BY PROF. T. VIRABHADRUDU, M.A.
(The Osmania University)
It has been said that ‘compared to the East, the
West is young’. 2 While admitting that spirituality or any aspect of
human culture or experience is not the monopoly of a particular race or
community, one might say that, for several centuries, India and the eastern
countries have been the abode of mysticism. Examples are many of sages and
saints who spent years in contemplation and in the pursuit of the Divine. On
the other hand, ‘mysticism in English poetry is a comparatively modern growth.’
3 Despite the
fact that much is being written about mysticism and mystics nowadays, in
popular estimation, it is still a term of reproach. By some, mysticism is
identified with occultism, magic and jugglery and is looked upon with horror or
contempt, as in the case of the author 4 of The Myth of the Mystic East whose aim in
writing this book seems to have been ‘to drive another nail into the coffin of
mysticism’. Many equate it with vagueness and unintelligibility. There are not
wanting in the present generation poets–some of them think they are imitating
Rabindranath Tagore!–who, when the reader unable, after reading and re-reading
the verses, to grasp their meaning or appreciate the propriety of the imagery
adopted, asks for more light, give the answer. “It is mysticism; you cannot
understand it”. About a Turkish poet Niyazi of the seventeenth century who was
supposed to be a mystic, a student of Turkish literature points out that when
trying to puzzle out their sense one finds oneself in constant agreement with
the Mufti 5 who, when appealed to on the question of their orthodoxy, replied that
only God and Niyazi knew what they (the poems) meant!
6 That this is true
not of one country but many countries can be gathered from Francis
Young-husband’s remark, ‘in spite of the works of Miss Evelyn Underhill and Dr.
Inge, mystics are still suspect and mysticism is confused with mistiness’7. To show that this world is loosely used,
sometimes in the sense of ‘strange’ and sometimes in the sense of ‘vague’, a
few sentences from modern writers may be cited:
The wonderful mysticism, which seems to surround these two great rivers (the Ganges and the Jumna) has also some other reason which is supported by modern investigation.
(Prabuddha Bharata, 1935)
They (the Parsis) are an intensely religious people
expressing their life not in mystical forms but through actions of service.
(From Jinarajadasa’s Address on Zoroastrianism at Adyar, January 3,
1936).
Let us now take up the question, ‘What is
mysticism?’ It is interesting to note what Ranjee G. Sahani has to say on the
subject:
The word ‘mysticism,’ like ‘love,’ has acquired an
infinity of meanings and applications, and so has come to signify nothing, because
it may signify so much…..He (the mystic) is the one spirit who has escaped from
the ‘whatness of the that’.
However, a mystic is generally described as ‘one
who seeks by contemplation and self-surrender to obtain union with or
absorption into the Deity, or who believe in the spiritual apprehension of
truths inaccessible to the understanding’. 9 Thus the mystic tries to see God face to face and
prays that he may be one with the Divine Spirit. Meditation, ecstasy,
illumination and intuition are associated with him. He passes through an
experience peculiar to himself and one which may not be easily conveyed or
expressed to others. That is probably one of the reasons why the mystics
generally resort to symbols and allegory. That the man in the street may not be
able to appreciate the full import of their utterances has to be allowed, as in
the case of the following:
Purnasya purnamadaya purnamevavasishyate.
10
(That is full; this is full; the full comes out of
the full; take the full from the full and the full remains.)
or,
Here’s a curious problem that has baffled the
brains of mathematics!
I add and I subtract,
And the answer is the same.
I multiply and I divide,
And the answer is the same.
I gain and I lose,
Name it what you choose,
But the answer is ever the same.
11
or
On the seashore of endless worlds children meet.
Tempest roams in the pathless sky, ships get
wrecked in the
trackless water, death is abroad and children play.
On the
seashore of endless worlds is the great meeting of
children.
The above passage from Gitanjali is very
sweet, but can we explain what exactly it means, or, is it only ‘some
meaningless cadence’, some sweet nonsense? To know what is mysticism, we will
do well to gather the sayings of a few of the great poets and philosophers of
the world. Feelings would be more appropriate than sayings, for,
the mystic’s message is nothing more than an expressing, in his Own way, his Rasanubhuti,
(personal experience). Poets like Tagore, Shelley, and Sarojini Naidu, Bhaktas
like Kabir and Mirabai, religious preachers like Buddha and Chaitanya and
moralists like Carlyle and Gandhi are all called mystics. At first sight, it
will appear a heterogeneous group, but they have all something in common.
Tagore and Gandhi represent two different ideals. The former is a poet, a lover
of beauty in nature and in human form and an artist to the tips of his fingers.
Gandhi is an ascetic preaching medieval simplicity and attempting to
reconstruct the world on the basis of Ahimsa (non-violence). One is a Bhogi
and the other is Tyagi. Carlyle was a great spiritual force during
his time, while Shelley was driven out of his college for his Necessity of
Atheism. Still, these are called mystics. A mystic is an idealist or
dreamer. He is often a very peculiar person. It is no exaggeration to say that
Gandhiji is a most curious phenomenon. When there is any domestic or national
trouble, he fasts, till, as he says, light dawns on him or till he purifies
himself and appeases God’s anger. He must be either a mad man or a great seer,
and nobody who knows anything of him will incline to the first view. But it
must be conceded that the mystics are mad in their own ways, which is often the
reason for their being ridiculed by their contemporaries, Chaitanya, it is said
‘walked like a mad man through untrodden paths; children threw dust at him and
clapped their hands saying, “Lo! there goes the ascetic mad after God.”
12 In modern times
people are not, of course, quite ready to accept the mystics or their message.
They refuse to believe in inspiration and intuition. They would
explain away all these rather extraordinary phenomena as ‘moments–they do not
last long–when we are only functioning at our top-level’. 13 To some of the Yoga and yogic exercises are
no more than ‘charlatanry’. Philosophers who plead for an idealistic view of
life are only ‘digging up dead gods and worshipping them. They are persecuting
reason and are among the forces destroying civilisation. Their philosophy is an
extreme form of intellectual quackery’.14 The prejudice has grown so strong that an English
writer has published the following attack in one of the journals of his
country:
Flirtation with the Absolute, an agreeably vague
notion of that which is ungoverned by space, time or any other relation,
appears to be a fashionable habit of our epoch….Mysticism seems to be no more
than a kind of sloppy self-cosseting which is concealing its absurdity with
pretensions to, the sublime. 15
If however we turn to the other side of the medal,
we note that there are more things in heaven and earth than science dreams of.
Even in this century there are people with whom ‘Yoga is an art of
self-opening and self-discipline’.16 Radhakrishnan, a most distinguished product of
modern education, thinks that ‘the deepest things of life are known only
through intuitive apprehension,’17 and the rishis (the sages of ancient India) are
not so much the authors of the truths recorded in the Vedas and the seers who
were able to discern the eternal truths by raising their life-spirit to the
plane of the universal spirit.’18 That means they (the Vedas) are the products of
their spiritual intuition, drishti or vision. J. C. Bose, the great
scientist, while emphasising ‘rigid demonstration’ as an essential part of the
scientist’s work, points out:
Even in this path of self-restraint and
verification, he (the scientist) is making for a region of surpassing wonder.
When the visible light ends he still follows the invisible.
19
The sober minded C, Y. Chintamani says, ‘Religion
is a matter of faith and not of proof,’ and adds:
There are persons who possess some small direct
knowledge of spiritual invocations. Are they all the victims of illusion? This
would be a rash conclusion. It would be a travesty of science and the
scientific method to dismiss summarily everything that cannot be tested in a
tube with the aid of an acid. 20
Thus in the realm of thought the pendulum seems to
be swinging towards the mystics or seers. If they are occasionally ‘mad’ it is
a kind of poetical madness, a divyonmada (divine frenzy). There is a
Telugu saying that a touch of madness is required for the making of verses.
