The Saundarya Lahari · The Ananda Lahari

The root claim of the whole Saundarya Lahari is set down in the very first line, and it is a daring one. Shiva, who is pure consciousness, can create only when he is joined with Shakti; without her this god cannot even stir. Knowing is one power, and that is Shiva; yet until an impulse, an energy, rises from within, the limbs do not move, and that is Shakti. So how could anyone find the strength to bow to the Devi or to praise her, the Devi whom even Hari, Hara, and Brahma worship, unless some merit had ripened in them first? In the next shloka the same claim moves on with a light playfulness: gathering a single fine speck of dust from the Devi’s lotus feet, Brahma fashions all the worlds; Vishnu bears that same speck on his thousand heads only with great effort; and Shiva grinds it down and smears it over his body like ash. The three who are held to be the very highest all rest on one grain of that root Shakti.

Now that single source becomes the answer to every lack. For those lost in ignorance, for the darkness inside them, the Devi is a city on a sun-bright island; for the dull of mind, she is honey dripping from the flower of consciousness; for the poor, a string of wish-granting chintamani gems; and for those drowning in the ocean of births, she is the very tusk on which Vishnu, in his boar form, once lifted the earth. Whatever state the seeker is in, the Devi arrives as the answer to that state. Then a tender distinction: every other god shows the gestures of fearlessness and boon-giving with the hands, while the Devi has no need to make that sign at all, because her feet are themselves skilled at saving from fear and at giving more than is asked. Why would one who is fearlessness itself need to shape a gesture that promises freedom from fear?

Beauty and allure are a power too, and they also have a source. Vishnu worshipped the Devi, then took on the form of Mohini and unsettled even Shiva; and Kama too, once he bowed to the Devi, won a form so lovely that the minds of even the great sages sway before it. The power to attract that shows in Vishnu or in Kama is borrowed, drawn from this one source. And see how frail this Kama is: his bow is of flowers, its string a row of bees, his arrows only five, his general the spring, his chariot no more than the soft Malaya breeze; yet alone, without a body, once he receives the grace of a single sidelong glance from the Devi, he conquers the whole world. The real strength is in that grace which arrives from behind him. The size of his weapons counts for nothing.

5-6

हरिस्त्वामाराध्य प्रणतजनसौभाग्यजननीं
पुरा नारी भूत्वा पुररिपुमपि क्षोभमनयत् ।
स्मरोऽपि त्वां नत्वा रतिनयनलेह्येन वपुषा
मुनीनामप्यन्तः प्रभवति हि मोहाय महताम् ॥ 5॥

धनुः पौष्पं मौर्वी मधुकरमयी पञ्च विशिखाः
वसन्तः सामन्तो मलयमरुदायोधनरथः ।
तथाप्येकः सर्वं हिमगिरिसुते कामपि कृपाम्
अपाङ्गात्ते लब्ध्वा जगदिदमनङ्गो विजयते ॥ 6॥

Now, for the first time, the poet gives the Devi a form, and that form holds two moods together. She wears a softly chiming girdle; she leans a little under the weight of a bosom full as the brow of a young elephant; she is slender at the waist; her face is the full autumn moon; and in her hands she holds a bow, an arrow, a noose, and a goad. On one side tenderness, on the other four weapons, and each weapon carries an inner meaning: the bow and arrow are the mind and the senses, the noose is the cord that binds together, the goad is what holds back. The Devi is beautiful, and she is also the one who keeps everything in order. Then, past the form, her divine dwelling. In the midst of an ocean of nectar, ringed by a grove of wish-granting trees, on an island of jewels, in a house of chintamani stone, on a couch shaped like Shiva, resting on the bed of Parama Shiva, the Devi who is a wave of consciousness and bliss is worshipped by only a few blessed ones. This is the map of an inner place, and every layer is a feeling: the ocean of nectar is the boundless, the wish-granting trees are every desire fulfilled, the jewel-island is preciousness, and at the center the wave of consciousness and bliss.

Now the whole journey of kundalini, told in two shlokas: one breath rising, one settling back down. The Devi is the energy asleep at the base of the spine; when she wakes she pierces the path through all the chakras, earth in the Muladhara, water in the Manipura, fire in the Svadhishthana, air at the heart, ether above that, and mind between the brows, and in the thousand-petaled Sahasrara she sports in secret with her lord. This is the rise from the grossest level to the very subtlest, the summit of yoga, said in the language of bhakti. Then she returns: from the union in the Sahasrara she pours a stream of nectar down through her two feet, waters the whole world with it, and then, taking the form of a serpent coiled three and a half times, folds herself back and sleeps in the deep hollow of the Muladhara. The nectar above is what keeps watering all the life below.

