The Saundarya Lahari · The Description of Her Beauty

The journey starts at the very top, above the head. The first picture already brings the whole sky down: in the Goddess’s golden crown, twelve suns are set as rubies, a sliver of moon above them, and against the golden glow that moon scatters like a rainbow. Then the hair, and a lovely conceit: her tresses carry a fragrance of their own, and even the flowers of heaven come to settle in this hair out of longing for it. Hair that lends perfume to flowers, the reverse of the usual, and sweet for that reason. Then the line of the parting: the beauty of her face brims over so fully that the parting looks like a flowing channel for the overflow, and the red sindoor set in the black hair looks as though the darkness has taken a single ray of the sun captive.

Now the whole face. Ringed by dark, curling locks like young bees, this face outdoes the lotus, and here is a fine touch: bees hover over a lotus, and over this lotus Shiva’s own eyes turn into bees and grow drunk. The forehead too curves like a slice of moon, and the poet works a sweet geometry: take the half-moon of the crown and the half-moon of the forehead, join them the wrong way around, and they make one full harvest moon stitched together with a coat of nectar. Then the eyebrows, and in them the bow of Kamadeva shows itself: the two arched brows are its curve, the bee-black eyes its string, and the nose between them the place where the bow is gripped, and this bow is the one that ends the fear of this world.

Now the eyes, and the poet makes them the source of time. One eye, formed of the sun, gives birth to the day; the second, formed of the moon, makes the night; and the third, like a half-opened golden lotus, holds the twilight in between. Here seeing and creating are one and the same. And shloka 49 is a clever play on words: Vishala, Kalyani, Ayodhya, Avanti, each word is at once a quality of the Goddess’s gaze and the name of a famous city, so the poet says the quality that gives those cities their names really belongs to the Goddess’s gaze. Then those same sidelong glances, so long that they reach the ears, become two young bees drinking the honey of the poets’ verses, and seeing this, the third eye flushes a little red with envy.

Here comes the loveliest shloka in the Saundarya Lahari. A single eye, and so many different moods, depending on whom it falls upon: soaked with love when it turns to Shiva, faintly resentful of her co-wife Ganga, frightened of Shiva’s snakes, smiling at her friends, and last of all, softest of all, “compassion, upon me.” The poet builds the whole list only to arrive at this one phrase: the Mother’s gaze, on the devotee, simple mercy. And then the bow of shloka 47 returns here fully drawn: the eyes so long, stretched to the ears, that they look like the arrows of Kamadeva, and this arrow is aimed at the calm mind of the very Shiva who is the image of renunciation. The three-colored eyes then become the three gunas, rajas, sattva, and tamas, out of which Brahma, Vishnu, and Rudra will be made again, and the poet calls her kohl “lila-anjana,” the play-collyrium, because for the Goddess creating the universe is a game as easy as lining her eyes.

The three colors of the eyes, red, white, and black, show the poet a confluence of three sacred rivers: the red Shona, the white Ganga, the dark Yamuna, a Triveni right there on the Goddess’s face, with no need to travel to any holy river. And then a startling conceit: if the opening of the eye creates the world and its closing dissolves it, then the Mother never blinks at all, so as to keep the world alive, a Mother gazing unbroken who never looks away for even an instant. The eyes are like fish, an old comparison the poet turns on its head: the fish hide in the water out of fear, because the Goddess’s eyes reach all the way to her ears and tell tales on them.

