding a philosophical text in the ordinary course, became stung, as it were, to the quick. And this is how I became personally involved in the work which now remains, even after three and a half years, a major challenge to my common sense or to that degree of average intelligence with which a man of my generation could be expected normally to credit himself.

3

Even at the moment of writing this (8th January 1972) the enigmatic nature of this work of great absorbing interest still stares me in the face. And it is with certain apologies to many worthy scholars anterior to me and with some hesitations that I enter now on this task of presenting to the modern world the one hundred verses of the "Saundarya Lahari".

THE ORIGINAL TEXT AND ITS COMMENTATORS

The first forty-one verses have to be distinguished, evidently according to the author himself, as the "Ananda Lahari", within the totality meant to be entitled more generally the "Saundarya Lahari". In Sanskrit, lahari means "intoxication" or "overwhelming subjective or objective experience of an item of intelligence or of beauty upsurging in the mind of man" The word saundarya refers to aesthetic value appreciation. Such an appreciation of beauty must necessarily belong to the context of the Absolute, if the name of Sankara, the great Advaitic commentator, is to be associated at all with this work, however indirectly it may be, on which point we shall presently have more to say.

Absolute value appreciation, which could be ananda (delight) subjectively, is saundarya (beauty), when understood objectively. These are two possible perspectives of the same absolute value factor. Through the centuries this work has puzzled pundits such as Lakshmidhara, Kaivalyasrama and Kameswara Soori of India; and professors such as Sir John Woodroffe and Norman Brown in the West, and continues to do so to the present.

It cannot be said, however, that interest in it has flagged even for a moment, since it saw the light of day. On the contrary, it has spread far and wide, as evidenced by the various editions of different dates and regions, some of them containing elaborate Persian, Mogul and Rajput paintings, and the increasing number of modern editions, mainly nurtured and nourished by a great revival of interest in that strange form of Indian spirituality known as Tantra.

There is every indication at present that such an interest is still on the increase. Any light, however feeble, that I might be able to throw on such a subject will not, therefore, be out of place.

4

MY INVOLVEMENT AND CONFRONTATIONS

Between the date of my first involvement in this interesting text and the present date, I have travelled as much by inner exploration as perhaps to the extent that my wanderings were widely distributed. The intensity of my involvement with this text became more and more absorbing to me.

My first plan was to go around the world by ship. The first lap of my journey was accomplished accordingly, and I found myself travelling in Southeast Asia, giving lectures on the "Saundarya Lahari" in out of the way places, both in Singapore and various parts of Malaysia. During this period, when I found myself moving from place to place, I did not relax even one day from the uniform and sustained pressure which I applied to the study of the text. Each morning exactly between half-past five and seven o'clock I kept up the habit of sitting around with interested listeners, with cups of black coffee and biscuits, trying to delve deeper into the meanings of each verse. I have done so for three and a half years and in the meantime I had to change the course of my world tour. Instead of crossing the Indian Ocean and trying to go towards Honolulu, where a friend was supposed to be awaiting me, I was suddenly attracted by an advertised offer of Air India which made it possible for me to come back to India once again and adopt a revised itinerary by which I could include Moscow, Gent, Luxembourg, Iceland, New York, Chicago, San Francisco, Honolulu, Fiji and Sydney, and be back in India through Malaysia once again, thus spending nearly a year in all my wanderings.

Wherever I had a fairly long stopover my coffee classes continued and, what was even more strange, I could notice that my lessons were evidently of greater attraction to others than to myself. Crowds gathered round me even at this unearthly hour and listened to me with remarkable avidity of interest. I could not solve many of the problems that seemed to crop up one after another as the studies continued. I began to differ from almost every book that I came across. The whole subject bristled with endless controversial questions and there were moments of despair in which I felt that I was hopelessly involved in some vain task.

Some of the questions that came to the surface could be initially and summarily stated as follows:

1. How could Sankara, who is known to be an Advaita philosopher, be credited with the authorship of this text which is evidently of the form belonging to the context of Tantra Shastra?

2. Why should he have written these verses after his great commentaries, which are by themselves sufficiently monumental to support his fame as a Vedantic philosopher?

3. If Sankara gave primacy to wisdom, as is well known, how is it that he seems to have come down to the vulgar or popular level of a worshipper of the beauty of a goddess?

4. The Sri Chakra, which figures in the text very prominently, seems to be the hallmark by which Tantra texts are recognisable. What has this geometrical design to do with Advaita Vedanta, which believes in the purest form of reason only?

5. What is the place of eroticism in the context of the austere Sannyasa (renunciation) which Sankara stood for so uncompromisingly?

6. Was Sankara interested in Yoga Shastra (the science of yoga) also?

7. If not, why does he take the trouble of describing the various details of Chakras (synergic centres) as seen in the verses of this text?

8. If non-duality is the teaching of Sankara, how is it that he postulates Shiva and Shakti as two distinct factors, principles or entities?

9. Is Sankara a religious man at all?

10. How far are the verses compatible with the doctrines developed in his other works?

11. Did his followers give any importance to this work so as to adopt its teaching in any way in their lives as inmates of various ashrams in which they practised their spiritual disciplines?

12. Why does he employ a Puranic and mythological language here?

6

CONVENTIONAL TRADITIONAL APPROACH

Because of these and various other miscellaneous difficulties even highly painstaking and correctly critical scholars like Professor W. Norman Brown of Harvard University have doubted even the authorship of these verses. He has gone into the reasons for doing so in very great detail in Volume 43 of the Harvard Oriental Series, and takes care to indicate on the title page of the work, in all academic cautiousness, that the "Saundarya Lahari" is only "traditionally ascribed to Sankaracarya". If we turn to the other great authority on Tantra literature, Sir John Woodroffe, these points are not clarified any better. Even a strict word-by-word translation of this work is not so far available, not to speak of a satisfactory versification. Every translation or commentary that I have examined so far, whether in Malayalam, English or in the original Sanskrit, has not failed to reveal here or there some appalling state of ignorance in respect of the main intent and purpose of these verses. Except for borrowing rather light-heartedly the Sri Chakra, which is described in minute geometrical detail in Verse 11 of this work, the whole work seems to be otherwise treated with scant and stepmotherly respect, both by tantrically minded pundits and professors alike. When I allude to pundits and professors at one and the same time, I am not unconscious of the fact that there are present in Bengal and in South India, especially in Kerala, many who claim to be authorities on Tantra generally, not excluding the "Saundarya Lahari" in particular. I have had occasion to consult quite a few of these authorities and I can assert with a certain pleasure that they have tried their best to clarify their respective positions in a conventional and traditional manner proper to punditry and pedantry in India. I must at least mention four names : Pundit S.Subrahmanya Sastri, T.R.Srinivasa Ayyengar of the Theosophical Society, Kandiyoor Mahadeva Sastri, and E.P. Subrahmanya Sastri, besides the three more ancient scholars already mentioned.

The greater part of Sir John Woodroffe's prolific volumes themselves is based directly or indirectly on what some pundits gave him to understand. It would not be wrong to say that they are directly based on hearsay, and therefore lack that direct appeal or apodictic certitude necessary to make us treat them with the seriousness which the subject deserves.

7

The interest of the present writer is not the same as that of a pundit or professor. Even the question of Sankara's authorship of the work would take at least as much trouble to prove as to disprove. I therefore do not wish to enter into any polemical dispute with anybody, and would content myself with taking a position by which I could say that all the great scholars who have devoted their energies to clarifying this text, though they are right only as far as they go, do deserve our gratitude.

My own personal interest in this subject is based on two considerations only. Firstly, it is a unique work in which, for the first time, Sankara is seen to adopt a non-verbal protolinguistic approach to philosophy, as when Marshall McLuhan would say, "the medium is the message." Secondly, believe that most of the controversies referred to above could be seen to arise from the fact that the text is usually looked upon as if it were a statically given doctrinal statement, instead of being considered as the dialectical revaluation of some anterior position prevailing at the time the author wrote it. The history of religion, as Professor Mircea Eliade of Princeton University has succeeded in proving in his monumental work on the subject, "Patterns of Comparative Religion", is a series of dialectical revaluations of anterior positions in terms of posterior doctrines. Viewed in the light of such a dialectical revaluation, it is not difficult, at least for me to see that here Sankara adopts a non-verbal or protolinguistic medium instead of a metalinguistic one, to restate the message of Advaita Vedanta, for which he has always stood, here as well as in his great commentaries.

When these two features are fully understood by the modern reader, it will be seen that most of the controversial problems that have puzzled both pundits and professors melt away altogether. The authorship of Sankara could then be easily proved by a certain type of logic acceptable to Buddhism and Vedanta alike, which is called "the argument by impossibility of being otherwise", known as anupalabdhi. This kind of logic belongs to the order of axiomatic thinking, and therefore is still understood even by phenomenological philosophers like Edmund Husserl, only with a certain degree of mistrust. No wonder, therefore, that the world of modern thought is involved in a characteristic puzzlement belonging to the same general intellectual and cultural malaise, the growing evidence of which is beginning to be recognisable wherever we turn, more especially when modern youth express dissatisfaction because of a general gap that they feel existing between themselves and their elders.

8

This brings us to the next most important consideration that has made me all the more interested in this strange and almost impossible text that I have been trying to understand with all earnestness. There is an unconventional new generation of young people with generally free ideas about sex, variously influenced by Eastern religions. They believe in miracles and the supernatural powers. Inner space is more important to them than outer space. Mind-expanding drugs are every day luring them deeper into themselves. Yoga and discipleship to a guru are taken for granted by them. Besides Yoga, they are also interested in the secrets of what is called Tantra.

Most of them are genuine seekers for a new way of life, although some of them are seen to be freaks or misfits. Whatever explanation of such a widespread social disadoption might be, it is clear that the movement requires sympathetic understanding and guidance. What they call "institutional life" is their common enemy, and clashing with it produces various forms of bad blood, repression or discontent which is at present becoming a problem to all concerned, most especially to themselves.

A revision and rearrangement of basic values in life seems to be what they are asking for. Discoveries in science have disrupted conventional standards in ethics, aesthetics, economics and even in education. Human ecology itself has to be reconsidered and revised.

The Saundarya Lahari, as I soon discovered, lent itself readily to the basic ground on which human values could be rediscovered, rearranged, revalued and restated more normally and normatively. It is this discovery that dawned on me more clearly each day as I taught in my global travels, that made this work all the more dear to me.

9

Side by side with this it also dawned on me with equal force that this mainly non-verbally conceived text was just the one that suited the most modern means of communication. Video and computerisation have been so fast and spectacular in their development that now it is possible to say that this mass medium has inaugurated what is beginning to be known as a Paleocybernetic Age, which can be expected to revolutionise the whole of individual and collective life of humanity within a few years. There is little that could not be accomplished through new technology to bypass the confusion of tongues non-verbally.

We can examine the workings of our own mind, not to say self, through the intermediary of this wonderful new medium where line, light, colourful vision and audition could help in the process of the marriage of sheer entertainment with the highest form of so-called spiritual education. The availability of such a medium could be said to be just around the corner. The only snag in this matter is that we need a new kind of literature that could be most advantageously fed into the machine when it becomes available. The answer to this kind of demand is already found in the "Saundarya Lahari".

This is the second discovery that came to me by chance. The possible appeal of the "Saundarya Lahari", more especially to the modern generation, became immediately evident to me. My ambition, therefore, was not primarily to write a new and more learned book on this work, but rather to avail myself of the wonderful possibilities of modern video technology to put across to the new generation the valuable contents of this rare book, where the message and the medium already co-exist without any contradiction between them.

The highest purpose of life, by which man is made to live more than merely by bread alone, which it was the privilege hitherto of religious bodies to cater to the public by way of spiritual nourishment, thus comes into the hands of every true educator.

What is more, "education" and "entertainment" become interchangeable terms. The success of the "Saundarya Lahari" could be expected to open the way to many other possibilities of the same kind. What is called Self- Realisation and the truth of the dictum that the proper study of mankind is man himself, can be made possible, as it were, by a strange irony of fate through startling advances in the world of mechanistic technology itself. Evil shall thus be cured in and through itself by its own cause.

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What is called "salvation" results from the cancellation of the self by the non-self. Beauty is a visible value in which line, light and colour can cooperate to reveal our true nature to ourselves. When thus revealed, that final cancellation of counterparts can take place which is capable of removing the last impediment to what we might soberly call "unitive understanding". This is none other than emancipation, or final Freedom with a capital F. This is the promise that the wisdom of the Upanishads has always held out as the highest hope of humanity. There is both inner beauty as well as beauty "out there" as it were. The former is that of the yogi and the latter of the speculative philosopher. Both are capable of effecting cancellation of counterparts between the Self and the Non-Self resulting in that Samadhi or Satori which marks the term and goal of intelligent humanity.

MAIN QUESTIONS

Having stated now the nature of my main interest , let me take one by one the questions that I have raised above and answer them as shortly as I can, without getting lost in too many unnecessary by-paths.

1. How could Sankara, who is known to be an Advaita philosopher, be credited with the authorship of this text which is evidently of the form belonging to the context of Tantra Shastra?

Sankara's great commentaries are primarily metalinguistic while this work is protolinguistic. Tantra is only a structural, protolinguistic, non-verbal approach to Indian spirituality at its best, when taken as a whole. We have to think of Mantra, Yantra and Tantra at once as presupposing one another, if we are to enter into a sympathetic and intuitive understanding of the dynamism that Tantra essentially represents. This dynamism is none other than mutual participation of the two other aspects which go with it, which are Yantra on the one side and Mantra on the other. Thus, Tantra is the "know-how" or savoir - faire by which Yantra and Mantra could interact mutually and produce what we call the fully real experience of unitive understanding, by a double correction. Yantra is associated with a wheel or machine, while Mantra evidently stands for uttered syllables or sounds. Each Mantra involves a devata, which term has to be distinguished from just a deva, or god.

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All the gods of the Hindu pantheon can be given their correct positions as monomarks in the context of the Yantra, which is essentially a geometrical figure called the Sri Chakra. Letters of the Sanskrit alphabet could be used in the place of monomarks to indicate structural aspects of the Absolute within the context of erotic mysticism, where beauty is the most prominent prevailing value.

In the erotic context of Tantra there are four functional monomarks commonly used which are the goad and noose, referring to the spatial dynamism applicable to an elephant, together with the sugar-cane bow and five flower-tipped arrows which indicate the limits of the horizontal world of erotic pleasure or enjoyment. Many of the Tantra texts quoted or alluded to in the writings of Sir John Woodroffe make profuse use of these monomarks and protolinguistic devices to such a point of intricacy that the modern reader could easily get lost in their ramifications and further complicated implications. For a clear statement we have to go to the "Mahanirvana Tantra", which perhaps owes its inspiration to Buddhistic as well as proto-Aryan Tantric sources. One sees very clearly from this particular Tantra how the colour of the dark monsoon cloud which hangs over the whole west coast of India, from Ujjain to Kanyakumari, has a place within the context of Tantrism. Moreover, the best palm-leaf manuscripts preserved to this day bearing on Tantra, are found in the collections of some Maharajas of this area. There is also a temple situated on the West Coast, half way between Gujarat and the Cape, which could be considered as the most ancient of the epicentres from which this kind of influence could be imagined to have spread far and wide, through the Mahayana Buddhism of Central and North India, reaching Tibet and finally nourishing the roots of the Shakti cult of present-day Bengal.

Tantra is a discipline which combines the secrets of Yoga side by side with other esoteric teachings, the greater part of which is a contribution by the lower strata of society, to whom the five Tattvas proper to its practice - matsya (fish), mamsa (meat), madya (liquor), maithuna (copulation) and mudra (gesture) - are to be considered both natural and normal. When this lower form of Tantra was subjected to revaluation and restatement in the light of Veda and Vedanta, it gave rise to further subdivisions and graded stratifications, such as the Purva Kaula, Uttara Kaula, Samayin and fully Vedantic versions of Tantrism. Thus Tantra is a complex growth in the spiritual soil of India.

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Sankara, as a great dialectical revaluator of the Hindu spirituality of his time, could easily be imagined to have attempted a final revaluation of the same body of spiritual wisdom which he proposed to clothe in a special kind of non- verbose language. As a result, there are two texts from his pen, the twin complementary works named "Saundarya Lahari" and "Shivananda Lahari", respectively. The former presupposes a negative ascending dialectical perspective, while the latter presupposes the same Absolute Value when viewed from a more positive position in terms of a descending dialectic. The final content of both remains the same, although the starting postulates might seem diametrically opposed to each other.

Beauty, especially when it is colourful and full of significant lights and lines, lends itself to be considered the most tangible content of the otherwise empty or merely mathematical notion called the Absolute. Truth and value thus are made to fulfil the same function: to give full tangible content to the Absolute. In short, metalinguistically stated Advaita coincides here with what is protolinguistically understood.

2. Why should he have written these verses after his great commentaries, which are by themselves sufficiently monumental to support his fame as a Vedantic philosopher?

As Sankara himself states in Verse 59 of the "Vivekacudamani", verbosity is a bane which could even cause mental derangement.

3. If Sankara gave primacy to wisdom, as is well known, how is it that he seems to have come down to the vulgar or popular level of a worshipper of the beauty of a goddess?

The simple answer is that no visible goddess is directly envisaged in any of the verses in the present series. Certain picturesque situations are, of course, presented here and there in such a way that when the numerator and the denominator aspects of the same are cancelled out we are left with an overwhelming sense of sheer absolute Beauty, independently of any anthropomorphically conceived goddess. The first and the last verses of the series, when read together, absolve Sankara completely of any possible charge of being a theist, deist or even a ritualist in the ordinary religious sense.

4. The Sri Chakra, which figures in the text very prominently, seems to be the hallmark by which Tantra texts are recognisable. What has this geometrical design to do with Advaita Vedanta, which believes in the purest form of reason only?

The Sri Chakra is a structurally conceived linguistic device. Just as a graph can verify an algebraic formula, there is no contradiction between the Advaita as Sankara has stated metalinguistically in his Bhasyas (commentaries) and that which the same Advaita represents in the form of a schema here.

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5. What is the place of eroticism in the context of the austere sannyasa (renunciation) which Sankara stood for so uncompromisingly?

The proper theme of all poetry or even art could be said to be love. No lover, no art. One cannot think of beauty without the form of woman coming into it. Thus the relevancy of erotic mysticism stands self-explained. The best proof in this matter is the high place that Kalidasa's poetry occupies to the present day.

6. Was Sankara interested in Yoga Sastra (the science of yoga) also?

7. If not, why does he take the trouble of describing the various details of Chakras (synergic centres) as seen in the verses of this text?

Yoga properly pertains to a dualistic school called Samkhya. When revised in the light of Advaita Vedanta, the abstractions and generalisations of the various stable syndromes and synergisms proper to the dynamism of Yoga discipline refuse to resemble other texts on Yoga such as "Kheranda Samhita", "Hathayoga Pradipika" or even the "Astanga Yoga" of Pantanjali. Thus it is that Sankara's treatment of Yoga seems different from other Yoga disciplines. He merely restates it in a more respectable form acceptable to an Advaita Vedantin. The "Vyasa Bhasya" and "Bhoja Thika" applied to Patanjali Yoga, are supposed to effect the same corrections and revaluations. Careful scrutiny of the Shakta Upanishads and the Yoga Upanishads will clarify any further doubt that might linger in the minds of keen and critical students in respect of the purport of these verses.