Now the Sri Chakra, the most sacred yantra of Sri Vidya, and the beauty of the Devi that nothing can match. Shiva’s four triangles and Shakti’s five, nine root triangles in all, together with lotuses of eight and sixteen petals, three rings, and three lines, open out into forty-four corners. The feeling beneath the numbers is this: the upward-pointing triangles are Shiva, consciousness; the downward-pointing ones are Shakti, energy; and they are interwoven so tightly that they can never be pulled apart, the very claim of shloka 1 made visible. Then that beauty, which even a crown-jewel of poets like Brahma somehow keeps laboring to match, and which the women of heaven grow so eager to behold that in their hearts they come to long for union with Shiva, the state that even hard tapas can barely reach. The mere wish to see her becomes, without their knowing it, a step toward liberation.

Now that same glance of grace, the sidelong look that is the root of every attraction, put as a piece of playful exaggeration. Take an old man, dull to look at, blank at any joke or banter; let even one sidelong glance of the Devi fall on him, and hundreds of young women come running after him, their braids loosening, their garments slipping, their girdles snapping. Attraction belongs to no one on its own. The real magic is in that sidelong glance. And the Devi’s feet stand above all of it. Each chakra has its own rays, fifty-six at the Muladhara, fifty-two at the Manipura, sixty-two at the Svadhishthana, fifty-four at the Anahata, seventy-two at the Vishuddhi, sixty-four at the Ajna; yet above all these rays are the Devi’s two lotus feet. Every inner energy there is points toward one thing, and that one thing stands above them all. The chakras are the stairs; the Devi’s feet are the place the stairs arrive at.

Now a single current runs through three shlokas, the deep bond between the Devi and speech, and here the poet speaks from his own experience. Bright as autumn moonlight, crowned with a knot of matted hair set with the moon, holding in her hands the boon gesture, the fearlessness gesture, a crystal rosary, and a book: this is the Sharada form, the form of learning and speech. Whoever will not bow to her even once with a true heart, how could speech with the sweetness of honey, milk, and grapes ever come to him? Then the Devi’s color is aruna, the red of the first light of dawn; the saints who worship her in this form find the lotus-grove of their poet’s heart bursting into bloom, and with speech like Saraswati’s deep, love-laden wave they win over the hearts of the good. And whoever meditates on the Devi together with the eight goddesses, Vashini and the rest, who glow like moonstone and give birth to speech, becomes the author of great poems. For one who settles the Devi within, beauty comes and sits on his tongue of its own accord.

The different fruits of meditating on the Devi’s aruna form open up further now, and one feeling underlies all three: meditation fixed on a single inner image changes the seeker from within. Whoever meditates on that glow of the Devi’s body, the glow that dyes the whole sky and earth with the redness of the newly risen sun, wins even celestial women like Urvashi to his will. Whoever takes her face as the point, below it the two breasts, and below that the half of Shiva, and meditates on this art of Manmatha, can set even the three worlds spinning; and what it points to stays quiet, since the effect of one correct, concentrated inner image is boundless. And whoever settles the Devi in the heart like an image carved in moonstone, she who scatters rays of nectar-juice from her limbs, calms the pride of serpents the way Garuda does, and cools those burning with fever with a single nectar-filled look. The effect of meditation does not stay confined to the one who meditates; once this cooling image has settled inside someone, their very presence begins to quiet the fever of others.

18-20

तनुच्छायाभिस्ते तरुणतरणिश्रीसरणिभिः
दिवं सर्वामुर्वीमरुणिमनि मग्नां स्मरति यः ।
भवन्त्यस्य त्रस्यद्वनहरिणशालीननयनाः
सहोर्वश्या वश्याः कति कति न गीर्वाणगणिकाः ॥ 18॥

मुखं बिन्दुं कृत्वा कुचयुगमधस्तस्य तदधो
हरार्धं ध्यायेद्यो हरमहिषि ते मन्मथकलाम् ।
स सद्यः संक्षोभं नयति वनिता इत्यतिलघु
त्रिलोकीमप्याशु भ्रमयति रवीन्दुस्तनयुगाम् ॥ 19॥