54-56 · Three holy rivers · The eyelids · The fish

पवित्रीकर्तुं नः पशुपतिपराधीनहृदये
दयामित्रैर्नेत्रैररुणधवलश्यामरुचिभिः ।
नदः शोणो गङ्गा तपनतनयेति ध्रुवममुं
त्रयाणां तीर्थानामुपनयसि संभेदमनघम् ॥ 54॥

निमेषोन्मेषाभ्यां प्रलयमुदयं याति जगती
तवेत्याहुः सन्तो धरणिधरराजन्यतनये ।
त्वदुन्मेषाज्जातं जगदिदमशेषं प्रलयतः
परित्रातुं शङ्के परिहृतनिमेषास्तव दृशः ॥ 55॥

तवापर्णे कर्णेजपनयनपैशुन्यचकिता
निलीयन्ते तोये नियतमनिमेषाः शफरिकाः ।
इयं च श्रीर्बद्धच्छदपुटकवाटं कुवलयम्
जहाति प्रत्यूषे निशि च विघटय्य प्रविशति ॥ 56॥

Now comes the tenderest shloka in the whole eye sequence. The poet asks for so little: one glance, let it fall even on him standing far away, and he offers a lovely argument. You lose nothing by it: moonlight makes no distinction between forest and palace, and grace does not shrink when it is shared. Then that curve between eye and ear, where the Kamadeva bow of shloka 47 shows itself again from a new angle. And then the earrings: when the Goddess drinks Saraswati’s words with the cupped hollows of her ears and, lost in delight, nods her head in a “wonderful,” her earrings with their ringing seem to answer those words, so vivid, so flavorful a picture of listening.

Now the nose, and a sweet conceit: this nose is as straight as the flagstaff of the Himalaya clan’s banner, and inside it are so many pearls that one pearl flows out with the Goddess’s cool breath and settles as the pearl of her nose-ring, an ornament born of breath. Then the red lower lip: to what can it be compared? The bimba fruit itself turned red only by catching the reflection of the Goddess’s lip, so how could it match the true redness? The poet admits his defeat at finding a comparison, and that admission becomes his most beautiful comparison. And the smile: the chakora birds drank the moonlight of the Goddess’s smile until they were so filled that their beaks went numb, and now they sip the real moon’s light thinking it sour gruel, the Goddess’s smile sweeter than the moon itself.

Now the voice, and the poet composes a delicate scene. The Goddess’s tongue is red like a hibiscus flower and tirelessly recites the virtues of Shiva, and Saraswati, seated on its tip, white as crystal, takes on that redness and turns ruby-red herself, so that even the Goddess of speech is dyed in the Goddess’s color. And the tambula, the betel: Kartikeya, Indra, and Vishnu, back from war, who by tradition avoid taking the leavings of Shiva’s offerings, long to receive the betel-quid that has come down from the Goddess’s mouth, for even the Goddess’s leavings are so holy that the great gods want them like a sacred gift. Then that same “wonderful”: Saraswati was singing Shiva’s glory on the vina, the Goddess nodded and said only “wonderful,” and the sweetness of that word made the vina sound so dull that Saraswati quietly slipped her vina back into its case.

Now the chin, and the poet cannot find a single comparison for it, yet even in defeat he leaves three tender images: her father Himalaya touches it with affection, her husband Shiva lifts it up again and again to kiss it, and for Shiva it is the handle of the mirror in which he looks at the Goddess’s face, three touches of three relationships on one chin. Then the throat, the stalk of the face-lotus, on which the thrill of Shiva’s embrace has raised the thorns of gooseflesh, and the white necklace smeared with dark sandal paste looks like a lotus stalk blooming out of the mud, so that even the smudge of an ornament becomes beauty here. And the three natural lines on the throat become witnesses to two things: to the threads of the auspicious marriage-cord of her wedded state, and to the boundary lines of the three gramas of music, as if the throat itself were an instrument.

Now the arms. Brahma praises the Goddess’s four tender arms with all four of his mouths, and the poet adds a mischievous reason: Shiva has already cut off one of Brahma’s heads, so, afraid, he is begging for a hand of “no fear” for each of his four remaining heads at once. The hands are more beautiful than the lotus, and that same trouble with comparison returns: the lotus might match them, but only when the red lac of Lakshmi’s feet is laid upon it, for the Goddess’s beauty is the original, and everything else asks her for its color. Then a lovely child-scene: the pair of breasts that both Kartikeya and Ganesha drank from belongs to the Mother-form, and Ganesha, drinking his mother’s milk, remembers the two swellings on his own elephant head and quickly gropes for them, “are mine all right?”, to everyone’s laughter.

