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Michael Taft: Welcome to , the podcast for metamodern mutants enthusiastic about meditation, neuroscience, Dzogchen, jazz, Tantra, philosophy, awakening, and far, way more. My name is Michael Taft, your host on the podcast, and on this episode, I’m completely happy to be speaking with my good friend, Rick Jarow.
Rick Jarow Ph.D. is an creator, teacher, and scholar of Indian languages and literature. Recently retired from his position as a Religious Studies professor at Vassar College in Latest York, Rick leads workshops and retreats worldwide. His books include:, and a latest work: . And now without further ado, I offer you the episode that I call “Eco-Aesthetics and the Poetry of Longing, with Rick Jarow.”
Michael Taft: Rick, welcome to the podcast.
Rick Jarow: Thanks. Thanks. Great to be here.
MT: It’s great to have you ever here. I’ve been wanting to have you ever on the show for years, literally for the reason that very first one. And so in the end, I’ve reached out with my cosmic microphone and captured you here in audio format.
RJ: Alright.
MT: In order you well know, and as listeners know, this is just not like a book interview podcast. We just don’t really do this. Nevertheless, the nominal excuse for having you on the show is your latest book called . And that’s published by Oxford University Press. So simply because that is an enchanting topic what’s Kalidasa’s Meghaduta?
RJ: Kalidasa’s Meghaduta translates literally as Meghaduta, or cloud messenger, is a few yaksha, who’s a semi-divine being.
MT: So, like an earth spirit, right?
RJ: It’s not clear actually, they’re tree spirits. A few of them are impishly fun, and a few of them are positively evil. They’ve been said to eat children. So (laughter) there’s an entire form of tradition of yakshas.
MT: So, it’s form of like fairies where they’re naughty and nice.
RJ: Yeah, yeah. This particular one is exiled on a mountain by his Lord Kubera, the Lord of Wealth. The explanation for the exile is rarely quite clear. However the yaksha is deeply pining for his beloved who’s back home, and sees a cloud within the sky and starts telling the cloud, please deliver a message to my beloved, and here’s the route it is best to take. And the substance of the poem is the yaksha detailing, very specifically, the route that the cloud should take through the landscapes of India. In order that’s the frame.
MT: And so it’s got this very traditional setting of Sanskrit poetry which is separated lovers.
RJ: Yes, this particular poem is named a Khandakavya or a shortened epic poem, or shortened lyric poem. And the theme of separation in love is everywhere in the tradition. And immediately, at the primary verse, the poem invokes Rama and Sita who’re the divine separated lovers. So it’s on this context.
MT: But as I understand it, it’s odd in that context, because almost not one of the poem is concerning the separated lovers. As an alternative, it’s all concerning the landscape of India.
RJ: Well, it’s each and that’s the genius to me that the landscape is just not different from the emotion, is just not different from the story. It’s an animated landscape, which is reflecting the anguish and the craving of this yaksha and allowing him to see things in a really animated way.
MT: Now, this poem has been famous since like 400 AD.
RJ: Yes, yeah.
MT: And what’s so wonderful about it that it stood out in all of the literature?
RJ: There are a couple of things. One is: Kalidasa is like Shakespeare; he has that form of brand power. But it surely’s also hauntingly beautiful poetry; the mix of sound and sense. The meter it’s written in is named which implies gently stepping and is reserved for matters of pathos and love and separation. And I’d also enterprise to say that it has retained popularity since it offers such a singular vision of the natural world, that’s what attracted me. It’s an interfacing of language, love, and nature.
MT: And is that what you mean within the subtitle with this word, eco-aesthetic?
RJ: Yes, since the landscape which incorporates birds, and animals, and humans, and mountains, and rivers, is a component of the aesthetic project. And to grasp that you have got to return to the roots of Sanskrit tradition, particularly the Aitareya Upanishad which says, Raso Vai Saḥ, that he or God is Ras, or is the ebullient flow of feeling. And so the Meghaduta is Ras par excellence. The truth is, once I was working on this poem in India, there have been individuals who told me a few professor who used to show the Meghaduta at Banaras Hindu University and was never in a position to get past the primary verse because he’d go into ecstasy. (laughter) And that was considered a very good thing by my colleagues in India. So it’s the aesthetic , in case you will, that I feel gives it its juice and enduring power.
