[[Mohan K.V 2016-08-05, 02:56:53 Source]]
सदास्वादः
86
व्रीडा चेत् किमु भूषणैः ?
(vrīḍā cet kimu bhūṣaṇaiḥ?)
Meaning
“When there is shyness, what is the use of ornaments and decorations?” Very telegraphic, but the depth of poetic connection within just 8 syllables makes us do a double take. There can only be one fellow who can do this with śārdūla-vikrīḍitas…
Context
It has been many chapters since we spoke of an old favorite, Bhartṛhari. We had featured one of his verses in chapter 3, and had referred to many in passing in other chapters. That is perhaps a consequence of his greatness: the few hundred verses attributed to him are so well-known in Sanskrit and many regional languages that they are inseparable parts of everyday conversations. It simply does not occur to us to seek out the author of such evergreen phrases as ‘kālāya tasmai namaḥ’, ‘vidyā paraṃ daivataṃ’, ‘vairāgyam evābhayaṃ’ ‘kaṣṭam apaṇḍitatā vidheḥ’, ‘na hi suptasya siṃhasya praviśanti mukhe mṛgāḥ’, ‘nyāyyāt patho pravicalanti padaṃ na dhīrāḥ’ – the thoughts of one man have come to so perfectly represent the voice of an entire culture. We are reminded of a joke by D. F. Wallace:
There are these two young fish swimming along, and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says, “Morning, boys, how’s the water?” And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes, “What the hell is water?”
Bhartṛhari’s crowning achievement is that he has managed to pervade so much of cultured speech for millennia in a similar fashion.
In a whimsical characterization many chapters ago, we had called Bhartṛhari the ‘Angry Young Man’ of Sanskrit. He is luxuriant in both his fulsome praise and acid criticism, and shows no hesitation to judge. When he declares vast swathes of people as mūdhas, mūrkhas or worse, he could not be farther from the delicate tightrope balancing that Kālidasa and Bhāsa constrain themselves to. Bhartṛhari takes their ideal of ‘never a stray word’ and turns it on its head, making flagrant imbalance itself an art form.
A feature closely connected to this imbalance is his stark idealism. Over and over, we see exhortations to immerse oneself in the finest pleasures life has to offer – and if there is the slightest dissatisfaction, to abandon them all and retire to the asceticism of the forest. The all-or-nothing idealist that he is, there is not one practical bone in his body, nor one sinew of bridging compromise. There is a strange magnetism to this kind of conviction, a maddening catnip to anyone with poetic sensibilities.
Indeed, to us, Bhartṛhari is all about his bipolarity and intensity of experience at the extremes: how intensely he savours pleasure and independence, and yet, how quickly his mind recoils from impermanence and fragility; how firm and forcefully expressed his emotions, and yet how endearingly unbalanced they often are; and really, how he manages to speak across the millennia directly to our hearts in a language that we rarely use, and yet forges a stronger bond than anything said in our mother tongues.
We’re convinced that in the course of time, we’ll feature pretty much every verse attributed to Bhartṛhari one way or the other; therefore, it doesn’t really matter how we go about categorizing them. In this chapter, we’ll look at an assorted selection from his three śatakas.
First, an anyokti (allegory) spoken to a deer:
यद् वक्त्रं मुहुर् ईक्षसे न धनिनां ब्रूषे न चाटून् मृषा
नैषां गर्व-गिरः श्रुणोषि न च तान् प्रत्याशया धावसि ।
काले बाल-तृणानि खादसि परं निद्रासि निद्रागमे
तन्मे ब्रूहि कुरङ्ग कुत्र भवता किं नाम तप्तं तपः ॥
yad vaktraṃ muhur īkṣase na dhanināṃ brūṣe na cāṭūn mṛṣā
na eṣāṃ garva-giraḥ śruṇoṣi na ca tān prati āśayā dhāvasi |
kāle bāla-tṛṇāni khādasi paraṃ nidrāsi nidrā-āgame
tat me brūhi kuraṅga kutra bhavatā kiṃ nāma taptaṃ tapaḥ ||
“You don’t care to see the face of rich men; you don’t sing dulcet songs of praise in vain;
You don’t listen to their words of haughty arrogance, neither do you go after them with any desire.
Rather, you eat sweet grass whenever you want, sleep whenever you feel like it —
Oh Deer! Tell me, please, what kind of great tapas did you do [to get so lucky], and where?”
