Songs for Siva Read online

  SONGS FOR SIVA

  Vacanas of Akka Mahadevi

  Translated by

  Vinaya Chaitanya

  NEW YORK • LONDON • TORONTO • SYDNEY • NEW DELHI

  CONTENTS

  Foreword

  Translator’s Introduction

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  About the Book

  About the Author

  Copyright

  Foreword

  H.S. SHIVAPRAKASH

  Beautiful as jasmine but pointed like an arrow…

  The vacanas of Akka Mahadevi – Karnataka’s greatest treasure – were first made available throughout the English-speaking world thirty years ago, in the late A.K. Ramanujan’s translations in Speaking of Siva. These were not the first translations, but the earlier ones were incapable of conveying Akka’s tough lyricism to a non-Kannada readership. Ramanujan was able to capture successfully those aspects of his source texts that lent themselves to translation into the Anglo-American poetic language of the time. Despite the shortcomings of his translations, the unmistakable power of the original struck a chord in the hearts of the English-reading public both in India and in the West. Now, decades later, the time is ripe for a new translation of Akka’s vacanas, for no single version can do justice to their many riches.

  There are two major problems with the existing translations of these vacanas. The subject of Ramanujan’s version is a spiritless body who resembles an accomplished athlete rather than Akka’s hero, who can imbue the spirit with physical warmth. On the other hand, in their enthusiasm to communicate the spirit of the writings, translators before him impaired their corporeality; the protagonist who emerges from them is a disembodied god without face or flesh, devoid of all beauty and power. They interpreted Akka’s vacanas as either scriptural or poetic texts. In fact they are neither. The twelfth-century saint poets of Karnataka held both scriptures and poetry in low esteem; indeed Adayya, a prolific poet of the period, considers both to be mere allegories. Those who believe in and live according to these allegories, says Adayya, are born of similes and die into similes. In short, vacana poets of Karnataka were aiming for something quite different from both the secular and the religious expression of their times. Because they believed deed (nade) to be embodiment of word (nudi), they mercilessly attacked all scripture and poetry that spoke of the imagined and idealized, and not of the experienced and lived truth. ‘How can those who have known no suffering / feel the suffering of those in pain?’ asks Akka in one of her vacanas.

  I am indebted to Vinaya Chaitanya for asking me to write this foreword, a task made easier by his well-informed and lucid notes, which will give the intended (non-Kannadiga) reader a key to the mysteries of this treasure trove. Unlike his predecessors, Chaitanya is admirably receptive to the experiential dimensions of Akka’s vacanas. Although he is alive to their socio-political nuances, his approach to them is above all a spiritual one. He has the open-minded humility of a genuine sadhak in the tradition of Narayana Guru of Kerala, who shared many of the socio-philosophical concerns of the twelfth-century saints of Karnataka, for instance, opposition to caste hierarchies and bigotry of all kinds. Chaitanya’s non-Kannada background gives him the advantage of objectivity, while his engagement with and personal experience of sadhana enables him to appreciate the overpowering resonance of Akka’s words. He shows, moreover, an acute awareness of textual issues that never bothered earlier translators.

  Most important of all, he has understood the multifacetedness of the original texts, for Akka’s compositions are poetic without being poetry, spiritual without being religious or scriptural. This crucial awareness informs his work even when the nuances of the words cannot be conveyed in translation. Whenever the word ‘Chan
namallikarjuna’ appears here, for example, it bears the suffix ‘jasmine-tender’. But this tenderness is only one attribute of Akka’s hero: he also has the brute strength of Arjuna, indefatigable archer. Akka describes herself as ‘a woman only in name’. In her longing for and union with her Cosmic Hero, Channamallikarjuna – beautiful as jasmine but hard and pointed like an arrow – she has lost her sexual identity, the basis of all dualisms. Though Chaitanya does not bring this out in his translation, the overall perception and selection of vacanas is informed by deep understanding of this essential point.

