Shaking The Tree: (Tamil alchemy)

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Shaking The Tree:

Kundalini Yoga, Spiritual Alchemy,

& the Mysteries of the Breath

in Bhogar's 7000

 

English Rendering

by Layne Little

anjaneya

 

Preface

 

Our normal waking consciousness, rational consciousness as we call it,

is but one special type of consciousness whilst all about it, parted

from it by the filmiest of screens, there lie potential forms of

consciousness entirely different. -William James

 

This work is a translation of the first eighty verses of the writings of

the seventeenth century alchemist-poet Bhogar. Written in Tamil, an

ancient language still spoken in the south of India, these eighty verses

deal specifically with the Yogic science of re-attuning the flow and

distribution of subtle energy in the body. The flow and distribution of

this energy is thought to directly affect consciousness in the most

crucial of ways. It is the balance and flow of breath in the two

nostrils which guides the energy through the body. Breath and the

movement of subtle energy is said to directly affect how we think and

feel. Any objective observation of the breath as we go about our day

reveals that the mind and it's functioning is mirrored in the quality of

our breathing process. When we are relaxed and in a calm state of mind,

our breathing is slow and even. Breath flows gently into our body and,

on a purely physiological level, muscular tension is released with each

exhalation. If we are nervous or experiencing stress, our breath is

shallow and rapid, often disjointed, flowing in and out in a rather

haphazard fashion. If our mental and emotional state so profoundly

affects how we breath, one can in turn wonder if how we breathe also

affects our state of mind and how we feel. Perhaps, it affects not only

how we feel but also how we perceive the world, both our outer and our

inner life. The Yogic science, it's practices and philosophy, is

centered largely upon altering consciousness and psychological

fine-tuning through the conscious control of our breathing process. This

was also Bhogar's intention when he composed the eighty-two verses

presented in this work. He has distilled the essence of Kundalini Yoga

into a kind of guided meditation that presents the tradition's set of

symbols, sequentially structured for visualization, interwoven with

technical advice on regulating the breath. The key to applying the

Siddhar teachings presented in this work begins with a process of

objective and unwavering observation of the breath and it's direct

relationship to the whole human organism. This practice of objective

observation is essential in cultivating the meditative awareness needed

to discern the subtle movement of the breath. In order for meditation to

truly take place, the subject must identify with the breathing process

rather than the mind's erratic wanderings. This allows the practitioner

to observe the mind and it's movements without being drawn back into the

compulsive identification with thought. At the initial outset of this

practice one inevitably forgets the objective observation of thought,

breath, and body again and again, but tradition encourages the

practitioner to simply take note of the momentary loss of mindfulness

and with persistence and patience return to being conscious of breath.

Breath then becomes the anchor of mindful awareness. Once mindful

awareness is established, the meditator widens that sphere of awareness

to include thought, emotion, bodily sensation and sound. Here again, the

goal is to simply observe phenomena, our mind and bodies response to

that stimuli without identifying with that response. Although Bhogar's

work deals specifically with using the breath and various meditation

practices to initiate a transformation in consciousness, he seems to

have made the assumption that his readers have achieved a certain level

of proficiency in the more fundamental of yogic disciplines. This is

perhaps a bit of an understatement, in that he does have a tendency to

present his system concealed within the language of an adept and, at

times, he makes no accommodations for even the practitioners from other

schools of Yoga. Works such as this were encoded in the secret languages

of the varying schools to preserve the tradition without revealing the

inner mysteries to the uninitiated. After researching other works from

Bhogar's school of Siddha Siddhanta as well as works from various

Tantric Yoga schools, I have presented in the commentary some of the

more common and recurring usages of Bhogar's obscure language and what

is inferred by the same in the Kundalini Yoga and meditation practices

of the Siddha Siddhanta & Saiva Siddhanta schools. Bhogar, like other

Yogis of the various Yoga schools that have grown from tantric roots,

employed a language of symbol, myth, and allegory to speak of the

transmutation of subtle energy which leads to the transformation of

consciousness. The complex network of pathways (nadis) through which the

subtle energy moves, is clearly defined. These pathways, 72,000 in

number, are distributed throughout the etheric body double, running

parallel to the Central Nervous System. Their location and function are

usually presented in a fairly straight-forward way. Being closely

aligned to the physical body makes them not as abstract as the six nerve

plexus' known as chakras. The term chakra (literally 'wheel') refers to

six centers of consciousness that run upwards along the spine at

specific points where the nadis cluster together. These nadi-clusters

form jump-points where the frequency of this energy (called 'Shakti')

