SEASONS OF LOTUS SUTRA
K P Ramesh
The lotus, blossomed in a pond, represents all the lotuses of the world. It is the Buddhist symbol of enlightenment. Its roots are immersed in the mud while the leaf and flower open up to the sun. Certainly, those lotuses to be blossomed again in our spirit by solacing our daily life. Its position is beyond the common intellectual haughtiness.
The Buddhist images in the poems of K.Satchidanandan have much significance. Those create a parallel flow with the impulsive time. By positing Gautam Buddha in a patio of the new era some works put on trial him with nirmamatha. Other poems show that there are so many hindrances in the way of Buddha.
In the preface of the poem, THE HOME CHANGE, Satchidanandan says: “To me, the Buddha is a symbol of philosophical struggle. So He is born in my poetry endlessly as mourning one, rational and annoyed”.
New rays of poetic revelation are emitting in those lines. Here, we enter to the holy land of poetic images. We remember the words, where the oriental mind is creative, of Masanobu Fukuoka: “everything is composed in one thing, but that one won’t be born out of everything”.
In the LOVE-BUDDHA we read likewise:
“That cave became a Bodhi
I got love’s enlightenment
Now I pass through many births
Only after the last human couple
Attain love’s nirvana
Shall I attain Godhood.”
This is an answer to the lovely one who asked which is the sweetest kiss in the earth. Revelation of the holy love is not fleshly. A Buddha , who is going through the emptiness or the universal relativity of many lives, can perceive the love and hate of human beings. Here, the aim is salvation. Zen Buddhism says that there is a Buddhahood in every man. The human age cannot do anything with Buddhahood. This poetry adore the Buddhist element that the Buddha is always incarnating until the last man would attain the nought.
Deeds of a Guru are described in THE ICON, a segment of the poetry GURU. Though there is no Buddhist sign as a guru in the same text, the following lines show an adorable one:
“Along with his dawn,
Guru came down discarding his godhood.
Among the men and trees of his own soil
In the intense sunlight of his actions,
In the heavy shower of compassion,
He roused, sowed, raised his crops.”
Guru who is descending the valleys from the height gives the holy offering of compassion. The hot sun of his deed is blazing over his head. He has no perplexity as he coming through the valleys of the dawn.
A Zen poem:
“If you wish to know the road up the mountain,
you must ask the man who goes back and forth on it.”
One who is enlightened and keeping himself calmness will show you the way. It is also the way to our own inner self.
A swan is the main character in the tale of Siddhartha and Devadatha. Siddhartha absorbs the pain of the wounded swan, for he is the idol of compassion. And so in the poetry of Satchidanandan, the same swan and Siddhartha get the judgment of the new era. The swan escapes to the stage of Kathakali and the situation of Siddhartha is not so good!
Some symbols like these are occurring in the poem, THE WOLF . Here, the wolf is an autocrat. We read its haughtiness from the poem:
“He who questions me
violates Nature’s law.
To be my food is the
Greatest fortune
My preys can dream of.
That is salvation,
Bodhisattva needs not be born again.”
These words of distress fall over the beings who have lost the spiritual consciousness of revolution from their self. This shows that grass roots of dharma would burnt in the sunlight of savage regime, Buddha faces a new challenge here. Prajna and Karuna-intuition and compassion- won’t see in the grounds where the desires graze. But , if Bodhisattva born again , the preys would get mercy. It is not happened so at present .Both Thunchath Ezhuthachan and Nikos Kazantzakis told that the human condition is like a frog which is a food in the mouth of a snake . According to the wolf, in Satchidanandan’s poem, the repression is interpreted as luck and the vice is worth. This bondage becomes the symbol of salvation. The sound of footsteps will keep a distance until we regain the ideal awareness.
We meet a man , in the poem MY TESTAMENT , who is fed up of the miseries of the present time and so goes to his own primitive sphere:
“I have been flung back to life
From the dark shore of silence and death.
As if I am discovering myself once again
In your eyes dug deep by penury and misery……
I am going somewhere
as the prince who met misery
goes to his Bodhi.”
There is a realization in the first part and a sort of lamentation in the last part. Those words are composed by pain and severity. Then, the poetry is neither a prayer nor an incantation but a spiritual lamentation. In THE FOX, there is a mournful monologue in a creature who is tortured:
“O, Bodhisattva, once you
took my form. Now teach me
your simple ways.
Give my thoughts the rhythms of love
Fill my begging bowl with
Breast milk instead of blood.
Teach me, O, Bodhisattva,
How to survive myself !”
These are verbal lotuses which are dedicated in the Buddha hearteously. Because, the words of someone, who is realized the lotus-face of compassion, has a heart throbbing for consolation. The soul of the following Zen poetry can be seen Satchidanandan’s work:
“In the bottomless bamboo basket
I put the white moon;
In the bowl of mindlessness
I store the pure breeze.”
The cosmos of imperience , conquered by virtuosity, is the other side of the same poetry by Satchidanandan . This poetry is tended to change from the hard language to the softness of inner experience and we can see the floral area of spiritual quest there.
In BATHING IN THE POND the poet chants on his past. Buddhist images become the rare lustre here too. In the moments of affairs he feels that his mother undulates as kathasaritsagara and grandma utters as panchatantra tales. His recollection of his father is likewise:
“In the Jatakas my father told
I took the many births of Bodhisattva
To learn the language of the moving and the standing,
My south and north in my trip to salvation.”