Macaulay, the illustrious Victorian who is by no means known for his other worldliness and who is anything but
mystical, has to admit that ‘perhaps no person can be a poet, or can even enjoy
poetry, without a certain unsoundness of mind, if anything which gives so much
pleasure ought to be called unsoundness’.21 He concedes truth is essential to poetry; but it
is the truth of madness. But while the lunatic’s behaviour is repulsive or pity-exciting, the mystic’s ‘madness’
is a purifying and elevating force. The enthusiasm shown for Rabindranath
Tagore by one of his Bengali admirers speaks volumes for the influence a mystic
poet can exercise on his reader:
I read Rabindranath every day; to read one line of
his is to forget all the troubles of the world.
22
The mystics are Bhaktas (devotees of God).
They derive pleasure from meditating on Him or repeating His sacred name. About
Prahlada 23 it was said:
Eating or drinking, seeing or talking, moving or
resting, laughing or playing, he would think of only one thing. Fixing his mind
on Narayan and reveling in that joy, he would forget the whole world.
24
The story of Valmiki is well-known. One who had
originally been a highway robber was, thanks to the Seven Sages who happened to
meet him, initiated into Dhyana (concentration), repeated the word
‘Rama’ for years oblivious of his surroundings, had illumination and became the
author of the Ramayana. Mysticism and Yoga are alike, the former
word being derived from a Greek root meaning “to close lips or eyes” and the
latter from a Samskrit root meaning “union (with God)”. According to the Gita,
Yoga is discipline of mind or concentration. A yogi is one who
believes in renunciation (sanyasa), is alone (Ekaki), has a
one-pointed mind (Ekagrammanaha), is unaffected by joy or sorrow (Sukham
va yadiva dukham), has perfect control over his self (Jitatma) and
has attained peace (Prasantaha). Thus the Gnani (wise man) will,
fully absorbed in meditation, pray:
Asato ma sadgamaya
Tamaso ma jyotirgamaya
Mrtyormamrtam gamaya 25
(From the Unreal lead me into the Real; from
Darkness lead me into Light; from Death lead me into Immortality).
Another Bhakta26 who is more poetically minded loses himself in his enthusiasm for a
personal God when he sings:
Adharam madhuram vadanam madhuram
Nayanam madhuram hasitam madhuram
Hrdayam madhuram gamanam madhuram
Madhuradhipaterakhilam madhuram
(Sweet is his lip and sweet his face; sweet is his
eye and sweet his smile: sweet is his heart and sweet his gait; O sweet, how
sweet, is everything about the Lord of Madhura!)
Some of the Bhaktas derive an indescribable
pleasure in simply repeating the name of their favourite deity. One of them,
Ramadas of Bhadrachalam, sings:
Sreerama neenamamemi ruchira...(Ram, O Ram, how
sweet is thy name! How sweet, how sweet, how sweet is thy name! Sweeter than
curds or butter, sweeter than honey or sugar-cane, O Protector of the fallen,
how sweet is thy name and delicious!)
According to Tulasidas, the famous Hindi poet:
Great sages sing the purifying power
Of God’s most holy Name:
In this lies beauty, purity and bliss:
Armed with this overcoming sword
Peace mayst thou win in turmoil,
Peace eternal, here and now:
To those who trust that Name,
No doubt is left, no fear.
27
Chaitanya, the Vaishnava devotee, who delights in
the name of Krishna, tells us ‘the name is a poem to me and gives me joys
untold.’ The mystic’s aim being to see God, silent contemplation is, in some
cases, adopted as the means to that end. Noguchi, the Japanese poet, speaks of
‘the poet’s castle of solitude’ and praises the blessing of silence. He says
‘we Orientals are happy to find the climax of poetry in solitude. To us it is a
holy sanctum; a place where the Infinite dwells.’ Evelyn Underhill shows a
similar longing when she puts the question,
What do you seek within, O Soul, my Brother?
What do you seek within?
28
and supplies the answer,
I seek a Life that shall never die,
Some haven to win
From mortality.
In that mood she is happy, and if we ask her what
she finds within, her reply is: ‘I find great quiet where no noises come.’
As she finds there a friend that in secret came,
she prays:
Bar door and window that none may see:
That alone we may be
(Alone! face to face,
In that flame-lit place!)
When first we begin
To speak one with another.
The devotee is ardently wishing for communion with
God, and where he (or she) feels sure of this, he joyfully exclaims: ‘Lord, I
am Thine and Thou art mine.’ 29
The enthusiasm of the disciple for the Master is so
great that he wishes the whole universe to be filled with His name. He should
listen only to one sound and see only one form wheresoever he may turn.
About Hanuman the Ramabkakta (lit.
worshipper of Rama) an interesting story is given. Rama, after having destroyed
Ravana and the demon-host returned to Ayodhya and held a Durbar at which
Sita made a present of a very valuable pearl-necklace to Hanuman as a token of
her gratitude for his services and appreciation of his very staunch devotion to
herself and her husband. The whole assembly was surprised and everyone was
asking himself, why should Hanuman be singled out for this honour, and that at
the hands of the noble queen? The recipient, however the monkey 30 that he was, began, the moment the gift came into
his hands, to break every pearl to pieces. No one had the audacity to call in
question the queen’s judgment but at last Sita herself, shocked at what was
being done, asked: ‘Maruti 31, what on earth are you doing with that necklace?’
The reply that ensued and silenced one and all was, ‘Esteemed Mother, I am
breaking these pearls to see if Rama’s name is inscribed in them.’ So far as
Hanuman was concerned, an object had value and a word had meaning when it
related to Rama, and a sound had significance when it contained that sacred
name. The same warmth for God is displayed by an Irish poet when he prays:
Christ be under me! Christ be over me!
Christ be beside me
On left hand and right!
Christ be before me, behind me, about me!
Christ this day be within and without me!
32
Tyagaraja, 33 the illustrious saint and poet-musician of South
India, expresses similar sentiments towards Sri Rama, the god of his worship,
and his enthusiasm is boundless when he addresses his master thus:
Nothing except Thee has a place in my heart; my
eyes are filled with the beauty of Thy image; my ears are filled with the music
of Thy tale; my mouth is filled with the sweetness of Thy name; whichever side
I turn, I see only Thee. 34
Potana, the author of the Andhra Bhagavatam,
declares emphatically that human life is absolutely worthless when it is devoid
of faith in God. The limbs of the body and the faculties of the mind justify
their existence only when they are used in knowing and seeing Him. He
writes:
The hands are useful that worship the Lotus-eyed:
The eyes are eyes that see the Lord of the Angels:
The ears are not lost that listen to the tales of
Vishnu:
The feet move that lead one to the temple of God:
The tongue functions that praises the Husband of
Lakshmi:
The head is blessed that bows down to the Sleeper
on the Serpent:
The day is not wasted that is spent on the God of
gods:
The book is good that reveals the greatness of the
Lord of the Wheel:
The teacher is the right one that tells the pupil
of the Ruler of the Earth:
The father is the true father that exhorts his son
to believe Hari and worship Him. 35
Thus the mystic feels there is one thing in the
universe which deserves his attention–God, and there is only one road which
leads to that goal–prayer. An English poet said once, ‘More things are wrought
by prayer than this world dreams of’ and the wisest man of our generation
firmly believes that prayer, genuine and sincere, is man’s only hope:
Prayer has saved my life. Without it, I should have
been a lunatic long ago.
Three of the greatest teachers of the world,
Buddha, Jesus, and Mohamed, have left unimpeachable testimony that they found
illumination through prayer and would not possibly live without it.