  Let me conclude by sharing what I consider to be the essence of Akka’s unique vacanas. ‘One has the here, another the hereafter, / One has no here, another no hereafter. / Another has neither here nor hereafter. / Those who have taken refuge in Channamallikarjuna, jasmine-tender, have both the here and the hereafter.’ With these words, she offers the world what it has found and lost over and over again: the awesome courage of lifelong surrender, something that has eluded materialists and spiritualists, theists, atheists and agnostics alike. Akka’s words embody and act out an inextinguishable love that is found only through self-effacement. It is precise and to the point, unlike that vague, universal love which seeks to love all despite being unable to love any one being. Neither is it limited, like the various forms of individual and collective selfish love that prevail in the world today. It is an intense vision and experience of the source of all love and all longing that alone can quench the thirst for all forms of thirst. It is entirely unlike the dukkha of Buddhism, the maya of Vedanta or the sin of Christianity. It is that naked primeval desire which is the mother of all desire. It burns and pines with love and throbs with irrepressible expectation. It is Channamallikarjuna, the name Akka gave to her path of Siva, where heaven and hell become one in the clear understanding of continuous awareness, turning nectar and poison into each other. For, in the true path of Siva, as Acharya Utpaladeva said, even poison turns into nectar and misery to joy.

  The image of Akka that emerged in earlier translations is of a radical woman poet prefiguring many of the concerns of present-day feminism. The image of our own age as reflected in Akka’s vacanas is accurate as far as it goes, but there are important differences. The experience of the sacred – precisely what our age has lost sight of – is the very breath of Akka’s vacanas, and Vinaya Chaitanya is to be commended for bringing this aspect of the author to the fore. There is little doubt that his labour of love will appeal to a wide readership, for in Akka’s vacanas is Siva’s plenty. Students and practitioners of literature, history, sociology, women’s studies, philosophy and religion are sure to find Akka’s vacanas fascinating in many different ways, while these vacanas are of great significance also to true spiritual seekers everywhere. In an age teeming with half-baked and imperfect gurus, the authentic and enduring voice of Akka the great Sivaguru can bring greater light and shaktipat, transmission of energy, to a world in which both are in short supply.

  H.S. Shivaprakash.

  Chaitra Pournima, Vasanta Masa, Svabhanu Samvatsara

  Translator’s Introduction

  VINAYA CHAITANYA

  United like word and meaning are Parvati and Paramesvara,

  The twin parents of the universe; them I adore

  With these opening lines from Kalidasa’s Raghuvamsa, let us invoke the blessings of our prime parents in order to find meaning not only of words, but also of life itself – the meaning of all meanings.

  Background

  Siva – sometimes seen sitting alone in silent contemplation on snowy peaks, sometimes less austerely under a spreading banyan tree surrounded by disciples both human and animal – is always portrayed facing south; hence he is sometimes called Dakshinamurti, the South-facing Lord. In the south, at the extreme tip of peninsular India where oceans meet, stands Kanyakumari, the Virgin Goddess, meditating on her lover-lord, the crescent-wearing madman of the north.

  It is between these extremities – the snowy peaks of Kailas and the watery depths of the southern oceans – that the poetry of Indian spirituality has its being. The extremes can also be seen as representing the ambivalence present in human knowledge itself: between concepts and percepts, names and forms, mind and matter, male and female and all such antinomies. These poles cancel each other out in a poetic upsurge that fills consciousness completely, eliminating the duality of the knowing subject and the known object.

  It is the dialectics between male and female that makes for the creative evolution of the world. When these opposites are united in harmony, there is peace and contentment; when the balance between them is lost, there is suffering. Different degrees of participation could produce various degrees of union or separation. The concept of ardhanarisvara, the half-man, half-woman deity, describes the most unitive state, in which female and male are the inseparable left and right halves of the same body. (The yin–yang of the Chinese too stands for this intimate indivisibility of the negative and positive principles of nature.)

  One could also think of one’s own consciousness as alternating between an instinctual point of departure and an aspirational or ideal end point; between this alpha and omega a circulation of values takes place. The closer the actual and the ideal are, the happier one is. Resolution of the basic conflict between the two, which makes life problematic to most of us, has been the aim of the numerous philosophical and mystical traditions of the world. How far each has succeeded can be judged only from within, by the system’s own unique yet universal norms. We must also remember that each system was a product of a particular time and its needs.

  Varied as these traditions may be, all have produced poetry of the highest quality – a natural result of the search for verbal expression of states of being from which ‘words recoil, together with the mind, not able to reach it’, as the Upanishads put it. Poetry infuses words with spirit, trying to embody the ultimate silence where word and meaning cancel each other out in the transcendent experience, within contemplative consciousness, of poetic meaning or value.