किरन्तीमङ्गेभ्यः किरणनिकुरम्बामृतरसं
हृदि त्वामाधत्ते हिमकरशिलामूर्तिमिव यः ।
स सर्पाणां दर्पं शमयति शकुन्ताधिप इव
ज्वरप्लुष्टान् दृष्ट्या सुखयति सुधाधारसिरया ॥ 20॥

Now the true summit of the Ananda Lahari, and right after it the tenderest shloka of all. That subtle art of the Devi, thin as a line of lightning, made of sun and moon and fire, seated in the Sahasrara above all six chakra-lotuses, only those great souls can see whose minds have been washed clean of stain and maya, and they sink into a wave of the highest bliss; the name of the whole text rises from right here. And then that eager grace: wishing to offer the praise, “Bhavani, cast your compassion-filled gaze on me, your servant,” the devotee manages to say only this much, भवानि त्वम्, and in that very instant the Devi grants him the state of union with her, the state whose feet are worshipped with waving lamps by the crowns of Vishnu, Brahma, and Indra. The heart of it sits in a play on words: भव and आनि can also be read as “may I become.” The devotee means to say you, and the Devi hears may I become you, and in that instant she makes him one with herself; the supplicant has not even finished his sentence, and the gift is already given.

Now that same deep claim, that Shiva and Shakti can never be pulled apart, first in a lighthearted turn, then on the scale of all creation. As Ardhanarishvara the Devi had already taken the left half of Shiva’s body, yet perhaps her heart was not filled, so it seems she took the other half as well; that is why this whole form of hers glows aruna, has three eyes, leans a little under the breasts, and wears the crown with the crooked moon, all of these being Shiva’s own marks. Each holds the other entirely within. And then that same thread runs through all of creation: Brahma builds the world, Vishnu sustains it, Rudra destroys it, Ishvara folds everything back and hides even his own body, and Sadashiva grants his grace to all; yet these five acts they can perform only when the Devi’s brow stirs for a moment, which is to say only when her command comes. Even the very highest gods depend on a single signal from the Devi’s brow.

Now the heart of single-pointed devotion, then the picture of Shiva left alone in the great dissolution. The worship of all three gods, born of the three gunas, happens on its own if only the Devi’s two feet are worshipped, because those three stand forever right beside the jeweled footstool of her feet, hands folded, crowns bowed; water the root, and the whole tree is watered, with no need to scatter your care. And at the time of the great dissolution Brahma meets his death, Vishnu passes into rest, Yama is destroyed, Kubera is wiped away, Indra’s whole company closes its eyes, and through all of it the Devi’s husband Shiva goes on sporting alone. Shiva remains because he is pure consciousness; yet the shloka addresses the Devi as Sati and Shiva as your husband, the real center being the one on whose account Shiva is Shiva at all, Shakti.

Now the whole definition of worship changes, and then the three great gods step down into a household scene. Let my every conversation become your japa, every motion of my hands your sacred gesture, my walking your circumambulation, my eating and drinking your oblation, my lying down your act of prostration; in the mood of handing myself over, let my every comfort become a form of your worship. There is only one condition, the mood of self-offering; where it is present, every moment of life becomes worship on its own, and the wall between the temple and the rest of life falls away. And those same three gods: when Shiva suddenly arrives at the Devi’s palace and she rises in respect, her companions warn her, “Move Brahma’s crown from your path, your foot will catch in Vishnu’s hard crown, push Indra’s crown aside,” because all three already lie bowed at the Devi’s feet, no more now than crowns strewn on the ground to be stepped around.

A paradox has already gone by in shloka 28: the gods drank nectar and still perished in the dissolution; Shiva drank the halahala poison and still stayed immortal, because the Devi is a wife whose husband lives and the ornament in her ears is the very mark of that living union. Shiva’s immortality rests in his bond with the Devi. No nectar and no poison had anything to do with it. Now the highest form of meditation, and Sri Vidya’s own lineage. Whoever meditates always on the Devi, ringed by the rays of the siddhis, anima and the rest, that rise from her own body, holding the thought “you alone are I,” for him even the wealth of Shiva is worth a blade of grass, and even the fire of the great dissolution turns into an arati for him, its flames waving before him like lamps of worship; once I and the Devi have become one, no ground for fear is left at all. And Shiva first kept the whole world entangled with sixty-four tantras, each tantra good for only a single siddhi; then, at the Devi’s insistence, he brought down to this earth that one tantra, your own tantra, which by itself fulfills all four aims of life, one complete path among the scattered ones, the Devi’s gift.

