Indian Antiquary Vol 51

Author(s): Richard Carnac Temple, Devadatta Ramkrishna Bhandarkar
Publisher: Swati Publications

Page 67

MARCH, 1922)
BOOK-NOTICE
59
I am God : thou art Man: but the light
That mothers the planets, the sea Of star-dust that roofs every height Of the Universe, the gulfs of the night,
They are surging in thee as in me. But out of the Chaos to lead us,
The Giants that borrow our eyes And lend us their shoulders, must heed us : They yield us their purposo, they deed us
Forever the worlds and the skies. Now the eclectie Muhammadan Sofis borrowed from any sourco open to them, including early Hinduism, and the sentiment in the fourth stanza quoted above is eminently Hindu. In the 14th century there arose in Kashmir a great mystic poetese, Lal Ded, Granny Lal, as she is now called with affectionate familiarity by the people, Lalls Yogishwari or Lalleshwari as she is known to the educated. She was a Shaiva Yogini, by
profession as it were, but she was imbued with the eclectic spirit of her time and was to a certain extent acquainted with Sufi doctrines. Again and again she reverts to the old Indian philosophy of the absorption of the individual in the universal Soul, and being a follower of the Shaiva Yoga, this meant that she taught the absorption of Man in Shiva, as the representative of the Supreme the One Cod. At times she becomes more mystical stiil and merges both Man and Shiva in the One God, the Nothing.
I venture to render one of her poems in English verse, in her own metre, as follows:
Lord, myself not always have I known;
Nay, nor any other self than mine. Care for this vile body have I shown,
Mortified by me to make me Thine. Lord, that I am Thou Ldid not know,
Nor that Thou art I, that.One be Twain, Who ain I ?' is Doubt of doubts, and so
Who art Thou 1' shall lead to birth again. In another illuminating poem she sings : Who shall be the rider, if for steed
Shiv the Self-Intelligence shall be ? . What though Keshav shall attend his need,
Helped by Brahma of the Mystic Three. If the Self-Intelligence be I,
I the Self-Intelligence must be. Needing Twain in One to know him by
What rider but the Supreme is he?
What the cold doth part, the sun combines : What the sun doth part, doth Shiv make
whole ; What Shiv doth part, the Supreme confinns
In one Shiv and Universe and Soul. Perhaps the whole attitude is best seen in the following poem--the Oneness of all observable things, earthly and divine--the absorption of the individual soul of all things, terrestrial and celestial, in the Universal Boul :
Thou art the Heavens, and Thou art the Earth:
Thou alone art day and night and sir : Thou Thyself art all things that have birth,
Even the offerings of flowers fair. Thou art, too, the sacrificial meal:
Thou the water that is poured on Thee : Thou art uinction of the things that heal:
Dost, then, need an offering froni ine ? Here then we have the Shaiva conception of the essential Oneness of the soul of all things conceiv. able, in tho poems addressed by a native of the Himalayan mountains to Shiva, the God of the Himalayas, as the highest representation of the Supreme possible to the mind of Man. In the " Song of Siva" Mr. Rihani gives a very different view of him, which is obviously a clever rendering of the Saff view: Hindu in substance, eclectic Muhammadan and Persian in form.
'Tis Night; all the Sirens are silent,
All the Vultures asleep; And the horns of the Tempest are stirring
Under the Deep; 'Tis Night; all the snow-burdened Mountains
Dream of the Sea, And down in the Wadi the River
Is calling to me. 'Tis Night; all the Caves of the Spirit
Shake with desire, And the Orient Heaven's essaying
Its lances of fire; They hear, in the stillness that covers
The land and the sea, The River, in the heart of the Wadi,
Calling to me. "Tis night, but a night of great joyance,
A night of unrent;The night of the birth of the spirit
Of the East and the West : And the Caves and the Mountains are dancing
On the foam of the Soe, For the River inundant is calling,
Calling to me.
And again : Ice and snow and water. these be three
That to thy vision separate seem : But they are one to the eyes that see
By light of the Consciousness Supreme.