MT: Now, I’m curious, since you’ve mentioned the meter and the best way it sounds and so forth, do you are feeling any of that comes through in English? Or is that utterly lost? And whether it is, then what stays?
RJ: That’s a very good query. And once I was a student of William Theodore de Bary at Columbia, he used to make this note with the Bible, he said, “Look, the Bible is written in Aramaic. We read it in English, but we’re still affected by it.” So it’s not necessarily the language, although knowing the language actually gives you one other dimension. But I feel it really works in English because what he’s speaking about is universal. All of us have experience of trees and birds and the dawn and the mountains. So it offers you a option to see the natural world, and I just do my best to convey it in a way that makes some sense in English without dishonoring the unique. It’s not mantra. Mantra relies upon the precise syllables and pronunciation, is something else.
MT: And once we’re listening or reading kavya, how are we meant to approach a poem like this?
RJ: Well, that’s one other thorny query because one thing: the Western practice of reading in private, didn’t exist. At this point, poems and songs were all communal, recited in groups, and kavya is believed to be early court poetry. So it was recited on the court, that’s as much as we all know of its so-called original context.
MT: So it’d be read aloud in front of all of the lords and ladies, essentially.
RJ: Yes, yes.
MT: So provided that we’re not lords and ladies, and we’re probably not going to even read it aloud to one another very much anyway, once you translate a poem like this, how are you imagining the reader engaging it?
RJ: I don’t, I could be within the School of Jack Kerouac, who principally says, in case you just write spontaneously from what’s inside you, it should communicate. And so I feel if I can translate this –with heart–which is what the tradition says how it is best to read, then it should communicate. And that’s the entire point of the aesthetic tradition is that no person ever asked, What does this poem mean? Nobody ever asked that query. In classical Indian aesthetics it’s, What does it taste like? And that taste, which is rasa, or ras in Hindi, is what’s necessary.
MT: So we’re not enthusiastic about the economics of fourth-century, India.
RJ: Exactly.
MT: Yeah. And so what does this poem taste like?
RJ: Ahhh. It is alleged by the tradition to be , which translates as compassion. But it surely’s more like an ongoing vibration of a highly magnified heartache, which magnifies the world around you to such a level that it becomes only a pageant of bliss. And this mixture of blissfulness and anguish is deeply encoded inside what’s called Sambogha and Vipralambha Shringara, the rasa of affection.
MT: Are you able to tell us more about that?
RJ: Hmmm. Well, in keeping with the aesthetic tradition, there are nine specific rasas, or tastes, that come through not only poetry, but any murals. And so they can mix. Nevertheless, it’s not only an emotional taste, it’s something deeper, it’s the concept that rarefied, refined, emotional connection is Brahma Swada–gives you the taste of absolutely the, Raso Vai Saha, Taittiriya. Upanishad. Sahadic Divine is rasa, is the flow of feeling. So the taste is alleged to be one in all , it’s overwhelming. When the center is overwhelmed, then there are tears, then you definitely get goosebumps, then you definitely roll on the ground. That’s the form of way people read this. The truth is, once I read this a couple of times in India, they observed like how I used to be reading, was I reading clinically? Or was I reading from the center? That was like the large thing that they were in search of. Not, did he translate that accurately? Does he understand the ras?
MT: Yeah, so in our own culture in relatively somewhat recent times, it jogs my memory of something like bebop horn players. Or as you brought up the Beats, or something, where it’s mainly concerning the feeling.