8. If non-duality is the teaching of Sankara, how is it that he postulates Shiva and Shakti as two distinct factors, principles or entities?

In the Samkhya philosophy there are the concepts of prakrti and purusa, the former being not imbued with intelligence, while the latter is the fully intelligent principle. Thus we find a heterogeneity between the two categories, which it is the purpose of the revised epistemology and methodology of Advaita to abolish effectively. Shiva and Shakti, as meant to be united in the present work, are to be understood as belonging together to the same neutral epistemological grade of the non-dual Absolute. They must lose their distinctness and, when generalised and abstracted to the culminating point, they could be treated as two perimeters or parameters to be cancelled out by their mutual intersection or participation. One has a vertical reference and the other a horizontal reference, while both exist at the core of the Absolute. When abstraction and generalisation are thus pushed together to their utmost limit, the paradox is transcended or dissolved into the unity of one and the same Absolute Value which is here referred to as Beauty or Bliss. Thus duality, accepted only for methodological purposes, is to be abolished at each step by unitive understanding.

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9. Is Sankara a religious man at all?

To this question, an unequivocal answer is to be found in the last verses of the series It is not difficult to see that Sankara's Advaita transcends all ideas of holiness or ritualistic merits altogether. He seems clearly to wash his hands of any such derogatory blemish.

The very beginning of the "Vivekucadamani" of Sankara contains other similar unmistakable indications which tend to show that sacred and holy religious values are repugnant and altogether outside the scope of the uncompromising spirit of Advaita that he has always represented.

10. How far are the verses compatible with the doctrines developed in his other works?

Sankara's other works, such as his great bhasyas (commentaries), are conceived on the basis of demolishing polemically a series of purvapaksins (sceptics) taken in graded and methodical order, in favour of a posteriorly finalized position called siddhanta. A careful scrutiny of each of the verses here will reveal that the same finalized doctrines are enshrined and clearly presented in almost every one of them, though clothed in a realistically non-verbal and visualizable form based on the value of beauty that could be experienced by anyone, whether they are a learned philosopher or not. Just to give one example, we could say that the second verse corresponds to the second sutra of the Brahmasutras, where creation, preservation and resolution form the subject matter, as phenomenal aspects born out of the same Absolute. Examples could be multiplied indefinitely.

11. Did his followers give any importance to this work so as to adopt its teaching in any way in their lives as inmates of various ashrams in which they practised their spiritual disciplines?

It is well known that almost all the existing ashrams or maths claiming allegiance to the teaching of Sankaracarya, such as that of Sringeri or Conjivaram, still speak in terms of worshipping a Wisdom Goddess, such as found in the Sarada Pith. The tradition started by Sankara is tacitly or overtly adhered to by his followers, although the critical understanding in respect of such worship still remains questionable with most of them.

12. Why does he employ a Puranic (legendary) and mythological language here? Letters of the Greek alphabet are advantageously used in scientific language. The large quantity of Puranic literature found in Hinduism affords a veritable never-expended mine from which an intelligent philosopher like Sankara could derive monomarks and divinities which could serve the same purpose as the Greek letters in the language of mathematics.

Thus, he merely uses them as the available linguistic elements derived from mythology instead of from mathematics as modern scientists would do.

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From the Upanishads through Kalidasa's poems, such as the "Shyamala Dandakam" and his various larger poems such as the "Kumarasambhava", there is to be discerned a definite lingua mystica using its own clichés and ideograms through the centuries down to our own time. After Kalidasa, Sankara used it most effectively, and it was given to Narayana Guru to be the continuator of the same tradition in modern times.

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GENERALITIES

It is a hard task to give a real or tangible content to the notion of the Absolute. All disciplines, whether cosmological, theological or psychological, imply a notion of the Absolute without which, at least as a reference, all philosophy or science tends to become incoherent, purposeless and inconsequential. Ethical, aesthetic or even economic values also require a normative regulating principle, which can be no other than the Absolute, presupposed tacitly or overtly for ordering and regulating these disciplines. Over-specialisation of science leads to compartmentalisation of branches of knowledge, each tending thus to be a domain proper only to an expert or specialist. The integration of all knowledge is beginning to be recognized as important for the progress of human thought at the present moment.


There is a hoary tradition in India which refers to a Science of the Absolute, which is called
Brahmavidya. It belongs to the context of Vedanta, which has attracted the attention of modern scientists in the West, such as Erwin Schrödinger and others. There is at present a large body of thinkers which believes that a rapprochement between physical science and metaphysics - which is independent of the senses - is possible, and that a Unified Science can thus be ushered into existence.

Attempts have been made along these lines, especially in Vienna, Paris, Chicago and Princeton. What is called the philosophy of science and the science of philosophy could be put together into the science of all sciences, in which many leading thinkers are interested. It is the central normative notion of the Absolute wherein lies the basis of any such possible integration. To give precise content to the Absolute is therefore an important problem engaging the attention of all thinking persons. The new physics of the West is tending to become more and more mathematical and theoretical.

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What is equally interesting is that Eastern disciplines, such as Zen Buddhism, Yoga and Vedanta hold at present a new interest for the western scientist.

The present work is meant to insert itself in between these two trends in modern thought. The large number of people now breaking away from conventional standards and patterns of behaviour, both in the East as well as in the West, not to speak of the polarity between northern and southern temperaments, are now trying to discover themselves anew. Humanity has to find its own proper bearings and gather up loose ends from time to time as "civilisation" takes forward steps. We are now caught in the throes of just such an agonising process. New horizons and more extensive frontiers have to be included within a vision of the world of tomorrow. Myths have to be revised and new idioms discovered, so that fact and fable can tally to verify each other and life can be more intelligent, consequential and consistent.

An integrated or unified science must fulfil the functions hitherto seen as proper only to religion or to metaphysical speculation. Educated people are called upon to take a position more intelligent than hitherto vis-à-vis the great quantity of discoveries being made in both inner and outer space.

This notion of inner space brings us to just that new factor which has recently entered the creative imagination of the present generation. Thermodynamics, electromagnetics, cybernetics semantics and logistics, aided by newer and newer mathematics, are bringing into view vistas unfamiliar hitherto, in which the student feels more at home than the professional teacher whose main interest is often merely to keep his job or shape his career.

The best of the students and the most original of the young professors feel that there is a widening gap between their own ambitions or legitimate urges and the prevailing standards, and have reason to complain that they are often obstructed in the name of out-dated precedents or rules. Co-education has abolished much of the distance between the sexes. Girls need no chaperones, and the university undergraduate does not have to live up to any Victorian form of respectability or even to the chivalry of days gone by.

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Adam prefers to keep the forbidden fruit in his hand, and naturally begins to treat the earth as a planet over which he must pass freely. Linguistic or racial frontiers as well as dinner jackets and wine glasses are being left behind in favour of more individualistic patterns of dress or group conduct. Parisian fashions do not impress youth any more, and mind-expanding drugs are beginning to replace those other poisons like champagne that induce merely a feeling of lazy comfort. Public standards are floundering because of this accentuation of inner space, which is holding out new interests to allure the imagination of adolescents.

INNER SPACE AND STRUCTURALISM

LSD and allied drugs, which have what they call a mind-expanding effect, have opened up a new world that could be called pagan as opposed to prophetic. Sensuousness is no sin to Bacchus, while to Jeremiah, prostitutes and idolatry and all the existential values belonging to animism and hylozoism are highly repugnant.


The golden calf had to be replaced by the table of commandments that Moses and Aaron held up before their chosen followers. The waters of the Ganges are sacred to the Shiva-worshippers of India, and this is why they are spat upon as idolaters and infidels, fit to be trampled by the elephants of the emperor Aurangzeb.


As between the logos of the Platonic world of the intelligibles and the nous of the pre-Socratic Eleatics, two rival philosophies emerge in modern times, giving superiority to existence over essence or vice versa.


Psychedelics reveal a new vision of the negative aspect of consciousness where what is called the subconscious and all its contents become magnified and revealed to inner experience.


There are thus at present two rival minds to deal with: one that is interested primarily in percepts, and the other in concepts. Both of these have to be accommodated together in an integrated picture of absolute consciousness. A lopsided vision can spell nuisible consequences.


It is this discovery of inner space that is upsetting and disrupting the scheme of values of the individualistic dropouts of the present day. Values do not all hang together with reference to the same point anymore, and the double or multiple standards thus emerging must necessarily confuse people in the domain of ethics, aesthetics and economics, not to mention those of education and religion or spirituality.


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Values, both positive and negative, have to be fitted into a fourfold structure, the limbs of which could be summarily indicated in advance as representing the conceptual, the perceptual, the actual and the virtual. This fourfold structure has been known to poets in the West since the time of Milton, and in India since the time of Kalidasa. The lingua mystica of every part of the world seems to have had this mathematical secret hiding within its semantic or semiotic structuralism - sometimes referred to as "semantic polyvalence".


The Upanishads contain many passages that reveal unequivocally the fourfold structure mentioned so directly in the Mandukya Upanishad, which states ayam atma catuspad, (this Self is four-limbed). The schematismus of Kant and structuralism as understood by post-Einsteinian scientists like Eddington, have brought this notion once again to the forefront, and it is offered as a kind of challenge for modern man to accept or reject. Bergson, while remaining essentially an instrumentalist, is also most certainly a structuralist, as is evident to anyone making a careful scrutiny of the following paragraphs:


"But it is a far cry from such examples of equilibrium, arrived at mechanically and invariably unstable, like that of the scales held by the justice of yore, to a justice such as ours, the justice of the rights of man, which no longer evokes ideas of relativity and proportion, but, on the contrary, of the incommensurable and the absolute."


(H. Bergson, "The Two Sources of Morality and Religion", Doubleday,1954, P74)


"Across time and space which we have always known to be separate, and for that very reason, structureless, we shall see, as through a transparency, an articulated space-time structure. The mathematical notation of these articulations, carried out upon the virtual, and brought to its highest level of generality, will give us an unexpected grip on the real. We shall have a powerful means of investigation at hand; a principle of research, which, we can predict, will no henceforth be renounced by the mind of man, even if experiment should impose a new form upon the theory of relativity."


(H.Bergson, "Duration and Simultaneity", Bobbs-Merrill & Co.,1965, P150)


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SANKARA'S "SAUNDARYA LAHARI"

Sankara's "Saundarya Lahari", when examined verse by verse, reveals many enigmas which come to light only when a structural analysis is applied to each of them. Otherwise it remains a closed book to punditry which has beaten its wings in vain trying to make the great poet-philosopher's words have even a mere semblance of coherent meaning.


The "Saundarya Lahari" (The Upsurging Billow of Beauty), together with Sankara's other century of verse called "Shivananda Lahari", treats, we could say, of the same absolute value from perspectives tilted 180 degrees from each other. The mythological elements that enter into the fabric of this composition and its large array of Hindu gods and goddesses, are pressed into service by Sankara to give a precise philosophical context to the supreme value called Absolute Beauty, the subject-matter of these verses. This same subject can be looked at in the more positive or modern light of a structural and mathematical language where geometric or algebraic signs and symbols can verify a formula. This is the basis of the protolinguistic approach that we have adopted in conceiving this work.


Line, light or colour, also biological, crystalline or radiated structures, can all be made to speak a non-verbal language with at least as much precision as in the case of essentially verbose commentaries, such as those of Sankara himself. How successfully this series of verses can be treated as a sequence of visions is a matter that the success of the present work alone must prove hereafter.


Meanwhile, it is not wrong to state that modern technical discoveries, such as the stroboscope, laser holograms and computer graphics , animation and devices such as collage, montage, mixing , merging and filtering of colours, could together open up a new age for visual education as well as entertainment through the most popular medium of modern times: the film.


Large and verbose treatments of such subjects are likely to go into cold storage in the future, because the output of printed matter is too much for the busy person of the present to cope with. This work is meant, as we have just indicated, to be educational as well as entertaining. Its appeal is not therefore primarily to box-office patrons who might wish to pass an easy or comfortable evening of relaxation after a hard day's work; but to a more elite audience which wishes to learn while looking for visual enjoyment. There are thus many features that are not conventional in the film world which have to be taken into account even now by the reader, anticipating its fuller film version.


The first 41 verses of the "Saundarya Lahari" are distinguishable by their content as pertaining to the world of inner Yoga. Mandalas, Chakras, Yantras, Mantras and Tantras, representing stable psychic states or experiences of the Yogi, figure here to the exclusion of beauty as seen objectively outside. Global perspectives of objective beauty are presented in the latter section of the "Saundarya Lahari", this name being more directly applicable to Verses 42 - 100 inclusive.


As against this second part of the work, we have the first 41 verses which are distinguishable by the name "Ananda Lahari", Ananda (bliss) being a factor experienced within, rather than from any outer vision. "Saundarya Lahari" as the title of the total work of one hundred verses is justified in spite of this inner division, because it is still the absolute value of Beauty, upsurging or overwhelming in its wholesale appeal, which is the subjective or objective value-content of this entire work of Sankara's. This is a value which humankind needs to be able to give tangible content to the otherwise empty notion of the Absolute.


Sankara is well known in the context of Advaita Vedanta for his great bhasyas (commentaries) on the three canonical texts of Vedanta: the Upanishads, the Brahma Sutras and the Bhagavad Gita. Although some scholars still doubt the authorship of the present sequence of verses and tend to attribute it to others than Sankara, anyone familiar with the doctrinal delicacies and particularities of the Advaita that Sankara has always stood for, cannot for one moment doubt the hallmark that has always unequivocally distinguished his philosophy .


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The internal evidence available from almost every verse in this text, as well as in the "Shivananda Lahari", can, in our opinion at least, leave no doubt about Sankara's authorship of these two exceedingly interesting and intelligent works. Moreover, Sankara is unmistakably the correct continuator of the Vedic or Upanishadic tradition that has come down to us through the works of Kalidasa to the present day.


There is an unmistakable family resemblance here which, when viewed in its proper vertical hierarchical perspective, exists between ideograms, imagery and other peculiarities of the mystical language. One can recognise this masterpiece as representing the best of the heritage of the ancient wisdom of India preserved through the ages, and of which Sankara is one of the more modern continuators.


SANKARA AS A DIALECTICAL REVALUATOR
Sankara is a great dialectical revaluator of all aspects of ancient Indian wisdom. Nothing of Sanskritic cultural importance has been lost sight of by him, including factors of semantic, logistic or merely ritualistic (Tantric) importance. Sankara's authorship of these hundred verses need not be doubted if only for the final reason that we cannot think of any other poet-philosopher or critic attaining to the high quality of this work and its sister-work, the "Shivananda Lahari".


The history of religion is nothing other than the history of dialectical revaluations of prior positions in terms of posterior doctrines. These two positions could be treated as complementary to each other. In the Biblical context, this same transition from the old to the new, as from the Mosaic Law to the Law of Jesus, is invariably marked with the words: "You have heard it said, but verily, verily I say unto you". It is not unreasonable to think that Sankara here takes up what until then was known as esoterics such as Tantra, Yantra and Mantra, especially in the Kaula and Samaya traditions, both of Bengal and of South India, and subjects them to his own critical and dialectical revaluation.


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Sankara restates those esoteric doctrines in a fully exoteric form, in keeping, above all, with his own avowed position as an Advaita Vedantin. This view must suffice to show that all those who hitherto treated the "Saundarya Lahari" as some kind of text belonging to the Shaktya mother-worship cult, would be guilty of a great inconsistency which they could not themselves explain, in thinking that an avowed Advaita Vedantin could ever write a text that did not support his own philosophy. It is strange that even Sir John Woodroffe, who treats of the "Saundarya Lahari", tends to belong to this category. Professor Norman Brown of Harvard has the same misgivings as revealed in the very subtitle of his work where the authorship is dubiously stated as "attributed to Sankara".


Modern man is interested both in post-Einsteinian physics, as well as in the discipline of Yoga. Zen Buddhism opens up a world in which both meditation and contemplative experience from within the self have an important place. The Upanishads and Vedanta too, are based on inner as well as outer experiences proper to the contemplative. When we write of inner experiences, we are in reality referring to the mystical experiences of the yogi within himself.


THE NATURE OF THE TEXT
The Saundarya Lahari consists of a sequence of one hundred verses of Sanskrit poetry written in a heavy and dignified metrical form. The syntax and inflections of Sanskrit are especially suited to the use of highly figurative language, and there are often layers of more and more profound suggestions as one meaning gives place to others implied below or above it, in ascending or descending semiotic series.


We are here in the domain where meanings have their own meanings hidden behind each other, and the mind sinks backward or progresses forward, upward or downward, within the world of poetic imagination or expression. A sort of meditation and free fancy are presupposed in compositions of this kind, heavy-laden with suggestibility or auto-suggestibility. There is always a subjectivity, a selectivity and a structuralism implied.


The conventional film world treats of a series of horizontal events that the camera can register in a fluid or living form. Every day new techniques are being developed, bringing into play more of what is called "inner space".


The present work is an attempt to follow up these new trends so that the film projected on the basis of this work could be the means for modern knowledge of a new and unified variety to be put across from the side of the savant to the so-called man on the street. While relating outer space with inner space, we also necessarily bring together East and West, besides unifying science and metaphysics.


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FURTHER IMPLICATIONS OF STRUCTURAL LANGUAGE
With reference to this work, it is necessary to clarify the implications of what we call structural analysis.


Poetry has the primary function of being pleasing or beautiful. Literary critics in the West tend to condemn metaphysical or moralistic poetry as inferior to pure poetry where enjoyability is the only desirable quality. In the world of Sanskrit literature, however, mysticism and the wisdom that goes with it have never been divorced from the function of poetic art. Aesthetics, ethics and even economics can legitimately blend together into a pleasing confection that can console or satisfy the love of bliss or joy that good poetry can give, without the compartmentalisation of such branches into separate disciplines of literature. Moralist maxims such as found in Aesop's Fables or in Alexander Pope's writings have been condemned by critics in the West as being didactic in character and thus detracting from the pure function of poetry as such. We do not look for morals or precepts any more; much less do we expect, according to western norms of literary criticism, to learn metaphysical truths from poems. We feel that poetry must necessarily suffer because didactic tendencies can never be reconciled with the proper function of poetry, which is mainly lyrical or just pleasing. Metaphysical poetry in the West tends to be artificial or forced. The Upanishadic tradition has, however, quite a different history. It has always had the serious purpose of revealing the Truth through its analogies and figures of speech. The one Absolute Value that wise people have always sought has been the single purpose of the innocent, transparent and detached way of high thinking exhibited through the simple lives of the Upanishadic rishis (sages).


The degree of certitude that they possessed about this value content of the Absolute reached a very high point in their pure contemplative literature. They had no private axes to grind. Thus, the wisdom that refers to all significant life interests taken as a whole entered into the varied texture of these mystical and mathematically precise writings. Poetry and science were treated unitively here, as perhaps nowhere else in the world's literature, with a few exceptions perhaps as attempted in Dante's "Divine Comedy", Milton's "Paradise Lost", or Goethe's "Faust". The Upanishadic tradition has been compared to the Himalayas as the high source of the three great rivers of India; the Indus, the Ganges and the Brahmaputra.


