Before the arrival of Europeans with their horses,
mules and oxen, there were no large animals native to
Joy Harjo wonders in one of her old web logs if “there’s a word for meditation in the Mvskoke language. Maybe some things don’t need words. Maybe words can narrow rather than open up meaning and understanding. I don’t know that. What I call meditation is paying attention, listening and being grateful. This means remembering and utterly knowing there is no separation between the human spirit and that of the redbird-person spirit, or that of the winds who live in the Ko’olau’s, or your ancestors and yourself, the ocean, or any other manifestation of life as it happens as you are breathing and taking in the gifts of life. Most of all, perhaps, it’s stopping thinking. Thinking has become too prevalent in this culture. It has been given power over good old common sense, even… Thinking by itself, however is dangerous. Massacres and countries voting in leaders who promote war for greediness can happen only when thinking is predominant, when there is no link to the heart, to the intuition. We’ve been taught that thinking and acquiring intellectual knowledge is what it means to be civilized…”
But whether there’s a word or not for meditation in our digital language, let
us read Mary Olivers The
Buddha’s Last Instruction in its modern nakedness:
“Make of yourself a light”
said the Buddha,
before he died.
I think of this every morning
as the east begins
to tear off its many clouds
of darkness, to send up the first
signal—a white fan
streaked with pink and violet,
even green.
An old man, he lay down
between two sala trees,
and he might have said anything,
knowing it was his final hour.
The light burns upward,
it thickens and settles over the fields.
Around him, the villagers gathered
and stretched forward to listen.
Even before the sun itself
hangs, disattached, in the blue air,
I am touched everywhere
by its ocean of yellow waves.
No doubt he thought of everything
that had happened in his difficult life.
And then I feel the sun itself
as it blazes over the hills,
like a million flowers on fire—
clearly I’m not needed,
yet I feel myself turning
into something of inexplicable value.
Slowly, beneath the branches,
he raised his head.
He looked into the faces of that frightened crowd.
The mornings come but we make ourselves not the light, and the Buddha returns
not. In fact, why should he? Should he return, he will definitely have to make
a trip first to
Sarojini Naidu lived in another world where she would address to the Buddha seated on a lotus. The
days were yet warmer and there was the colourful intimacy between men and
things, with the “intuitivities of psychic feeling, sensation and life-vision
or a subtle and psychic and spiritualised imagination and intelligence”.
Lord Buddha, on thy Lotus-throne,
With praying eyes and hands elate,
What mystic rapture dost thou own,
Immutable and ultimate?
What peace, unravished of our ken,
Annihilate from the world of men?
The wind of change for ever blows
Across the tumult of our way,
To-morrow’s unborn griefs depose
The sorrows of our yesterday.
Dream yields to dream, strife follows strife,
And Death unweaves the webs of Life.
For us the travail and the heat,
The broken secrets of our pride,
The strenuous lessons of defeat,
The flower deferred, the fruit denied;
But not the peace, supremely won,
Lord Buddha, of thy Lotus-throne.
With futile hands we seek to gain
Our inaccessible desire,
Diviner summits to attain,
With faith that sinks and feet that tire;
But nought shall conquer or control
The heavenward hunger of our soul.
The end, elusive and afar,
Still lures us with its beckoning flight,
And all our mortal moments are
A session of the Infinite.
How shall we reach the great, unknown
Nirvana of thy Lotus-throne?
There is great inspiration behind the second and the third stanzas; they seem
to come from a high overhead plane, yet lyrically psychic. The rest is,
professionally perfect in which the Buddha’s rapture doesn’t become
convincingly mystic. About remarkable Sarojini Naidu, Sri Aurobindo writes in a
letter: “Her work has a real beauty, but it has for the most part only one
highly lyrical note and a vein of riches that has been soon exhausted.” In the
above two stanzas there is the valid psychic-spiritual atmosphere and it is
these which will endure the passage of time.
But The Golden Age by
the Irish poet George William Russell (AE) is more sustained, more reassuring:
When the morning breaks above us
And the wild sweet stars have fled,
By the faery hands that love us
Wakened you and I will tread
Where the lilacs on the lawn
Shine with all their silver dews,
In the stillness of a dawn
Wrapped in tender primrose hues.
We will hear the strange old song
That the earth croons in her breast,
Echoed by the feathered throng
Joyous from each leafy nest.
Earth, whose dreams are we and they,
With her heart’s deep gladness fills
All our human lips can say,
Or the dawn-fired singer trills.
She is rapt in dreams divine:
As her clouds of beauty pass,
On our glowing hearts they shine,
Mirrored there as in a glass.
So when all the vapours grey
From our flowery paths shall flit,
And the dawn begin the day,
We will sing that song to it.
Ere its yellow fervour flies.—
Oh, we are so glad of youth,
Whose first sweetness never dies
Nourished by eternal truth.
The singer of the “eternal truth” is undoubtedly a insightful mystic. With him one
really enters “into the mystery of things” that comes out characteristically
with a “delicate and fine beauty of the word of vision and of an intuitive
entrance”.
Ethna Carbery’s The
Four Places of Sorrow has a thicker kind of mysticism, charged well
enough with the occult but not deepening into the sweet and the splendid:
There is sorrow for me in the North, where the black wind blows,
(Hush, O Wind of the dirges, O Voice of the restless dead!)
The ache of its cruel keening thro’ my heart like an arrow goes,
I see in the tossing waters the sheen of a dear bright head.
There is sorrow for me in the South, where the white wind sings,
(Hush, O wind of all lovers, crooning a laugh and a cry!)
On the pain of a dream love-haunted breaks the music of wings,
Seagulls, sweeping and swaying, saw ye my dead drift by?
There is sorrow for me in the East, where the red wind bums,
(Hush, O Wind of remorse, O Wind of the scourging flame!)
Under its slow cold dawning the soul of the drowned returns
And wan, in the startled daybreak, a ghost from the sea he came.
There is sorrow for me in the West, where the brown wind raves,
(Hush, O Wind from the bogs, O memory-freighted Wind!)
He is spindrift hither and thither, sport of unweary waves:
Would that my heart were close on his heart, my eyes on his eyes were blind!
The last example we might take is that of Sigitas Geda’s God's Family:
Once in the universe ripened
God’s small family: a wife
and a small boy, who looked
at the great blue evening
with dark eyes,
and a husband—a brave musician,
a pleasant singer from the circus,
who loved to drink wine
the color of smoky grasses.
Once in the universe ripened
God’s small family:
on wayworn legs the boy
carries an ant on his
palm toward the elderberry bush
swaying in the night...
The dark-eyed woman, alas, didn't know
why it was all necessary
and knitted far into the night.
Once in the universe ripened
God’s small family,
and there is no one to tell now
what awaits them, what will
still be... Toward the dusty
elderberry falls the reddening
blossom of the stars,
and paled lips articulate
a single word: death...
Translated by Jonas Zdanys
A single word: death—is that what the Buddha meant when he said make yourself a light? I think these compositions provide us a good occasion to check whether we can meditate on the issues of profound concern in the context of Aswapati’s downward look exploring in the manner of the sea the depths lying below it. (Savitri, p. 322) If these poetic creations can be taken as an index of a promise of the best possible human potential, then the kind of utterance we have in Savitri seems to belong to something totally out of its reach. And yet we ought to get there, at the authentic mantra. Sri Aurobindo has willed it and the divine Muse must arrive to accomplish it.