RJ: Yes, it’s all concerning the feeling. But it surely’s not simply feeling, like if Plato made a sandwich of feeling and being, it’s something like this. And the easiest way I could describe it’s: imagine that a horrible thing happens in your neighborhood, a automobile runs over a child, that’s horrible. We’re all upset, we write within the newspaper, we go to the funerals, we’ve got to vary the traffic laws, all this. But, in case you see a movie a few automobile running over a child, it abstracts it from the concrete external and brings it into the purity of that feeling itself. And that’s what rasa is alleged to do. And what’s really interesting is that the things that help create rasa are things just like the springtime, the clouds, the flowers, the natural world is ready to be of Vyabhicāri, an adjunct that helps create this divine mood.
MT: It’s so interesting, because we may run into stuff like this, perhaps in a Judeo-Christian context, there could be a few of it. But in the fashionable West, in Hindu or Buddhist traditions, particularly Buddhist traditions, there’s not plenty of this sense tone sort of work happening, you recognize, it tends to be barely, or perhaps not so barely, more mental and clinical and somewhat cold, right? Even when it’s intended to be emotional, like something like a metta practice or a Brahma Vihara practice can come off as a bit bit rote and a bit bit sterile.
RJ: Yeah. The one place I do know of where there was a mixture of the Buddhist tradition and aesthetic coming together was in Japan, not only Zen however the Tantric practices in Japan, which involve all types of artwork and template constructing, and haiku poetry.
MT: Well, and we get the identical thing in Vajrayana in Bengal, and likewise Vajrayana in Tibet, where every male or female master is writing a song of awakening or a joyous celebration of liberation poem, or whatever. The poetry tradition is admittedly reasonably vast.
RJ: Yeah.
MT: And it’s intended to be a part of practice and yet, doesn’t appear to be used quite that way. I mean, even once we’re reading those poems were slogging through the literal translation, and there doesn’t appear to be much of an try to often, at the least that I’ve seen, to actually tap the barrel of ras there and begin to feel it. Really let your heart swell with it.
RJ: Yeah, well, where does it come from? The Sanskrit aesthetic tradition goes back to the Vedic tradition, which was all poems. I mean, all of the Vedic mantras are also poems, they usually’re not only personal poems, but they’re poems of offering to the divinities of nature. And I’d see Kavya as an offspring of that. So you have got a young 11-year-old Ramakrishna, who sees a cloud within the sky and faints in ecstasy. That might be considered perhaps irresponsible in certain Western institutions. But within the aesthetic traditions of India, he’s considered a Rasika, someone who was really in a position to taste the ras.
MT: And it is a Meghavarnam context? Like he’s seeing the cloud because the limbs of–or the colour–of Krishna.
RJ: He never says, he never says. Earlier, there was one other saint Madhavendra Puri, who did see the cloud as Krishna because his body is alleged to be the colour of a dark rain cloud.
MT: Yeah. Same as Vishnu.
RJ: In Zen, these could be seen because the to ras, the blossoms in spring, and the wind blowing through the trees, and the birds within the sky. These are all helping to create the ras. And so nature becomes a partner in the best way of the center, which I feel is admittedly powerful, because still within the West, when people think concerning the way of the center, they’re generally either fascinated about romantic love, or some form of sentimental relationship with the world, versus the depth of it, that goes beyond preferences, or likes, or dislikes and integrates the world. That’s what’s so powerful for me. It’s not an enlightenment. That’s why I call it a Tantric sensibility. It’s not a state that’s beyond the natural world. It’s a state that is a component of the incorporation of the natural world.
We do have, within the Western tradition, at the least one story that form of shows what’s happening, in that, when Rabbi Akiva and his three of 4 mystical companions went on this journey to the Holy of Holies. After which they got here out and one killed himself, one gave up the religion, one went insane. And Akiva is the just one who stayed, quote, normally alive.
So for a whole bunch of years, the rabbis asked what did they see what happened? What was the large deal? And what they got here up with was that when Akiva went to the Holy of Holies, what he saw was this grass, trees, clouds, everyone else was expecting something. But Akiva realized that that is it, you recognize, and that was beyond the comprehension of the non-poetic world.