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Like the Nile for the Egyptians, the snowy peak of Gaurisankara and the waters of the Ganges have provided idioms, ideograms analogies and figures of speech that have perennially nourished Sanskrit literature. Without the Himalayas and the figurative language in which the family of Shiva is represented, living on Mount Kailasa, Kalidasa's poetry would be reduced to some kind of insipid babble. Shiva is the positive principle of which the Himalayas are the negative counterpart. Parvati is sitting on his lap and his twin children represent between them the striking ambivalence of personal types. The white bull, Nandi, the good and faithful servant and vehicle to the principle which Shiva represents, reclines nearby. This family can be seen by any imaginative or intuitive person to be a replica of the grand scene of the Himalayas as revised and raised to the dignity of divinity. When an absolutist touch is added to this implied quaternion structure of a Shiva family, with the bull representing the foothills of the central mass and the peak structurally recognisable as dominating the total content of the Absolute, we come to have a close and correct perspective by which we may examine this century of verses.


Each verse leaps into meaning only when the underlying structural features are revealed and brought into view; otherwise these hundred verses remain as they have remained through the thousand years or more of their history; a challenge to vain pedantry or punditry.


In other words, structuralism is the key that can make this work understandable, a scientifically valid work with a fresh appeal to all advanced modern thinking persons of East or West. It will be our task within the scope of the work itself to introduce the reader, as occasion permits, to further implications and intricacies of this structural approach, which perhaps is the one feature on which rests the value and success of this work.


Theology permits man to say that he is created in the image of God. This is only a polite way of stating that "The Kingdom of God is within you" or "The Word was with God and the Word was God". The bolder Vedantic tradition, however, asserts the same verity when it says: "Thou art That" or "I am Brahman" ( I am the Absolute).


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A subtle equation is implied here between the relativistic perspective of the content of Brahman and the more conceptual or Absolutist aspect of the pure notion itself, so that the word "Absolute" could have a tangible content. Such a content cannot be other than a high value because without value it cannot be significant or purposeful in terms of human life. When Keats says "A thing of beauty is a joy forever", we recognise a similar Platonic thought repeated on English soil after the European Renaissance. To treat of Absolute Beauty as the content of the Absolute is fully normal to Vedantic or Advaitic thought, and what is existent (sat) and subsistent (cit) must both be covered in their turn by ananda (bliss or value factor), which in turn could be easily equated to the high value of absolute Beauty. Thus we see unmistakably the sequence of reasoning justifying the title of the "Saundarya Lahari". It becomes not only justified but lifted above all lower ritualistic or Tantric contexts to the pure and exalted philosophical domain of a fully Advaitic text, in keeping with the dignity of a scientific philosopher like Sankara . The pure and the practical, the noumenal and the phenomenal, the absolute and the relative, the transcendental and the immanent, res cogitans and res extensa, and all such other conjugates whether in philosophy or science, could only refer to what is distinguished in Vedanta as para and apara Brahman. Different schools might have differing terms for the same two intersecting parameters which they have as their common reference.

Each of the hundred verses with which we are concerned here, when scrutinised in the light of the structuralism that we have just alluded to, as also in the light of the equation implied in the para and apara (i.e. the vertical and the horizontal) aspects of the same Absolute, will bring to view as far as possible in non-verbose language, the content of the Absolute seen from the negative perspective of Absolute Beauty as viewed sub specie aeternitatis. Thus a book that has remained closed to punditry all these years will come to have a significant and practical bearing even on our modern life.


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YANTRA, MANTRA AND TANTRA
The word "Tantra" has to be understood with its other associated terms, which belong together to a certain type of esoterics found in India, independently of formulated philosophical systems or doctrines. Just as the bed of a river contains some precious deposits mixed with its sand at the bottom, cultures that have flowed down the ages over valleys or plains such as that of the Ganges or the Nile have often deposited rich sediments of esoteric wisdom value.


The Hermetics, the Kabala and the Tarot represent such deposits near the Mediterranean cities of antiquity. As in the case of the "I Ching" of China, fortune telling and astrology have their own vague contributions to add to this body of esoteric wisdom found in different parts of the globe. To change esoterics and present it in a more critically revised form as exoterics is impossible without a normative reference. Tantra, Yantra and Mantra are three of the fundamental notions connected with a certain type of esoterics found particularly in Tibet and also in India along the Malabar Coast and Bengal. The central idea of Mother-Worship and erotic mysticism has nourished this school of thought known as the Shakti Cult, and kept it alive through the ages without being subjected to the corrections of either Vedism or proto-Aryan Shaivite philosophy.


Thaumaturgists made use of the vague twilight, full of secret mystery, in which its teachings flourished - mainly in basements and cellars hidden under old temples and shrines - to participate in certain kinds of orgies where wine, women and flesh-eating figured to support a pattern of behaviour known as vamachara ( a left-handed way of life) which the more learned Brahmins would not recognise. These practitioners went under the general name of Shaktyas, which came to include two sections, the more ancient and cruder section being called Kaulins, and the other branch which received at least some recognition from the Vedic priesthood, being called Samayins. These schools indulge in exorcising evil spirits and in correcting psychological maladjustments by preparing amulets or talismans, the word for which in Sanskrit is yantra. It often consists of a scroll of thin metal, which is tied around the neck. Because of the lucrative value of such a profession, priestcraft, as anywhere in the world, gave this school its patronage, allowing it to persist on the Indian soil for ages, independent of the prevailing religious authority at any given time in history. The Yantras invariably contain geometric figures with magic letters marking angles, points, lines or circles.


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The letters would correspond to the notion of mantra, which depends on a symbolic chant or incantation. The figures themselves are attempted protolinguistic representations of the same mystery, the technique of which is to be distinguished as Tantra. It is thus that the terms Yantra, Mantra and Tantra belong together to a certain form of esoteric mystery still attracting the attention of many people, both intelligent and commonplace, where mysteries naturally thrive on a sort of vague twilight background of human thought.


Since Sankara was a Guru who wanted to revise dialectically the whole range of the spirituality of his time and restate it in a proper critically revised form he did not overlook the claim of this particular form of esoterics. He wanted to salvage whatever was precious in it and bring it into line with the Upanishadic tradition. He had himself the model of the great Kalidasa, whose writings, as his very name suggests, belonged to the same context of Mother-worship. Although Kalidasa's works have largely become a closed book to even the best pundits of present-day India, it is still possible to see through a structural analysis of his works the common lineage between Sankara and his forerunner Kalidasa and thus take our mind backwards to the great source of wisdom contained in the Upanishads.


Speculation scaled very high in India at the time of the Upanishads, which centred around one main notion - the Absolute (Brahman). The structural implications of the Absolute found in the mystical language of the Upanishads has served as a reference and nourished subsequent thought down to our own times. In the light of the structuralism that has come into modern thought through the back door of science, as it were, and through the precise disciplines of mathematics going hand in hand with the progress of experimental scientific findings, it now becomes possible to see these ancient writings as consistent with a fully scientific modern outlook. It is this discovery, if we may call it so, that encourages us to present the "Saundarya Lahari" through the visual language of film or video.


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THE MEANING OF "LAHARI"
The title of this century of verses itself underlines its unique characteristic. Each verse when properly understood will be seen to contain two distinct sets of value counterparts. If one of them can be called "physical", the other could be called "metaphysical". When they cancel out against each other through a complementarity, compensation or reciprocity which could be recognized as implied between these two counterparts, the resultant is always the upsurge of an experience which could come from either the inner or the outer pole of the total absolute self.


This resultant could even be called a constant, and thus an absolute belonging to a particular discipline and department of life. To give a familiar example, when heat and cold cancel out climatic conditions can yield the possible absolute constant of that particular context. When heavenly values and earthly values cancel out by a complementarity, alternation or split-second cancellation, we can also experience another kind of beauty, bliss or high value factor. When viewed in its proper absolutist perspective, such a constant amounts to attaining the Absolute. Such an attainment of the Absolute would be tantamount to the merging of the Self with the Absolute in Upanishadic parlance, and even to becoming the Absolute itself.


Sankara has named his work a "Lahari", which suggests an upsurging or overwhelming billow of beauty experienced at the neutral meeting point of the inner sense of beauty with its outer counterpart. We always have to conceive the whole subject-matter in its four-fold polyvalence to be able to experience this overwhelming joy or bliss, to produce which, each word, phrase or image of these verses consistently strives in its attempt to give a high value content to the Absolute. There is no mistaking that the present work is perfectly in keeping with the same Advaitic doctrine that Sankara has laboriously stood for in all his other writings.


Cancellation of counterparts is therefore one of the main features of this work. It is neither a god nor a goddess that is given unilateral importance here. It is an absolute neutral or normative value emerging from the cancellation or neutralisation of two factors, named Shiva and Shakti respectively, that is noticeable consistently throughout this composition. If Shiva is the vertical reference, Shakti is the horizontal referent.


Understood in the light of each other, the non-dual in the form of beauty becomes experienced.


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Next to the principle of the quaternion referred to above, there are two parameters of reference, the vertical and the horizontal, which have to be clearly distinguished within the structure of the Absolute, which latter would otherwise be merely conceptual or empty of content. The phenomenal and the noumenal have to verify each other for the absolute value to emerge into view. It is the absolutist character of the value of beauty as understood here that justifies Sankara's use of the term "Lahari".


THE ALPHABET OF THE WORLD OF BEAUTY
All philosophy consists of generalisation and abstraction in order to give meaning to the Absolute. This meaning must have human value significance. "Beauty" or "Bliss" is the final term of speculation bringing us to the very door which opens onto the Absolute. Thus, there is the world of beauty in aesthetics just as there is the world of discourse to which logic belongs, or the world of calculables of mathematics . Mathematics has its elements which can be algebraic or geometric in status.


Similarly linguistics can use either signs or symbols. A red light is a signal or sign, while the word "stop" is a symbol, but both of these have the same meaning. In the same sense, percepts meet concepts and cancel out into one value factor. Beauty can be analysed structurally to reveal its relational aspects, i.e., through geometric figures it could be given monomarks which might belong to any alphabet. The world of beauty has its alphabets or its lines or angles. It is in this sense that for the Pythagoreans the numerological triangle called the tetraktys became a divine symbol still worshipped in their temples. The alphabets understood as belonging to metalanguage and geometrical elements such as angles, points, lines or concentric circles can be used protolinguistically to reveal the content of the Absolute in universally concrete terms. This is the truth that Kant mentions in one of the footnotes in his work on pure reason by which he means to state that schematismus can verify philosophical categories and vice-versa. Thus corrected both ways, in a back-to-back structural relationship contained within the paradox of the two parameters (vertical and horizontal) these could verify between them various algebraic formulae. Thus we have in our hands a rare instrument of research, about which Bergson writes in the quotation already cited on pages 19 and 20.


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What we are concerned with is not only the alphabet of the world of beauty, which belongs to the metalinguistic or conceptual side, but also with its schematic counterpart, which is of a more perceptual order. If the alphabet of the world of beauty, as monomarks or letters which are essentially symbolic in status, is metalinguistic; elements not of algebra but of geometry, such as the triangle, the circle, the line or the point, together with the vertical core, will be protolinguistic, and will be able to give a dynamism to the total static structure.


The various limits within which the structure lives could be named algebraically by letters of the alphabet as monomarks. Thus, elements of the world of beauty could belong together to the context of absolute Beauty, conceived neutrally or normatively. We arrive in this manner not only at alphabets, but at elements about which we will speak in the next section. It could be said that the alphabets themselves have a taxonomic value, helping us to name and recognise unitive factors in the context of absolute Beauty. Further implications of such an alphabet of the world of beauty will become evident when we treat of the actual verses of the present work in their proper places, such as in Verse 32. There letters are linked with elements so as to verify each other and lead us to the certitude about the content of Beauty which the interaction of these verses reveals, and which justifies the use of this kind of double-sided language of signs as well as symbols. All alphabets, however analytically understood, have still to be held together at the core of consciousness, as they are in the esoterics dealt with here, by the unifying letter hri which is the first letter of the word for "heart" in Sanskrit. However varied the alphabets might be, they have to have the heart at the core of consciousness to hold them together like the spokes of a wheel.


Thus structuralism and its own nomenclature belong together. While watching the kind of film proposed here, one would have to be familiar both with alphabets of beauty as well as with elements of Beauty, each from its own side of the total situation. Alphabets could be as many as contained in any language and could include vowels as well as consonants. Each letter could be made to represent a certain characteristic, forming a component unit or part of the total content of the Absolute. The rays radiating from a certain point of light could thus have a letter attributed to them for purposes of recognition or nomenclature. Thus, these letters belong to the Mantra aspect, while the Yantra aspect is the structure itself.


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The savoir faire or "know-how" aspect of imparting the knowledge about beauty could be called the Tantra aspect of the same. Thus Tantra, Yantra and Mantra belong together and verify one another to make this experience of beauty surge up within one's consciousness with an overwhelming force. A sense of beauty overpowers that person who is able to enter into the meaning of each verse both analytically and synthetically at one and the same time.


ELEMENTS OF THE PERCEPTUAL COMPONENTS OF THE WORLD OF BEAUTY
Crystal-clear gems, when they reflect, refract or diffract light, represent beauty in the most evident sense. They have angles, points, lines and colours, and they make various beautiful combinations. Next to gem-beauty comes flower-beauty. The lotus has been the flower dear to the heart of the contemplative Indian mind throughout the ages. Thus God is praised as having lotus feet, lotus eyes, a lotus mouth, a lotus in the heart and at the various psycho-physical centres called Chakras or Adharas. When structural features belonging to the biological world are abstracted and generalised, we enter the three-dimensional world of conics. Conic sections can be related at various levels to a vertical parameter running through the base of two cones, placed base to base. The triangle is only a particular two-dimensional instance comprised within the solid geometry of conics. The apex of each triangle could be inverted and a series of interpenetrating triangles could be placed within the cones for purposes of structurally analysing the total relation-relata complex in the light of which we are to examine the beauty contained in the Absolute.


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A vertical symmetry and a horizontal symmetry, the former with a complementarity, the latter with a parity, could be included within the total possible structural perceptual patterns that emerge to view. Parity could imply a right-handed and a left-handed spin, twist or mirror asymmetry, and complementarity could imply ambivalence, reciprocity or compensation of various intensities.


The vertical axis is purely mathematical or logical in status in which degrees of contradiction could be admitted. Time can absorb space and space time; this dynamism which is at the basis of modern physics and the very essence of Cartesianism is to be kept in mind here by us.


To use our own terminology, there is always to be attributed a polarity, an ambivalence, a reciprocity, a compensatory principle, a complementarity and finally a cancellability between the limbs of the quaternion structure here postulated.


At its core there is a vertical back-to-back relation and horizontally there is what might be called a belly-to-belly relation. The latter admits contradiction and is the basis of all conflict in life. Vertically, however, all shocks and stresses are absorbed and abolished by mutual cancellation at whatever level of this two-sided parameter. There is a dialectical descent and ascent between the positive and negative poles of the total situation.


Structure has thus to be conceived statically first, and then to have its own proper dynamism introduced or attributed to it so that we get a global view of all the perceptual component factors that make up the total picture in which the high value called beauty is to be examined by us in each of the hundred verses. There are subtler factors which enter into the dynamism which we cannot enumerate exhaustively here. They will enter into our interest normally as we focus our attention on the representations implied in each verse.


A flashlight held in our hand when walking through misty darkness can only light a circle within our visible area at a given time, although mist and darkness are not limited to what we can see. Contemplative minds, especially as understood in the logic-tradition of India, thus justifiably think in terms of circular or global units of consciousness placed in a vertical series beginning from the bottom pole of the vertical axis and ending at the top pole. Although its physiological position may not correspond to psychological units in terms of consciousness, the vertebral column with a central strand of nervous energy called susumna nadi, together with two other psycho-physical strands, at the left and right respectively, called ida and pingala, are generally taken for granted in yogic literature. If we now imagine six zones of consciousness ranging from bottom to top, we get the Adharas or Chakras, sometimes described and elaborated in detail by geometrical and biological analogies such as triangles and coloured petals in Yoga books.


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There are various schools of Yoga, the most important one being that of Patanjali, which uses eight such centres. In the present work, however, we find six centres prominently mentioned, each representing a point where horizontal and vertical factors cancel out to reveal a stable neutral or normal aspect of the Absolute proper to that particular level. The ambivalent factors always cancel out to reveal the same constant Absolute, however varied the pictorial content of the beauty to be appreciated might happen to be. The Tarot cards consist of pictorial representations supposed to represent the alphabet of a kind of mysterious schematism of thought. Yoga books also indulge in a similar pictorial language, but on Indian soil such pictures are mostly nourished by the mythology or analogies proper to the long Vedic or Sanskrit tradition. This is to be treated as only incidental by modern persons who can understand the same without mythology through a revised protolanguage such as that which we adopt and recommend here. The various gods of the Hindu pantheon happen to be themselves structural or functional components to be fitted together, giving us a content for the totality called Absolute Value which is always the object of any speculation, independent of time or clime. Sankara can be seen to have taken full advantage of the implications of this mythological language, not because he is religious himself, but because it lends itself admirably to the problem of giving beauty-content and full significance to the otherwise empty notion of the Absolute.


We shall try in the preliminary part of the projected Saundarya Lahari film to present certain of the mythological components used by Sankara, together with their proper background. In this way, the modern filmgoer, especially outside India, may be helped to see how the mythological language, together with a strict protolinguistic structuralism and the dynamism proper to it helps us to experience the essence of Absolute Beauty which is overwhelming in its total appeal.


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A WORD ABOUT THE BINDUSTHANA, OR LOCUS OF PARTICIPATION
The first 41 verses of the Saundarya Lahari presupposed a contemplative yogi, seated with eyes shut, representing an introspective withdrawal into the world of inner consciousness. The objective or positive side of consciousness in relation to the self will be the "object matter" proper to the rest of the composition. When a person meditates properly, his mind attains one-pointedness. This very term presupposes a point, not necessarily on a blackboard, but at a locus within one's self, which is referred to in Tantric literature as bindusthana. This focal point is where the global drop or essence of existence resides. When we think of a drop-like bindu, we could think of it as being made of an Absolute Substance, described also by Spinoza as a "thinking substance". We could visualise the same Absolute Substance with its own vertical reference when we add to it the dimension of res cogitans as used by Descartes. This vertical element is often referred to in Yogic or Tantric literature as nada, the essence of sound. Nada and bindu participate vertico-horizontally in terms of a thinking substance known as nadabindu, which is supposed to be the ontological starting point - the source or place of origin and dissolution - of all that comes to be or become in the mental or material world.


It is usual in contemplative Sanskrit literature to refer to nadabindu in terms of the tender lotus feet of the god or goddess. Only the tenderest part of our mind can participate with an equally tender part of that which we meditate upon, because any participation between subject and object, even in meditation, has to presuppose the principle of homogeneity, which is called samana adhikaranatva. The soldering together of two metals presupposes this principle; the base metal and the noble metal can be made to participate intimately only when there is an equality of status between them. The tenderest devotion thus meets on equal terms the tender petals of the lotus feet of the god. It is therefore usual to put the two feet of the god that you are meditating upon at the focal point where mind and matter cancel out at the neutral point of the thinking substance. The two feet within a lotus could be placed at any point on the vertical parameter, which is cut at right angles by an implied horizontal forest of lotuses, independent of the bindusthana (locus) of meditation. Thus a vertical series and a horizontal series of lotuses is presupposed for structural purposes in each of these verses. The horizontal dimension is incidental only, whereas the vertical reference is the essential parameter that links essence with existence - existence marking the lower (hierophantic) Alpha Point, and essence marking the highest (hypostatic) Omega Point. The point of intersection represents the normative bindusthana proper, but at whatever positive or negative point in the vertical series the feet of the Adorable One might be placed by the contemplative, there is a value regulated by the central normative lotus which is always the constant reference.


