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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
30
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.
31
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.
32
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.
33
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.
34
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.
35
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.
36
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.
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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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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