Ananda Bhairavi-Anandalahiri-an analysis

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Dear apple pies of Divine mother Rajarajeshwari,

This is rather a lengthy posting. I had been saving in my word document for a long time and adding on and on till it reached this size!.Please take a printout and read in leisure if you dont find time to read in one go.

Saundarya Lahiri is a marvellous piece of poetry on Divine mother.I had the fortune of having some good expierience reading it.It is said to have been written by Adi shankaracharya after his visit to Kailasha.

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 theSaundarya 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.

 

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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.

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 Sastra?

2. Why should he have written these verses after his great

commentaries, which are by sufficiently monumental or supporting

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 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?

8. If non-duality is the teaching of Sankara, how is it that

he postulates Siva and Sakti as two distinct factors,

principles or entities?

9. Is Sankara a religious man at all?

10. How far are the verses compatible with the doctrines

developed in his other works?

11. Did his followers give any importance to this work so as to

adopt its teaching in any way in their lives as inmates of

various ashrams in which they practised their spiritual

disciplines?

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

 

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CONVENTIONAL TRADITIONAL APPROACH

Because of these and various other miscellaneous

difficulties, even highly painstaking and correctly critical

scholars like Professor W. Norman Brown of Harvard University

have doubted even the authorship of these verses. He has gone

into the reasons for doing so in very great detail in Volume 43

of the Harvard Oriental Series, and takes care to indicate on the

title page of the work, in all academic cautiousness, that the

Saundarya Lahari is only "traditionally ascribed to

Sankaracarya". If we turn to the other great authority on Tantra

literature, Sir John Woodroffe, these points are not clarified

any better. Even a strict word-by-word translation of this work

is not so far available, not to speak of a satisfactory

versification. Every translation or commentary that I have

examined so far, whether in Malayalam, English or in the original

Sanskrit, has not failed to reveal here or there some appalling

state of ignorance in respect of the main intent and purpose of

these verses. Except for borrowing rather light-heartedly the Sri

Chakra, which is found if Verse 11 of this work, described in

minute geometrical detail, 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 three or

four names : Pandit 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.

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, I 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 the anterior positions in terms of posterior

doctrines. Viewed in the light of such a dialectical

revaluation, it is not difficult, at least for me to see that

here Sankara adopts a non-verbal or protolinguistic medium instead

of a metalinguistic one, to restate the message of Advaita Vedanta,

for which he has always stood, here as well as in his great commentaries.

 

When these two features are fully understood by the modern

reader, it will be seen that most of the controversial problems

that have puzzled both pundits and professors melt away

altogether. The authorship of Sankara could then be easily

proved by a certain type of logic acceptable to Buddhism and

Vedanta alike, which is called "the argument by impossibility of

being otherwise," known as Anupalabdhi. This kind of logic

belongs to the order of axiomatic thinking, and therefore is

still understood even by phenomenological philosophers like

Edmund Husserl, only with a certain degree of mistrust. No

wonder, therefore, that the world of modern thought is involved

in a characteristic puzzlement belonging to the same general

intellectual and cultural malaise, the growing evidence of which

is beginning to be recognisable wherever we turn, more especially

when modern youth express dissatisfaction because of a general

gap that they feel existing between themselves and their elders.

 

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This brings us to the next most important consideration that

has made me all the more interested in this strange and almost

impossible text that I have been trying to understand with all

earnestness. There is an unconventional new generation of

young people, with generally free ideas about sex, variously

influenced by Eastern religions.

They believe in miracles and the supernatural powers. Inner space

is more important to them than outer space. Mind-expanding drugs

are every day luring them deeper into themselves. Yoga and discipleship

to a guru are taken for granted by them. Besides Yoga, they are also

interested in the secrets of what is called Tantra. Most of

them are genuine seekers for a new way of life, although some of

them are seen to be freaks or misfits. Whatever explanation of

such a widespread social disadoption might be, it is clear that

the movement requires sympathetic understanding and guidance.

What they call "institutional life" is their common enemy, and

clashing with it produces various forms of bad blood, repression

or discontent which is at present becoming a problem to all

concerned, most especially to themselves.