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These are some of the characteristics of the structural language adhered to by classical convention through a tacitly understood lingua mystica, coming down to us from pre-Vedic times through the Upanishads, through Kalidasa and through Sankara. It is impossible for us not to recognise the two sets of lotuses radiating from the central lotus at the bindusthana, as suggested in Verse 21. A justification for all we have said above is found in this verse.


STRUCTURAL DYNAMISM
It is one thing to visualise the alphabets of the elements of structuralism in situ, as it were, and quite another to visualise this structuralism in living or dynamic terms. Yogic meditation is not a static fixation of the attention on objects such as a bindu (central locus), which is mere hypnotism or crystal-gazing. The bindu must be thought of as a target to be reached by the mind, as with a bow fitted with an arrow directed vertically upwards towards the Omega Point. In order for this arrow to have the maximum momentum the bowstring would have to be pulled intently towards the Alpha Point.


The bowstring, when thus pulled, would tend to make its own hyperbolic triangular shape, with an apex pointing toward the base of the lower cone as implied in the suggested static structural figure of two cones placed base to base. The flying arrow reaches the target at the apex of the top cone, while its reciprocal dynamism is implied in the tension of the bowstring trying to attain the limit at the Alpha Point.


The Alpha Point thus has a negative psycho-dynamic content in the form of an introspective or introverted mystical or emotional state of mind, full of tender feelings such as between mother and child, shepherd and sheep, etc. This is the domain of the weeping philosopher and the agony of the mystic.


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The stages marked on the plus side of the vertical axis represent brighter and more intelligent states of the psycho-physical or psycho-somatic self. The coloration tends to be brighter and whiter as the emotional content transforms itself in its ascent by stages into fully emancipated states free from the weight of emotional content . A rich magenta glory might thus be said to be present even to the normative or centralised psychosomatic vision, though this is only subjectively experienced by the Yogi. The arrow flying upwards at right angles with a momentum proportionate to the tension of the horizontal bowstring pulled toward the negative pole of the vertical axis, attains its maximum limit the more it approximates to the Alpha Point, when released with maximum tension. The speed and power of penetration of the arrowhead breaks through all barriers, cancelling out the arithmetic difference that might persist between the arrow and the target.


It is usual to refer to a Chakra as a ganglion or plexus, such as the solar plexus, but psycho-physics properly understood has to reject all partial pictures slanted in favour of physiology and find a point that is correctly and neutrally placed psychosomatically perhaps between mind and matter.


The notion of syndromes and synergisms treated together with different electrical potentiality comes nearer to what is represented by the Chakras, which are not to be thought of partially as either mind or matter, but neutrally, as pertaining to the context of an Absolute Thinking Substance.


Thus there is a cancellation of counterparts along a vertical parameter to be understood with its negative and positive content, but always having a central normative magenta glory for reference. Such are some of the dynamic features of the structuralism which we have to insert correctly into the same context when we have visualised its static structural features. Psycho-statics and psycho-dynamics have thus to belong together when we try to understand the value that each verse reveals. Each of the six or eight positions usually distinguished as Adharas or Chakras is to be looked on as a stable cross-sectional point of equilibrium between counterparts which are always cancellable to normality or neutrality - just as a numerator number of whatever value could be cancelled out against a denominator value of the same set or category, yielding a constant that remains uniform at any position along the vertical parameter. It is always the neutrality of the magenta glory that is revealed when vertical and horizontal factors cancel out within the core of the Absolute. This aspect of subjective psycho-dynamism must be kept in the mind of the spectator, at least in regard to the first 41 verses distinguished as the "Ananda Lahari".


OTHER MISCELLANEOUS IDEOGRAMS
There are many other ideograms besides the bow and arrow which bring into the picture the dynamic aspect of structuralism. We have seen how the lotus flower and the feet figuratively represent ideograms. Now we find a number of secondary ideograms which are consistently used as alphabets or elements or both, within the scope of the lingua mystica which is the language employed in this work.


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The bee drinking honey from the lotus always implies the bhokta or enjoyer, as the honey implies the side of the bhogya, or enjoyable. There is a subtle dialectical interaction between these two sets of values; one referring to the subjective world, and therefore vertical; the other to the objective world, and therefore horizontal. At the point of separation between the vertical and horizontal we could imagine a row of bees sucking honey, with a corresponding flower for each bee. The horizontal parameter would be the line separating the row of bees each from the flower or the drop of honey it seeks. Instead of a row of bees, sometimes we find a rows of cranes, or rows of elephants, which refer to the four quarters of the compass in a sort of vectorial space within consciousness. Thus the Dig Ganas, the four or eight elephants representing points of the compass, are to be imagined as playing havoc or pushing their trunks into a central pole or axis.


The crystal imagery, resembling that of a colour solid, properly belongs to the base of the vertical axis, while at the neutral O Point, this same crystalline form would resemble a maze or lattice or matrix of vertico-horizontal lines, looking like a cage. Above the central O Point, when we think in terms of a radiating light going from a point to some universal here or elsewhere, the colour solid gives place to its counterpart, to be visualised as two cones, placed not base to base, but apex to apex. Thus crystals, conic sections, radial arrangements in flowers, logarithmic spirals with complementary spins, inversions and transformations, both vertical and horizontal; all enter into the complex fabric of the dynamics of the structural language employed here.


Petals, like the apexes of triangles, together with rays of light radiating outwards, can represent elements of various abstractions or generalisations within the scope or content of the absolute value of beauty here. The letters of the alphabet could be applied preferably to conceptual rays, while lines standing for relations of a here-and-now ontological character are proper to the crystal which serves to explain more ontological relation-relata complexes.


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The matrix of the centre of the axes serves to clarify the four-fold quaternion aspect. The most central dynamism could be represented by a figure-eight, exemplified by the familiar pulsations in electromagnetic interference figures, and also by the systole-diastole function of the heartbeat.


Every pulsation in its double aspect could be biologically reduced to conformity with this figure-eight which depends on the sine function of waves or frequencies. Wave lengths are horizontal, while frequencies are vertical, or vice-versa, as the case may be. When inserted together into the same space, they make this figure-eight structurally valid in terms of cross-polarized light.


All these figures trace their courses within the grand flux of universal becoming which is the most basic phenomenal manifestation of the neutral Absolute. The universe becomes experienced in most general terms as a process of flux or becoming. This is what Heraclitus meant when he said that one cannot enter into the same river twice. Bergson's philosophy supports the same flux in terms of the élan vital. Vedanta also thinks of the universe in terms of a process of flux or becoming when it refers to Maya as anadhir bhava rupa (of the form of a beginningless becoming), itself having an absolute status. Maya, as the negative aspect of the Absolute, however, could yield a normative Absolute which would cancel out this flux, but viewed from the side of relativity to which a living person naturally must belong, the universal flux of becoming is a reality which could be abolished only when the total paradox implied between physics and metaphysics is also finally abolished. In this grand flux of becoming, structuralism enters as naturally as it does in modern physics, where space and time belong together as conjugates and can be treated as Cartesian correlates. The articulation of space and time gives us the vertical parameter.


Thus we have referred to some further aspects of the peculiar visual language which will help the viewing audience to follow intelligently the content of this film. Indications of a more detailed order will be given in the film itself.


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FUNCTIONAL MONOMARKS OF GRADED AND DUPLICATE DIVINITIES OR PRESENCES
Before actually witnessing the film, some of the more hidden technicalities involved here will have to be explained.


Dynamism presupposes functions. Eros is the god of love who has the function of sending arrows to smite the hearts of lovers. Eros thus is a demigod or demiurge who is often symbolised by the bow and arrow held by him. The bow and arrow represent in visual language the monomarks belonging to his function. The three divinities, Brahma, Vishnu and Shiva, have their respective functions of creation, preservation and destruction within the total scope of cosmological phenomena comprised in the pure notion of the Absolute.


Thus Vishnu's function lies structurally in the middle zone, while Brahma brings up the rear and Shiva functions as the destroyer of everything at the Omega Point of nominalistic over-conceptualisation. Upward and downward logarithmic lines between the lower and higher limits would indicate the ambivalence between the function of Brahma and that of Shiva.


Eros, or Kamadeva, must have his counterpart Rati as his virtual companion. Shiva can destroy Eros only when Eros' presence falls outside the vertical negative parameter: but when occasionalism favours him as he takes refuge within the vertical negativity of the Absolute, he reigns invulnerably supreme in his own right, as in Verse 6.


The divinities can be either hypostatic or hierophantic in their significance. Where they have a numerator value, they are represented as gods or demigods, but when they have a denominator value, they are spoken of as "presences" with an ontological or an existential status, as in Verse 8.


The devotee, as Sankara himself indicates in the first verse, is placed outside the scope of the holy or the sacred at the bottom of the vertical axis and beyond Shiva, who normally marks the Omega Point at the top. Paramesvara (supreme Shiva), who has a more thin and mathematical status, is to be presupposed as the counterpart of the devotee as his saviour. As prayer or worship always implies a benefit between the worshipper and the worshipped, we could imagine an endless series of devotees praying for benefits compatible with themselves, each placed in duplicate at points marking hypostatic or hierophantic values within the total amplitude of the two-sided vertical parameter. Each of the divinities involved could confer its benefit on the believer or worshipper who constantly meditates on it. All prayers correctly made from the denominator side must necessarily find their compatible response from the numerator side. Such is the time-honoured presupposition in all prayer.


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Thus a mathematical Paramashiva (supreme Shiva) beyond the Omega Point on the thin vertical parameter has his counterpart in a footstool or cushion on the negative vertical side, either for the Devi or himself indifferently. From her toes to the top of her tresses there are subtler values to be placed back-to-back. Nothing can be omitted because the universal concrete that the Absolute represents enters even into the essence or existence of the toenails and the hair. Flowers could be hypostatic or hierophantic in their origin, or both, according to the circumstances. The waters of the Ganges, representing high value, can pour down to purify or bless a total situation, from the head of Shiva to his feet. When originating at the O Point in a lake represented by the navel of the Goddess, this water flows horizontally like an actual or geographical river conferring benefits on cultivators.


These suggestions must be kept in mind as the audience watches the unfolding of absolute Beauty in terms of magenta glory. The seventh verse, when scrutinized, will reveal how these levels and dimensions are woven into the structural dynamism adopted by Sankara.


A DRAMA UNFOLDING WITHIN THE SELF AS IN THE NON-SELF
The present series of verses could be viewed statically as representing Chakras or Mandalas. The Yantra could provide a dynamism because it suggests a wheel always going around. A picture as well as a drama may be said to be unravelling itself before our vision as the poem reveals to our view various aspects of absolute Beauty. The dynamism thus superimposed on the structuralism makes the whole series resemble the scenes of a dramatic universe to be thought of both subjectively and objectively at once. All drama involves personages or characters. Besides the hero and heroine, who represent the vertical and horizontal references, there is a villain responsible for bringing in the complications to be resolved during the action of the drama.


When the classical rule of the unity of time, place and action is fully respected, as it used to be before the time of the romanticism of Victor Hugo, we get a more global perspective of a comedy or tragedy with many stratifications of paradises gained or lost, infernos and purgatories, incorporated into the picture of Dante and Beatrice, God and Satan, Faust or Mephistopheles as the main personages involved. A clown and a chorus can be used to add a touch of levity to the scene.


41


All the nine emotional attitudes known to Sanskrit aesthetics, ranging from masculine passion to the tenderest emotions of motherhood, could enter into the total picture that the drama presents to our view. In Aeschylus' play, the bound Prometheus supplies the central locus round which action develops, radiating polyvalently in all directions. A clown could be an interloper functioning both as a villain as well as a tale-bearer. A strong man could add a herculean touch in which hierophany prevails over hypostasy. In the present composition, all corresponding personages of Indian mythology can easily be distinguished. Eros is recognized as a complicating character. The presentation and resolution aspects of the drama have the same Eros involved in them in milder or modified forms as occasion demands. The antinomy between Zeus and Demeter is resolved in the present work by the attempt made in every verse to resolve the paradox involved between them, rather than to enhance the element of contradiction, as in classical Greek literature. Shiva and Shakti participate in a gentle dialectical way so that a normative cancellation without conflict takes us beyond the contradiction of paradox. Such is the interplay of the functions of the various characters which are enumerated in Verse 32 by the author himself.

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VERSES WITH TITLES

 SAUNDARYA LAHARI

 

SECTION TITLES AND VERSES

 

SECTION 1, "MAIN STRUCTURAL FEATURES INTRODUCED" (V1 TO V10)

PRELIMINARY STRUCTURAL DYNAMISMS

 
The problem is to treat the Denominator side of the first verse so as to be sure that it has a fully cancelable status with the vertical axis of Shiva.
You need both a horizontal line and an Alpha Point reference.

 

1) Vertical-Horizontal. Paradox Posed as between the Field and the Knower of the Field at the core of the Absolute.

Shiva, united with Shakti, becomes able to manifest,
If otherwise, this god knows not even how to pulsate,
How then could one of ungained merit be able to bow to, or even praise,
One, such as You, adored even by Vishnu, Shiva and Brahma.

 

 2) Particle World. "Monde Affiné" - Three Agents.

The fine dust arising from Your lotus feet,
Brahma, gathering up, the worlds creates,
Vishnu incessantly bears them up somehow with his thousand heads,
And Shiva, having shaken it up, accomplishes with it his ash-wearing rite.

 

3) Quaternion. Four-fold Value-affiliations as Among Human Beings: Quaternian Structure.

To the uninstructed You are the light-city, inner darkness banishing, mid-ocean placed
To inert ones the mind-expanding ooze of sweetness within blossoms celestial,
While for indigent spirits you become a brood of philosophers' stones
And for those submerged in the ocean of birth and death, the very tusk of Vishnu's boar

 

4) Square-root-of-minus-one Ontology. Primacy of Cause over Effect: Satkaranavada.

You alone do not act overtly, by gesture, the promises of refuge or boon
Other arms than Yours can confer protection or boon;
What is more, Your feet, o sole refuge of the worlds of beings,
Are alone expert indeed in yielding boons more than asked for.

.

5) Reflected Glory onto Vishnu and Mohini.

To the uninstructed You are the light-city, inner darkness banishing, mid-ocean placed
To inert ones the mind-expanding ooze of sweetness within blossoms celestial,
While for indigent spirits you become a brood of philosophers' stones
And for those submerged in the ocean of birth and death, the very tusk of Vishnu's boar

 

 6) Ocasionalism Gives Power to Eros. (Springtime, flower-arrows, etc.)

O Daughter of the Snowy Peak, just deriving from Your glance askance
Whatsoever grace he could; with flowery bow, bumble-bee bowstring,
And five-flowered dart and springtide for minister; all these as one withal:
Mounting the chariot of the mountain breeze , he victoriously reigns, that god of love.


7) Structural Dynamism - KEY VERSE. Four-fold Structures Superposed. (Kvanat kanchi…)

O let Her appear before us, that proud counterpart of the City-Burner
Resounding with waist-belt of jingle bells, recumbent by breasts
Like frontal bulges of a calf elephant, slim of waist, with autumnal full-moon mature face,
Holding aloft bow and arrow, noose and goad!

 

8) Inner Beauty Unit. Yogi's Vision of Beauty, Completely Seen. (Gem island mid-nectar ocean placed.)

Seated on a couch of Shiva-form and having the Supreme Shiva for cushion;
Placed within a mansion wafted round by the perfume of blossoms of Kadamba trees,
Located within a celestial grove on a pearly-gem island in the midst of a nectar ocean,
Some fortunate ones contemplate You as the upsurging billow of mental joy.

 

 9) Series of such Inner Beauty Units. Sadhadharas. Series of Vertical Values. (The Chakras)

The earth placed in the Muladhara, water in the Manipura,
Fire in the Svadhisthana, air in the heart, with space above;
And amid eyebrows placing the mind, and breaking through the whole Kula path,
You do sport with your lord secretly in the thousand-petaled lotus.

 

10) Ascent and Descent of Values. A Verticalized Series Ranging both Ways. (Kundalini, 3 ½ Coils.)

With streaks of ambrosial essence streaming from between Your twin feet,
Sprinkling blessings over the worlds and again from that point of high intelligible values,
Turning Yourself into a snake form of three coils and a half,
You sleep in the hollow of the Kulakunda, Your proper ground attaining.

 

 

SECTION 2:  SRI CHAKRA AND ARUNA. (V11 TO V20)

 

11) Sri Chakra Presented as a Conical Section View with 43 Elements of Refuge. CENTRAL VERSE

With the four of Shiva and of Shiva-maids five,
And severally the nine of prime nature, with eight and sixteen petals
Three circles and three lines, are thus complete,
The forty-three elements making up Your angular refuge.

 

12) Conceptual Versus Perceptual Beauty. Existence Superior to Essence. (Innocent young maidens.)

O Daughter of the High Peak, to estimate the equal of Your beauty,
The best among poets, exercising their fancy, somehow created Brahma and others.
Eager Your beauty to see, heavenly damsels mentally attain to
What is hard even for ascetics to attain; the state of union with Shiva

 

13) Aegis of the Absolute. Ambivalent Compensation Between Numerator Ugliness and Denominator Beauty. (Sub Specie Aeternitatis.)

A man overaged, uninteresting to the view, inert in sport;
Falling within the range of Your side-glance, they follow, running in hundreds -
Young women, with hair dishevelled, their rounded, shapely breasts by blown-off clothes revealed
Their waistbands bursting and silk garments in disarray.

 

 14) Numerological Structuralism. Vertical Conic Section Numerologically Analysed.

Fifty-six for earth; for water fifty-two;
Sixty two for fire; for air fifty-four;
Seventy-two for ether; for mind sixty-four;
Are the rays, even beyond these are Your twin feet.

 

15) Vedic Devi. Worlds of the two Dictionaries Cancelling into a Common Value.

Clear as autumnal moonbeams, with matted hair-made diadem,
Attached with crescent and with hands bearing refuge or boon-giving
gesture, rosary made of crystal-clear beads and book:
How could anyone, worshipping You but once,
Not gain in flow of words somehow, the pleasing sweetness of honey, milk and grapes?

 

16) Magenta Cancellation - CENTRAL VERSE. Magenta Glory by Cancellation in the Minds of Poets.

That beauty residing within the minds of superior poets,
Resembling that of a forest of lotuses, when touched by the tender light of dawn:
He who can thus adore You, who are so dear to Brahma as magenta itself;
He, by profound words of most tender erotic content, shall please the same select ones

 

17) Scintillating and Fluorescent Light. Semantic Blending of Vertical with Horizontal Word-bearing Elements.

He who can contemplate those word-bearing elements of broken moonstone lustre,
Joined with Vasinis, having an elusively fluid gleam;
He becomes, o Mother, the author of great poetic works,
Adding sweet charm to the lotus face of the Goddess of the Word.

 

18) Complete Aurora - CENTRAL VERSE. Cancelable Counterparts. (How many, how many others?)

With shades of Your bodily form enriched by the tenderly sunlit dawn,
And the whole earth submerged within magenta glory;
That man, able to contemplate You thus, wins You over with Urvasi and how many, how many other
Heavenly nymphs having gentle, startled, wild deer eyes.