vibrates on new and higher levels. As the spine's vibratory frequency is

quickened, neuron transmissions reach peak output and brain activity is

heightened. The senses are also heightened, pushing thought through new

neural pathways, opening up unexplored avenues of perception. It is in

describing these chakras, situated at the axis of the etheric body, that

Yogis and Mystics have had difficulty in describing their subtle and

enigmatic nature. Long ago they discovered symbolism as the most

effective tool for conveying their insights and experiences as to how

the Kundalini Shakti is awakened and caused to propel the human

awareness up the spine and through the six chakra houses. This journey

of consciousness culminates in the Sahasrara, the thousand petalled

lotus that crowns the top of the head. Sahasrara is the seventh and

final step of the journey, the fabled 'un-chakra,' where every possible

level of consciousness is simultaneously perceived and one is said to

perceive the universe from all vantage points at once, fully identified

with every aspect of creation. Contemplation of the symbol, applying the

symbolic language to every aspect of life, opens up roads that penetrate

into the subtle inner realms. Breath then becomes the vehicle of the

undefiled and crystalline awareness that transverses the secret inner

terrain, mounting upwards to the blossoming lotus of

super-consciousness: Sahasrara.

 

Introduction

 

In all languages there have been poets and mystics who have practiced an

alchemy of words. Poets who have transformed the baseness of a

functional system of communication into an expression infinitely more

vast; one that strives to enrich humanity in some essential way,

breathing new life into human existence. The Tamil poets have had the

added advantage of using a language medium that is perhaps not as

heavily encumbered as the rest; where the quality of sound and the

impact of meaning seem to share a common ground as far as function is

concerned. Aesthetics and application need not be relegated to opposing

ends of the spectrum of necessity. Words are meant to convey both

feeling and meaning. Need we set the human heart and mind in opposition

of one another when language is adopted as the vehicle of our

expression? Poets in all ages, throughout the world, have defied man's

tendency to cut asunder the union of heart and mind, and have instead

celebrated this marriage as an invaluable asset in reconciling the

incongruities of life. The whole of the Tamil language is the poet's

ally. It was born vibrant and malleable, ever ready to be shaped into

rhyme or reason. It simply waits for the expelled breath. A breath that

is filled with a great passion for life: be it the sighing of heart or

the winds of thought. Even the most dry and linear idea, when voiced

with the Tamil tongue, is enlivened by this expelled breath. The sound

produced has shape: fine curves & subtle contours, texture & color. The

beauty of Tamil does not rely on any trivial meaning which the mind

might attach to it. The richness of the sound imbues the words with a

life of their own, independent of any meaning that our concepts strive

to convey. There is an inherent sweetness to the Tamil tongue; and to

the Tamil people themselves, "Life" (birth, growth, love, work, death;

the struggle of it all) has a sweetness all it's own.

 

Like moonlight and the sky,

like the warrior and his sharp sword,

like the beautiful blossom and it's fragrance,

like the crocodile-shaped lute and it's music,

like the eye and it's lustre,

so is my sweet Tamil and I.

If a stranger asked me, what was the name of my tribe,

an inexpressible joy would arise in my heart.

'I am a Dravidian,' I'd say, and my tongue would be all

honey, and my pride and glory would reach the skies.