In spite of despair staring me in the face on the
political horizon, I have never lost my peace. In fact, I have found people who
envy my peace. That peace comes from prayer. 36
But, worldlings as we are, we cannot fully
appreciate the full significance of the above words, for, most of us never
pray. Even with regard to the others who believe in prayer and pass through the
ceremony, the saying is true that it is very easy to say prayers and very hard
to pray, Was not Claudius, Hamlet’s uncle, correct when he confessed,
My words fly up, my thoughts remain below:
Words without thoughts never to heaven go.
The mystic is a visionary who sees sights which are
not seen by the ordinary man. Sir Galahad 37 tells us,
When down the stormy crescent goes,
A light before me swims,
Between dark stems the forest glows,
I hear a noise of hymns.
His heart being pure and his faith great, he hears
a voice, though none are there. Wordsworth shows how Childhood and the thought
of his past years confer a blessing on him:
Hence in a season of calm weather
Though inland far we be,
Our souls have sight of that immortal sea
Which brought us hither.
Thanks to the “first affections” and “shadowy
recollections,” he can enjoy those visions,
And see the Children sport upon the shore,
And hear the mighty waters rolling ever more.
38
Shelley always felt that
The awful shadow of unseen Power
Floats though unseen among us. 39
One day, while he was musing on man’s lot, he had a
vision of that ‘awful Loveliness’ whom he addresses thus:
Sudden, thy shadow fell on me,
I shrieked, and clasped my hands in ecstasy!
Prahlada had peculiar visions of God. For Instance,
When the Husband of Lakshmi approached him he
ceased to move with his friends;
When the Destroyer of Evil came to play with him,
he forgot all about his playmates;
When the Friend of Devotees spoke to him, he paid
no heed to other speeches;
When he saw the Lord of the Heavenly Orders, elated
with joy, he did not look at anything else;
When his heart was filled with the pleasure of
meditation, he attained fullness of being; he was motionless and, though with
life, behaved like one without it. 40
The mystic is subject to moods and they are not
always logical or consistent. Here is another description:
Engaged in heavenly thoughts, he sometimes cries
for sorrow, sometimes he feels proud and sings for joy. Once he says ‘Vishnu is
after all this’ and smiles and smiles. Another time he jumps and dances
shouting, ‘I have discovered a treasure, It is mine’. Now he repeats the Holy
Name. Now he shuts his eyes and stands and stands without end.
41
About Bhagavan Sri Ramakrishna there are many
interesting stories. When he was god-possessed he would remain motionless for
hours and be entirely ‘unconscious of birds perching on his head or snakes
crawling over his motionless body.’ 42 Chaitanya was also subject to trances, terrible
emotional experiences, especially at the time of the Sankirtan 43 parties. A blue cloud in the sky, or the colour of the sea, or the water
of the Jumna would remind him of his blue-coloured God (Sri Krishna) and his
behaviour on such occasions would border on madness ‘In the sea he saw his
Krishna smiling and beckoning him, and he jumped into it with arms outstretched
to embrace his God; a fisherman saved his life.’
44 The love of Radha
and Krishna and their mystical union has inspired many poets of our country.
Lilasuka describes how each of the lovers was so absorbed in love that they
were once utterly unconscious of the realities of life. Radha the milkmaid
wanted to churn curds. The churn-staff was turning and turning, but the vessel
was empty. Krishna the cowherd wanted milk. But the God that he was, he brought
a bull for milking! 45 There was another girl of whom the poet has something equally
interesting to say:
Vikretukama kila gopakanya murari
padarpita chittavrttihi
Dadhyadhikam mohavasadavochadgovinda
narayana madhaveti.
The milkmaid wanted to sell curds, etc., and was
going round the sereets but, completely immersed in love, she went about
crying, “Govind, Narayan, Madhav.” They were her milk, curds and butter! Mrs.
Sarojini Najdu’s Song of Radha the Milkmaid is a most beautiful lyric
describing a similar experience. The girl carried her curds to the Mathura fair
and wanted to cry:
“Who will buy, who will buy
These curds that are white as the clouds in the sky
When the breezes of Shrawan are blowing?”
She was however so lost in love as to confess:
But my heart was so full of your beauty, Beloved,
They laughed as I cried without knowing:
Govinda! Govinda!
Govinda ! Govinda!
How softly the river was flowing!
Mirabai, the Rajput-princess, had a similar passion
for Sri Krishna. For his sake, she cut off family ties and defied social
conventions. The ecstatic love of Radha for Krishna inspired her and she
surrendered herself to the great Lover. She is proud enough to say: ‘Kana have
I bought; the price he asked I paid’. 46 Some thought the price was too much and others
considered it too cheap a bargain, but, so far as she was concerned, she was
happy:
I paid in full, weighed to the utmost grain,
My love, my life, my self, my soul, my all.
The doctrine of the mystic is the doctrine of the
heart, and, according to the Sufis, the heart is the palace of the Beloved. In
Browning’s opinion, love is the essence of life. He boldly says: ‘I let the
world go, and take love!’ 47
He knows the limitations of earthly love but says:
I mind how love repaired all ill,
Cured wrong, soothed grief...
He wishes us to remember
He who in all His works below
Adapted to the needs of man,
Made love the basis of the plan,
Did love, as was demonstrated.
Thus faith and love are two things which stand out
prominently in the lives of the mystics. They are generally indifferent to the
orthodox forms of religion and some of them go to the extent of aggressively
opposing it. Sadi, the Persian poet, treats with contempt the man who is vain
of having visited holy places. He says the Haji (one who goes on a
pilgrimage) went a small snake and returned a huge Python! Shankaracharya is
sorry that we are all so simple as to think flowers and incense constitute
worship:
(Man, the fool that he is, plunges into a deep lake
or wanders up and down in a forest, dreadful and uninhabited by men, or on a
long range of mountains m search of flowers for his worship. Would he but
dedicate one flower–the lotus of his heart–to thy service, O Lord of Uma, how
happy should he be! But he knows not. How strange! How strange!)
Kabir is sorry that the Yogi chooses to dye
his garments, rather than dye his mind in the colours of love, and his message
to humanity is this:
Listen to me, friend, he understands who loves.
One interesting feature which characterises the
mystics is their belief that all things are full of God. Every object in the
universe or every natural phenomenon is a symbol of His presence, and the
differences in size, shape or colour are only the various changes adopted by
the changeless One. He is the source of all things and there is nothing grand
or majestic in the world that does not reveal His glory. The Bhagavad-Gita says:
mrganam cha mrgendroham vainateyascha pakshinam.
(And I am Prahlada of Daityas; of calculators Time
am I: and of wild animals the imperial beast (lion); and Vainateya of birds).
48
Pavanaha pavatamasmi Ramaha sastrabhrtamaham
Jhashanam makaraschasmi srotasamasmi Jahnavi.
(Of purifiers I am the wind; Rama of warriors I;
and I am Makara of fishes; of streams the Ganga am I).
49
‘All vital virtue,’ says an English poet, 50 ‘flows from life’s first fountain, God’ and he
sees the Creator everywhere:
Brahma’s Eyes look forth divining
From the welkin’s brow,
Full bright eyes–the same are shining
In the sacred cow.
51
Poet Aurobindo asks,
In the blue of the sky, in the green of the forest,
52
Whose is the hand that has painted the glow?
and feels the presence of the Supreme
In the strength of a man, in the beauty of woman,
In the laugh of a boy, in the flush of a girl.
He is convinced that
All music is only the sound of His laughter,
All beauty the smile of His passionate bliss;
Our lives are His heart-beats, our rapture the
bridal
Of Radha and Krishna, our love is their kiss.