19) Unilateral and One-sided Shakti Worship. Revalued Partial Samayin Cult. (Atilaghu.)

O Shiva Consort, making Your face the locus with twin breasts below,
And below still, as the better half of Shiva; meditating on Your erotic aspect,
Without delay he can stir the hearts of women; this is but slight
And at once agitates even Her of the three worlds, when sun and moon form Her twin breasts.

 

20) Centralization of Tendencies to Gain Two Kinds of Psychic Powers. Finding the Heart Locus.
FOR EVERY ONE OF THESE VERSES, THE FOUR FEET MUST BE REVEALED;THIS IS THE SECRET

He who can bring You, as emanating nectar out of Your limbs all around,
Into his heart like a moonstone-made statue,
He can quell the pride of serpents like the King of Birds
And a fever patient cure by his very look of ambrosial streak.

 

 

SECTION 3: TRANSCENDENCE BY VERTICALIZATION. INTERSUBJECTIVE AND TRANS-PHYSICAL REVERSIBILITY.OSMOTIC INTERCHANGE, COMPLEMENTARITY, ETC.
(V21 TO V30)

 

21) Negative Verticality. Thin Parameter Revealed. (Devi's lightning-streaked body)

As lightning-streak-bodied, made of sun, moon and fire,
And as placed even above the six lotuses in a great lotus grove;
Those great ones, as seers of such, Your aspect, free from dross and ignorance
They experience the upsurging billow of ultimate delight.

 

 22) Revisable Equation. (Bhavani tvam.) No Unilateral Worship. Reversibility - CENTRAL VERSE

O Goddess, You, on this Your servant bestow a kind look:
Thus intending to adore, no sooner one begins saying:
"O Goddess, You"; You grant him that state of identity with You
The same as what Vishnu, Brahma and Indra accomplished by the waving of the lights on their diadems.

 

23) Reciprocity. All but the Omega Point Absorbed Stage by Stage by Magenta Cloud. (Crescent and magenta are made equally thin and cancelled.)

Absorbing the left half of the body of Shiva and unsatisfied in mind still,
The other, I surmise, became absorbed also; therefore,
This Your form, having three eyes and bent by twin breasts,
Wearing crescent bedecked crown, became of magenta glory.

 

 24) Plus and Minus Compensation. Transcendence Within Brackets.

Brahma creates the world, Vishnu protects, Shiva destroys:
Negating all this and his own body, the lord fades out.
Thus what results: Shiva who has eternity for prefix (Sadashiva)
He blesses, obeying the orders derived from Your instantly vibrating eyebrow-twigs

 

25) Alpha to Omega modes. Absolutist Worship Transcends both Ontological and Teleological values. (Puja puja.)

Of the three gods, who are originated from Your three nature modalities,
Their worship of You, o Consort of Shiva, would alone be worship
Offered to Your twin feet; it is indeed thus when they do so,
Standing eternally beside Your gem-decked foot-stool, joining bud-like their hands well above their crowns

 

26) Negative Becoming. Quintuple Functions Abolished. Five-foldedness of Phenomenal Functioning Absorbed by Vertical Axis. ("He does sport alone")

Brahma regains his pure quintuple nature; Vishnu becomes passionless;
The God of Death destruction meets; the God of Wealth becomes bankrupt;
The great Indra becomes functionless, with half-shut eyes;
In this great doom, he sports, o constant spouse, Your lord alone.

 

27) Homogeneity of Physical and Metaphysical Worship when Treated as Ensembles. Reversible Ritualism - CENTRAL VERSE

Incantations, mutterings, ritual acts, hand gestures, gait,
Circumambulations, food offerings, inclination, adoration by lying down
All such enjoyments, as coming within the scope of self-surrender,
And thus synonymous with worship of You, let such be what from me might shine forth

 

28) Dignity of the Fourth Dimension. Shiva Survives by Pure Verticality Between Two Limits. (Poison and marital string.)

Even on partaking of nectar, so potent against fear, old age and death;
They reach their doom, all such gods as Brahma or Indra;
On even swallowing that terrible super-poison, for Shiva, time's function is not operative:
The source here being the power of Your marital string.

 

29) Ascending to Omega Point Dignity. Eternal Present Movement in the World of Intentionality, Dignity of the Devi and Shiva.

"Remove Brahma's crown from before, and that of him called Vishnu;
You are going to hurt his hard headgear: bypass Indra's crown"
As inclining in front of You, they remain, at that very moment for him on his homecoming,
You are about to rise. Such words of Your retinue, they do ring supreme.

 

30) Reversibility of Psychic Dignity. Self and Non-Self Reciprocity in Attaining Psychic Powers: the Worshipper is Worshipped as a Result.

Out of the rays arising from Your proper body, representing psychic powers such as atomicity,
Attendant on You, o Eternal One, one who contemplates these in terms of oneself:
What wonder for him that all benefits from the Three-Eyed One should only be worth rejection,
And that the fire of doom should perform for him in turn the light-waving rite.

 

Language begins subjectively, and the way you move the lips is the motor part.
The physical is the moving of the lips; the subjective is what you understand.
Thus, when two people are talking, it is an inter-subjective and trans-physical interchange.

 

 

SECTION 4: STRUCTURAL DYNAMISM STUDIED WITH MONOMARKS LEADING TO REGULAR ADHARAS. (V31 TO V41)

 

31) 64 Know-how Factors and their Negative Counterparts.

By sixty-four know-how factors, each capable of generating its own psychic power;
Transcending the whole world while remaining immobile,
The Lord of Beasts, again, by Your insistence, by that free expertness of Yours,
Caused to be brought down this firm earth for the unified fulfilment of all life purposes.

 

32) 3 Sets of Monomarks and Letters for Distinguishing 4 Limbs as Pertaining to the Heart.

Shiva, Parvati, Eros and earth; sun, moon,
God of Love, swan and Indra; Para, Mara and Hari;
With these three sets, with their heart monomarks suffixed,
They adore Your letters, o Mother, by way of naming Your component limbs.

 

33) Garlands of monomarks. Dynamics of Hedonistic Ritual. (Mahabhoga.)

Eros, source, wealth; this triplet placing first within Your charm
O lone and eternal one, innumerable seekers of great enjoyment
Adore You, telling beads of philosopher's stone, ever sacrificing into the fire of Shiva
By hundreds of streaks of clarified butter oblations from the celestial cow.

 

34) Vertical participation. Reciprocity of Bodies. Shiva and Shakti Participate; Sun and Moon as Breasts.)

You, who are the body of Shiva, having sun and moon for twin breasts
Yourself, I surmise, o Goddess, as a new sinless self.
Therefore, by mutual complementarity, this relation remains one of common reciprocity
Between You two, participating on equal terms of transcendent bliss.


35) Descending Series of Manifest Values, Representing Chakras.

The mind You are, the sky, the wind too, also the charioteer of the winds
You are the water, as well as the earth; apart from Your manifest form there is nought else indeed!
You, in order to manifest Your own self, by taking a universal form
Of mental bliss substantial, do assume the role of Shiva-bride, and thus triumphant rule.

 

36) Ajña Chakra Described. (The tendency or reference is upwards.)

I adore that Shiva ultimate, as placed in Your willing centre, shining with the brilliance
Of millions of suns and moons, whose flanks are illumined by the light of the intelligibles beyond;
Whom, worshipping with devotion, lifted beyond the reach of sun, moon and fire,
In that shining domain above all need, one lives indeed in that bright world of light


37) Visuddhi Chakra. (Belongs to the Devi as above, She is there with Shiva.)

In Your Vishuddhi Chakra, crystal-clear and sky-generating,
I adore Shiva and the Goddess also, with a parity of status with Shiva
By whose combined, streaming, moonbeam-like fluorescence,
With banished inner dross, like a female partridge, the world hereunder shines.

 

38) Anahata Chakra. Restful Middle Chakra with Two Swans.

I adore those twin swans, intent on enjoying the nectar
Of the lotus blooming within the consciousness of certain great ones,
Moving within whose minds as a result of their elaboration, the maturation
Of the eighteen arts takes place freed from dross, their goodness extracted as milk from water.

 

39) Svadhisthana Chakra. The Cooling Touch of Samaya.

O Mother, I praise, placing in Your Svadhisthana the fire of sacrifice
Ever looking upon it as the great fire of doom, and placing there her also called Samaya,
So that when the worlds are burning due to his anger,
Her mercy-moist regard renders to it the cooling touch of early spring.

 

40) Manipura Chakra. A Cloud which Rains on the Burning Worlds.

As found in certain contemplatives who take full refuge in Your Manipura,
I adore that dark cloud of Yours, as traversed by forceful lightning,
Banishing darkness and shining, bursting into sparks with the varied gem-decked brightness of Indra's bow,
While over the three worlds, agonized by the heat of Shiva-sun, it sheds its showering waters.

 

41) Muladhara Chakra. They Confer on the World the Status of Being Parented.

I meditate on Your new self, as placed at Your Muladhara, together with Samaya,
Given to her light-step dance, as also that great bold-step dancer;
Giving expression thereby to all nine aesthetic interests, thus by their joint lordship,
By mercy ordaining the rebirth of the world, they confer on it the renewed status of having both father and mother.

The whole of the Kula-path is passed in review.

 

NOTE: there is ambivalence as between 31-34 and 35-41. In the last three Chakras, Shiva and Samaya cancel out to give an absolutist Devi, but each Chakra "belongs" to the Devi. Verses 31-34 are building blocks, then come the Chakras.

 

 

SECTION 5: BRACKETING OF BOWS AND CRESCENTS AT DIFFERENT HYPOSTATIC LEVELS IN DESCENDING ORDER.(V42 TO V50)

 

42) 12 Suns Fused and Verticalized into Twilight, the Devi's Crown as 12 Suns. Verticalized Absolute - CENTRAL VERSE

These sky orbs twelve attained to rubyhood and placed close together
He who can praise thus Your golden crown, o Daughter of the Snowy peak
Would he not have then in his mind the impression of the bow of Indra
When, by reflected glory, a slender crescent is produced by the gems imbedded therein

 

43) Omega Point Darkness Cancelled. Ontological Richness as against Teleological Indigence, even at the Hypostatic Level.

Let the blooming blue-lotus forest growth of Your thick, glossy and lustrous locks
O Shiva Consort, banish the darkness within us
To gain whose natural fragrance those other flowers of the garden of Indra,
As I can guess, take their place within Your tresses.

 

44) Vertical Parameter Produced Upwards, Invasion of Rival Horizontal Forces. (The Devi's hairline.)

May it bless us, the upsurging billow of the beauty of your face
Outflowing into a stream, to resemble Your parted hairline,
With vermilion dust bedecked, keeping apart the strong growth of tresses
As if in bondage held by anti-darkness gangs, to reveal the tender rays of dawn


45) Bees Around Lotus Face. Central and Peripheral Ambivalence: Conical Cross-section. The Devi's Face with the Mouth as Bindu or Central Locus.

Your face, exuding perfume, as it gently smiles,
Having Your bright teeth for filament, when surrounded by Your natural curls
Like so many revelling, honey-licking bees; each the eye
Of the Eros-burner, puts to shame the beauty of the lotus.


46) Absolute Beauty as Enclosed within Crescent Moon Brackets. Two Crescents - One crescent is the Mind, the other is Matter, and they Participate.

I fain would treat Your forehead, shining with radiant beauty,
As a second crescent to that other frail one fixed to Your crown,
So that reversed in position, both as knit one-to-one,
Results the form of a fully-matured moon, emanating soft ambrosial essence.

 

47) Eros' Bow. Tragic Contradiction between the Bow of Devi and the Bow of Eros at Right-angles.

O Uma, ever pained in concern for banishing the fear of all creatures
And thus with eyebrows somewhat arched, with eyes of bee-like beauty below
I do surmise them as making up the bowstring for this bow
Of the Lord of Love, held by his other hand, his arm and fist hiding the middle part

 

48) 90 Degree Tilt; Vertical Twilight Derived from Horizontal Sun and Moon. Day and Night - CENTRAL VERSE

That eye of Yours, in essence the same as the sun and other than the left,
It generates daytime; the left one, presiding over night, creates its three vigils;
While the third eye, like a half-open golden lotus bud,
Ushers in the twilight time, moving between day and night.


49) Value Cities. Each of Eight Famous Cities has a Personality Derived from a Value Factor.

Vishala the expansive, Kalyani the auspicious; Sphutaruchi the clear of taste
Ayodhya the invincible, by blue lotus bound; Kripadharadhara, on mercy's fountain founded;
A certain Madhura, the sweet; Avanti, of saving power; Bhogavatika, enjoyment affording;
All such names of various cities of lasting fame, within Your total regard they do reign triumphant

 

50) Jealous Mid-eye. Jealousy between Vertical and Horizontal Value Factors. (Magenta has a vertical and horizontal participation.)

Seeing Your baby bumble-bee-like pair of eyes which, while seeming to cast glances,
Do not give up the bases of Your ears, mellowed by the play of the nine aesthetic interests,
Remaining like aptness with poets, wholly absorbed in drinking the honey within a spray of blooms;
Your mid - forehead lotus-bud eye, by jealousy touched, seems magenta - tinged

 

 

SECTION 6: EROTIC AESTHETIC INTERESTS, SOMETIMES VERTICALLY NEUTRALIZED. FOUR GRADES OF STRUCTURES SUPERIMPOSED ON THE FACE. (V51 TO V60)

 

51) The Nine Rasas. Seven Moods or Attitudes. Karuna or Kindness towards the Devotee.

Moved by sentimental love for Shiva, resentful to any other person;
With anger of jealousy towards Ganges, and with transports of wonder at Shiva's story;
With fearful surprise for the snakes of Hara, and for friends a jestful smile;
As such a source of lotus-red grace, Your regard, o Mother, for me will remain one of kindliness.

 

The face is the index of the soul; all art is only the playing of the needle on the dial of the face.
The most important thing is that someone is shooting arrows, and there is nothing to do but to learn how to fall down in the right way. Forbidden fruit, concupiscence, original sin etc. are all dealt with properly here.

 

52) Eros' Arrows Verticalized (i.e. homogeneous in the vertical). Kataksha, Side-glance of Jealousy for Shiva.

Drawn fully to the ear-limits, like gleaming Eros arrows, with lashes looking like
Arrow-base feathers; these Your eyes, having the effect
Of disturbing the complacent detachment of the City-Burner,
Make for Your glory as the highest clan of the Mountain King.


53) Homogeneous Structures. Three Gunas like Folded Japanese Fan. Through a Burst of Passion, because the Devi is in Love, the Three Gunas are Absorbed wholly into the Horizontal.

The tricolour distinctness of Your eyes, o beloved of Ishana (Lord)
Presented in clear threefold relief by the use of collyrium,
Would seem to create afresh the gods Shiva, Vishnu and Indra,
Bereft of passion and having the qualities of Rajas, Sattva and Tamas


54) Flux of Three Gunas. The Same is Vertically Folded. Bathing at the Triple Confluence of Rivers is Purifying.

O one of kindly, sympathetic regard, Your heart being
Given over to the Lord of Beasts: of rivers such as Shona, Ganga and Yamuna,
Coloured red, white and black:
Their sacred waters You do blend indeed into sinless confluence for our purification.

 

55) Open and Shut, Figure 8. Neutral Balance between the Phenomenal and Noumenal Aspects of Creation. (Her eyes are half-open.)

With eyes open or shut, You can effect, as saints say,
The being or non-being of the world, o Daughter of the Earth-Supporting Lord;
What thus came to be as you opened them, this entire world, without anything left,
To save, I now surmise, You remain now with eyes unwinkingly withdrawn

 

56) Participation of Eye and Ear Interests like Sapharika Fish. Four-leaf Clover Structure - CENTRAL VERSE

O Aparna, afraid of the gossip carried to Your ear bases by Your lengthened eyes
Surely they lie merged unwinking in water like the female Sapherika fish
This Lakshmi too, leaves behind at dawn the closed petal doors of water lilies,
And at dusk, forcing them open, She re-enters therein.

 

57) Lengthened Side-glance Better than a Frontal Glance, Moonbeams. No Direct Favouritism. (The story of Pancha Nalli can be used here. (Untraceable reference. ED.))

With Your long-extended regard having the beauty of water-lilies just opening,
O Shiva Consort, do bathe with mercy even me steeped in misery far off
Thus shall I be blessed with no loss to You;
The moonbeams do fall on forest and mansion with equality.

 

58) Structural Dynamism Within Four Limits. Ear and Eye Bow Limits, with Eros' Arrow aimed at Right-Angles.

The two sets of curved limiting lines of Yours, o Daughter of the King of Mountains,
Who is it that will not fancy them as the bow of the flower- arrowed one;
Where, placed obliquely, and reaching beyond the path of hearing,
As it shines, adhering to Your side-glances, it gives the impression of the fixing of the arrow.

 

59) Two Chariots. Vertical and Horizontal Chariots Confronting Each Other. (Four-wheeled and one-wheeled chariots.)

This, Your face, I consider Kama's chariot with four wheels,
As seen when Your ear ornaments are reflected on Your shining cheeks;
Surmounting which that great hero Kama assails the Lord of Hosts,
Who, with sun and moon for foothold, mounting the globe for chariot, is fully ready to give him battle

 

60) Medium and Message. Interaction between Perceptual and Conceptual Values. (The Devi's telephone call.)

The good sayings of Saraswati, exuding nectar sweetness,
Ever absorbing as with slow interest, You bend Your ears to them, o blessed one
Each bright wit therein approving with nods,
While Your series of earrings seem to applaud them with their high-pitch jinglings

 

 

SECTION 7: INTIMATE VERTICAL PARTICIPATION (V61 TO V70) AND ONE-ONE CORRESPONDENCE. (IN V70)

 

61) Levels of Inner and Outer Plenitude.

O banner of the dynasty of the Himalayas, Your nose ridge, here as Your clan's flagstaff,
Let it ripen for us, standing so near below You, deserving fruit;
Inwardly wearing pearls as they do, and dropped by cool moonbeam respiration,
It bears, even outside, pearls due to the plenitude of the same.

 

62) Figure-8 Dance in Search for Parity between Redness of Lips and Teeth.

O one of goodly teeth, of Your parted lips naturally red I shall declare the similitude;
Let the coral reef bear fruit by reflection from its original model
With which desiring to climb to the point of mid-parity,
However could it avoid being abashed at least by a degree?

 

63) Participation in Terms of the Enjoyment of Moonlight. (Sweet and sour alternate.)

Your smile, like a moonbeam cluster out of Your moon-bright face,
Partridges, on drinking, by surfeit of sweetness
Numbness of tongue they got; thus presently do they imbibe eagerly
The nectar thereof, treating it as sour brew, night by night.

 

64) Adhyasa: Participation at the Tongue-tip. (The tongue-tip and a crystal image participate with each other.)

By incessant repetition of a muttered charm glorifying Your Lord;
As offering the flower-red shade of Your tongue triumphs;
The pure, clear, crystal outline image of Saraswati,
While seated at Your tongue-tip, o Mother, in turn attains to rubyhood in its bodily form.

 

65) Polyvalent Participation, with Reservation by Skanda.

O Mother, they merge, those mouthfuls of betel-juice of Your face,
As Skanda, Vishnu and Upendra, returning from vanquishing demons in battle,
Taking off their headgear and armour, they return, discountenancing
That Shiva's portion of offering meant for Chanda which are moon-bright bits of camphor.