The deer’s life is maybe a little romanticized, and tigers and hyenas are conspicuously absent; but as we file our mid-year reviews, we can’t help but nod in agreement!
यद् धात्रा निज-भाल-पट्ट-लिखितं स्तोकं महद् वा धनं
तत् प्राप्नोति मरु-स्थले ऽपि नितरां मेरौ ततो नाधिकम् ।
तद् धीरो भव वित्तवत्सु कृपणां वृत्तिं वृथा मा कृथाः
कूपे पश्य पयोनिधावपि घटो गृह्णाति तुल्यं जलम् ॥
yad dhātrā nija-bhāla-paṭṭa-likhitaṃ stokaṃ mahad vā dhanaṃ
tat prāpnoti maru-sthale ’pi nitarāṃ merau tataḥ nādhikam |
tad dhīraḥ bhava vittavatsu kṛpaṇāṃ vṛttiṃ vṛthā mā kṛthāḥ
kūpe paśya payonidhau api ghaṭaḥ gṛhṇāti tulyaṃ jalam ||
“Whatever fortune the Creator wrote on a man’s forehead – small or great –
he will always find it, and not a bit more, whether he’s sitting in a desert or on the top of Mount Meru [where the gods themselves reside]
Therefore, be wise. Do not beg in front of powerful men in vain.
Look: a bucket holds the same amount of water, whether from a shallow well or from the great ocean.”
Bhartṛhari invokes the common belief that a man’s Fate is written by the Creator on his forehead when he’s born. Our modern instincts are first to completely disagree – of course there is no Fate, individual action is everything! But over time, we wonder if there isn’t a nugget of truth in the idea: a poetic, worldly truth, if not a scientific, transactional one. Consider this anecdote of the Nobel laureate (and U.S. Energy Secretary) Steven Chu, and the King of Saudi Arabia:
In 2010, [oil minister] Naimi escorted Chu to visit King Abdullah at his palace in the desert oasis of Rawdhat Khuraim. The elderly monarch was in a philosophical mood and took the opportunity to pose a few questions to the Nobel laureate physicist, says [U.S. Ambassador] Smith, who went along for the visit.
“Tell me how the universe was formed,” the king asked, in Smith’s recounting. Chu patiently laid out the story of the Big Bang theory. “What does that mean for God?” the monarch said. Chu and Smith conferred for a moment on an appropriate, diplomatic response. “There are some things we know, and for other things, we have God,” Chu replied.
“And tell me, how did we get all this oil?” King Abdullah asked. As Chu described how organisms decomposed over millions of years, Naimi whispered in Smith’s ear, “I’ve told him this a hundred times.”
By a fortuitous (fateful?) coincidence, the anecdote covers the ‘maru-sthale’ aspect as well :-)
Whatever be the truth of his premise about Fate, we greatly admire the conclusion that Bhartṛhari draws: that one can be content in a desert or a mountain, drawing from a well or the ocean, and that it isn’t worth it to get too disturbed about one’s status.
Adam Smith speaks of much the same sentiment in a more refined manner in his Theory of Moral Sentiments:
“The great source of both the misery and disorders of human life, seems to arise from over-rating the difference between one permanent situation and another. Avarice over-rates the difference between poverty and riches: ambition, that between a private and a public station: vain-glory, that between obscurity and extensive reputation. The person under the influence of any of those extravagant passions, is not only miserable in his actual situation, but is often disposed to disturb the peace of society, in order to arrive at that which he so foolishly admires. The slightest observation, however, might satisfy him, that, in all the ordinary situations of human life, a well-disposed mind may be equally calm, equally cheerful, and equally contented. Some of those situations may, no doubt, deserve to be preferred to others: but none of them can deserve to be pursued with that passionate ardour which drives us to violate the rules either of prudence or of justice; or to corrupt the future tranquility of our minds, either by shame from the remembrance of our own folly, or by remorse from the horror of our own injustice.”
This passage is possibly one of the most insightful ones we have had the good fortune to come by in all our journeys, thanks to one of our readers Prof. Balaji Srinivasan!