Also, the mystic is wise enough to recognise the
existence of the Spirit in the small as well as the great:
In the tiny atom and in the heart of the mighty
Himalaya, in the delicate human breath and the vast and limitless ocean, in the
little ant and the huge elephant, dwells the Spirit Divine, the Cause of all
causes, the Brahman to whom we all pray for guidance and inspiration.
53
According to Robert Browning, God is there
In the star, in the stone, in the flesh, in the
soul and the clod.
Mrs. Browning is emphatic when she says,
And truly, I reiterate, nothing’s small!
In her opinion,
Earth’s crammed with heaven,
And every common bush afire with God;
But only he who sees, takes off his shoes,
The rest sit round it and pluck blackberries: 54
A Punjabi Sufi thinks that even the dust we
tread upon is not to be despised. He says:
Farid, revile not dust, there is nothing like it.
When we are alive it is beneath our feet, when we are dead it is above us.
The people of ancient Greece believed that their
mountains and rivers were haunted by gods and goddesses, and the Hindus of
India still look upon them as sacred and worship them as places where the
Creator lives. Pantheism, the theory that God is identical with the Universe
and that God is everything and everything is God, has had its champions in
every epoch. The nature-poets of England seem to share the same belief. Cowper
thinks that
Nature is but a name for an effect,
Whose cause is God.
He is convinced that one ‘spirit rules universal
nature’.
Not a flow’r
But shows some touch, in peckle, streak, or strain,
Of his unrivall’d pencil. He inspires
Their balmy odours, and imparts their hues.
55
The mystical quality of Wordsworth’s poetry is
well-known. Whenever he looks at objects of nature, ‘he feels a presence that
disturbs him with the Joy of elevated thoughts,’ and he becomes conscious of
A motion and a spirit, that impels
All thinking things, all objects of all thought,
And rolls through all things.
56
Shelley, the great poet of English Romanticism,
explains how he is very happy in the company of nature. He exhorts mankind to
run
Away, away, from men and towns,
To the wild wood and the downs–
for, in cities in the midst of society, as it is
constituted, the soul has to ‘repress its music’,
While the touch of Nature’s art
Harmonizes heart to heart.
It is there, in the wild woods and the plains, that
the lawns and the pastures, the sand-hills of the sea, the wild flowers and the
violets, make him shed his worries. It is an ideal place,
When the blue noon is over us
And the multitudinous
Billows murmur at our feet,
Where the earth and ocean meet
And all things seem only one
In the universal sun. 57
In Shelley’s case as in that of Wordsworth, nature
worship is the poet’s religion, and the contact with natural objects raises him
to a place where he is at one not only with himself but also with the whole of
humanity. It is there that he realises the oneness of life. This outlook on the
universe, a consciousness of its fundamental unity, it may be safely said, has
been the most outstanding feature of mysticism throughout its history. Carlyle,
the great prophet of nineteenth century England, never loses sight of this fact
and never misses an opportunity of impressing this truth on the minds of his
countrymen:
“Wondrous truly are the bonds that unite us one and
all…….I say, there is not a red Indian, hunting by Lake Winnipic, can quarrel
with his squaw, but the whole world must smart for it....It is a mathematical
fact that the casting of this pebble from my hand alters the centre of gravity
of the Universe.” 58
J. C. Bose, the great scientist, sees ‘an
underlying unity amidst bewildering diversity’. The layman thinks that science
and religion are opposed to one another, the former representing analysis and
the latter synthesis. But the distinguished Indian scientist advises us never
to ignore the fundamental truth that there are not sciences but a single
science that includes all’. He astonishes us by declaring that there is no
basis for the time-old distinction between the animate and the inanimate:
In my investigations on the action of forces on
matter, I was amazed to find boundary lines vanishing and to discover points of
contact emerging between the Living and Non-Living.
59
Thus the scientist becomes a mystic, and his faith
and imagination are so strong that his daring adventures into the great seas of
the unknown have enabled him to feel that ‘the problem of the great mystery of
Life and Death is brought a little nearer solution, when in the realm of the
living we pass from the Voiced to the Unvoiced’. Thus that life has an
essential unity is the chief point in the mystic’s creed and he is always eager
to see the One in the many. This is the message which the Gita conveys
to its readers:
Yo mam pasyati sarwatra sarwam cha mayi pasyati
Tasyaham na pranasyami sa cha me na pranasyati.
(He who seeth Me everywhere, and seeth everything
in Me, of him will I never lose hold, and he shall never lose hold of Me)
60
In the Bhagavata-Purana there is an
interesting episode relating to Krishna’s childhood. As a boy he was full of
‘mischief and tricks’ and would play pranks with his neighbours, but when he
came to his mother the Eternal Child would be as innocent as a lamb. Tired of
these complaints and desirous to see how far these tales were true, Yasoda on
being told that he was eating ‘matti’ (dust) one day asked her son to
open his mouth. He did accordingly but what did she see within? Lakes and
rivers, hills and forests, the sun and the moon, the planets and the stars, in
fact the whole of creation! The scene was so awe-inspiring that the good lady
was wondering as to what it was, a dream or a reality. The mystic, says an
English poet, sees a whole world in a grain of sand. He discovers not only the
One in the Many but also the Many in the One.
To the true worshipper of God the universe is one
indivisible whole and there is only one community living in it. The differences
which we ordinary men notice, and make much of, between one sect and another do
not concern him. Set the Kaaba in one eye and Kailas in the other and he will
look on both indifferently. There is the story of a Muslim Saint who, when once
questioned about his religion gave a curious answer.
61 ‘Are you a Shiah or
a Sunni?’ ‘Between the two.’ ‘Between the two is nothing.’ ‘Yes, yes, that
nothing I am.’ There is only, one God ruling over the world and all are the
same in his eyes, irrespective of their conventional modes of worship. Blake,
the English mystic, considers all human beings his brothers, since in each of
them is reflected the Divine Image:
And all must love the human form,
In heathen, Turk or Jew;
Where Mercy, Love, and Pity dwell
There God is dwelling too.
Differences there are, but they are apparent rather
than real, for,
By many names is he called,
But he himself is One only:
The vessels are diverse
But the clay whereof they are made
Is one. 62
Also, even in one community, there are the high and
the low, wise men and the simple folk and, as Kabir puts it, ‘Brahma suits His
language to the understanding of His hearer.’ Evelyn Underhill points out how
His ‘starry wings’ He sometimes forsakes and how He ‘meekly fits His stature to
our need. 63 The, true saint will despise no one, for he realises that ‘He walks in the clothes of the humble among
the poorest, and lowliest, and lost.’ 64 He will place his entire reliance on Him and trace
His hand in everything that happens. He will always remember:
(I am the Self, seated in the heart of all beings;
I am the beginning, the middle; and also the end of all beings). 65
He will be so devotedly attached to Him that he
will seek all pleasures in Him and sing:
Mother thou art,
And Father:
Brother thou art,
And Friend:
Knowledge thou art,
And wealth. 66
As God is both Creator and Destroyer he will make
no difference between life and death, but will say
Life is a prism of My light,
And Death the shadow of My face. 67
He will constantly pray for light and, as the
result of his meditation, will rise higher than the outer forms and understand:
He has no father, no mother, no wife, no son: He
has neither friends nor enemies: He is the soul of all creatures: He is the
light of the world: to save the righteous from distress, the Shapeless has
taken shape: Protection and Destruction are but plays of the Divine.
68
In the fullness of his wisdom he will at last come
to the conclusion that Truth is within ourselves and will proudly declare:
A living Temple of all ages, I
Within me see
A Temple of Eternity!