Now the Devi’s name and her form are no longer two separate things. Shiva, Shakti, Kama, Kshiti; then Ravi, Chandra, Smara, Hamsa, Shakra; and then Para, Mara, Hari, the seed-letters that stand for all of these, joined at the ends with three हृीं, become the limbs of the Devi’s name-mantra. This is the coded language of the fifteen-syllable mantra, the details veiled on purpose, because the mantra passes from a guru; this much is clear, that the Devi’s name is itself a composition, woven from the root elements of the universe, and the name and the one the name points to are not apart. And some seekers place three seeds, Smara, Yoni, Lakshmi, at the beginning of the Devi’s mantra, take up rosaries of chintamani beads, and pour hundreds of oblations of fragrant ghee into the fire of Shiva, becoming connoisseurs of a boundless, supreme bliss. This is a special color of Sri Vidya; the purest form of bliss is found right here, with no dry austerity in it, and the name Ananda Lahari comes true again.

32-33

शिवः शक्तिः कामः क्षितिरथ रविः शीतकिरणः
स्मरो हंसः शक्रस्तदनु च परामारहरयः ।
अमी हृल्लेखाभिस्तिसृभिरवसानेषु घटिता
भजन्ते वर्णास्ते तव जननि नामावयवताम् ॥ 32॥

स्मरं योनिं लक्ष्मीं त्रितयमिदमादौ तव मनो-
र्निधायैके नित्ये निरवधिमहाभोगरसिकाः ।
भजन्ति त्वां चिन्तामणिगुननिबद्धाक्षवलयाः
शिवाग्नौ जुह्वन्तः सुरभिघृतधाराहुतिशतैः ॥ 33॥

Now the two greatest claims of the Ananda Lahari, the ones that state the bond of Shiva and Shakti most plainly. The Devi is Shiva’s body, with the moon and the sun for its two breasts; and Shiva is the Devi’s soul, that spotless Shiva of the nine-fold Self. So which is the support and which is the supported, the question itself is pointless, since each is the other’s body and soul, both are one rasa, one in the highest bliss; the very attempt to separate Shiva and Shakti falls away. And then the greatest claim of all: the Devi is the mind, she is space, air, fire, water, earth; once she has turned into all these forms, nothing else remains at all. She herself turns herself into the form of the universe, and still keeps her own form of consciousness and bliss within. This whole world is the transformed shape of that one blissful consciousness. Nothing inert lies beneath it; whatever comes into sight, that is she.

Now the climb turns back toward the upper chakras, Shiva and Shakti together in each, and an inner light in each. At the Ajna chakra, between the brows, the poet bows to that supreme Shambhu who shines with the light of ten million suns and moons and whose side is merged with the Para Shakti; whoever worships him with bhakti comes to dwell in that world where the light of sun and moon and fire does not reach, and which still blazes with a light of its own, an inner light lit by its own flame. Then the Vishuddhi chakra, the chakra of the throat, where Shiva and Shakti are both clear as crystal, and the Devi is called equal in nature to Shiva, with no higher and no lower between them; the blended radiance of the two flows like moonlight, and the world drinks it in like the chakora bird, its inner darkness washing away. And a pair of swans, connoisseurs of the honey of the lotus of unfolding consciousness, floating on the mind-lake of the great; once this pair settles in someone’s mind, he sorts the good out of the flawed the way a swan sorts milk from water, and the inner union of Shiva and Shakti grants the gift of discernment.

Now the climb comes back to the two lower chakras, and the Ananda Lahari settles into its coolest image of all, a balm set beside the fire. At the Svadhishthana chakra, Rudra in the form of the fire of dissolution sits forever upon the flame, and with him the great goddess Samaya; when Rudra’s anger-filled gaze is burning the worlds, the Devi’s gaze, wet with mercy, works on him like a cooling treatment, and wherever there is a burning energy there is a cooling power right beside it. Then at the Manipura chakra the Devi appears as a dark raincloud, lightning her power, the rainbow her jewelry; and this cloud rains on the three worlds scorched by the sun of destruction, a soothing rain where the world is being singed. Last, the Muladhara chakra at the very base of the spine, where the Devi Samaya dances the gentle lasya and Navatma Shiva dances the fierce tandava of the nine rasas; two dances side by side, and from this joined dance of theirs the whole world, with its mother and father, is born. The claim with which the Ananda Lahari began comes to rest here in its tenderest form, two dancers, and this entire world born of their dance. Now, in Part 2, the form of that Mother, from crown to feet, is about to open.