An echo of it appears in DVG’s Manku-Timmana Kagga:
ಪರಮ-ಲಾಭವ ಗಳಿಸೆ ಜೀವಿತ-ವ್ಯಾಪಾರ-
-ಕಿರಬೇಕು ಮೂಲ-ಧನವದು ತತ್ತ್ವ-ದೃಷ್ಟಿ |
ಚಿರ-ಲಾಭ ಜಗದಾತ್ಮ-ಲೀಲಾ-ವಿಹಾರ-ಸುಖ
ಧರೆಯ ಸುಖ ಮೇಲ್ಬಡ್ಡಿ - ಮಂಕುತಿಮ್ಮ || 749
“To get the highest gain, the commerce of one’s life
must have as its principal a sense of philosophy.
Then, the eternal profit is simply savoring life in all its myriad meanderings —
Any happiness beyond this is merely interest”
We have translated ‘tattva-dṛṣṭi’ as ‘a sense of philosophy’. Literally, it is ‘an eye toward the Truth or the essential nature of things’. We think this essential nature is exactly what Adam Smith outlines.
परेषां चेतांसि प्रतिदिवसम् आराध्य बहुधा
प्रसादं किं नेतुं विशसि हृदय-क्लेश-कलितम् ।
प्रसन्ने त्वय्यन्तः स्वयम् उदित-चिन्तामणि-गणो
विविक्तः संकल्पः किम् अभिलषितं पुष्यति न ते ॥
pareṣāṃ cetāṃsi prati-divasam ārādhya bahudhā
prasādaṃ kiṃ netuṃ viśasi hṛdaya-kleśa-kalitam |
prasanne tvayi antaḥ svayam udita-cintāmaṇi-gaṇo
viviktaḥ saṃkalpaḥ kim ababhilaṣitaṃ puṣyati na te ||
“By seeking out other people’s minds over and over again, day after day,
Do you hope to get a sense of clarity and satisfaction? [Why do you do this foolish thing!]
Look inward. When you are at peace with yourself, the wish-giving jewels
of wisdom will arise within you — every desire of yours will be fulfilled then!”
We have translated ‘viviktaḥ saṃkalpaḥ’ as ‘wisdom’, but it is closer to ‘discriminative desire’ or ‘judicious intentions’. Cintāmaṇis, wish-giving jewels, being within us suggests something echoed across poets from Sun Tzu to Shakespeare: the wise man ‘wins’ by choosing his battles and his desires wisely, not by being superior in indiscriminate śvā-pada-ceṣtitas with whichever opponent happens to come by his way. If one’s desires are wise to one’s condition, of course there will be no disappointment. Sun Tzu constantly speaks of knowing one’s terrain well, just as the Bard remarks, “The better part of valour is discretion”.
At a deeper level, this verse recognizes that the treasure of happiness is within us. Without exploring that source by looking inward, seeking to open it by frantically trying all kinds of keys from the outside is bound to cause frustration. Know yourself well, and none of those external keys will be necessary.
The limitations of looking into ‘pareṣāṃ cetāṃsi’ was particularly well-demonstrated when a seeker of inner peace raised a number of questions about scriptures, commentaries and past masters’ views. A wise man listened patiently, and made a short reply: “Be a beacon unto yourself, my man. Why would you study bathroom graffiti for signs in such an important matter? Time is short.”
भोगा मेघ-वितान-मध्य-विलसत्-सौदामिनी-चञ्चला
आयुर्-वायु-विघट्टिताब्ज-पटली-लीनाम्बु-वद्-भङ्गुरम् ।
लोला यौवन-लालसास्-तनुभृताम् इत्याकलय्य द्रुतं
योगे धैर्य-समाधि-सिद्ध-सुलभे बुद्धिं विदध्वं बुधाः ॥
bhogā megha-vitāna-madhya-vilasat-saudāminī-cañcalā
Āyuḥ vāyu-vighaṭṭita-abja-paṭalī-līnāmbu-vad-bhaṅguram |
lolā yauvana-lālasāḥ tanubhṛtām iti ākalayya drutaṃ
yoge dhairya-samādhi-siddha-sulabhe buddhiṃ vidadhvaṃ budhāḥ ||
“Pleasures are fickle, like the dancing lighting streaks in the middle of a spread of clouds.
Life itself is fragile, like a drop of water on a lotus leaf being swayed by the wind.
The passions of Youth are transient — recognizing all this quickly,
O Wise Men! Put your mind to Yoga, which is easy to get by applying courage and wisdom.”