 

 

66) Line of Separation. (Her vina covered with cloth.)

Starting as You do to sing with Your vina, with head movements,
Of the varied exploits of the Lord of Beasts, You, as the Goddess of the Word
The one of lovely speech, You promptly cover up to silence
Your instrument as mocking the sweetness thereof by sounds of strings.

 

67) Father's Touch on Her Chin is Static, Her Husband's is a Dynamic Figure-8.

Affectionately touched by the tip of the hand of the Mountain king,
And lifted again and again by that Shiva out of desire
To drink of the lips thereof, that which makes the handle
For Your face-mirror, how could we ever speak of it, Your peerless chin.

 

68) Contrast Puts Absolute Beauty into Relief.

Incessantly embraced by the arms of the City-Burner,
And thrilled to thorny bristling of the hair of Your neck,
It shows a lotus-stalk grace, smudged by excess of dark cosmetic paste
By itself it retains beneath the creeper-tendril suppleness of the pearly necklace lotus core

 

 69) Three Subtle Vertical Levels of Music.

Those three lines on Your neck, o One fully expert in time, syncope and melody;
They are the counter-grounds of Your marital thread of strands and sub-strands,
As they do shine as the ground wherein is born many a melody;
Giving position, regulation and limitation for the three groups of musical keys.

 

70) Fourfold and One-to-one Correspondence at Two Levels.

Of the lotus-core tender beauty of Your fourfold hands,
He sings the praise, the lotus-born god, trembling the while because of Shiva's nails
That once of yore nipped off his extra head, he (Brahma) intending now to pray for
Your refuge-granting hand- gesture for each of his remaining heads

 

 

SECTION 8: BRACKETING, ONE-ONE CORRESPONDENCE AT LOWER LEVELS OF THE VERTICAL AXIS; RECIPROCITY. (V71 TO V80)

 

71) Bracketing within upper and Lower Limits. (The Vedantic contribution.)

Shining by the brilliance of Your fingernails that mock the colour of
Just-opening lotus buds, how could we speak of the beauty of Your hand?
Granted be, o Uma, that the lotus could have one shade less of parity with it
If at all, and that, alas, only when touched by the magenta paste of the sole of Lakshmi as she plays thereon.

 

72) Mutual Adhyasa; Mutual Error between Mother and Child; Hallucination both Ways.

Let it banish our misery, o Goddess, your twin breasts,
Ever being sucked equally by Skanda and Ganesha;
Of which, seeing their milk-spouting fronts, Ganesha causes laughter
As he feels his own front with misgivings in his mind.

 

73) Compensation between Higher Nourishment, giving a Purer Life. Ganesha and Subrahmanya together make up the Absolute.

O banner of the King of Peaks, Your breasts, shoulder-borne
Are nectar-bearing ruby pots indeed, without any trace of doubt:
These two, Skanda and Ganesha, both innocent of the pleasures of marital contact
Drinking from them they remain thus child-like to the present day

 

74) Descending Parameter from Pearl to Ruby to Black.

Your mid-bust region, wearing a slender garland of pearly beads,
Derived and worked out by some elephant-demon vanquished by Shiva
The semblance bears of his reputation with added redness of lips
And an inner brightness presenting a picturesque charm.

 

 75) Milk of Wisdom Equated to Words of Wisdom. (Dravida shishyu.)

Your breast milk, I consider, o maiden born to the Earth- Supporting Lord,
As if it were word-wisdom's ocean of nectar, flooding from out of Your heart
Offered by one who is kind, which, on tasting,
This Dravidian child, amidst superior poets, is born a composer of charming verse.

 

76) Parameter Continued below the O Point. (Eros dives into a navel-lake.)

That mind-born god, once, on his body being engulfed
In the fire of Shiva's ire, into the deep lake of Your navel,
O Mountain Daughter, he dived, and on re-emerging,
The smoke thus raised, the people look upon as Your rows of hair.


77) Pure Structuralized Space Reduced to Ethereal Shreds.

O auspicious Mother, that something revealed at Your slender waist
Looking like ripples on the surface of the river Kalindi,
Looms in the mind of contemplatives as space reduced to ethereal particles
Entering into the cavity of Your navel, and produced by the friction of Your pot-like breasts.


78) O Point with Four-fold Polyvalence. (Aspects of the Devi's navel.)

O mountain-born, your navel reigns supreme
As a stilled Gangetic whirlpool, as the fecund flowerbed of Your breast-bud-bearing creeper
As the sacrificial fire-pit for Kama, and for Rati as her pleasure- bower
While to the eyes of the Mountain Lord the cavern mouth for his austerities

 

79) Precarious Vacuity at the O Point. ("Let there be security forever")

For Your waist, naturally slim, fatigued by weight of bust form,
Bending by form and on the point of breaking,
Equal in state to a tree on a collapsing brook bank;
O mountain-born one let there be security forever.

 

80) Reciprocity Between Horizontal and Vertical Tendencies in Life.  (Eros saving the tragedy of double negation.)

O Goddess, having made Your twin breasts gain the beauty of gold pots,
Rubbing at the upper arms, bursting the bodice and presently perspiring,
The God of Love, now wanting to save your threefold waist from breaking, saying: "enough!"
With three strands of a wild creeper, he presently binds.

 

 

SECTION 9: FINAL STRUCTURAL DETAILS: PRIMACY OF ONTOLOGICAL ABSOLUTE. (V81 TO V90)

 

81) Figure 8 Circulation between Existence and Subsistence. Ponderability and Expansiveness.

Ponderability and extensiveness Shiva once bestowed on You as dowry
Cutting them off from his own hips; thus it is this
Yours here, both weighty and expansive, cancels out the whole world
And by prior substantiality confers lightness on it too.

 

82) Knee Callosities and Frontal Lobes of Elephants Compared and Cancelled.

Beating both the best of elephant trunks, and groups of golden banana stems,
By thighs and by knees having goodly callosities, due to daily devotions
To Your lord, even the twin frontal knobs of the heavenly elephant
You out-do, o Mountain Daughter triumphant.

 

83) Universal Concrete Gets Primacy with Arrowheads Simulating Toe-nails.

His quiver duplicating as Your twin legs, looking like pillars
Made by the God of Love, for giving battle to Shiva,
They show at their knees ten arrowheads, simulating nails,
Sharpened only on the whetstones which are the crowns of gods.

 

84) Cancellability of Vertical Limits: the Bottom Limit of the Vertical Axis Becomes the Top of the Next Vertical.

Mother, Your twin feet, marking as they do the crest point of wisdom,
Wearable as head ornament by You as by me, kindly place both upon my head
Water for their ablution comes from the stream in Shiva's matted hair
And the red paste on their sole comes from the magenta glory of Vishnu's crown

 

85) Mystical Thrill at Different Levels of the Vertical Axis, Extending to Lower than Human Levels.

Spoken words of worship do we offer to these Your lotus feet,
Beauteous as they are to view, smeared over with paste of magenta glory
Extremely jealous is he, the Lord of Beasts, of that Ashoka tree
In Your pleasure grove, for desiring to be kicked by them.

 

86) Ontology Meets Teleology Rather Abruptly; Shiva is Indifferent to Nominalism.

On having inadvertently defaulted in respect of Your family name,
While stooping in shame, Your husband's forehead as You kicked with Your lotus feet,
That enemy of Shiva, wholly giving up his rancour, his victory
celebrates with clamour of many jingle bells.

 

87) Four-fold Circulation of Values Between Two Pairs of Lotus Feet.

Capable of being killed by snow, and fully at home on the snow peak;
Sleeping at night, and in bloom both at dawn and after;
Making Lakshmi's bowl overgenerous to Your Vedic worshippers,
Such the twin lotus of Your foot, it triumphs: what wonder herein?

 

88) A Pun on the Conceptual and Perceptual Import of Value. (Shiva lifts Devi's foot.)

Your foot is the seat for good repute, o Goddess;
How then from danger to safety did it come? The wise treat it as of tortoise-shell hardness;
How then was it that Shiva,
At his wedding, could lift it with a tender mind to place it on the ritual stone?

 

89) Hypostatic and Hierophantic Values Reviewed Together under the Aegis of the Absolute. (Chandi, the tragic one.)

With fingernails like moons, putting to shame
The lotus hands of celestial damsels, and feet that seem to mock celestial trees,
O tragic one, Chandi, Your twin feet offer fruit to heaven dwellers
With leaf-tender finger-tips, and bring secure riches to the poor instantly and incessantly

 

90) Vertical and Concentric Absorption in the World of Absolute Value. (Let my life Go…)

Giving riches to the needy as required and of its store of honey
Distributing plentifully sweetness around; into such a beauty
Of the celestial blossom of Your feet, immersed altogether,
Let my life go merged with legs and inner organs into six-footed bee-hood.

 

 

SECTION 10: FINAL ABSTRACTION AND GENERALIZATION WITHOUT ABOLISHING UNIVERSAL CONCRETE EXISTENCE OR REALITY. (V91 TO V100)

 

91) Ontological Limit Structurally Understood and Revised Conceptually.

Your young domesticated cygnets, intent on learning from You the sportive pose of steps,
Practising still with faults, o one of graceful gait, on their not giving up,
With the sound of gem-filled anklets imitating,
It would seem now that You are teaching them.

 

92) Downwards Normalization of the Devas from the Omega Point. (Shiva's canopy.)

Gone as they are to Your couch-hood, Brahma, Vishnu, Ishvara, Rudra and others
Shiva wearing a deceptive canopy derived from his crystal light;
By Your radiance projected on to it and turned to a magenta shade,
As the very embodiment of erotic bliss, he charms the view.

 

93) Transparent but Firm Ontological Innocence in a Girl. (Curly in hair...)

Curly in hair and naturally simple in smile, with a magenta-flower-supple mind
Bust firm like a kitchen mashing stone, extremely slender at waist,
With solid shoulders and hips, thus Shiva's world to save,
She reigns supreme, a certain kindliness called magenta.

 

94) The Circulation between Essence and subtle Existence in the Physiological and Cosmological Body of the Goddess.

The dark zone of the moon is musk; the moon's orb is water;
The moon's phases they are camphor bits filling a box of ebony,
Which, when emptied daily by Your joys,
For Your sake, Brahma fills it again and again.

 

95) Disinterested Worship versus Worship for Benefits (Siddhis).

You being the consort of Shiva, it is difficult indeed
For unsettled minds to attain the equivalent of the way of Your worship;
Whatever limitless gains they, the divinities such as Indra and others might have had,
Those psychic powers such as Anima, from just outside Your door they got them

 

96) The Ultimate Constancy of Parvati can know no Horizontal or Vertical.

The wife of Brahma, how many poets does she not woo?
How many are there not, who, by having some wealth, can claim Lakshmi's hand?
O constancy's ultimate meaning, outside Shiva
The contact with Your breasts is hard even to a favourite garden tree

 

97) The Maya Vision is Superior to the Turiya Vision.

As the Goddess of the Word, Veda-knowers speak of You as Brahma's wife
Lakshmi is Vishnu's wedded one, and the Mountain Daughter is Shiva's consort;
Certain others as the unattainable and boundless fourth state refer to You;
While you remain as the great Maya, making the universe go round, as queen of the Ultimate Absolute.

 

98) The Final Surrender of the Vidyarthi (Wisdom-Seeker).

When, o Mother, tell me, shall this thy supplicant drink
Of the ablution water of Your magenta sap-smeared feet?
As causing even one dumb born to be a poet,
When will he enjoy within the flavour of the betel juice in the lotus mouth of the Word-Goddess?

 

99) Centralized Four-fold Normalization or Cancellation in the Absolute.

Sporting with Saraswati and with Lakshmi as co-consort with Brahma and Vishnu
While disrupting with his charming body the constancy of Rati to her lord,
With banished animality and bondage, living long,
He enjoys what is known as ultimate bliss, your supplicant.

 

100) All action is Abolished in Favour of Unitive Understanding.

To carry out the ritual propitiation of the sun by waving flames,
To offer oblations to the moon, the source of nectar, by particles of moonstone water,
To appease the deep with offerings of water its own,
Such, o Mother is this wordy praise with words Your own.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

SAUNDARYA LAHARI

 


PART I


ANANDA LAHARI

 

 

VERSES 1 TO 10 - THE MAIN STRUCTURAL FEATURES ARE INTRODUCED
 
 
VERSE 1

THE PARADOX BETWEEN VERTICAL AND HORIZONTAL IS POSED
THE DISTINCTION BETWEEN THE FIELD AND THE KNOWER OF THE FIELD IS WISDOM.
.

शिवःशक्त्यायुक्तोयदिभवतिशक्तःप्रभवितुं
चेदेवंदेवोखलुकुशलःस्पन्दितुमपि।
अतस्त्वाम्आराध्यांहरि-हर-विरिन्चादिभिरपि
प्रणन्तुंस्तोतुंवाकथ-मक्र्तपुण्यःप्रभवति॥

 

sivah saktya yukto yadi bhavati saktah prabhavitum
na ced evam devo nakhalu kusalah spanditum api
atastvam aradhyam hari hara virincadhibhir api
pranantum stotum va katham akrtapunyah prabhavati
 
Shiva united with Shakti becomes able to manifest
If otherwise, this god knows not even how to pulsate.
How then could one of ungained merit be able to bow to, or even praise
One such as you, adored by Vishnu, Shiva and Brahma.
.
 
This opening verse squarely poses the paradox of life. Sanskritic literary convention requires that the beginning of any work must indicate:
  1. the subject matter or content of the work,
  2. the context of the work, i.e. where it belongs in relation to other disciplines and kinds of literature,
  3. the overall purpose of the work,
  4. the type of person to whom the work will correctly apply.
These requirements are correctly kept in mind by Sankara in this opening verse of the "Saundarya Lahari".
 
A paradox always implies two rival positions, both of which could be true alternatively or when taken together dualistically. The wise man, the poet, the philosopher, or the spiritual guide have to face this paradox which lurks at the very core of life as its most central problem. It is of a highly subtle, speculative or philosophical order. Other problems belong to human life in its numerous everyday aspects. In every case an enigma lurks between two factors, such as appearance and reality, mind and matter, theoretical and practical, noumenal and phenomenal etc., as an endless series of antinomies. Man and woman, father and mother, husband and wife, cause and effect, are conjugates of the same kind; their relation in every case being of a subtle and enigmatic order. Even a word and its meaning belong to each other inseparably; for they cannot be thought of disjunctly from each other.
 
The Bhagavad Gita refers to this duality by its own terms, as the field (kshetra) and the knower of the field (kshetrajna). By abolishing the duality between them one attains the Absolute. Thus we come to a notion - the Absolute - which is the same as the Brahman in Vedantic philosophy, with which Sankara is most directly concerned. It is well known that he stood for Advaita Vedanta, a strictly non-dual philosophical position which admits of no reality outside itself. The doctrine of the "Saundarya Lahari" is the same philosophy that he has elaborated in all his great commentaries (bhasyas), although here it is presented in a non-verbose, visible and colourfully real protolinguistic form. Failure to appreciate this fact has made most scholars and authorities treat this work as pertaining only to the discipline of Tantra, rather than of Vedanta, thus resulting in a wholly wrong estimation . We have explained this fact in our "generalities" above. Sankara makes Shiva and Parvati represent between them the highest of human values, as easily recognizable even in everyday conjugal life known to all humankind anywhere in the world.
Shiva is not a demiurge here, but has his place as the counterpart of his own negative aspect, as represented by Parvati. The relation is a subtle and enigmatic one. The word and its meaning belong together. The word is merely nominalistic or conceptual, but its meaning must refer to human experience without being a mere abstraction. We call the abstraction a concept, while the experienced aspect of the same would be a percept. Thus nominalism and perceptualism, which Vedantins refer to more simply as "name and form" (nama-rupa) meet and fuse together, cancelling out into what we appreciate as the meaning, which is neither a concept nor a percept, but is the result of the two-sided participation between these two opposite sides.
 
To give an example; truth and beauty can be thought of as human values resulting from the participation and cancellation of what is visible with what is intelligible. The status of the resultant meaning, represented by the words "Truth" and "Beauty", written with capital letters, falls under the aegis of the Absolute. All human values can be treated in this way, as Spinoza says: sub specie aeternitatis.
 
In the "Saundarya Lahari", Sankara combines the beauty of Shiva and Parvati so as to give them together the human value of Beauty with a capital letter, by which it attains to an overwhelming absolutist status, as suggested by the title of the work itself. Sankara's aim here is to give to the abstract notion of the Absolute the content of absolute beauty. In doing so he reveals himself as a man of superior poetic genius, by virtue of which the Absolute, otherwise a mere abstraction, comes to have a concrete, real and visible, as well as a truly experienceable, content.
 
Colour is a reality, and the twilight colour, magenta, has a special status among all other colours, for it results from the meeting of the infra-red and the ultra-violet. We find as the central theme of each of the hundred verses the personification of the value of absolute Beauty in the form of the Goddess who is directly related with the colour magenta (aruna) (e.g. see Verses 23, 50, 84, 92, 93, 98). Thus, the author intends here to bring together two aspects: something fully real and visible on the one side, that is, the colour magenta; with, on the other side, as its counterpart, a highly thin and mathematical abstraction which also represents the Absolute, not in visible, but in purely intelligible terms. The universal concrete and the universal abstract are thus inserted into the same neutral or unified ground. By intersection we could say that magenta, as a universal reality, has a horizontal reference, where it inseparably participates at the core of the field of consciousness with its own vertical parameter of a highly fourth-dimensional order. Such theoretical matters will become clear as we proceed. Lesser degrees of abstraction and generalisation could be given as an endless series of intermediate positions. In a hierarchy of values, each position could then represent one item of value always coming under the aegis of the Absolute, when correctly placed and cancelled out within the four-fold structural situation. What we must understand is that Shiva and Parvati, who are mythological figures or divinities of the Hindu pantheon with specific functions attributed to them in the traditional literature of Hinduism, are here being exalted by Sankara to the position of two ambivalent abstract principles - their intimate participation having a complementarity, a reciprocity, a compensation and a cancellability between them.
 
All overt action or activity is horizontal in status, and therefore must be relegated to the domain of the negative existential principle, which is the function of Parvati. Her reference is at the negative vertical limit of the four-fold structural whole previously described. This participation between Shiva and Parvati takes place at the very core of the total situation, ground or field. Shiva, as the positive principle within this same field, is to be visualized as a thin vertical parameter, having its reference at the hypostatic or positive vertical limit of this quaternion situation. No kind of action, except in the most purely mathematical sense, applies to him. He is a kind of "unmoved mover" of Aristotle, which, like the catalyst in chemistry, while acting, is not really acting at all.
 
The distinction here can be compared to a time-like and a space-like function. Horizontal action is space-like, while vertical action is time-like, spending itself in duration, which is partly conceptual in status. If we abstract this paradox of concept and percept even further, it abolishes itself by double assertion or by double negation, both of which attain that Absolute which is beyond paradox. Such are some of the subtleties which must be kept in mind by the intelligent reader who examines the content of this century of verses, starting from this very first one. Without doing so, the reader is likely to make the error of treating this work as a theological or cosmological scripture, or even a textbook of Tantra, meant only for religious or philosophical study by persons lesser in their cultural interests than the uncompromising Advaita Vedantin, like Sankara himself, who is to be kept in mind as the adhikari (the type of person for whom these verses are meant). It is in this sense that Sankara takes care to indicate that he is outside the scope of that kind of Vedic religious orthodoxy which thinks in terms of holiness or meritorious works when he says that he is incapable of praising or even saluting the Absolute Principle of Beauty here intended. The way of works and merit is unequivocally rejected by him in this verse as being outside his scope or intentions. We have to read this first verse together with the last verse of this series, where he again washes his hands of any intention to present a specific religious doctrine, which ordinary religious people might infer that he is tacitly supporting. The Absolute is proven by itself, and should be left alone to declare its glory to the world.
 