The poet frames a delightful argument: why did Ganesha and Kartikeya stay unmarried their whole lives? Because they drank the Mother’s nectar-milk, and whoever has tasted that supreme rasa never wants any other rasa again, the Mother’s milk holding a fulfillment that lets no other thirst even arise. Then the necklace: the string of white pearls from the demon Gajasura’s skull, catching a glimpse of the Goddess’s red lips, turns pink from within, as if it were the fame of Shiva mixed red with his valor. And the breast-milk: it is really a milk-ocean of knowledge flowing from the heart, which is why, when in her compassion the Goddess gave that milk to a Dravidian child to drink, the child, having tasted it, became the most charming poet even among seasoned poets, the Mother’s first food the first sip of knowledge itself.

Now the lines around the waist, and the poet turns them into a whole story. Shiva had burned Kamadeva with his third eye; the burned Kamadeva fell into the deep pool of the Goddess’s navel, and from there a thin creeper of smoke rose up, and people take that for the line of down on her belly, the whole story of a burned love held in one line on the body. That same thin line becomes, in the next conceit, a slender wave of the Yamuna, as if the sky between her two pitcher-like breasts had been pressed thin by their nearness and were slipping into the cave-like navel. And the navel alone becomes five things: a whirlpool of the Ganga, a flower-bed, the fire-pit for the burning of Kamadeva’s brilliance, the pleasure-house of Rati, and deepest of all, the mouth of the cave through which the meditator’s inner sight descends.

Looking at the waist, the poet grows genuinely anxious, and one shloka becomes a prayer: “may it be well,” this waist that is naturally thin, bent under the weight of the breasts, barely holding on like a tree on a collapsing riverbank. But the very next shloka brings its balm from the same body: the three lines on the belly (the trivali) are really three cords with which Kamadeva has tied the waist so it will not break, the answer to the worry found in that same body. And then the hips, and a sweet play on words: “nitamba” also means the slope of a mountain, so Himalaya cut away the heaviness and breadth of his own slopes and gave them to his daughter as dowry, a father handing his daughter his very own identity, his own weight.

Now, coming down to the knees, the poet admires their roundness, with one tender thought alongside: the knees have grown “hard from bowing again and again,” meaning the Goddess bows to Shiva so often that her knees have turned firm, so that a devotional feeling is hidden even inside the praise. Then the calves: Kamadeva has only five arrows, but conquering Shiva is a large task, so he made the Goddess’s two calves into two quivers of twenty arrows, and the sharp tips of those arrows are the ten nails of the Goddess’s feet, sharpened on the whetstone of the gods’ bowing crowns. And then the feet, and here the poet’s tone changes, the description suddenly becomes a prayer: those very feet that the Upanishads carry on their heads, whose wash-water is the Ganga in Shiva’s matted locks, let her set them on my head too.

Now the poet bows to the feet, and in each shloka a new tenderness: even Shiva grows jealous of these feet, because the ashoka tree blooms at the kick of a woman’s foot and the Goddess’s feet want to touch that ashoka, and Shiva wishes the touch would come to him instead, so the poet fixes even upon a god that small jealousy of a lover. Then a domestic scene of sulking and coaxing: in a lover’s teasing the Goddess lets slip someone else’s name, Shiva bows his head in embarrassment, and the Goddess, laughing, taps her foot on his forehead, and the cry of the burned Kamadeva is heard as the jingle of the Goddess’s anklet. And then the comparison with the lotus, which the poet defeats point by point: the lotus dies of cold, her feet were raised in the Himalaya; the lotus shuts at night, her feet stay open all night long; Lakshmi lives inside the lotus, but the feet themselves give her away.

