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Shadows Of The Heart
And seeking haplessly trod, yoked by karma, feet in sod,
bounded day after day in the furnace of himself without title or portfolio, torn jeans and braided hair completely adrift, all appeared to him as some adventure, mighty youth that had its own example for its central clue
made peace and war in endless profusion,
bespoke of complex visions for the future, fickle and generous, compulsive and wanting, angry and adroit, demanding that the world obey
and give his monstrous, all-consuming self
an endless guarantee of protective weather, but barely reckoned that the precious moment was passing forever.
SHANTY PANCHAL, IN THE COLLECTION OF ROHIN S. SHAH
Remove your watch, a guardian white-clad said to me, it was the leather, you see, which had no place in such a temple, where every
social suasion had turned to gleaming stone, and, in turn, a sanctuary whereby not one ant was left out
in the cold, neither cricket, beggar, elephant or bum, prime ministers and first graders, whether homeless or a moghul, no colour, no slant, no preferred clientele, no rant, no entrance ticket,
the abolishment of race, a parliament of souls
in perfect crystalline silence one code: the word, ahimsa, and a phrase, new to western ears, parasparopagraho jívanam, the interdependency of all.
THE MONK AT THE SOUTH BANK, LONDON 1999. WATERCOLOUR ON PAPER
Wherein my eyes gathered across time, through clarity and incense
by ageless vowels, suffuse with loving charity my first experience of a mirror whose image stunned the yearling wayfarer, I cried out, wanting to flee deeper into its mystery
and later, one temple adjoining another, saw men walking without clothes, only a gourd of boiled water,
and broom of peacock feathers, feathers that had fallen to the ground, someone explained,
to brush away the bugs no other possessions, these Digambara ascetics.
From that moment in utter freedom,
wandered its inner courtyards. smelled the air and gazed upon a new day dawning in that one Jain temple square, somewhere
in India, a revolution that collided with the unravelling boy whose ecology of pain -suddenly, without warning
was transformed by all those truths self-evident into a heroism of daily life, a phrase that Carl Jung once intriguingly adopted for purposes which now begin,
in retrospect, to make eternal sense -every religion
worth one gram of salt, has known the total story of tears, tried hard to reveal the possibilities of the day
without exception, no exclusion, no compromise
to make each act of kindness the final word and bring humanity around again towards that original deed by which the gods, whoever, whatever they may be,
granted life on earth its sovereign contract
March - May 2002 . Jain Spirit 35
Jain Education International 201003