A revision and rearrangement of basic values in life seems to be

what they are asking for.

Discoveries in science have disrupted conventional standards in ethics,

aesthetics, economics and even in education.

Human ecology itself has to be reconsidered and revised.

The Saundarya Lahari, as I soon discovered, lent itself readily to

the basic ground on which human values could be rediscovered,

rearranged, revalued and restated more normally and normatively.

It is this discovery that dawned on me more clearly each day as I

taught in my global travels, that made this work all the more

dear to me.

 

 

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Side by side with this it also dawned on me with equal force

that this mainly non-verbally conceived text was just the one

that suited the most modern means of communication.

Video and computerisation, have been so fast and spectacular

in their development that now it is possible to say that this mass

medium has inaugurated what is beginning to be known as

a Paleocybernetic Age, which can be expected to revolutionise

the whole of individual and collective life of man within a few years.

There is little that could not be accomplished through new technology

to non-verbally bypass the confusion of tongues.

Man can examine the workings of his 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, which it was the privilege

hitherto of religious bodies to cater to the public by

way of spiritual nourishment, by which necessity man is made to

live more than merely by bread alone, 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.

 

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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 man's true nature to

himself. 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 man. 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.

 

 

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All the devas 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 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 sugarcane 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 use of

these monomarks and protolinguistic devices profusely, and to

such a point of intricacy that the modern reader could easily get

lost in their ramifications and its 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 Sakti 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.

 

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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 were two texts from his

pen, the twin complementary works named Saundarya Lahari and

Sivananda 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 for supporting 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 series here.

Certain picturesque situations are, of course, presented

here and there in such a way that when the numerator and the

denominator aspects of the same are cancelled out we are left

with an overwhelming sense of sheer absolute Beauty,

independently of any anthropomorphically conceived goddess. The

first and the last verses of the series, when read together,

absolve Sankara completely of any possible charge of being a

theist, deist or even a ritualist in the ordinary religious sense.

 

4. The Sri Chakra, which figures in the text very prominently,

seems to be the hallmark by which Tantra texts are

recognisable. What has this geometrical design to do with

Advaita Vedanta, which believes in the purest form of reason

only?

 

The Sri Chakra is a structurally conceived linguistic

device. Just as a graph can verify an algebraic formula, there

is no contradiction between the Advaita as Sankara has stated

metalinguistically in his Bhasyas (commentaries) and that

which the same Advaita represents in the form of a schema here.

 

 

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5. What is the place of eroticism in the context of the

austere Sannyasa (renunciation) which Sankara stood for so

uncompromisingly?

 

The proper theme of all poetry or even art could be said to

be love. No lover, no art. One cannot think of beauty without

the form of woman coming into it. Thus the relevancy of erotic

mysticism stands self-explained. The best proof in this matter is

the high place that Kalidasa's poetry occupies to the present

day.

 

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

also?

 

7. If not, why does he take the trouble of describing the

various details of Cakras (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 Sakta

Upanisads and the Yoga Upanisads 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 Siva and Sakti 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. Siva and Sakti, as meant to be united in the

present work, are to be understood as belonging together to the

same neutral epistemological grade of the non-dual Absolute.

They must lose their distinctness and, when generalised and

abstracted to the culminating point, they could be treated as two

perimeters or parameters to be cancelled out by their mutual

intersection or participation. One has a vertical reference and

the other a horizontal reference, while both exist at the core of

the Absolute. When abstraction and generalisation are thus

pushed together to their utmost limit, the paradox is transcended

or dissolved into the unity of one and the same Absolute Value

which is here referred to as Beauty or Bliss. Thus, duality,

accepted only for methodological purposes, is to be abolished at

each step by unitive understanding.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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9. Is Sankara a religious man at all?

 

To this question, an unequivocal answer

is to be found in the last verses of the series. It is not

difficult to see that Sankara's Advaita transcends all ideas of

holiness or ritualistic merits altogether. He seems clearly to

wash his hands of any such derogatory blemish.

The very beginning of the Vivekucadamani by 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 and mythological language here?