In this very first verse the reader can see that Sankara wishes to emphasize the necessity of thinking of Shiva and Shakti as belonging together to the one and only unitive content which is that of the value called Absolute Beauty. It is a great mistake to separate the functions of the twin counterparts that are meant to enter into a unified non-dual function here. Mother-worshippers in India are likely to make the mistake of saying that the beauty of the three worlds represented by the Goddess, sometimes referred to as Shakti or Tripura Sundari, is to be given primacy over the Shiva principle. They tend to forget that the basic cancellability of status between these two counterparts - male and female, positive and negative, vertical and horizontal, conceptual and perceptual etc. - is all-important to be kept in mind throughout the unfolding of this sequence of verses. To forget this idea is to fall into the error of duality, the most repugnant attitude for Advaita Vedanta. The Kaulins and perhaps the Samayins, were just such Shakti-worshippers, whose unilateral position Sankara must have wanted to correct and revalue by undertaking the present work.
 
Another point to notice in this verse is that when Shiva is not united with Shakti, he has no function at all. Some commentators say he has become sava - a dead body - when he is not united with the feminine principle. This is to forget that a correlating parameter running through the whole universe and able to ordain it, making cosmos out of chaos, is as important as any other function or aspect of the same Absolute.
 
Here, a form of pure verticalized action is implied as running through the world like the guiding thread of Ariadne, without which Theseus would never have been able to ascend out of the labyrinth of the Minotaur. Even the Mandukya Upanishad, which eliminates all functions and even predications when it refers to the highest Absolute in its final verdict - describing the ultimate Absolute as removed multi-dimensionally beyond all taint of relativity or predicability - still retains a certain auspicious value or attribute, referred to there as santam sivam advaitam (peaceful, auspicious, non-dual). A further qualification is mentioned immediately anterior to these final epithets by the words prapancopasanam referring to that principle which abolishes the phenomenal world, that is, all that has a horizontal reference. Thus it is of great importance to clearly distinguish the implied paradox from the very start, so as to finally abolish it correctly without violating the requirements of an absolutist epistemology, methodology or axiology. Science and mathematics, physics and metaphysics, the visible and the intelligible, are all counterparts that have to be treated as belonging together to an Absolutist whole.
 
There is in this verse a reference to the three gods: Brahma,Vishnu and Shiva, who have three distinct functions to perform within the totality of the field in which Shiva and Parvati live together. The value of the union itself is the ground of the Absolute, and the three functionaries are to be inclusively contained therein as having only a secondary importance. With any number of other gods, permissible under the aegis of the Absolute, this eternal union of male and female represents the resultant of the absolute value of Beauty. In mathematical terms this union is just a cancellation taking place between the vertical and horizontal parameters, the latter of which can be thought of as a curved or asymptotic line or perimeter, while the former could be a straight line or parameter. The three main functionaries represented here are fully justified and they could be recognized even by strict scientifically minded persons when we treat them each as having the status of a factor with a function belonging to it, as when we say that y = f(s) in algebra. Thus, the mythological personifications can be disregarded as merely incidental to the exigencies of language. Other monomarks could be chosen to refer to these same functions, which are creation, preservation and destruction. These three functions are inevitable concepts in the context of the cosmological, psychological and axiological processes taking place in the universe within the self and the non-self, when thought of in most general and abstract terms. Mythology is less positive than mathematics, as Auguste Comte would put it. The positively-minded modern person need not take mythology seriously. These demiurges could be treated as monomarks for the three functions understood in the abstract, where the grand process of becoming in the universe can be thought of as coming under the inevitable functional phases or aspects of beginning, enduring and disappearing, to one or other of which three phases any process, inner or outer, must conform.
 
These three gods or demiurges belong to the Vedic religious context. Vedanta is outside mere Vedism, but does not conflict with it, just as a well could be hidden within an expansive lake. Vedism, with its distinctions of meritorious actions and sin, based on the notions of the sacred and the profane, could be inclusively transcended or submerged within the scope of the more open and generous dynamism of the Advaitic outlook. We have to distinguish the two limiting points within the scope of spiritual progress. Just so does the River Rhone expand into the lake of Geneva at one end but pass out at the other as a thin stream again - to use one of Henri Bergson's favourite examples. One could place oneself at the lower, expanding limit of the river or at the upper, contracting limit of the lake, in a vertical perspective, without coming into conflict with less absolutist, religious disciplines which are vitiated by hedonistic or relativistic considerations.
 
This first verse marks the lower limit. By the time the discussion reaches the last verse, spiritual progress through works has attained to its maximum maturation; thus effectively abolishing its own importance; just as the same water can transcend to become a simple river again. The three gods thus come into the picture only between the lower and the higher limits of the total situation to be kept in our minds here. Sankara himself prefers not to enter into the context where merits and demerits or causes and effects, or obligations and taboos, come into interplay within these two limits. The effects of good works accrue only at the upper limits. Sankara, at the start here, correctly places himself before any action or reaction of cause and effect begins to operate. He wishes to remain a strict absolutist, in keeping with his own neutral and normalized position, giving equal importance to both cause and effect, but taking his stand preferably before the causes even begin to operate. He is thus removed from all taint of the phenomenal process of becoming. Transcending this, he is again seen, at the end, to be outside the scope of the four-dimensional set-up in which alone good and bad could interact. This is the reason why he takes care to underline in this verse that he is one of unaccomplished merits, unlike the demiurges who are caught within the process and strive to attain the positive limit which is the culminating point of all meritorious actions.
 
Vedanta is a negative way (nivritti marga). That is a further reason why this description, evidently applicable to himself as well as to the correct reader, is treated as being outside the scope of both merit and demerit taken together. When speaking of himself in this manner, we are also justified in thinking that he is indirectly referring to the adhikari - the kind of person to whom this work applies - which refers to any member of the public having the same status as himself in the total situation to be visualized here. This could only be done by what is called extrapolation in mathematics. Thus, the subject matter of this work - the value of Beauty under the aegis of the Absolute - is correctly seen in the context of Vedantic tradition, which transcends the Vedic context in which the three gods aspire for perfection by works of religious merit, as being placed at the positive top limit of the structural vision. As a Vedantin, Sankara himself takes his position initially on the negative side of the total situation, opposed to all aspiration, as is in keeping with the nivritti marga (negative path) of Brahmavidya, the Science of the Absolute - as understood in the Upanishadic context. In the Upanishadic tradition there is a reference in Kena Upanishad (3rd Kanda) to the situation in which the three gods - Agni, god of fire, Vayu, god of wind and Indra, the chief of the gods - stand puzzled about the nature of a Supreme Spirit that presents itself in vacant space before them. This is the positive Absolute, which is approached closest by Indra, the best of the demiurges. The same space then suddenly reveals the beautiful form of Uma (as Parvati is also called), the daughter of the Himalayas, representing the negative aspect of the same Absolute without contradiction or mutual exclusion.
 
The beauty of Uma (The Devi, or Parvati), here treated as interchangeable in value with what the Absolute represents, thus affords us a correct precedent acceptable to the teachings of the Upanishads, of which the Saundarya Lahari could be treated as a correct continuation.
 
Shiva worship is proto-Aryan and chiefly of South Indian origin, but the Upanishadic tradition blends both Aryan and proto-Aryan and Dravidian cultures, as is unequivocally implied in Verse 75. These comments on this first verse are to be taken as important preliminary clarifications for the understanding of the remaining verses also.
 
(See bottom of this page for the relevant extract from Kena Upanishad. ED)
.
 
.

ADDITIONAL COMMENTS WITH STRUCTURAL DIAGRAMS RELATED TO THIS VERSE FROM SAUNDARYA LAHARI/NOTES.

EDITORIAL NOTE: these notes, as they are taken from different sources, do not present a sequential whole - there are repetitions and near-repetitions in many places. Rather than over-edit and perhaps lose something, we have left them as they are. Anyway, this is a very difficult and subtle subject and repetition will probably help understanding.


A word-for-word translation in the Guru's handwriting.

 

WORD FOR WORD
Shivah = Shiva (numerator factor).
Shaktya = with Shakti - the phenomenal factor in the centre of the Absolute.
Yukto-yadi = when united, unified (i.e. when participating vertically and horizontally with each other).
Bhavati Shaktah = becomes able (Shiva).
Prabhavitum = to realize himself, become fully himself, attain full plenitude.
Nachedevam devah = if likewise this god.
Nakhalu kushalah = is not capable indeed
Spanditumapi = even to oscillate like a straw (?) to or (illegible)
Atah stvam = thus to or for you.
Aradhyam = worthy of worship
Harihara virinchadhibhir api = (illegible)
Prananthum = to adore
Stothum va katham = even to praise, how.
Akritapunya = one who has no merits of good acts.
Prabhavati = become specified.

 

EDITORIAL NOTE: throughout this commentary, where the Guru's notes, as extracted from the source material found in saundarya lahari/notes (see saundarya lahari/index) are used, there are many passages that were taken down by students in a form which is not immediately clear to the general reader - that is, to anyone who was not a full-time student of the Guru's and familiar with the background material. Therefore we have provided explanatory notes - clearly labeled "EDITORIAL NOTE and/or signed "ED.", and written in italics, and we have also corrected or reconstructed some structural diagrams. Without this, we think that it would be impossible to make these brief notes understandable. THESE ADDITIONAL NOTES AND MODIFICATIONS REFLECT OUR PERSONAL OPINION AND ARE IN NO WAY TO BE TAKEN AS DIRECT STATEMENTS OF THE GURU. However, we have been studying and teaching this text for 44 years and hope that they will clarify matters.

 

According to Purva Mimamsa, the first verse of a work must say:
1) What subject you are dealing with.
2) How does it relate to other subjects?
3) Does it lead to salvation?
 All of this is stated in Verse 1.
 
(Purva Mimamsa: For purposes of classification, Vedic lore has been divided into Purva, or former, earlier; and Uttara, later, divisions. This division has to be understood both in the historical and literary sense. The Purva Mimamsa (Earlier Critique) is where ritualist injunctions and obligatory rules are discussed critically by Jaimini. (see Uttara Mimamsa).

Vedas: The early Sanskrit writings in praise of Indra, Varuna and phenomenal gods of nature; later displaced by the philosophical concept of the Absolute Brahman in the Upanishads. The four chief Vedas are the Rig, Sama, Yajur and Atharvana. ED)

 
 
The Main Themes of Verses 1 to 10:

Verse 1 - Vedanta is radical; do not ask me to come into the temple, there are no rituals in Vedanta.

 (Sankara places himself outside the ritualistic, relativistic or religious context of the three gods. The Advaita Vedanta he represents is concerned with wisdom, not ritual actions of worship. ED)

 

Verse 2 - In Vedanta the world is a monde affiné as Bergson calls it - a flux; a world of particle physics, not as actual as it seems.

 

Verse 3 - Put Absolute Beauty at the bindu (central locus) of the quaternion, do not put a comparative or relativistic goddess there: there is a fourfold structure.

 

Verse 4 - In Vedantic Methodology primacy is given to cause - do not get lost in effects. There is a borrowed light of Absolute Beauty, a reflected glory as when Vishnu takes on a women's form as Mohini. (And seduces Shiva. ED)
 
 
(Verse 5 - Erotic occasionalism; the arrow of Eros can hit Shiva if it is aimed vertically.

 

Verse 6 - There is a four-dimensional abstraction and generalization.

 

Verse 7 - The Goddess as Purushika with four limbs bearing noose and goad, bow and arrow.

 

Verse 8 - Conic sections: getting away to the negative side is .....(? - the original faded manuscript appears to read "...to the negative side is loud" which seems meaningless ED)

 

Verse 9 - There is a stable ascending series of cross-sectional positions known as Chakras.

 

Verse 10 - There are ramified sets of values within the Absolute on the positive and negative sides:

Two trees of Porphyry, one growing upwards and the other downwards, representing existential and subsistential values.
 
(Here are examples of trees of Porphyry, by way of illustration only. ED)
 

 
 

 
 
 


 
 
 
 
 
Sankara is dealing with Shiva and Shakti (literally "power" - another name for the Devi): this is the content of Verse 1.
 
a) This verse deals with the conceptual and phenomenal aspects of the universe.
 
 
 
Sankara says: "I am not writing this for my salvation, I am already a brahmavit (a knower of the Absolute)".
 
(Sankara's Advaita Vedanta or Brahma Vidya (Science of the Absolute) is outside the context of salvation - all it is concerned with is understanding. The phrase "Unitive Understanding" is sometimes used as a translation of "Advaita Vedanta". ED)
 
b) There is a paradox between Para and Apara Brahman, (the immanent and the transcendent absolute) as between mind and matter, the conceptual and the phenomenal, reality and appearance.

Shakti, (the Goddess or Devi) is the specific manifestation of Shiva.
Shiva is living vertically and becomes manifested when united with the Devi.
 
c) If Shiva is not united with the Devi, he cannot have even the slightest vibrating horizontal movement.
 
(To give the reader some familiarity with what Shiva and the Devi represent in the Indian tradition, we present below some representations from classical sculpture; from medieval art and from popular folk-art prints. ED)
 

 
 
 
 
d) The three gods, in the process of becoming, are in charge of creation, preservation and destruction - the three functions of nature - and the Devi is in charge of them.

 
(To assist the reader, as above, here are some representations of these three gods. ED)
 

 
Brahma.
 
(Brahma: One of the members of the Indian pantheon as the first creator and source. He is four-faced, representing the four directions (with an up and down, zenith-nadir fifth sometimes added). As creator he is distinguished from the neutral Brahman, the Absolute, which is no god, but a philosophical Reality. ED)
 

 
Vishnu.
 
(Vishnu: The second of the so-called Hindu Trinity, of which Brahma the creator is first and Mahesvara or Shiva is the last. Shiva is also the destroyer. Vishnu is referred to as the preserver, although taken by themselves each of them is in turn preserver and destroyer. These result from the fusing of three cosmological and psychological currents of religious thought in India. ED)
 

 
Shiva.
 
(Shiva: The ancient hero-God from the times of prehistory, associated with radical virility and renunciation. He is an unconventional god like Dionysius, wearing skins and dancing in ecstasy, drunk with cosmic consciousness. He is the most ancient and the most important figure of the Indian pantheon, and occupies his seat in Benares and Kailasa. ED)
 
The Devi's task is to manifest the world.
The two parameters, vertical and horizontal, are revealed here, together with the subtle participation between them, and Sankara says he will focus on the negative aspect of the Absolute and treat of the lower Absolute (Apara-Brahman), not the higher (Para-Brahman).
 
(Para: Beyond; pertaining to the Ultimate or Supreme; as opposed to the immanent here-and-now aspect of reality which is apara. It could mean transcendent. (cognate with the English word "far").
 
The Devi, as manifester of the perceptual world, can be equated with Apara-Brahman, the negative perceptual aspect of the Absolute and the subject of the Saundarya Lahari. ED)
 


But, Sankara says, "I am outside the picture, I belong to no context".
 
(Sankara is saying he is a Vedantin, concerned with the Science of the Absolute (Brahma-Vidya) not a ritualistic Vedic practitioner (Brahmin).

Brahmin: One who conforms to the religion of the Vedas and initiated or confirmed by the bestowal of the sacred thread which causes him to be known as a "twice-born" (dvija) and fit thereby to assist at ceremonies of burnt offerings to the Gods of the Vedas. Socially he is the highest of the types of castes, statically viewed, in the Indian world of caste hierarchies, the others being Kshatriya (warrior), Vaishya (merchant) and Shudra (servant). Vedic learning and ritual accompanied the Brahmin as priest in the formation of society as it stratified with the penetration of the Aryans into the Indian matrix, about 1500 BC. ED).


.
 
Shiva and Parvati.
 

ALL OF LIFE IS A LOVE AFFAIR
 
Absolute Beauty is the result of cancellation.
 
Beauty emerges when two sides meet and cancel.

Creation, which exists, subsists and has value, is beauty.

Fill your mind completely with overwhelming Absolute Beauty and you are a mystic.



 
 
You meditate on the Devi and establish a bi-polar relationship with the Absolute.

A yogi can meditate on a certain abstract principle of Absolute Beauty, leading to an understanding without logic - through the emotions and intuition- something you can experience: then you will establish a relation between the Non-Self and the Self which will cancel out into a joy forever.
 
 
All proper meditation is erotic; anyone who says that it is not so does not know what he is talking about.
 
The contribution of Indian Civilization to spirituality is Erotic Mysticism - it was not repressed by patriarchal and prophetic religions that frowned on sensuality.


.

 

SANKARA IS OUTSIDE THE PICTURE
 
BELOW WE HAVE A REPRESENTATION OF THE WORLD OF PERCEPTS IN THE STRUCTURE ABOVE
 
 

 
 
 
 
IN A SERIES OF STRUCTURES DEPICTING VERSE 1 THROUGH TO VERSE 41 DESCRIBED AS "ANANDA LAHARI MANDALAS"
VERSE 1 IS REPRESENTED AS BELOW:

 
There is a participation of horizontal and vertical factors.
On a homogenous ground there is complementarity.
 

A) Shiva can pulsate only with the Devi´s collaboration.
The Devi is being worshipped by the three gods; Shiva is just one of these.

(There is a distinction between Shiva seen as one of the three gods representing creation, preservation and destruction - relativistic demiurges dealing with the world of change and becoming - and Sada Shiva -  "Sada" implies eternity - who is the counterpart of the Devi, or Absolute Beauty. A demiurge is an artisan-like figure responsible for the fashioning and maintenance of the physical universe ED)


Sankara is in meditation below the Alpha Point at the negative vertical pole, while thinking only of the Omega Point at the top of the vertical axis.


He is verticalized -This is like Bergson's image of the Rhone river expanding to form Lake Geneva and then contracting into a river again


Sankara is outside the whole picture.

The horizontal contains a fanwise expansion of the vertical, that is all.


 

 For purposes of comparison, here is an earlier version of a translation of Verse 1:


TRANSLATION
Shiva = mathematical, general
by specific function = shaktya, representing the two phenomenal factors;
wave length and vibration, res cogitans and res extensa (Descartes' thinking substance and extended substance, similar to mind and matter)
(only) when united = yukto
if he (should) become able to manifest in becoming
if not thus, this god
is not indeed expert (in the matter)
even to pulsate (pulsation)
it being thus, You (the Devi)
are being worshipped
even by (api) Brahma, Vishnu and Shiva (Vedic, relativistic gods)
to prostrate, even to praise
(Now Sankara is outside the Vedic context - below it)
one of unaccomplished merit
specifically attain (?)

 

BELOW IS AN EXTRACT FROM THE EARLIEST COMMENTARY ON THE SAUNDARYA LAHARI BY NATARAJA GURU

 

VERSE 1, from an article in "Values" Magazine.