-Bharatidasan

 

Origins

 

The origins of these people and their language have been lost in some

distant past; only legends remain... a handful of obscure memories. One

of which speaks of how the Tamil language came to be... There were seven

great Seers, and one would suppose that they are still around, beyond

the realm of form, watching the cogs of time spin round and round. One

of them was named Agastya. He knew the secret of language: that all

things are vibrating; that the name and its corresponding form are

closer than we think. Agastya paid a visit, long long ago, to the

Sanskrit College at Benares, but he being a wandering hermit, clad in

rags, humble-hearted, and having the pompous airs and assumptions of the

scholar conspicuously absent, he was, needless to say, rejected

outright. Distraught and forsaken, he returned to his little hut feeling

very sad and terribly alone in the world. There he sought solace by

praying to Chandraswami to teach him a language that was even sweeter

than the sacred Sanskrit. All of a sudden his house became fragrant. The

God spoke softly, 'Look in the corner.' Agastya rushed to the corner of

his house, and in a nook in the wall he found a small package. He

unwrapped it and therein found a stack of Cadjan volumes. His eyes

darted over the inscribed words and he dropped to his knees shouting,

'Tamil! Tamil!' ('Sweetness! Sweetness!'). The God taught Agastya the

language of sweetness which he brought to the south and taught to the

Dravidian people. Thousands of years later the Siddhar alchemist Bhogar

sat at a small shrine on the top of Palani Hill in the colonial days of

17th century Tamil Nadu. They say he had come to Tamil Country from

China and crafted the icon of the Murugan of Palani Hill out of nine

arsenics. Water poured in worship over that Murugan is credited with

mysterious healing properties. He is said to have attained perfection

through yoga, discovering all the universe hidden in the depths of

consciousness. With a mind immersed in silent meditation, he related, in

flowing verse, how the ensuing serenity he enjoyed became the gate to

life's mysteries.

 

Having become calm...

I perceived the accompanying experience.

Having experienced...

I have composed 7000.

 

Seven-thousand verses poured forth gracefully from a foreigner's hand. A

foreigner who rejected much of grammar's laws; letting sound run wild in

places, letting Tamil's sweetness speak for itself of Life's secrets.

These seven-thousand verses flow in graceful rhyme, a complex echoing of

sounds whose meanings convey a flux of images: some humorous or straight

forward, brimming with a simple wisdom; others enigmatic, encoded in the

secret language of the mystic, haunting if not bizarre.

 

My fine fellow,

If you see Nandi,

then you will know alchemy.

To say even one word

is just noisy useless talk.

It's like having a chat

with a corpse in the burning ground.

Only by seeing the light

of the jewelled root

will the golden chain

of the Circle's End

come open.

 

As this preceding verse infers, Bhogar makes little attempt to explain

the Siddhar mysteries. His work reads like a narration of his own

free-flowing chain of consciousness, as if he embarked upon some journey

through the tangled forest of his own subconscious, mapping out the

landmarks along the way, as he propelled himself deeper and deeper into

the soil of human existence trying to ferret out the very root of

consciousness. With each line he digs up another shovelful of the mind's

soil, peeling back layer after layer of thought, of ways of perceiving

'reality,' until he could reveal the essential living root of being.

Bhogar's work is completely spontaneous. Not a slave to order, wonder

explodes as verse in the deceptive guise of a child's conspiratorial

mid-night whisperings upon waking from a dream. He tells his secrets

with gravity, a touch of humor, and a wealth of unrelenting paternal

warmth. Bending the laws of grammar, he even rejects being encumbered by

the weight that our rigid meanings attribute to words. Discarding

reason, he paints in sound and image an ancient uphill path to freedom.

He cast aside logic, dismissing it as empty noise, he sought essence. He

makes no pretense that the mind's ceaseless ramblings bear any real

fruit. As he so pointedly puts it:

 

'With words and logic

you get nothing.'

 

Bhogar has made no attempt whatsoever to make his experience of these

altered states of consciousness at all intelligible to the common man.

Over vast centuries of experimentation with Yogic disciplines and

meditation, people like Bhogar have reported their experiences in their

own unique way. Oddly enough, there is a staggering consistency to these

reports, that, particularly over the last hundred and fifty years, has

attracted the attention of western scholars and scientists.