 

Letters of the Greek alphabet are advantageously

used in scientific language. The large quantity of Puranic

literature found in Hinduism affords a veritable never-expended

mine from which an intelligent philosopher like Sankara could

derive monomarks and divinities which could serve the same

purpose as the Greek letters in the language of mathematics.

Thus, he merely uses them as the available linguistic elements derived

from mythology instead of from mathematics as modern scientists

would do

 

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From the Upanisads 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.

 

 

 

16 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 a precise content to the

Absolute is therefore an important problem engaging the attention

of all thinking men. The new physics of the West is tending to become

more and more mathematical and theoretical. What is equally

 

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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 man is called upon to take a position more intelligent

than hitherto vis-a-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 Victoria form of respectability or even to the

 

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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 on 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 Siva-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 Auranzebe.

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 lop-sided 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,

 

19

 

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.

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 Upanisads contain many passages that reveal unequivocally

the fourfold structure mentioned so directly in the Mandukya Upanisad,

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

 

20

 

on the real. We shall have a powerful means of investigation at

hand; a principle of research, which, we can predict, will not

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)

 

 

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 that 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 Sivananda

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 the 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 educative 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 Upanisads, 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 . The internal evidence

available from almost every verse in this text, as well as in the

Sivananda Lahari, can, in our opinion at least, leave no doubt about

 

21

 

Sankara's authorship of these two exceedingly interesting and

intelligent works. Moreover, Sankara is unmistakably the correct

continuator of the Vedic or Upanisadic 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.

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

 

22

 

Saktya 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 Upanisads 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 one hundred verses

and forms a sequence in 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.

 

 

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.

 

 

23

 

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 Upanisadic 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 Upanisadic Risis (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 Upanisadic 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.

 

24

 

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 Siva family 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".

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.

 

 

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

 

26

 

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 Kabbala 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 Sakti Cult, and kept it alive through the ages without

being subjected to the corrections of either Vedism or proto-Aryan

Saivite 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 Vamacara ( a left-handed

way of life) which the more learned Brahmins would not

recognise. These practitioners went under the general name of

Shakteyas, 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 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.

 

27

 

The letters would correspond to the notion of Mantra, which

depends on a symbolic chant or incantation. The figures

themselves are attempted proto-linguistic 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 and

restate in a properly critically revised form the whole range of

the spirituality of his time, 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 Upanisadic

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 that links Sankara with his forerunner Kalidasa

and thus take our mind backwards to the great source of wisdom

contained in the Upanisads.

Speculation scaled very high in India at the time of the Upanisads,

which centred around one main notion - the Absolute (Brahman).

The structural implications of the Absolute found in the mystical

language of the Upanisads 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.

 

 

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".

 

28

 

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 an upsurge

of an experience which could come either from 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 Upanisadic

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 a 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. Next to the principle of the

quaternion referred to above, there are two parameters

29

 

of reference, the vertical and the horizontal, which have to be

clearly distinguished within the structure of the Absolute, which

latter would be otherwise 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

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

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,

 

31

 

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.

The "savoir faire" or the 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, 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.

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

 

32

 

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 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,

 

33

 

 

 

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 angles and

coloured petals in Yoga books.

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 the 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 misterious 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.

 

A WORD ABOUT THE BINDUSTHANA,

OR THE 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

34

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

 

35

 

(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.

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 Upanisads, 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.

The stages marked on the plus side of the vertical axis represent

Brighter and more intelligent states of the psycho-physical or

36

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 psycho-somatic

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

 

37

 

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.

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 its 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 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

 

38

 

to explain more ontological relation-relata complexes.

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-of-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-of-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-of-

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 man 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.

 

 

 

 

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

 

39

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, 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.

Thus a mathematical Paramasiva beyond the Omega Point on the thin

Vertical parameter has his counterpart in a footstool or

 

40

 

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 Aeschilus’ 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 Sakti

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.

 

Anadabhairavi,

 

Mama hridayavaasini, Hrillekhini!

Subodha

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Purity, Powers, Parabrahmam...

 

 

 

 

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