[[Mohan K.V 2013-02-24, 04:30:39 Source]]
सदास्वाद
भव्यानां भवशान्तिचिन्तनफला भूत्यै भवत्येव धीः
(bhavyānāṃ bhava-śānti-cintana-phalā bhūtyai bhavaty-eva dhīḥ)
Meaning
“For the good, wisdom arises from thinking about how to ease life’s problems, and leads to prosperity”. All the lead words are derived from the root bhū, ’to exist’, and it is surprising how vast a range of meanings they have acquired: ‘bhavya’ is a good/great person or thing, ‘bhava’ is life or existence (usually focusing on its problems), ‘bhūti’ is prosperity. Aside from alliteration, this line is remarkable in how it describes dhī, wisdom/intelligence: as being born of trying to improve the world. Where does this incredibly progressive line of thinking come from?
Context
Today’s phrase is taken from the Caturvarga-saṃgrahaof Kṣemendra.Kṣemendra was a poet of 11th century Kashmir, and was a great scholar and polymath. He was a prolific writer, and has written kāvyas, treatises on literary criticism, satires, retellings of the 3 major epics, didactic poems and much more.He was part of a major resurgence in Sanskrit that took place between 1100 to 900 years ago in Kashmir.He was a student of Abhinavagupta, the main exponent of the very influential theory of rasa, which predominates most forms of Indian art to this day.
Kṣemendra is in some sense the ‘missing half’ of the Sanskrit literary corpus. While virtually every Sanskrit poet concerned himself with the affairs of kings,Kṣemendra was one among a handful who wrote about the state of ordinary people and the characters of his society. While others gave much attention to depth and profound emotions, he wrote much that was light, humorous and sometimes even vulgar. As any fan of Samuel Jackson or Lee Ermey can testify, this side of art can be as deeply satisfying as any other! While many poets spent their time exploring the nuances of Sanskrit’s grammar,Kṣemendra learnt many foreign languages and brought in tens of new idiomatic phrases that harmonize perfectly with the Sanskrit sound-space. As marketing executives in charge of naming products know, this is no mean task! Finally, while many were comfortable with the deeply intertwined nature of plain human goodness, ritualistic practice and traditional learning,Kṣemendra made a very successful attempt at separating these strands. This gave his work an incredibly universality and catholicity that speaks effortlessly across the yawning gap of a millennium.
Today’s phrase is from a work of his, Caturvarga-saṃgraha, that possesses a level of abstraction that resonates very easily with our modern ways of thinking. This work is an exploration of the idea of the 4 puruṣārthas, or ‘motivations’ – dharma, artha, kāma and mokṣa. Indian thinking is full of these knots around which are woven very many narratives to make sense of life and society. In this particular case, the motivations for our actions are divided into those stemming from moral or ethical concerns, those from gain or profit, those from desire and a final class that transcends the 3 others. Every one of our actions necessarily falls into one of these 4 bins. Artha and kāma are easy enough to understand because they pervade our lives today, but the impersonal dharma motivation is more contentious. Kṣemendra offers an incredibly perceptive and cleverly inversive summary in verse 1.19:
लक्ष्मीर्दानफला श्रुतं शमफलं शीलं परार्चाफलम्
चेष्टा धर्मफला परार्थिहरण-क्रीडाफलं जीवितं ।
वाणी सत्यफला जगत्सुखफला स्फीता प्रभावोन्नतिः
भव्यानाम् भवशान्तिचिन्तनफला भूत्यै भवत्येव धीः ॥
lakṣmīrdānaphalā śrutaṃ śamaphalaṃ śīlaṃ parārcāphalam
ceṣṭā dharmaphalā parārthiharaṇa-krīḍāphalaṃ jīvitaṃ |
vāṇī satyaphalā jagatsukhaphalā sphītā prabhāvonnatiḥ
bhavyānām bhavaśānticintanaphalā bhūtyai bhavatyeva dhīḥ ||
(śārdūlavikrīḍita, 19 syllables per line)
“Wealth comes from giving, learning from tranquility, character from adhering to a higher calling;
behavior from principles, and all manner of living is a game of exchanging others’ wealth.