Unfortunately though, they have always encountered some inherent

difficulty in finding a way to apply the findings of these mystics to

the existing models of the objective scientific world.

 

Tirumoolar

 

Bhogar's approach to meditation and Kundalini yoga, as well as his

application of mythic images and Hindu ritual are by no means

revolutionary. He followed so closely in the footsteps of Saiva

Siddhanta's 8th century founder Tirumoolar that one is often amazed at

the continuity of teaching and principle preserved and sustained over a

period of one thousand years. Between the 7th-11th century A.D. a

strange synthesis of Indian esoteric schools was taking place. Saivite

Tantrism, alchemy, magic, Vajrayana Buddhism, and Hatha Yoga began to

merge. The Tantric mysteries, drawing together all of the mystic's tools

under one roof, made such distinctions obsolete. Function over form

became the rule. Mystics were no longer concerned with postulating the

nature of the universe, nor with philosophical concepts and the like;

they sought only that which produces a tangible effect, only that which

transforms consciousness in an unshakable way. Intellectual theories

proposing some 'empirical truth,' and the debates that ensued, lost

their predominance and credibility as an emphasis on the purely

experiential became the rule. It is impossible to paint an accurate

historical picture of this era of cataclysmic transition in India's

philosophical arena. The writings of this period pay no mind and render

no aid to chronological accuracy, and scholars, both east and west,

endlessly propose a vast and conflicting array of dates for these works.

Not wanting to flog a dead horse, I make no attempt at proposing a way

out of this historical maze, but one thing can be said for certain:

after centuries that stretch back into pre-history, living secluded on

the furthest outskirts of society, yoga came down out of its Himalayan

sanctuary and entered the mainstream of Indian thought.

 

Yoga Comes Down

 

Sometime in the 8th century (and even this vague date is subject to much

dispute) there was a high yogi, said to have reached the very precipice

of perfection, who came wandering southward from his home on the holy

mountain Kailash in Tibet. Legend has it that his name was Sundarar and

that he came to Tamil country in search of his friend and fellow-yogi

Agastyar who had taken up residence in the Pothiya Hills. After joining

his friend for a time, Sundarar wandered deeper into the south. One

evening just after dusk, on the outskirts of a little village called

Tiruvavaduthurai, he came upon a small herd of cows lowing and bellowing

mournfully. As he came nearer he saw that the cows, obviously very

upset, were standing round the dead body of a cow-herd. A few hours

earlier, Moolan the cow-herd, was stung on the heel by a serpent. His

soul had gone to pasture, and his body lay crumpled in the grassy field.

It was getting quite dark and Sundarar, taking pity on the poor cows,

shifted his awareness into the body of Moolan. Leaving his original body

hidden in the hollow of a log Sundarar brought the much relieved cows

home wearing the guise of the cow-herd Moolan. The new 'Moolan' was no

longer your average cow-herd, but a great yogi. You can imagine the

consternation of his wife when Moolan refused to return home. In

frustration, she called together the village elders who examined Moolan.

They found that the little cow-herd had become a saint. They had no

recourse but to advise Moolan's wife to let the sage wander as he like.

When the yogi went back to the grassy field in search of his body... it

had disappeared. The saint disregarded this minor inconvenience as

Siva's grace. He went to Chidambaram, Dancing Siva's holy city, and

seated himself at the base of a pipal tree. People began to flock there

to see the holy man. Most often he was lost in the trance-like ecstasy

of samadhi, but every now and again he would look out at the world and

utter a few words about the wonders to be found inside. His words always

came out in verse.

 

'The brinjal seeds were sown

and the bitter gourds grew;

when I dug out the dust,

I found the pumpkin blossoming.'