He is keeping the treasured memories of Jataka tales as a food which is held in reserve in his journeys through his mental strata.
One thing is to be born in mind that the “I” in these poems doesn’t belong to the poet itself. In the same poetry, mentioned above, there is one more phase where the inner and outer journeys becomes complementary. He finds out the differential aspects of Buddha from the scenes of his journeys. It commemorates the days of Thathagatha. THE FEVER, one of his famous works, notes that Thathagatha should get evolution in the current period. We see the redness spread over in Bodhi tree, in the poem RIVERS. This tree becomes a hand which is raised for a revolution. Thus we can experience the power and grandeur of a Buddhist rebellion in this poem. Certainly, according to a revolutionary Buddha, the suffering and indifference are mere mental actions. Same motif is seen in the poems BODHAVATHI and AHALYA..
Ryokan, the Zen poet, says :
“ If you speak delusions,
Everything becomes a delusion:
If you speak the truth,
everything becomes the truth.
Outside the truth there is no delusion,
But outside delusion there is no special truth.
Followers of Buddha’s Way!
Why do you so earnestly seek the truth in distant places?
Look for delusions and truth in the bottom of your own hearts.”
One cannot overcome the new land if he lost the villages of speculation. It is so honest in the case of a modern Buddha, as we read in the poem BRECHT AND BUDDHA. Buddha ,in this writing, is a witness of our time ,who says that “the Eightfold paths and Four Noble Truths have no substance in front of a child who is dying of hunger”. This is a pathetic vision-no, version!- of the famous statement by Jean Paul Sartre.
Buddhist images in these poems are the poetic reactions by Satchidanandan. In poems like MINE-WORKER IN DANBAD, THE LOVE-BUDDHA, THE POET, BODHAVATHI and AHALYA there is a zone of social retort emitted by the spiritual revolution. Sometimes it becomes anti-revolution.
A scene of alternation can be seen in THE BUDDHA IN PUNJAB. In his wanderings Buddha visits
“Buddha’s begging bowl fills with blood.
Stop this dreaming, see the blood in your hand.”
Colour of the liberation-fighters’ blood is reflected in the sound raised from the same land. Passing the delusive visions, Buddha goes to Kalahandi the land where the hunger-death is dancing. The poet tries to say something real by putting the Buddha in the face of strikes and in the lands of misery. THE BUDDHA IN KALAHANDI is a best picture of it . Buddha travels in a boat through the great river of tear. In the boat there are only the Buddha and boatman. As the oar is falling in water the river would startle as in a nightmare. As the primitive art-forms of terrible nights are seen in the song of the boatman,Buddha’s eyes sing likewise:
“Buddha, this earth is burning
not by lust but by hunger.
They don’t need salvation,
They are already nothing.
Tongues dry up not for
Want of wisdom
And the bellies burn not for
Want of meditation.
It is not your lips
Bursting into philosophy
That they watch, but they
Stare, longingly at the
Begging bowl your fingers hold…
Go and beat the drum of
The weak’s awakening,
Retrieve your bread, your power.”
Here, we know the ironic sense of the saying, mentioned above, by Sartre, we can say that the so –called dharma-sutras are meant for the people whose bellies satisfied. There is compassion when the Buddha says that he would offer his body as a tuberous root. He becomes enlightened by saying that we have to attain the Buddhahood after eating and drinking the same essence. He know that those people’s blood has turned into roots and flowers in the land. There are great waves of spiritual revolution in the summon of Buddha. By hearing it , as the poet writes , some lotuses bloomed by the unity of the enlightened people, Buddha’s footsteps became the art of tattoo in the wet land and his eyes became stars which spread over the valleys. It is notable that a splendour in the fallen place of rays in Buddhist message.
RELICS OF A LIFE expresses that the effort for a new interpretation of olden things is virtue. They sing in Satchidanandan’s poems. Symbols of sun in some poems are facing the days of hope. INDIAN LENIN describes that Lenin is borne as an Indian many times. This Bodhisattva goes through the lives of deer, dog, golden eagle, peacock, Bhikku, meditator and scholar. There are signifiers of new Jataka tales too. Though the Bodhisattva is born in
These Buddhist images become the signifiers of a philosophical revolution. In the following lines there blooms a kind of self consciousness:
“I shall give you the meditative harmony
of Bodhi that slays all fear,
Give you Godhood in a drop of dew.”
[ON THE HILLS, AGAIN]
By “Let the forgotten Buddha of Sanchi,/ the one who walks the road of dharma, awake”[A MID-INDIAN ELEGY] there is a summon of humble request; by “He took poison to become nectar/ for tomorrow’s children,/ to become the Bodhi’s shade for /those erected from their homes” [HIM, TOO] there is an indirect symbol of the Bodhi tree; by writing “The seat of the meditator …the hell of the meditator” [EZHIMALA] reflects the dichotomies in earth; by “I thought that the Buddha had a bang tusk”[THE GLASSES] the painful situation of our time is depicted and by “I see the Buddha in every peepal leaf”[MY TREES] there is a hopeful message that the Buddhahood is omnipresence.
We perceive the aesthetic pleasure from these Buddhist images. They try to find innovative seasons of the soul. In fact, those are the contemplative chants on Lotus, otherwise the poetic scriptures of the Lotus of Fine Dharma.
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k.p.ramesh
zorba publications
ayalur po, palakad-678510, kerala ,India
ph: 0091 9447315971
e-mail :rameshzorba@gmail.com
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