Whenever one's mind rests on the question of one's own identity, it is hard, if one is aware of it, to avoid returning repeatedly to the terse yet subtle Mandukya Upanisad.
Terse, because it does not give the weekend essayist much to work with (unlike the Taittiriya, which is a cornucopia of delights, that I fully indulged in a while back).
Subtle, because it yields multiple revelations upon reflection.
There are two masters, each of their particular craft that have given 'voice' to the Mandukya that are worth spending time with.
The first is an introductory essay on this Upanisad by William Butler Yeats. One of the great poets to come out of Ireland, he dived deeply into mysticism and was able to use his talents as a writer to bring a modern sensibility to ancient texts and make them accessible while adding his own poetic accents to the valuable mental flights one comes to expect from the Upanisads.
Here below is an extract of W.B. Yeats' introduction on the Mandukya:
The Mandukya Upanishad. That shortest and the most comprehensive of the Upanishads examines the sacred syllables: AUM. "The word AUM is the imperishable Spirit. This universe is the manifestation."
'A' is the physical or waking state. 'U' is the dream state, where only mental substances appear. 'M' is deep sleep, where man "feels no desire, creates no dream," yet is this sleep called "conscious" because he is now united to sleepless Self, creator of all, source of all, unknowable, unthinkable, ungraspable- a union with it sole proof of its existence. The Self, whereto man is now united, expressed by our articulation of the whole word OM, is the fourth state.
For some forty years my friend George Russell (A.E) has quoted me passages from some Upanishad, and for those forty years I have said to myself - some day I will find out if he knows what he is talking about. Between us existed from the beginning the antagonism that unites dear friends. More than once I asked him the name of some translator and even bought the book, but the most eminent scholars left me incredulous. Could latinised words; could polyglot phrases, sedentary distortions of unnatural English… represent what grass farmers sang thousands of years ago, what their descendants sing today?
To write well", said Aristotle, " express yourself like the common people, but think like a wise man"…
Then when lack of health and money made India impossible we chose Majorca to escape telephones and foul weather…. I am satisfied; I have escaped that polyglot, hyphenated, latinised, muddied muddle of distortion that froze belief. Can we believe or disbelieve until we have put our thought into a language wherein we are accustomed to express love and hate and all the shades between? When belief comes we stand up, walk up and down, laugh or swing an arm; a mathematician gets drunk; finding that which is prerogative of men of action…
I have not worked to confound George Russell, though often saddened by the thought that I could not - he died some months ago - but to confound something in myself. He expressed in his ceaseless vague preoccupation with the East a need and curiosity of our time.
Physical research, which must some day deeply concern religious philosophy, for its evidence surround the pilgrim and the devotee though they never take the centre of the stage, has already proved the existence of faculties that would, combined into one man, make of that man a miracle-working Yogi. More and more too does it seem to approach a main thought of the Upanishad…
I offer to some young man seeking, like Shakespeare, Dante, Milton, vast sentiments and generalizations, the oldest philosophical compositions of the world, compositions, not writings, for they were sung long before they were written down.
European scholarship with many doubts has fixed their date, or the date of the most important, as little before 600 B.C. when Buddha was born, but Indian scholarship prefers a far earlier date. Whatever the date, those forest Sages began everything; no fundamental problem of philosophy, nothing that has disturbed the schools to controversy, escaped their notice…
It pleases me to fancy that when we turn towards the East, in or out of church, we are turning not less to the ancient west and north; that a system of thought like that of these books, though perhaps less perfectly organized, once overspread the world, as ours today; that our genuflections discover in that East something ancestral in ourselves, something we must bring into light before we can appease a religious instinct that for the first time in our civilization demands the satisfaction of the whole man.
(Excerpts from the Introduction by William Butler Yeats for 'The Mandukya Upanishad' published in the Criterion, July 1935.)
The second master offers a magical rendition of the Madukya through music. Pandit Jasraj delivers a genuinely layered and extended composition and delivery. This great singer of Indian classical music, takes us on a musical journey through the three states and the fourth of human consciousness. It is a 3-disc set that has a special place in my library.