All Kingdoms I descry
In me. 69
To be able to realise that the Supreme is not far
away from us but is near us and within ourselves is the height of spiritual
illumination, a privilege enjoyed only by a few, the real philosophers of the
world. It is an experience associated with some of the Rishis of ancient
India who, after years of intense devotion to God and severe discipline of
mind, were able to reach that lofty summit. As the Gita says:
Sarwabhutastthamatmanam sarwabhutani chatmani
Ikshate yogayuktatma sarwatra samadarsanaha.
(The self, harmonised by Yoga, seeth the Self
abiding i all beings, all beings in the Self; everywhere he seeth the same).
70
Guru Nanak laughs at people who go about in search
of God. He asks:
Why dost thou go in search for him.
In lonely forest-glades?
Forever God abideth in thee,
And yet above, beyond thee.
71
and gives this advice:
“Search for him, friend, within thyself:
Jalaluddin Rumi, the great Persian mystic,
describes his own experience which is similar to this in his Finding of the
Beloved:
Cross and Christians, from end to end,
I surveyed; He was not on the Cross.
Then he tried one place after another:
I went to the idol-temple, to the ancient pagoda;
No trace was visible there.
I went to the mountains of Herat and Candahar;
I looked; He was not in that hill-and-dale,
At the end,
I gazed into my own heart;
There I saw Him ; He was nowhere else.
72
There is another Persian tale 73 in which the same experience is described:
“Love came to crave sweet love, if love might be;
to the Beloved’s door he came, and knocked: - She asked ‘And who art thou? We
know not thee!’ ‘It is I’ ‘Nay, thee and me this house will never hold.’ The
lover went home depressed but came again after three seasons. The old question
was repeated, ‘Pray, who is there? What is thy name?’ But by now Love had
learnt the magic of replies,
‘It is Thyself!’ he whispered, and behold,
The door was opened, and Love’s mystery told,”
Me and Thee are for us but not for the mystic who
does not recognise-duality. In his opinion, He is both ‘knower and known’, He
will say,
Master thou art, and servant too.
It was this truth that was taught by Bhagavan Sri
Krishna to Arjuna, and through him to humanity, centuries ago:
Aham Kraturaham yajnaha swadhahamahamaushadham
Mantrohamahamevajyamahamagniraham hutam.
(I the oblation; I the sacrifice; I the ancestral
offering; I the fire-giving herb; the mantram I; I also the butter; I the fire;
the burnt-offering I.) 74
It is interesting to note that this Hindu view of
man’s relation to God has influenced directly or indirectly human thought, and
kindled the imagination of poets, in other parts of the world. Omar Khayyam,
the Persian philosopher and poet, discusses the comparison of the Creator to
the potter in all its aspects and cuts the Gordian Knot by asking, “Who is the
Potter, pray, and who the Pot?” Emerson, the American writer and thinker,
believes that the slayer and the slain are not two distinct creatures but are
only two phases of the Eternal Spirit:
They reckon ill who leave me out;
When me they fly, I am the wings;
I am the doubter and the doubt,
And I the hymn the Brahmin sings.
75
According to Swinburne, ‘He is both the doer and
the deed, the sower and the seed; he is stricken and he is the blow.’ Another
English poet calls him ‘maker and breaker, the ebb and the flood, Here and
Hereafter’.76 The same mystical conception of God in relation to man and the universe
is found in a nice little piece by a poet of the Irish Renaissance who is in
many ways Indian in sentiment and thought. Here he tells us how he wanted to
know Immortal Truth and to find ‘the secret of the skies and healing for life’s
smart’. He made various attempts and travelled a good deal. He scaled high
Heaven; he stormed the gates of Hell but her he never found:
Till thro’ the tumults of my Quest I caught
A whisper: ‘Here, within thy heart,
I dwell; for I am thou: behold, thou art
The Seeker-and the Sought.’
77
An account of mysticism would be incomplete without
a reference to the mystic’s love of symbols. The mystic who has a passion for
God, curiously enough, often expresses his ideas or emotions by indirect
suggestion rather than in a plain and direct manner. A desire to attach
peculiar meaning to natural objects or facts and particular words or sounds is
common. For instance, the word Om is particularly Sacred to the Hindus
and has to them a mystic power. Symbolist poetry is often obscure and
‘hard-headed realists think symbolism a terrible evil’.
78 The mystic79 on
A poem is a mystery whose key the reader must seek.
Three-quarters of the enjoyment of a poem lies in the pleasure of guessing
little by little.
According to ‘A. E.,’ the Irish poet, symbolism is
‘clothing the vast with a familiar face’. It is, in a way, knowing the abstract
with the help of the concrete. He says:
We rise, but by the symbol charioted,
Through loved things rising up to Love’s own ways:
By these the soul unto the vast has wings
And sets the seal celestial on all mortal things. 80
In the Bhagavata-Purana, the Gajendramokshanam
(The Episode of the Elephant and how he was saved) is highly instructive. An
elephant, who was the uncrowned king of the forest, and was a little too
conscious of his strength, entered a lake to quench his thirst and a crocodile
caught hold of his legs, and they struggled and struggled for a thousand years,
till at last the former in a completely exhausted condition made this appeal to
Vishnu, the Ruler of the Universe:
There is not an atom of strength in me. Courage and
endurance have been completely shattered. The breath of life is about to
expire. The limbs are exhausted and I begin to faint. Great Master, forgive
this poor mortal. All my life I have believed in none other than Thee. Thou art
my only help. Come, Generous Lord, and save me from destruction.
81
He prayed and prayed and concentrating his
attention on God and forgetting everything else, like a Yogi lost in
meditation, called Upon Him to rescue the helpless creature from utter
annihilation. The Episode, which is full of devotional poetry of the loftiest
type, seems to symbolise the human soul struggling with Evil and making an
effort to be free and the Veyisamvatsaramulu (a thousand years) during
which the conflict was on is an indefinite period and simply means ‘since the
beginning of time’. If to the author of the Gajendramokshanam God is the
saviour of the human being and his only hope to Browning he is the Potter who
handles the clay of the human soul and gives it shape. It may be argued that
‘since life fleets, all is change’. But the poet-philosopher points out:
Earth changes, but thy soul and God stand sure:
Time’s wheel runs back or stops: Potter and clay
endure. 82
To some poets the simple arts of weaving and
spinning have a lot of significance. Alfred Noyes sees in the Creator the image
of the weaver:
In the light of the silent stars that shine on the
struggling sea,
In the weary cry of the wind and whisper of flower
and tree,
Under the breath of laughter, deep in the tide of
tears,
I hear the Loom of the Weaver that weaves the Web
of Years.
In the opinion of Dowden, to spin is to know the
secret of the universe. The poet gives us an account of his experience:
I spin, I spin, around, around,
And close my eyes;
Then gaze upon the world; how strange! how new!
The earth and heaven are one,
The horizon-line is gone.
This, the spinner thinks,
This is the sole true mode
Of reaching God,
And gaining the universal synthesis
Which makes All-One.
And
As all things spin
Without, within,
As Time spins off into Eternity,
And Space into the inane Immensity,
And the Finite into God’s Infinity,
his advice to mankind is:
Spin, spin, spin, spin.
83
No wonder that our great leader, Mahatma Gandhi,
believes in spinning and exhorts the high and the low to do a minimum amount of
spinning every day. Francis Thompson’s Hound of Heaven is another
illustration of symbolic poetry. The poet describes how he tried his very best
to run away from God but could not escape:
From those strong Feet that followed, followed
after.
He made every effort to shield himself from ‘this
tremendous Lover’, for he was afraid.
Lest, having Him, I must have naught beside.
But his attempts were of no avail and he was
overtaken at the end of a long pursuit. Man, lost in worldly pleasures, wants
to flee away from God; but he is eventually won over and his eyes are opened to
Reality, as when the Voice says:
Ah, fondest, blindest, weakest,
I am He Whom thou seekest!
