issue 22: winter 2020
For Ever, From Ever
Again and again I go to words from our ancient past called śruti (that which is heard, or revelations)1 for echoes and clues. Apparently timeless, allegedly authorless, elusive and yet poignantly relevant, they pull my attention like no other literature.
A typical word-pair in Sanskrit describes that which is beyond time: anādi–anantaḥ (without beginning – without end). Between for-ever and from-ever, unchained to past and future, the timeless becomes also ever- present.
Inconceivable as the idea is, similes help.
Chapter fifteen of the Bhagavad Gita opens with a vivid description of a banyan tree that has roots above and branches below (ūrdhva mūlam adhaḥ śākham).2 Many including myself have translated this as an “upside-down tree.” It is described in the same verse as inexhaustible (avyayam), infinite.
ūrdhvamūlam adhaḥśākham aśvatthaṃ prāhuravyayam | chandāṃsi yasya parṇāni yastaṃ veda sa vedavit || (15.01)
Here is a literal translation: Roots up/above, branches down/below— a banyan tree called Infinite. The leaves of which (are) vedic stanzas. He who knows this is a Knower.
There must be a reason why the tree of this stanza is an aśvattha (Banyan). I do not think it’s because of the poetic meter, for there are many names of trees with three syllables. I like to think that it is because the Banyan has aerial roots. If upside down, it would look like a giant puppet show, strings going up to the roof of a stage, and all the actors choreographed from “above.”
The more I dwell upon it (- rather, under it), I find that the point of this stanza is not the upside-down tree. It is about what we can reach.
The roots or sources of the tree of life are too high for us to reach, they are beyond us. We can only reach the leaves of this tree. These particular leaves are a species of words called chandas – vedic mantras.
A system of measures and tones was devised to reproduce them in their exact sound-form. Then they were carefully placed in the bark of memory and carried by the river of time from one generation to another.
Chandas is also another name for poetic meter, a meaning which is easy to defend because mantras are covered in meters, and meters preserved these vedic mantras. According to 4th century BCE Yaskacharya’s etymological treatise called Nirukta, “chandāṃsi chādanāt” which means that vedic mantras are called chandas because they “cover.” To cover means to keep something covert, to keep a secret. To cover means to protect.
Whereas we perish.
~~~
Over two thousand years ago, a boy called Nachiketa asked Death:
yā iyaṃ prete vicikitsā manuṣye
asti iti eke na ayam asti iti ca eke.
There’s a doubt –
In a disembodied person
Some say it is, and some say it is not (Kaṭhopaniṣad)
Do we exist after death? We still ask. Spinning and going around the sun as we come and go, breath to air and body to ash, aching for echoes, looking for clues, or answers.
Answers in revelations may not be acceptable nor even fathomable. Perhaps that is because the worlds to which those words are linked are not evident to us.
Like icebergs. From clouds that arrived from far away, dissolved upon icy peaks. Freezing and thawing to seasons. A glacier shelf that broke from a tremor in the earth or from its own weight. Then growling along a torrent, head above water, like a sail, like a fin– most of its body tapering under water.
Consider these two stanzas from Īśāvāsyopaniṣad. Translations try to make it easier on the reader by offering conclusive interpretations. The candid speculation in my translation below with the italicized commentary lets the reader live with the mysteries of the original.
anyad evāhur vidyayā anyad āhur avidyayā
iti śuśruma dhīrāṇām ye nas tad vicacakśire
We heard from the wise
who spoke to us:
Knowledge is one thing
Lack of knowledge another
vidyāṃ ca avidyāṃ ca yas tad veda ubhayaṃ saha
avidyayā mṛtyum tīrtvā vidyayāṃ amṛtam aśnute
But there’s also
He who has both
How can you have both? Does not one cancel the other?
Due to lack of knowledge crosses mṛtyu death
Due to knowledge reaches amṛtam deathlessness
Just what is aṃṛtam? Deathlessness? Immortality? Fame? Ambrosia?
Does crossing mean to go through, or to go past?
To die, or to overcome death?
Bewildering? Yours faithfully.
If only the author had left a notebook about what it all means. But, revelations are said to be “apauruśeyaḥ,” i.e., “not of a person.” Vedic hermeneutics also posits that this excludes the possibility of any author, including “Ishvara” (god). The words (- or whatever they may be) are perceived, seen, heard or realized by a person who is not-the-author, and who has the role of a collaborator, mediator, adapter and scribe.
Such an idea is also a trope in literature. Posterity considers mortal authors like Kalidasa so worthy, so infallible, it credits his talent to Goddess Kali. Paeans like the Soundarya Lahiri attributed to 8th CE Sankaracharya are memorized as mantras or other-worldly sound formulas with magical effects.
~~~
Sitting under the world’s oldest tree, I look at the leaves. I feel the world is vested in them. One leaf at a time until it fills my eyes and then I close my eyelids, letting the memory of the leaf be tattooed upon my mind.
A leaf is also an eye. When things are countless, we call them “one thousand.” Thus, a thousand witnesses pinned me to my seat under the world’s oldest tree. If a bird flew across, all leaves would flip and I could escape. I did not want to. I live there.
[1] Vedas and tantras are called śruti, revealed word— they include the earliest poetry of the Indian region. These sources are distinguished from smṛti, remembered word— which includes epic-histories like Ramayana and Mahabharata.
[2] This stanza is also in the Kaṭhopaniṣad, 6.1, perhaps an earlier source for it.
Mani Rao is a poet, translator and independent scholar.Mani has ten poetry collections including Sing to Me (Recent Work Press Australia, 2019), New & Selected Poems (Poetrywala India 2014), Echolocation (Math Paper Press Singapore, 2014; Chameleon Press Hong Kong, 2003) and Ghostmasters (Chameleon Press Hong Kong, 2010). Her books in translation from Sanskrit are Bhagavad Gita (Fingerprint India 2015; Autumn Hill Books USA 2010), and Kalidasa for the 21st Century Reader (Aleph Books India, 2014). Her latest book Living Mantra— Mantra, Deity and Visionary Experience Today (Palgrave Macmillan 2019) is an anthropology of mantra-experience among tantric practitioners in south India.
Journals and anthologies with Mani’s poems and essays include Almost Island, Poetry Magazine, Wasafiri, Meanjin, Washington Square, Fulcrum, West Coast Line, Interim, Colorado Review, The Penguin Book of the Prose Poem, Zoland Poetry, W.W.Norton’s Language for a New Century, Penguin’s Sixty Indian Poets, and the Bloodaxe Book of Contemporary Indian Poet. She has participated in literary gatherings including Almost Island Dialogues, The Age Melbourne Writers’ Festival, Chicago Humanities Festival, New York PEN World Voices, and The Man Hong Kong International Literary FestivalTranslations of her poems have been published in Latin, Italian, Korean, Chinese, Arabic, French and German. She has held writing residencies at the Iowa International Writing Program (2005 and 2009), the University of Iowa International Programs (2006), Omi Ledig House USA (2018) and International Poetry Studies Institute Canberra (2019). Mani was born in India in 1965, and worked for nearly two decades as a creative professional in the advertising and television industries in Chennai, Mumbai and Hong Kong. Turning to writing and study full-time in 2004, she did an MFA in Creative Writing from UNLV (2010), and a PhD in Religious Studies from Duke University (2016).