Listen at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b61jjWoMlt8
Procure at: http://www.raaga.com/channels/sanskrit/moviedetail.asp?mid=s0000753
My own take on this gem is that we are indeed vastly complex psychological beings. The four states of psychological being are a valuable way of organizing and understanding how we experience the world. The fourth state of silence was and continues to be a dramatic leap of insight and intuition. Out of silence comes everything and into silence dissolves everything.
More than being prideful of this knowledge, I am rather mostly thankful for being endowed with awareness that allows me to participate in a wonderful dialogue with my conversation companions on the wonder of it all.
Terse, because it does not give the weekend essayist much to work with (unlike the Taittiriya, which is a cornucopia of delights, that I fully indulged in a while back).
Subtle, because it yields multiple revelations upon reflection.
There are two masters, each of their particular craft that have given 'voice' to the Mandukya that are worth spending time with.
The first is an introductory essay on this Upanisad by William Butler Yeats. One of the great poets to come out of Ireland, he dived deeply into mysticism and was able to use his talents as a writer to bring a modern sensibility to ancient texts and make them accessible while adding his own poetic accents to the valuable mental flights one comes to expect from the Upanisads.
Here below is an extract of W.B. Yeats' introduction on the Mandukya:
Yeats on the Upanishads
'A' is the physical or waking state. 'U' is the dream state, where only mental substances appear. 'M' is deep sleep, where man "feels no desire, creates no dream," yet is this sleep called "conscious" because he is now united to sleepless Self, creator of all, source of all, unknowable, unthinkable, ungraspable- a union with it sole proof of its existence. The Self, whereto man is now united, expressed by our articulation of the whole word OM, is the fourth state.
For some forty years my friend George Russell (A.E) has quoted me passages from some Upanishad, and for those forty years I have said to myself - some day I will find out if he knows what he is talking about. Between us existed from the beginning the antagonism that unites dear friends. More than once I asked him the name of some translator and even bought the book, but the most eminent scholars left me incredulous. Could latinised words; could polyglot phrases, sedentary distortions of unnatural English… represent what grass farmers sang thousands of years ago, what their descendants sing today?
To write well", said Aristotle, " express yourself like the common people, but think like a wise man"…
Then when lack of health and money made India impossible we chose Majorca to escape telephones and foul weather…. I am satisfied; I have escaped that polyglot, hyphenated, latinised, muddied muddle of distortion that froze belief. Can we believe or disbelieve until we have put our thought into a language wherein we are accustomed to express love and hate and all the shades between? When belief comes we stand up, walk up and down, laugh or swing an arm; a mathematician gets drunk; finding that which is prerogative of men of action…
I have not worked to confound George Russell, though often saddened by the thought that I could not - he died some months ago - but to confound something in myself. He expressed in his ceaseless vague preoccupation with the East a need and curiosity of our time.
Physical research, which must some day deeply concern religious philosophy, for its evidence surround the pilgrim and the devotee though they never take the centre of the stage, has already proved the existence of faculties that would, combined into one man, make of that man a miracle-working Yogi. More and more too does it seem to approach a main thought of the Upanishad…
I offer to some young man seeking, like Shakespeare, Dante, Milton, vast sentiments and generalizations, the oldest philosophical compositions of the world, compositions, not writings, for they were sung long before they were written down.
European scholarship with many doubts has fixed their date, or the date of the most important, as little before 600 B.C. when Buddha was born, but Indian scholarship prefers a far earlier date. Whatever the date, those forest Sages began everything; no fundamental problem of philosophy, nothing that has disturbed the schools to controversy, escaped their notice…
It pleases me to fancy that when we turn towards the East, in or out of church, we are turning not less to the ancient west and north; that a system of thought like that of these books, though perhaps less perfectly organized, once overspread the world, as ours today; that our genuflections discover in that East something ancestral in ourselves, something we must bring into light before we can appease a religious instinct that for the first time in our civilization demands the satisfaction of the whole man.
(Excerpts from the Introduction by William Butler Yeats for 'The Mandukya Upanishad' published in the Criterion, July 1935.)
Listen at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b61jjWoMlt8
Procure at: http://www.raaga.com/channels/sanskrit/moviedetail.asp?mid=s0000753
My own take on this gem is that we are indeed vastly complex psychological beings. The four states of psychological being are a valuable way of organizing and understanding how we experience the world. The fourth state of silence was and continues to be a dramatic leap of insight and intuition. Out of silence comes everything and into silence dissolves everything.