Thou dravest love from thee, who dravest Me.
Whitman’s Passage to India is another
stimulating poem in which we find a description of the advantages of the soul
in search of ‘primal thought’, a voyage upon ‘the seas of God’.
To reason’s early paradise,
Back, back to wisdom’s birth, to innocent
intuitions.
The poet will undertake the journey singing the
song of God and chanting the chant of exploration. Like Vasco de Gama who
doubled the Cape of Good Hope in the XV century, he will sail but on ‘waves of
ecstasy’ to find the Elder Brother and to bring about the marriage of
continents. And his enthusiasm for the voyage is so great that he exhorts his
soul thus:
Passage to more than India!
Are thy wings plumed indeed for such far flights?
O soul, voyagest thou on voyages like those?
Disportest thou on waters such as those?
Soundest below the Sanskrit and the Vedas?
Then have they bent unleash’d.
Several poets of the East and West have looked upon
God as the Divine Spouse and, according to Coventry Patmore, ‘the relation of
the soul to Christ as his betrothed wife is a mine of undiscovered joy
and power.’ God is the Heavenly Bridegroom and the human soul is the bride.84 Poet Jayadev 85 sees in the supreme Ruler of the Universe the
Eternal Lover and in his Gita-Govinda he gives us a most poetical
rendering of the love of Radha (the Milkmaid) and Krishna (the Cowherd). In
their passionate attachment to each other and their rapturous union, we may
read the longing of the earth to meet the sky, of the Prakriti to be
joined to the Purusha, of the Finite to be absorbed into the Infinite,
or of the soul to be united with the ‘Oversoul’. And the reciprocation of that
love by Krishna, his eagerness to meet Radha, his disappointment in not finding
her, and the indescribable bliss he enjoys in her company, all go to point to
God taking sometimes the shape of the Lover and sometimes that of the Woman who
loves and is loved. Thus,
This little germ of nuptial Love,
Which springs so simply from the sod,
The root is, as my song shall prove,
Of all our love to man and God.
86
The worship of Siva as Ardhanarisa by many people
in our country is significant. ‘Ardhanari’ means’ Half-woman’ and it is one of
the forms of Maheswar who is represented as half-male and half-female. It
symbolises the Supreme Creator as a combination of the masculine and feminine
forces of the world, and their union is such that they can never be separated.
So Poet Kalidas, in the opening Sloka of one of his Kavyas,
offers his salutations to Parvati and Parameswar, the Parents of the universe,
who are for ever united (in one body) like the word and its meaning.
87 The conception of
God as the Divine Mother has made a special appeal to mystics like Sri
Ramakrishna Paramahamsa. To them, the mother is the dearest thing in the world
and the most sacred. She is all love and as such represents God who assumes
that sweet shape. True, there are some who think woman is inferior to man, but
here is a poet who voices the feelings of those that challenge that view:
I am the poet of the woman the same as the man,
And I say it is as great to be a woman as to be a
man,
And I say there is nothing greater than the mother
of men. 88
Numerous saints and Bhaktas of the South have expressed, through
the medium of song 89 their enthusiasm for God as Mother. Their songs, composed in Sanskrit
or Telugu, are exquisite not only as musical pieces but also as devotional
poetry. Whether it be Rajarajeswari (Supreme Queen) of Sivaganga, Dharmasamvardhani
(Promoter of Dharma) of Tiruvoiyar, Meenakshi (Fish-eyed Goddess) of Madura,
Kamakshi (Wanton-eyed Goddess) of Kanchi, Sugandhikuntala (The lady with
fragrant hair) of Trichinopoly, Phaladambika 90 (the Mother who gives what we want) of Varshapuri,
she is the joy of man, the Saviour of the fallen, the origin of things, the
sacred word, Om Impersonate. To Mrs. Naidu she is Kali the Mother, ‘the
Terrible and tender and divine’. She is the mystic mother of all sacrifice, and
it is to her that we take not only basil leaves and saffron rice but also all
gifts of life and death, all gladness and all grief. One of the Bhaktas is so
deeply attached to the Universal Mother that he prays:
Yadisyam tava putroham mata tvam yadi mamakee
Daya payodharastanyasudhabhirabhirabhishincha mam.
(If I be Thy son and Thou my Mother, drench me with
the milk of thy love);
and Sankara’s one desire in life is this:
Yatraiva yatraiva manomadiyam tatraiva tatraiva
tava svarupam
Yatraiva yatraiva siromadiyam tatraiva tatraiva
padadvayam te.
(Wherever, wherever be my mind, there, may there be
Thy form; wherever, wherever be my head, there, may there be Thy feet.)
Sri Aurobindo, the mystic of mystics, is also a
devout worshipper of God as Mother. He thinks The Spirit that rules the world
is Shakti, and, if we want to invoke her help, there must be a total and
sincere and unreserved surrender on our part. This Force or Mahashakti has four
aspects or four outstanding Personalities. She is firstly Maheswari
representing wisdom and benignity. Secondly, she is Mahakali who stands for
titanic energy, strong will and determination. Thirdly, she is Mahalakshmi full
of charm and beauty, conferring upon mankind all that constitutes happiness in
life. She is lastly Mahasaraswati taking interest in work, patient toil and
thoroughness in whatever one does: Thus the Mahashakti is a combination of
wisdom, strength, harmony and perfection, and. it is only our selfless devotion
to her that can bring down into this world of sin and suffering, Truth, Light
and Ananda. 91 In Dante’s love for Beatrice we find a relationship which is unique.
This beautiful angel, this ‘glorious lady of my soul’ as the poet describes her
in his Vita Nuova, was first seen by him in Florence when he was nine
years old and she of about the same age. When he saw her for a second time, ten
years later, she was passing along the street, and he was ‘thrilled through and
through with awe’ when she turned her eyes towards the spot where he was
standing. It was a curious love affair, for they never talked to each other and
she married someone else. When Beatrice appears again in the Divine Comedy, she
is the ‘Sacred Lamp,’ the ‘Splendour’ and the ‘Sacred Light Eternal’. She is
the poet’s heavenly conductress’, ‘his sweet and precious guide’ clearing his
doubts and helping him to ascend higher and higher, and the nature of the
guidance can be gathered from the poet’s own words:
Astounded, to the guardian of my steps
I turned me, like the child, who always runs
Thither for succour, where he trusteth most:
And she was like the mother, who her Son
Beholding pale and breathless, with her voice
Soothes him, and he is cheered.
92.
Whether Beatrice was a real woman, or ‘a mystically
exalted ideal of womanhood,’ or heavenly wisdom, the lines,
With
Beatrice, I thus gloriously
Was raised aloft, and made the guest of heaven,
are symbolical of the relations between man and woman and the nature of
the debt the former owes to the latter. Lastly, there is one more of our human
relationships which has fired the imagination of poets and mystics, and that is
the love of the mother for the child. The child is the solace of the parents,
the delight of one and all and the image of God, and a good deal of the poetry
of childhood for which Indian literature is famous centres round Sri Krishna.
That there can be nothing more touching than a mother’s affection for the child
can be illustrated from one episode in Krishna’s life. To be saved from the
wickedness of his uncle, the little child had, as soon as born, to be sent away
from the place of his birth to Vrepalle to be brought up by Nanda and Yasoda.
When however he returned, some years later, to his original paternal home,
knowing how his foster-parents would miss him, he asked one of his friends,
Uddhav, to convey to his father and mother his affectionate greetings and give
his old play fellows, the cowherds and the milkmaids, his love. The moment the
messenger arrived, they all gathered round him, and Nanda not only extended a
most hearty welcome but also put a hundred questions to the guest. “Sweet
Friend, does Krishna keep fit? Does he ever remember us, his father and mother?