-Tirumantiram: 2869

 

One legend says that only once a year the saint would leave his

meditation and speak that one precious verse that the faithful would

note down. Tirumantiram, the book that has compiled these utterances, is

three-thousand verses long. So the people say that the sage sat under

that pipal tree for three-thousand years. Perhaps this seems a little

far-fetched, but it may very well be true from Moolan's (Tirumoolar's)

point of view. You see, what the people don't take into account, is the

Tirumantiram's description of the Tantric Buddhist concept of

Kaalachakra. 'Kaalachakra is a system of yoga which stresses that:

(a) the universe, with all it's objects and localities, is situated in

the body and

b) time with all it's varieties (viz., day, night, month and year)

exists in the body in its process of the prana vayu (the vital wind).

It believes that by pranayama (the controlling of the prana vayu) time

could be controlled.' As in this case, problems of interpretation are

always evident when one tries to apply one's own sociological

conventions and cultural predisposition to the obscure musings of the

mystic. Naturally a pursuit of a more scholarly interpretation of

mystical poetry is no different.

 

Understanding Tamil Poetry

 

In Songs of Experience Norman Cutler discusses the problems that western

critics have in applying their western set of literary values to the

Tamil Bhakti poetry (from which Bhogar's style ultimately develops):

'Because bhakti poetry disrespects and even undermines distinctions, it

is subversive to certain hallowed principles favored by many literary

critics in the West.' In the West poetry generally takes an array of

words and phrases, and through extensive ornamentation weaves them

together by relying on their decoration to create a sense of order and

unity in the work. The ideas and images find integration by dilution, by

dulling the sharp-edge of the words with rhetoric. The stark impact of

the idea or image is sacrificed when the author employs his lavish

display to convey a sense of cohesiveness to his audience. The Western

critic lets some Classical sense of order be the judge of beauty. He can

rarely penetrate the gaudy mask of ornamentation and discern what

substance is there, the many stark and coarser parts of the skeleton

that support a shroud of order. 'The bhakti poet and, even more so, the

sectarian interpreters of the saints poems offer a challenge to this way

of looking at literature. Unlike many Western critics who find

multiplicity underlying the superficial appearance of unity, the

commentators find unity underlying a seemingly multiple surface.' Just

look at our Bhogar: shooting out in rapid fire, a jumble of images that

makes the mind's train jump its tracks and go speeding off into the

wilderness of the human psyche. His poetry seems but a barrage of

images, terse and sharp, that gather momentum in the stillness and

silence that frames them on the page. It is the economy of language that

empowers the idea and makes the words resonant. Better still are those

chasm-like spaces between words that make an image tower over the

clutter of our mind's empty noise. The space between words provides us

with an opening through which we can escape the tyranny of the mind.

 

The Gateway of Earth & Stone

 

At the top of Palani Hill, near the holy Murugan which Bhogar had

crafted from nine arsenics, there is an opening in the Earth; it is a

hole in the ground; the mouth of a cave which lies below. Bhogar often

lowered himself into the Earth, sat in the cave, accessing Life's hidden

secrets. He performed great austerities there, the magnitude of which

very few in this modern age can fathom. There at the opening Bhogar

erected a humble shrine to the Great Mother: a few yantras, a couple of

five-metal icons bearing the form of the Mother and her son Murugan. He

worshipped a small emerald lingam there, about ten inches in height. His

one and only disciple, Pulipani (perhaps the only one who truly

understood the sage), kept him company at the entrance to the

underground cavern on the top of Palani Hill. When Bhogar felt that his

outer work was done, he entered the gateway of earth and stone and sat

down in the darkness of the cave. Faithful Pulipani heaved a stone slab

over the entrance, sealing Bhogar forever in the blackness of his

earthen womb. For thirteen generations Pulipani's descendants have

watched over that stone slab that marks the gateway to the underground

chamber. Long ago, Bhogar's little shrine was set atop that hallowed

spot, and even today, is still worshipped by the vigilant sons of the

faithful Pulipani. They say that Bhogar is seated quietly in meditation

even now; alone in the darkness; watching the slow passage of time. His

breath is still. His mind is quiet, his heart unwavering; but through

the dense dark matter of his earthly form stabs the vibrant & relentless

flame of the Kundalini Shakti. There he waits...

 

 

What it all means...

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