One’s voice comes from adhering to Truth, and a flourishing prosperity from keeping the whole world happy.
For the good, wisdom arises from thinking about how to ease life’s problems, and leads to prosperity”
Let’s consider just the first line more carefully. “Wealth comes from giving” – in spite of there being tens of poets who can’t wait to decry takers and freeloaders, Kṣemendra with a simple inversion shows us one of the most paradoxical truths of life. In our times, the Argentinian poet Antonio Porchia beautifully echoed a similar sentiment in his book of aphorisms, Voces: “If those who owed us nothing gave us nothing, how poor we’d be!”
There is another, subtler hint in this inversion. It tells us that the soul of taking is in giving. Producing is the only way we can stay sane in a world dependent on consumption. Lakṣmī by herself is a source of great anxiety, always keeping us worried about missing out on something, and filling us with a restless, unquenchable thirst for more. It puts us in a passive state of reception. Dāna in contrast is an act of defining oneself consciously, an act of firmness that assuredly ends up enriching oneself.
Learning, in spite of the necessity of exposure to the human anthill to provide for the raw material, still needs a quiet space within oneself to become whole. Or, to put it in a fortune cookie’s brevity,“Learn to pause–or nothing worthwhile can catch up to you!” :-)
The bit about character is rather counter-intuitive – why can it not be that character and conduct arise naturally, without the need for any mental abstractions of higher principles? The answer seems to be that we’re simply too complex to act simply. David Foster Wallace’s words are wonderfully germane:
In the day-to-day trenches of adult life, there is actually no such > thing as atheism. There is no such thing as not worshipping. > Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship. And > the compelling reason for maybe choosing some sort of god or > spiritual-type thing to worship–be it JC or Allah, be it YHWH or > the Wiccan Mother Goddess, or the Four Noble Truths, or some > inviolable set of ethical principles–is that pretty much anything > else you worship will eat you alive. If you worship money and > things, if they are where you tap real meaning in life, then you > will never have enough, never feel you have enough. It’s the truth. > Worship your body and beauty and sexual allure and you will always > feel ugly. And when time and age start showing, you will die a > million deaths before they finally grieve you. Worship power, you > will end up feeling weak and afraid, and you will need ever more > power over others to numb you to your own fear. Worship your > intellect, being seen as smart, you will end up feeling stupid, a > fraud, always on the verge of being found out. But the insidious > thing about these forms of worship is not that they’re evil or > sinful, it’s that they’re unconscious. They are default settings. On > one level, we all know this stuff already. It’s been codified as > myths, proverbs, clichés, epigrams, parables; the skeleton of every > great story. The whole trick is keeping the truth up front in daily > consciousness. >
These thoughts from vastly different quarters illustrate Kṣemendra’s lofty ideals and their currency even today.
Thought for today
Sanskrit has a rich history of riddles and word puzzles. We’ll feature some in the coming weeks, giving the riddle itself in one edition and the answer in the next. Your challenge every week is to figure out what the solution is!
वृक्षाग्रवासी न च पक्षिजातिः त्रिनेत्रधारी न च शूलपाणिः ।
त्वग्वस्त्रधारी न च सिद्धयोगी जलं च बिभ्रन्न घतो न मेघः ॥
vṛkṣāgra-vāsī na ca pakṣi-jātiḥ trinetra-dhārī na ca śūla-pāṇiḥ |
tvag-vastradhārī na ca siddha-yogī jalaṃ ca bibhran na ghato na meghaḥ ||
“Sits on treetops, but isn’t a bird; Has three eyes, but isn’t Śiva. Wears clothes of bark, but isn’t a Siddha-yogī. Carries water, but isn’t a pot or a cloud.” What are we talking about? :-)