  In the Upanishads, the poet-seer is identified with the Absolute Godhead. Christian theology allows man to say that he is created in the image of God: ‘the Kingdom of God is within you’, that ‘you can be perfect even as your Father in Heaven is perfect’ or that ‘the Word was with God and the Word was God’. Indian traditions assert with equal boldness that ‘You are That; I myself am He’, and that ‘the knower of the Absolute becomes the Absolute’. The equality in these existential statements endeavours to give tangible meaning to the notion of the Absolute, more popularly known as God. Such meaning must be a universal value, otherwise it will have no significance for purposeful human living. It can only be in this sense that ‘a thing of beauty is a joy forever’. A thing must exist, must be known and must have intrinsic value. Existence, consciousness and value are three categories or perspectives from which the real is apprehended in the Upanishads. In Sanskrit, they are called satcidananda. Satyam, sivam, sundaram (the true, the good, the beautiful) are used in Saivite traditions. We find the same categories in Plato.

  From the Tirukkural of Thiruvalluvar in Tamil; the works of Kalidasa; the hymns of Sankara; the poems of Kabir; Tukaram, Jnaneswar and other great devotees of the Marathas; the poetic genius of Allama Prabhu and Akka Mahadevi; right down to the most recent utterances of Sri Ramakrishna, Vivekananda, Tagore and Narayana Guru, the golden thread continues, always trying to give meaning to the notion of the ultimate. This ultimate can be thought of theologically as a god or goddess, psychologically as the self, or cosmologically as the universe or the All. The urge towards union itself must be understood as a dynamism, alternately touching the loftiest heights or the most earthy depths of value worlds or visions.

  Envisioning beauty necessarily brings up the ‘form’ of beauty, the beautiful. To the man, the form of absolute beauty is that of woman, and vice versa. This is where the erotic-mystical enters poetry. The poems of St John of the Cross, Rumi and Attar, the Song of Songs, may all be pro
fitably studied in this context. The Saundarya Lahari and Sivananda Lahari of Sankara, the Gita Govinda of Jayadeva, ‘Kali Natakam’ and other poems on the eternal feminine by Narayana Guru, the Syamala-dandakam and Kumarasambhava of Kalidasa, all belong in the same highly charged category. Study of these will help us to understand the eternal and universal significance of the life and teachings of Akka Mahadevi and to place her in context. It is regrettable indeed that we have lost the names of most of the women gurus through the vicissitudes of history, but fortunate that some of their poetic genius has been preserved.

  The proper theme of all poetry, or even art, could be said to be love. Poetry must be pleasing or beautiful. In Indian poetic traditions, mysticism and the wisdom that goes with it have never been separated from the beauty of poetry. Aesthetics, ethics, economics and all other disciplines that involve human well-being can be blended into a symphonic whole that consoles or elevates the spirit. Thus, poetry in India has always had the serious purpose of revealing the ultimate. It is wisdom – the finalized knowledge or certitude that we can have about our own feelings and thoughts – that is the subject matter as well as the object of poetry. It is in this context of perpetual wisdom that we must place Akka Mahadevi as a poet of the universal aspiration for union with the All, whom she visualized as Channamallikarjuna, the Jasmine-tender Lord.

  To those who may find all this detour from the pure or devotional poems of Akka unnecessary, I can do no better than point to the very first of the poems, in which she refers to her Lord who ‘hides as the being behind becoming’. Bomma (from Brahman) and bhava are the words that she uses; and they must be recognized as belonging to the idiom of a perennial philosophy, which she would not have used unconsciously.

  Introduction

  Akka Mahadevi is one of the brightest luminaries of the Virasaiva movement, which flourished in Karnataka in the twelfth century under the high-minded inspiration of devotees like Basavanna and poet-seers like Allama Prabhu who were moved by great compassion towards fellow beings oppressed by ignorance and misery. Such seers evoked the archetypal Siva-father image, ever vibrant in the recesses of primal memory, to speak out against those perverted customs that, in the name of piety and holiness, polluted the pure springs of wisdom. Vehemently opposed to everything that divided the family of humankind – be it caste, sex, language or dress – they established model communities which transcended the social barriers foisted on the common people by decadent theocracies and corrupt monarchies. There were many women seers, too, at the forefront of the movement.