Do the cows, the forest lands, the river banks, the playground and his old
friends, the boys and girls of this village, ever come back to his mind? Is he
likely to visit us at any time, and is there any chance of our having a look at
his lovely face before we die?” As the husband was making these enquiries and
describing, in a voice almost choked, how his beloved son had talked and how he
had played, how he had cried and how he had smiled, Yasoda was overpowered by
love and overwhelmed with grief; and,
Chanumonala balu guriyaga ganugonalanu
jalamulolukaga beggaliyen.
93
‘as’ from out of the nipples of her breasts flowed the motherly milk and
from out of the corners of her eyes flowed the parental tears, sat there like
one who was beside oneself.’ The strength of the bond between the mother and
the child, the sweetness of that affection and the poignancy of the separation cannot
be easily measured. In Tagore’s Crescent Moon there is a conversation
between the child and its mother. “Where have I come from, where did you pick
me up?” the baby asked its mother and the latter answered:
You were hidden in my heart, as its desire, my
darling.
You were enshrined with our household deity; in his
worship
I worshipped you.
In all my hopes and my loves, in my life, in the
life of my mother you have lived.
In the lap of the deathless Spirit who rules our
home you have been nursed for ages.
The child being an embodiment of heavenly
qualities, poets and sages have seen in him something more than ‘a six years’
darling of a pigmy size’. He is,
Haunted for ever by the eternal Mind,–
Mighty Prophet! Seer blest!
On whom those truths do rest
Which we are toiling all Our lives to find.
94
To ‘A. E.’, Sri Krishna, ‘the little heavenly
runaway’ 95 is the King of Kings, the Light of Lights. For the parents as well as
for most of the others, Krishna was a sweet and mischievous little boy, but the
poet adds:
The mother laughed upon the child made gay by its
ecstatic morn,
And yet the sages spake of It as of the Ancient and
Unborn.
Narayanatirtha, author of Sri
Krisknaleelatarangini, a series of songs omposed in Sanskrit, gives us a
picture of Balakrishna (boy-Krishna) dancing and singing before him in his
song,
Krisknam Kalaya saki sundaram
Bala Krisknam Kalaya salcki sundaram.
Friend, mark, mark that lovely Krishna! Note how
charming that Balakrishna looks!
Control over worldly desires, Cause of all that is,
Conquest of demon-hosts, see, see there in the form of a little boy!
Wisdom personified, the shore for this ocean of
human miseries, the essence of all the Vedas, the hope of all Yogis,
see, see there in the shape of that attractive little boy!
The wealth of the world, the destruction of all
evil, the hope, bliss and salvation of Narayanatirtha, see, see there
transformed into that angelic little boy!
Thus God as the Eternal Lover, the Eternal Spouse,
the Eternal Mother, or the Eternal Child has inspired the poets of the world
who, thanks to their deep love and intense devotion and the sweetness of this
relationship, have reached mystic heights and realised God. But which of these
is the Sweetest and most delicious of human relationships, who can tell?
Thus the mystic is a devotee of God aspiring for
communion with Him. He is a dreamer of dreams. He sees unity in diversity and
recognises the Imperishable Presence in every object in the universe. He loves
all creatures and shares the sentiments of the great bhakta 96 who had said:
Mata cha Parvati devi pita devo Maheswaraha
Bandhavaha Sivabhaktascha swadeso bhuvanatrayam.
(My mother is Parvati, the Universal Mother; my
father is Maheswar, the Supreme Lord; worshippers of the Lord are my kinsmen;
the Universe is my native land.)
And many of the great poets of the world have been
mystics calling our attention to God from time to time, and advising us to have
‘less speed and more soul’… It may be, remembered here that a mystic need not
necessarily cut himself off from human life. He may be a family man like any
one else. As Sri Ramakrishna says, the boat may be in the water but the water
must not get into the boat. A devotee of God may be in the world but
worldliness must not get the upper hand of him. But people often ask, ‘Is not
mysticism a thing of the past? Can you interpret mystical experience in terms
of science? How is it that the average man is utterly innocent of this
intuition or illumination, these visions and strange forms of experiance and
insight?’ The answer to it would be that experience is something personal and,
as someone put it, to the common man mysticism is as much a puzzle as the
rope-trick! The fact that Gandhi belongs to our century is proof positive that
the age of mystics is not gone. But what Tennyson said a hundred years ago
about the mystics is applicable today to our relations with him:
Angels have talked with him, and showed him
thrones:
Ye knew him not: he was not one of ye,
Ye scorned him with an undiscerning scorn;
Ye could not read the marvel in his eye,
The still serene abstraction.
This is as it should be, for,
How could ye know him? Ye were yet within
The narrower circle; he had well nigh reached
The last. 97
A story is given of a simple woman who, some years
back, was a worshipper at the temple of Girigopal (The Cowherd of the Hill) at
Ummidi in the Godavari District of the Andhra country. She had come from
somewhere and the Darshan (seeing and offering her worship to the Deity)
was the only thing in which she was interested. She was a peculiar person who
was ‘in the habit of crying out in the night, laughing and chattering in her
sleep’. She was left unnoticed till on a particularly sacred day, when the
temple worship was going on in all its elaborateness and solemnity, the woman
was so affected by the atmosphere that she began to sing:
Sarasamuladetanduku Samayamidi Kadura na sami. 97
(Is this the time for romance and love-making, My
Lord, is this the time for pleasantries and love-overtures, my master?)
A song, the favourite of nautch-girls, to be sung
on the temple premises on the holiest of days! Needless to say how shocking it
was to the priest and authorities of the temple, and how big the stick was with
which the poor woman was beaten. The next day something strange happened. ‘It
is the latest miracle, and, as miracles go, the most authentic.’ It was Janmashtami
and at midnight, the hour of the birth of the Lord, there came from the
outer side of the temple wall, sung in a most beautiful voice, the words of the
song,
Nanupalimpa nadachivacchitivo na prananattha ...
(Hast thou come walking all the way to bless
me, Lord of my heart, hast thou come walking all the way to save me?)
The music was so enchanting that the inmates of the
temple could not help coming out to see what it was. And what did they see? The
woman in a sitting posture with flowers in her hands, and a boy of fourteen,
blue in colour, of wonderful grace and with a flute to his lips, standing
beside her. The first man that noted it cried ‘Gopal!’ and before the others
could get a reply to their question’ ‘Where?’, the boy disappeared and the
woman was dead.98 Coming to the problem of explaining such experience with the help of
logic, reason or science, one might say with Venkataramani, “You can never know
the truths of life with the help of the mind, as the ancients say, but only
with the eye of faith. Peace comes not from probings, nor from protests, not
from preaching, but from surrender and detached work that is dedicated to the
will of God.” 99 That the reasoning faculty is not always a sure guide in enabling us to
grasp the ultimate things of life or in interpreting the mystic’s experience
with regard to God is supported by Sir A. S. Eddington, one of the greatest
scientists of the present century, He says in the course of a discussion on
mystical religion:
The materialist who is convinced that all phenomena
arise from electrons and quanta and the like controlled by mathematical
formulae, must presumably hold the belief that his wife is a rather elaborate
differential equation; but he is probably tactful enough not to obtrude this
opinion in domestic life. If this kind of scientific dissection is felt to be
inadequate and irrelevant in ordinary personal relationships, it is surely out
of place in the most personal relationship of all, that of the human soul to
the divine spirit. 100
While the supremacy of science is still
acknowledged, the people of the West–at least some of them–seem to realise that
the rational study of things has not given man the happiness he had looked for,
and ‘it is as though the world were undergoing a spiritual revitalisation,
spurring it on to experience–even through destruction and death–a further
measure of Reality and Truth.’ 101
That this change in outlook is to be seen in poetry
and the other creative activities of the mind as well, can be gathered from the
statement that follows. ‘Another way is discovered which opens up virgin
territories, in which abundant wealth lies hidden...The rights of intuition are
proclaimed; mysticism revives in all its forms...and all these readily
contribute to the making of a new Romanticism.’