Now two lovely complaints, made with great love. One, the poetic tradition has long compared the soft sole of the Goddess’s foot to the hard shell of a tortoise, and two, at the saptapadi during the wedding, how did Shiva set so soft a foot on a hard stone, and with a heart full of pity at that, this meeting of the soft and the hard leaves the poet uneasy. Then beyond the wish-granting kalpavriksha tree: the kalpavriksha gives its fruit only to the dwellers of heaven, but the Goddess’s feet give even to the destitute, and “ahnaya,” at once, without making anyone wait. And at the end, the tenderest turn of the whole journey to the feet: the poet’s soul, whose own feet have wandered until now through the five senses, wants only this, to sink into the flower of the Goddess’s feet and become a bee, at rest in the honey, belonging only there. The journey that began at the hair finds a new home here.

This stage of the journey to the feet passes in glimpses, some light, some deep. The royal swans of the palace want to learn the Goddess’s walk and follow her, stumbling, and the jingle of her anklet seems to teach them that walk without words, so that even the bird with the most beautiful gait is learning from the Mother. Then the famous image of the Sri Vidya: the Goddess’s couch, whose four legs are Brahma, Vishnu, Rudra, and Ishvara, and whose spread is Sadashiva, so that all five great gods together are no more than a single bed for the Goddess, and the white Sadashiva, catching the Goddess’s red glow, turns pink himself, the color of Shakti upon consciousness. And then the summing-up shloka: the poet leaves off limb by limb and gathers them all at once, the hair, the smile, the mind, the breasts, the waist, and says this whole form is really the compassion of Shiva, who took on a body to save the world, the Mother beautiful because she is compassion.

Now the description rises from the body toward the cosmos and the supreme reality. The waning and waxing of the moon is no longer an astronomical event for the poet: the moon is really the Goddess’s makeup box, filled with musk and camphor, and when the Goddess takes her adornments from it each day it wanes, and Brahma fills it again, the whole sky at work in the Goddess’s service. Then the siddhis: the Goddess is Shiva’s innermost private chamber, into which those of restless mind have no direct entry, and yet gods like Indra, merely by standing near the Goddess’s door, became the eight siddhis, anima and the rest, so that standing at the threshold alone bears fruit. And her singleness of devotion: many poets win Saraswati’s grace, anyone can become the “husband” of Lakshmi with a little wealth, but the Goddess is the foremost among faithful wives, and apart from Mahadeva her touch is beyond the reach of even the kuravaka tree.

Now the poem reaches its largest statement. There are three goddesses, Saraswati, Lakshmi, and Parvati, the companions of the three gods, and the Goddess of the Saundarya Lahari stands apart from all three of them. She is the Turiya, the fourth, who lies beyond the three and is the source of the three, the way waking, dream, and deep sleep are three states and Turiya is the fourth, the ground-consciousness beneath them. Then the poet makes his most personal prayer, no great attainment, only this much, that he might drink the water that washes the Goddess’s feet, the water that turns even a mute person into a poet, remember that Dravidian child, and even after writing a whole book the poet calls himself only a “student.” And what does the Goddess’s devotee gain? Learning, prosperity, beauty, these of course, but the real thing comes at the end, “chiram jivann eva,” in this very life, while still living he is freed from his bonds and tastes the rasa of supreme bliss, and this is jivanmukti, liberation while alive.

And then the close, on such a humble note. The poet says: this whole hymn that I have written, what is it really? Waving a lamp-flame to worship the sun, when the sun is itself the source of all light. Offering the moon an arghya made of the drops that fell from it. Satisfying the ocean with its own water. Mother, you are the Goddess of speech yourself, and the very words I praised you with were given by you; I have given you nothing, I have only returned to you what was yours. The whole journey of a hundred shlokas comes to rest on a single feeling: everything we have is a gift from her, and devotion is simply handing it back with gratitude.