The beauty of this verse is in the sound, another characteristic feature of Bhartṛhari. It is exhilarating to feel the sense of understanding chase the racing sound and finally catch up with it. The mastery of the metre, the multiple internal rhymes and the long samāsas are visible at a glance. Note how small ‘bhogāḥ’, ‘āyuḥ’ are, but how long and intricate their descriptions – aren’t pleasures and life itself this way, easy to conceive of, but impossibly complicated to actually experience?
We can take a minute to contemplate the word ‘Dhairya’. In most vernaculars, it has come to mean ‘courage’ or ‘fearlessness’, almost as a synonym of ‘śaurya’ (making ‘dhīra-śura’ a repetition). However, in Sanskrit, ‘Dhīra’ first means ‘wise’ or ‘intelligent’ (dhiyaṃ rāti ‘gives thought’). Because a wise man gives thought, he is courageous, steadfast, calm and patient, and therefore ‘dhairya’ can also take on those meanings. A man cannot be wise if he’s not courageous at the face of life.
This is one of the pristine joys of Sanskrit, where each word has so much thought behind it!
क्षान्तिश् चेत् कवचेन किं किम् अरिभिः क्रोधो ऽस्ति चेद् देहिनां
ज्ञातिश् चेद् अनलेन किं यदि सुहृद् दिव्यौषधैः किं फलम् ।
किं सर्पैर् यदि दुर्जनाः किमु धनैर् विद्यानवद्या यदि
व्रीडा चेत् किमु भूषणैः सुकविता यद्यस्ति राज्येन किम् ॥
kṣāntiḥ cet kavacena kiṃ? kim aribhiḥ krodho ‘sti ced dehināṃ
jñātiś ced analena kiṃ? yadi suhṛd divyauṣadhaiḥ kiṃ phalam |
kiṃ sarpaiḥ yadi durjanāḥ? kimu dhanaiḥ vidyā anavadyā yadi
vrīḍā cet kimu bhūṣaṇaiḥ? sukavitā yadi asti rājyena kim ||
“When one has patience, what is the use of armour? When there is anger, why does one need enemies?
If one has a relative, why does one need a fire [to be burnt and hurt by]? When one has a friend, what is the use of divine medicine?
When there are bad men around, what harm can serpents do? When one has true knowledge, what is the use of riches?
When there is shyness, what is the use of ornaments and decorations? And where there is poetry, what is the use of a kinghood?”
This is deservedly one of Bhartṛhari’s most famous verses. The ‘X-ena kim?’ ‘What from X’ is an idiomatic construction, somewhat akin to English ‘What of X?’. It means to disparage X as being unnecessary or useless. The brevity of Sanskrit allows the poet to fit two per line, and that same brevity makes the complex abstract connections seem all the more powerful.
As always, fine nuances abound: in the second line, jñāti and suhṛt are both singular. Even one near relative is sufficient to supplant burning fire! Likewise, one friend is enough to render divine medicines superfluous. The absolute pinnacle of this verse is of course ‘vrīḍā cet kimu bhūṣaṇaiḥ’ – THIS is the kind of sensitivity and beauty that is so rapturous that it makes speaking the next phrase itself superfluous. Hrt-sāmye kimu muktakaiḥ? :-)
Parting Thought
Here is a classic example of Bhartṛhari’s force of expression:
परिवर्तिनि संसारे मृतः को वा न जायते ।
स जातो येन जातेन याति वंशः समुन्नतिम् ॥
parivartini saṃsāre mṛtaḥ ko vā na jāyate |
sa jāto yena jātena yāti vaṃśaḥ samunnatim ||
“In this world which is constantly turning around, who doesn’t die and who isn’t born?
He is truly born, by whose birth his family gains respect”
We hadn’t expected to see reincarnation used as a backdrop for achievement! Making birth and death so trivial seems to take the wind out of the sails of most motivational ideas, but Bhartṛhari subverts it in his characteristic fashion.
We are not satisfied, however, with his last quarter. Really, the point of birth is for one’s family to gain respect? That seems like the poet values prestige, social status and the fickle opinions of others far too much. We would think sukhaṃ prāptaṃ ahiṃsakaṃ (‘[He is truly born, who] gains happiness that doesn’t hurt others’), duḥkham alpīkṛtaṃ bhuvaḥ (‘who reduces the sorrow of the world’) or bhāraṃ laghukṛtam bhuvaḥ (‘who lightens the load of this world’) are closer to our own values. What do you think?
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