102 Now coming to the
third question, why this mystical experience is not shared by everybody, the
answer is fairly simple. All people are not on the same level with regard to
anything in life. Leaving political rights and democracy apart, that all people
should or could think alike or feel alike is asking for too much. In the field
of imagination and in the matter of capacity for emotion, there is difference
between the ordinary man and the exceptional being. There are of course those
who go to the other extreme and say, ‘It (mysticism) has a corner in every
heart and an appeal to every mind, for there is none among us who at one time
in his life or the other, has not, in the course of his mental or spiritual
adventures, experienced its charms.’ 103 Coming as this does from one who was a statesman
and who spent most of his life in handling facts and figures in the Finance
Department, it has a special interest to us. But even here it is clearly
pointed out that it is only those who pass through ‘mental or spiritual
adventures’ that are likely to taste the sweets of mystical experience. The
others who lead prosaic and dull lives remain untouched. The average man is not
expected to have those emotional thrills that are enjoyed by the mystic, but he
undoubtedly feels all the better for having come into contact with one of such
lofty souls. Also, however rich or poor, cultured or ignorant, happy or unhappy
we may be, there will come to some of us some rare moments in which we exclaim,
like the conventionist in Victor Hugo’s novel,
O thou! O ideal! thou alone dost exist!” .
1 A lecture delivered before the Poetry Society
(Hyderabad Centre) on Novomber 18, 1943, at the residence of Prince Basalatjah
Bahadur.
2 Middleton Murry (The Aryan Path, February
1930).
3 A. Hamilton Thompson: The Mystical Element in
English Poetry (Essays and Studies VIII).
4 Lt. Col. Elliot.
5 Official head of religion and expounder of Muslim
Law in Turkey.
6 Gibbs: Ottoman Poetry, Vol. III.
7 Modern Mystics.
8 The Coming of Karuna (P. 87 and P. 88).
9 The Oxford English Dictionary.
10 From the Upanishads.
11 Shri Purohit Swami: The Song of Silence (8).
12 Dinesh Chandra Sen: Chaitanya and His Comapnions
(P. 14).
13 The Rt. Hon’ble V. S. Sastri’s Address at Annamalai
University, (March 1, 1936).
14 Leonard Woolf: Quack, Quack.
15 Ivor Brown in The Manchester Guardian,
(March, 1937).
16 Mahendranath Sarkar.
17 The Idealist View of Life, P. 142.
18 The Idealist View of Life, P. 89
19 Address delivered at the Benares University,
(1916).
20 The Sri Krishna Rajendra Silver Jubilee Lecture
delivered at the Mysore University on
October 10, 1935.
21 Essay on Milton.
22 Gitanjali (Macmillan & Co.,) P. vii-viii
23 A boy-devotee mentioned in the Bhagavata-Purana.
24 Tr. of the Telugu verse, Paniyambulu dravuchun in
Andhra Bhagavatam, Section VII.
25 From the Upanishads.
26 Vallabhacharya (1479-1531).
27 M. K. Gandhi: Songs from Prison. P. 64.
28 Introversion: Oxford Book of English Mystical
Verse, Page 526.
29 G. Herbert: Clasping of Hands. Page 28.
30 Hanuman is supposed to have had the shape of a
monkey.
31 Son of the god of the wind.
32 J. C. Mangan: S. Patrick’s Hymn before Tara. (Oxford
Book of English Mystical Verse. Page 136.)
33 1764–1847.
34 Tr. of the song Ninuvina na madiyendu.
35 Tr. of the Telugu verse Kamalakshu narchichu.
36 Gandhi’s message to the American nation.
37 Tennyson’s Sir Galahad.
38 Ode on Intimations of Immortality from
Recollections of Early Childhood.
39 Hymn to Intellectual Beauty.
40 The verse Sreevallabhudu dannu jerina . . . in
Andhra Bhagavatamu, Section VII.
41 The verse Vaikuntthachintavarjitacheshtudai . .
. in Andhra Bhagavatamu, Section VII.
42 Young husband: Modern Mystics.
43 Congregational singing and worship.
44 D. C. Sen: Chaitanya and His Companionship, P.
159.
45 Radhapunatu . . . in Sree Krishna Karnamrutam.
46 M. Macnicol: Poems by Indian Women, P. 59.
47 Easter-Day.
48 Annie Beasent: The Bhagavad Gita X-30.
49 Annie Beasent: The Bhagavad Gita X-31.
50 Blackie.
51 Blackie: Trimurti.
52 Who.
53 Tr. of a Telugu verse Anuvunayandu . . . by
C. Lakshminarasimham of Rajamundry.
54 Aurora Leigh.
55 The Task.
56 Tintern Abbey.
57 The Invitation.
58 Sartor Resartus, Chapter VII.
59 Address delivered at the Benares University in
1916.
60 Annie Besant: The Bhagavad-Gita Gita (VI-30).
61 Gulraj: Sind and its Sufis.
62 Anandaghan (Songs from Prison, P.121).
63 Immanence.
64 Gitanjali.
65 Annie Besant: The Bhagavad-Gita X (20).
66 Gandhi: Songs from Prison (P. 42).
67 Sarojini Naidu: The Soul’s Prayer.
68 Andhra Bhagavatamu (X-1447).
69 Thomas Traherne. A Hymn upon St. Bartholomew’s
Day.
70 Annie Besant: The Bhagavad-Gita (VI-29).
71 Songs from Prison, (P. 95),
72 The Persian Mystics I.
73 Samuel Waddington: A Persian Apologue.
74 Annie Besant: The Bhagavad-Gita IX-16.
75 Brahma.
76 W. E. Henley: I am the Reaper.
77 James H. Cousins: The Quest.
78 From The Poetry Review (Sept.-Oct., 1940).
79 Mellarme (From The Hindu, June 20,1937).
80 Symbolism.
81 The Telugu verse Lavokkintayuledu.
82 Rabbi Ben Ezra.
83 The Secret of the Universe.
84 Henry Vaughan’s The World, Tennyson’s St.
Agnes’ Eve, and Patmore’s The Cry at Midnight.
85 A Sanskrit poet of the 11th century A.D.
86 Coventry Patmoro: Love Justified.
87 Vagardhavivasamprktau.
88 Walt Whitman: Song of Myself.
89 Cp. songs like Sivaganganagaranivasini,
Dharmasamvardhani Mayamma, Needucharanapankaja, Kanjadalayatakshi, Neemadichallaga,
Nityakalyani.
90 Cp. Sreephaladambika, a tribute paid by
Kotcherlakota Ramaraju Pantulu to this goddess popularly known as Pallalamma of
Vanapalle in the Godavari District.
91 The Mother.
92 Dante: The Vision (Paradise, Canto XXII)
93 Andhra Bhagavatamu, Section X.
94 Wordsworth: Intimations of Immortality.
95 Krishna.
95 Shankaracharya.
96 The Mystic.
97 A Telugu song,
98 B. R. Kabad ‘Miracle at Ummidi’, The Hindu,
28th August, 1938.
99 Illumination.
100 Gifford Lectures, 1927.
101 The Oxford Book of English Mystical Verse, Page vi.
102 Legouis and Cazamian. A History of English
Literature. (Page 1,220).
103 The late Rt. Hon’ble Sir Akbar Hydari’s speech at
the All-India Philosophical Congress in 1939.