Their paintings (The artist
couple he was visiting), some of which I also saw, were of a non-representational kind where the human form, when faintly present, blended with geometric patterns and cancelled out with them in glorious symmetrical designs of colour and form.

I at once thought of the possibilities of a colour language to serve as a lingua mystica (mystical language) proto-linguistically, to explain the verses of the Saundarya Lahari (the Upsurging Billow of Beauty) of Sankaracharya, whose cryptic verses had recently intrigued me highly and lured me towards attempting a structural analysis of this much-misunderstood yet truly Vedantic text, hitherto lost to the pseudo-scientific esoterics of Tantrism and the Shakti cult of post-Buddhist decadent India.
 
Further scrutiny of about forty verses, with comparative study of interpretations by scholars, including the verse translation of the same by the famous Kumaran Asan (A poet from Kerala), has convinced me that all of them have fallen short of a truly critical estimate of this masterpiece. Sankara himself must have thought in terms of a structuralism then understood, belonging to the Tantra and Shaktya (Goddess-worshipping) background, whose remnants still persist as remains of past culture, both in Kerala as well as in Bengal, at the present day.

This stratum, with its precious esoterics, has been more or less overcovered by other debris accumulated and deposited in other parts of India, where the chequered rule of emperors and kings or chieftains, with greater or lesser Muslim permeation, has succeeded in covering up even the outcrops of this stratum.
 
The Tantra school has its proto-linguistic traditions. The Mother Goddess is also a favourite in the esoterics of Yoga.
 
Thus we touch here a rich deposit of ancient wisdom of rare beauty and quality. Proto-linguistic speculation excels itself here.

Having thus struck upon a rich vein of treasure trove, I have been directing my interest in scrutinising and analysing some of the verses structurally. Even the title has been intriguing and elusive enough to attract my interest.
 
The words "Saundarya Lahari", which are the title of these hundred verses in classical Sanskrit, suggests both the intoxication arising from beauty as well as a general overwhelming upsurge of the aesthetic sense in the contemplation of the Absolute Self. This aesthetic sense, arising out of the supreme Bliss-Value, is of the essence of the emotional content of the Absolute. Ethics, aesthetics and penetrating metaphysical analysis meet here in the upsurging of the sense of beauty within the contemplative, as understood by Sankara.
 
In this composition Sankara proves to be fully absolved from the possible charge as a dry-as-dust philosopher, with which appellation he is associated in the popular mind because of the exegetics and logistics in which he indulges in most of his commentaries.
 
Although Shakti-Tantrism is evidently the assumed background of the composition before us, there is unmistakable internal evidence to suggest that Sankara, the well-known Advaitin, is its author. His seal can be discovered as imprinted on every verse by the clear absolutism revealed and by the classical finish of the verses, as inimitable as in the case of Kalidasa. In order to give the reader just a foretaste of the delicacies and delights of this composition from a master philosopher and dialectician, we translate here the first verse of this series:
 
If Shiva should, only when united with Shakti,
Get the power to manifest in becoming;
If again, without such, he has no ability even to pulsate,
How then could one of unaccomplished merits
Have the privilege of bowing to, or even to praise
One such as You, adored even by Hari, Hara, Virincha and others.
 
Here we have more than one rhetorical question by which Sankara fulfills the conventional requirement of adoration of a deity. As an Advaita Vedantin, his praise has necessarily to refer to no other high value than the Absolute. The Upanishadic way does not give primacy to ritualistic or meritorious works for emancipation.
The structural and literary requirements of the Vedic context are, however, retained for linguistic purposes here, as useful in a negative way; by default rather than by open obligation for direct worship or praise of a single goddess or deity.
 
The goddess here belongs to the context of Brahman (the Absolute).
This, and every other verse of the series, approaches the Advaita by the negative way of omission rather than by recommending adoration of the Goddess Parvati or Shakti as the followers of the Tantra school, more properly so called, might do. The Tantra background, however, is seen here to be taken advantage of and adapted to serve the requirements of the highly suggestive and structural language proper to the lingua mystica of Vedanta.
 
In the last line, reference is made to the triple gods Vishnu, Shiva and Brahma, who have the functions of preservation, destruction and creation, respectively, in the theological and mythological context of Hinduism. He implies here that, as a devotee praising the Goddess as the negative absolute factor coupled with Shiva (who is positive, as the counterpart of the negative feminine principle), he is not on the same footing as the Vedic gods who only belong to the context of relativistic and meritorious Vedic ritualism.
 
The schematic analysis of the diagram below will reveal some of the structural implications applicable to the aesthetic value of the Absolute, when viewed from a negative rather than from a fully positive perspective.


 
 
Note here that it is the totality that is indirectly adored or praised.
The question of merit does not even arise when the total Absolute Value is intended here. The manifesting function is that of the horizontal negative, and the pure Absolute itself is beyond action, as it is comprised within pure verticalized positivity.
 
There is thus only indirect praise of the Absolute initially at the start of the work, from a negative viewpoint.
 

 

Saundarya means "value", and the highest abstract value is beauty.
Sankara under-focuses on the negative side, or the side of Maya.
He talks about beauty, and through Axiology, Methodology and Epistemology arrives at a description of the Absolute Upsurge of Beauty, as "Saundarya Lahari" can be translated. Sankara first shows the map with all the gods etc., then wraps it up by showing the dynamism of the circulation between the parts. If he uses mythological language, it is only to build up a structure, the understanding of which reveals the Absolute.
 
Sankara is saying,
"Do not say that I believe in all these gods - I have used them only to praise the Absolute (via ideograms)."

Reciprocity, compensation and cancellability are all operative here.

 
 
AN EARLY TRANSLATION OF VERSE 1:
The god Shiva (as a great numerator factor) and Shakti (the horizontalizing principle on the negative side)
When united only (or unified) - (when participating vertically and horizontally with each other).
(Shiva, he) becomes able - (at best participating nominally). (only when he participates does he become able)
To realize himself (in any specified way), (to become fully himself) (attaining all plenitude), (only when he participates does he keep from evaporating), (will only be an absurd mathematical figurehead).
If likewise this god is not capable indeed (wavelength means horizontal movement).
Even to oscillate (like a straw) - horizontal, as opposed to vertical movement.
Thus how can for You (Devi).
Worthy of worship (by).
Even by Vishnu, Shiva and Brahma (representing the three relativistic functions: preserver, destroyer and creator), but only as demiurges of a base order.
You are not only on the negative side of the vertical axis, but You also touch the finger of Shiva, thus representing the Absolute - and thus being worthy of worship by the three demiurges.
 
And below is another version:
 
TRANSLATION
Either to praise or worship You (how?).
One who has no merits of good acts - (I am not a Brahmin or a learned man), (how can I ever attain to the Absolute beyond all words?).
How can I become a specified personality? - (Either I must fill it with the content of beauty, via protolanguage*).
I am not a priest (Brahmin) who performs meritorious deeds.
How can I praise You? (Vedanta is not just giving alms and going to temples).
I will have to put You into relationship with Shiva, the Logos or Omega Point.
If You are not touching Your husband (participating vertically) he is just a theoretical, mathematical Omega point.
 
*(In the terminology of Nataraja Guru, these terms, proto- and meta-language, have a different meaning from their usual definitions in linguistics: the structural methodology used throughout his works is protolanguage. The Cartesian co-ordinates are protolinguistic in essence; so also are the longitudes and latitudes of maps. Symbols are protolinguistic; signs are metalinguistic. Alphabets belong to metalanguage and geometrical elements such as angles, points, lines or concentric circles can be used protolinguistically. ED)
.
 
MATTER AND METHOD FOR MAKING A FILM OF THE SAUNDARYA LAHARI:
 
Double negation is "shining like a polished door"; "prize me no prizes, for my prize is death "
It is like Milton's "dark-splendid": there is no real poet who does not know this double negation.

 
 
(The Guru now makes a comparison with another example of Erotic Mysticism in Sanskrit Literature. ED)
 
In the case of the abhisarika (tribal) woman, (in Kalidasa's Ritusamhara) the lightning does two things: it lights her path and it helps her to appreciate the vertical aspect of her passion.
(She is walking in the Himalayas to meet her lover. ED)
 


She represents the Self, which has two references, vertical and horizontal.
 

 

 

The abhisarika (tribal) woman in Kalidasa - horizontally, she breaks the pearl necklace and the pearls drop one by one onto the ground.
She wants go both horizontally and vertically: the fire to copulate has another reference, vertically placed, it is represented by sunlight.

Vertical and horizontal aspects of her passion participate and reveal the Absolute.
When you can appreciate this, you are a mystic.
 
She says: "It may be the Himalayas, it may be midnight, but I am going anyway because I badly want a child". Passion is what is found in her heart and sunlight reveals the vertical aspect of the same.

 
(There is a discrepancy in the original documents, from saundarya lahari/notes: in the text of the Ritusamhara, the Abhisarika woman is walking across the mountains in the moonlight; however, some of the notes say "sunlight". It is probable that the student who originally wrote the notes was confused and wrote "sun" for "moon". We have reproduced both versions as they appear in the original notes - in any case, it is not all that important - what is important is that there is a light from above descending vertically upon the scene with the love-sick woman providing the horizontal counterpart.ED)

 
 
(Further comments on Kalidasa's Ritusamhara can be found in Saundarya Lahari Notes, 1970 SLC8, Page 23. ED)
 
Kandukavati, Nataraja, thunder and lightning, the Abhisarika woman; they can all be telescoped together into a paradigmatic cliché to be repeated over and over again after the basic portions of the cassettes on which the Saundarya Lahari can be produced.
 
(Nataraja: The dancing Shiva. The virile cosmic principle which Shiva stands for is seen dancing on a demon, representing ignorance, in the familiar bronze statues. The Shiva dance is referred to in various mythic contexts, where the glory of Shiva is emphasised as against later intrusions into this prehistoric tradition. ED)

Below is a depiction of Nataraja:

 
 
A tribal or Abhisarika woman:
 
 
 
("Kandukavati" refers to the description of a dancing girl from the Dasakumaracarita of Dandin (Page 105). Dandin was a 6th-7th century author of Sanskrit prose romances. A commentary on this passage is to be found in Saundarya Lahari Notes, 1972, File SLP2, pp.4-30. ED)
 

 
 
 
 
On Kandukavati and her dance, Nataraja Guru said: "There is no Indian Spirituality without the Dancing Girl. Take away the dancing girl and there is nothing left."

(In South India, a "devadasi" (Sanskrit: servant of deva (god) or devi (goddess) ) is a girl "dedicated" to worship and service of a deity or a temple for the rest of her life. The dedication takes place in a Pottukattu ceremony which is similar in some ways to marriage. Originally, in addition to taking care of the temple and performing rituals, these women learned and practiced Sadir (Bharatanatya), Odissi and other classical Indian artistic traditions and enjoyed a high social status as dance and music were essential part of temple worship. ED)
 
 
 
 
 
To make this passage understandable, one must introduce some well-thought-out representative clichés or ideograms: put three circles around them and treat them as Chakras.
 

 
 
 
 
There is a common subject-matter to Verses 1 and 2: the phenomenal and the noumenal, and the cancellation of the three functions of creation, preservation and destruction.
 
In the "Darsana Mala" by Narayana Guru there is cancellation into absolute value.
In his "Atmopadesa Satakam" the pure Absolute is at the Omega Point.
 
In Verses 3 and 4: Ontology is contrasted with a teleological approach - there is a normative centre.
 

 
 
Atmopadesa Satakam deals with Triputi (the" tri-basic prejudice" of seer, sight and seen), it is like the the Darsana Mala, but with bipolarity.
 
(Triputi: the aspects involved in the event of knowing something, namely: the knower, the known and the act of knowing. Literally "the three-petalled one" or "having three bases". It is a technical term in Vedanta referring to three aspects of cognition, namely the subjective, the objective and the process itself. The knower of the pot; the object called the pot; and the knowledge of the pot, would illustrate the three ways by which the same cognition could be viewed. Absolute knowledge is without this triple-based difference. ED)
 
Although the methodology for all Vedanta is roughly the same, we can find a doctrine appearing in different places: it can come at the beginning or at the end.

Narayana Guru fixes the Omega Point, at the top of the vertical axis, in the first verse of the Atmopadesa Satakam.
 

VERSE 1 OF ATMOPADESA SATAKAM:

Rising even above knowledge, what within the form

Of the one who knows, as equally without, radiant shines,

To that Core, with the eyes five restrained within,

Again and again prostrating in adoration, one should chant.

 
Thus, Nataraja Guru, from this point on, gives up trying to treat all three works together, he will work only on the Saundarya Lahari verses.

In Verse 1 of the Saundarya Lahari, all of life is a love affair.

Absolute Beauty is the result of cancellation.
Creation, which exists, subsists and has value, is beauty.
 
 

 
She is superior to the three gods.
The worshipper in this verse, Sankara himself, is a man without merits - an akrta punya, ("a man of ungained merit" - outside the context of sin and good deeds. ED) a man of no relativistic virtue.
Sankara is not a religious man.
 
Shiva shaktya yukto... (Shiva united with the Devi) - an arc lamp bursts into flame
There is a paradox between two factors, plus and minus.
 
Atah stvam = thus to or for you.
Aradhyam = worthy of worship
...imagine a globular mirror with pictures of the three gods prostrating.

The three gods, being Vedic, are in the context of religious merit, sin and virtue.  Sankara does no belong there; he is outside the religious context.

The relationship between Shiva and Shakti is a paradox.
 
Bowing down is existential.
"How can I praise?" is subsistential.
 
 
 

As the text states in a later verse, Verse 4:

"Other arms than thine are explicitly expert in giving boons..." She grants boons through Her feet - ontology is superior to teleology.

 

VERSE 4

Other arms than yours can confer protection or boon;
You alone do not act overtly, by gesture, the promises of refuge or boon
What is more, your feet, o sole refuge of the world of beings,
Are alone expert indeed in yielding boons more than asked for.

 

THE PARADOX BETWEEN VERTICAL AND HORIZONTAL IS POSED IN THIS FIRST VERSE OF THE SAUNDARYA LAHARI

Kshetra - the field - is horizontal.

Kshetrajña - the knower of the field - is vertical.


 

THE DISTINCTION BETWEEN THE FIELD AND THE KNOWER OF THE FIELD IS WISDOM.


Both Shiva and Shakti have equal importance.
Shiva is not active, he is only a catalyst, a parameter like the thread of a pearl necklace, a correlating principle at the Omega Point.

 


Maya is spreading from the Alpha Point to the virtual and actual sides.

(Understanding the concept of Maya is of the greatest importance to understanding Advaita Vedanta. Nataraja Guru has variously defined it as: the universal category of error, illusion, ignorance. A fuller definition is to be found in the Glossary on this website:


"Maya: Connotes a factor of epistemological and methodological importance in Sankara's Vedanta especially, and in Upanishadic lore generally. Whatever is postulated as the cause of the unreal, spoken of in the most generic of categorical terms in philosophy, as against theology, is to be laid at the door of maya. It is the basis of duality or synergic antinomies. The nearest Western equivalent is the Negativität of Hegel's system".

It is also important to keep in mind the identification of the Devi with Maya in Verse 97:

"As the Goddess of the Word, Veda-knowers speak of You as Brahma's wife
Lakshmi is Vishnu's wedded one, and the Mountain Daughter is Shiva's consort;
Certain others as the unattainable and boundless fourth state refer to You;
While you remain as the great Maya, making the universe go round, as queen of the Ultimate Absolute." ED)

 


The Numerator is only a thin parameter and a crescent moon:
It cannot pulsate without the Devi.

Shiva is a catalyst, he does not change. Shiva is a magnet
Shiva is a fire which is not affected by heat, but which heats an iron ball.

(The iron ball would represent the Devi or the manifested Absolute in this image. ED)

 

FROM KENA UPANISHAD

3rd KANDA

 

Once upon a time, Brahman, the Spirit Supreme, won a victory for the gods. And the gods thought in their pride, 'We alone attained this victory, ours alone is the glory;

Brahman saw it and appeared to them, but they knew him not. 'Who is that being that fills us with wonder?' they cried.

And they spoke to Agni, the god of fire: '0 god all-knowing, go and see who is that being that fills us with wonder.'

Agni ran towards him and Brahman asked: 'Who are you?' I am the god of fire,' he said, the god who knows all things.'

What power is in you?' asked Brahman. 'I can burn all things on earth.'

And Brahman placed a straw before him, saying: 'Burn this.' The god of fire strove with all his power, but was unable to burn it. He then returned to the other gods and said: 'I could not find out who was that being that fills us with wonder'

Then they spoke to Vayu, the god of the air. '0 Vayu, go and see who is that being that fills us with wonder.'

Vayu ran towards him and Brahman asked: 'Who are you?' 'I am Vayu, the god of the air,' he said, 'Matarisvan, the air that moves in space.'

'What power is in you?' asked Brahman. 'In a whirlwind I can carry away all there is on earth'

And Brahman placed a straw before him saying: 'Blow this away.' The god of the air strove with all his power, but was unable to move it. He returned to the other gods and said: 'I could not find out who was that being that fills us with wonder.'

Then the gods spoke to Indra, the god of thunder: '0 giver of earthly goods, go and see who is that being that fills us with wonder.' And Indra ran towards Brahman, the Spirit Supreme, but he disappeared.

Then in the same region of the sky the gods saw a lady of radiant beauty. She was Uma, divine wisdom, the daughter of the mountains of snow.

 

BELOW ARE SOME EXAMPLES OF STRUCTURAL METHODOLOGY AS USED IN VARIOUS FIELDS:

colour solid
.
.
.
 
 
 

 

 

 

Shiva is a catalyst, he does not change.
Shiva is a magnet
Shiva is a fire, not affected by heat, but it heats an iron ball.


FROM KENA UPANISHAD

3rd KANDA

Once upon a time, Brahman, the Spirit Supreme, won a victory for the gods. And the gods thought in their pride, 'We alone attained this victory, ours alone is the glory;

Brahman saw it and appeared to them, but they knew him not. 'Who is that being that fills us with wonder?' they cried.

And they spoke to Agni, the god of fire: '0 god all-knowing, go and see who is that being that fills us with wonder.'

Agni ran towards him and Brahman asked: 'Who are you?' I am the god of fire,' he said, the god who knows all things.'

What power is in you?' asked Brahman. 'I can burn all things on earth.'

And Brahman placed a straw before him, saying: 'Burn this.' The god of fire strove with all his power, but was unable to burn it. He then returned to the other gods and said: 'I could not find out who was that being that fills us with wonder'

Then they spoke to Vayu, the god of the air. '0 Vayu, go and see who is that being that fills us with wonder.'

Vayu ran towards him and Brahman asked: 'Who are you?' 'I am Vayu, the god of the air,' he said, 'Matarisvan, the air that moves in space.'

'What power is in you?' asked Brahman. 'In a whirlwind I can carry away all there is on earth'

And Brahman placed a straw before him saying: 'Blow this away.' The god of the air strove with all his power, but was unable to move it. He returned to the other gods and said: 'I could not find out who was that being that fills us with wonder.'

Then the gods spoke to Indra, the god of thunder: '0 giver of earthly goods, go and see who is that being that fills us with wonder.' And Indra ran towards Brahman, the Spirit Supreme, but he disappeared.

Then in the same region of the sky the gods saw a lady of radiant beauty. She was Uma, divine wisdom, the daughter of the mountains of snow.