More than being prideful of this knowledge, I am rather mostly thankful for being endowed with awareness that allows me to participate in a wonderful dialogue with my conversation companions on the wonder of it all.
4 comments:
As for you blog post, while I don’t think much of the metaphysics embodied in the Upanishads, even when interpreted through the lens of a great poet, it does bring to mind something I’ve read very recently. It is an appreciation of the work of the recently deceased classics translator, D. S. Carne-Ross by John Talbot in The New Criterion, Classic Carne-Ross.
In it Talbot writes:
Keats knew perfectly well that in reading Chapman’s Homer he was not reading the Iliad. Those rolling rhymed fourteeners, those pauses and those plunges, those metrical inversions: that is Chapman’s sound, not Homer’s. Yet Keats was pleased rather than perturbed. Chapman’s job, he knew, was not to give us Homer, who exists nowhere but in the original Greek. Not that Chapman was writing an autonomous poem in English, ontologically independent of Homer’s. But neither did he produce a crib, and much of what is good in Chapman’s translation can be understood as distinct from what it strictly owes to Homer. An original energy crackles in the relation between Chapman’s English and the Greek on which it draws. In particular, Keats seems to have been responding to Chapman’s sweeping Elizabethan truculence and vigor, as against the refinement and relative tidiness of Pope’s Iliad, the more recent and then-dominant version. A translation can hardly be expected to give the original, but a great translation can give much else, and Keats’s sonnet shows he knew the difference, and knew how gratefully to receive the gifts that Chapman had to give.
Keats wrote his sonnet in 1816, but by then notions about the purpose of translation from the Classics were already beginning to shift. It’s not that Classical culture was disappearing. Latin and Greek remained at the center of the school curriculum—even the Greekless Keats had Latin, and instruction in both languages boomed during the nineteenth century. Instead, the relationship between the Classics and the business of creating English poetry was altering subtly. Great poets, for example, were no longer turning to translation as an integral part of their work. In the 1820s, Wordsworth Englished a fraction of the Aeneid, but aside from that abortive attempt, what major Romantic or Victorian poet can show a great translation to set beside Dryden’s Virgil or Chapman’s Homer? I can’t think of a single example of a major poet translating a Classical author in that high creative mode that Keats so admired in Chapman. The poets of the nineteenth century let that tradition slide.
I have been leading to this point: that for the sake of English literature and for the future of the Classics in our culture, we need critics who will attend closely to the literary character of translations from the Classics. Fortunately there has been such a critic, and a great one. That great one, in Talbot’s (and many other’s) estimation, was D. S. Carne-Ross.
Which brings to mind the statement of Tarthang Tulku from my days at the Nyingma Institute that Westerners will never be able to get the full benefit of the iconography of Tibetan Buddhism because we did not grow up in the mythopoeic/semiology of the Tibetan culture and so don’t get it in the gut instead of the head.
From all of which one might reasonably conclude that the best translators of the Upanishads for westerners will not come from either western scholars nor Indian monks, but rather from western poets with a spiritual bent.
The powerful piece from Jasraj can pulverize one's pride for a peaceful journey into the cosmos. Unconditional love is the key for awakening!
Tim - I hear the east is east west is west never the twain shall meet refrain in the piece. Not in a bad way - but fundamentally. This could be disputable these days. I think I personally get both east and west in the gut and in the head. When I read T Jefferson I can understand him as 'a native'. - while I would love to think I am unique - there is at least a sliver of us in either direction.
But you make a broader point - the translator is not translating just for himself but the reader - which then become a tough proposition.
Your final line was an unexpected and pleasant kicker that I enjoyed.
Within my post - I loved the line on Aristotle - write like the common man but think wisely.
God forbid we do the opposite! :-)
Actually, if you heard a ‘the-east-is-the-east-and-the-west-is-the-west…’ cliché in my response that was not my intent. But upon further review, I see where I might have left that impression. So let see if I can clean up my mess.
Rather than an east v west distinction, I was try to make an ancient v modern distinction. I see that by bringing up Llama Tarthang Tulku’s comment about ancient Tibetan iconography not having much of a visceral effect on modern Westerners I confused my Talbot/Carne-Ross ancient v modern point with an east v west point. I therefore should have followed that observation with something like, “as would be true in the case of modern Tibetans too”.
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