And interestingly, Akiva was the one who insisted on keeping the Song of Solomon, the Song of Songs within the Bible, whereas the opposite editors were said to say, Oh, what’s this doing here? What are these love songs doing in a spiritual and non secular text? So, where is the space of the aesthetic? Is it something lower that you just come out of? Is it something that may take you higher? Something like that’s happening for me.
MT: How would you are feeling about reading a few your favorite verses of this in Sanskrit and just giving us their English meaning?
RJ: One thing, though, that I’ll mention is, why did I need to do that? How did this occur? Barbara Stoler Miller, who was the premier translator of Sanskrit poetry for her generation, and I first saw her she was giving a discuss Kalidasa. And when she mentioned Kalidasa’s name, I saw an excellent royal blue light throughout her. And I just thought to myself, holy shit, she is receiving transmission. She’s not only a tutorial; they’re coming through her. And indeed, when she translated any text, she would at all times light a candle to the creator of that text, simply to acknowledge where it’s coming from. In order that was form of my introduction to it. And thru her, I got enthusiastic about the Meghaduta, and she or he was the one who charged me with translating it. So it comes through a lineage of sorts. I’ll read the primary couple of verses sounds.
MT: Great.
RJ: Sanskrit:
That’s the primary verse which I translate as, “A yaksha banished in grievous exile from his beloved for a 12 months, his power eclipsed by the curse of his Lord, for having swerved from his duty, made his dwelling among the many Hermitages of Rāmagiri, whose waters were hollowed by the ablutions of Janaka’s daughter, and whose trees were wealthy with shade.”
Now with a view to understand what the Sanskrit aesthetic tradition calls the Divani or the resonance of this verse, it helps to know that Rama Giri means mountain of Rama, who’s God, and Janaka’s daughter is Sita, who’s the female aspect of the divinity.
So within the very first verse, the Meghaduta casts the yaksha’s exile inside the greater context of Rama being separated from Sita. So it takes on all the facility of this story, which everybody in India has known for 1000’s of years. So, in some ways, it’s commenting on this Ramayana, the theme.
I’ll do another, okay?
MT: Yes.
RJ: Sanskrit:
English: “On that hill, Adrau lovelorn, and months from his mate, his wrist so wasted that it had shed its golden bracelet, he saw throughout the first full moon of the season of Ashadha, a cloud nuzzling a mountain ridge, like a handsome elephant, playfully butting the side of a hill.
Now here Sanskrit can enable you and a knowledge of the gathering of myths, since it is alleged in a lot of texts that the elephants used to fly until Indra along with his thunderbolt, being threatened by them, form of knocked them down and their ears–the clouds–separated. So the clouds are what’s left to them. So the cloud is seen as an elephant. And never only an elephant, but Preksheni, a ravishing elephant. After which this word, nuzzling the side of a hill, pariṇata gaja prekṣanỉyaṃ. That word, parinatmi, can also be a word within the lexicon of the aesthetic tradition for the transformation that happens, from the mundane to the divine. So it’s working on many levels.
MT: Yeah. And immediately, we’re going into what for me is fascinating: Sanskrit deconstruction, and etymology, and so forth. And yet for us, after all, we now have now left the center realm, right, and we’re fully within the mental.
RJ: Well, let’s stay in mental for a second, because I’m curious what you think that of this fifth verse, which I’ll just read in English, since it brings out the philosophical query, “What does a cloud, mix of smoke, flame, water, and wind, need to do with meaningful messages meant to be conveyed by the fit senses of the living? Heedless of this from ardent fervor, the yaksha made his request, for lovers afflicted by passion, can not tell the aware from the inert.”
So in the fashionable problems with deconstruction–and the query is: Can language ever mean anything? Language is a cloth construct. It’s fabricated from smoke, flame, wind, water, like a cloud. How can that carry a living message? And certain schools say, it could’t, that words can never point to a truth. They’re just things that you have got to cope with to get through them or go into utter silence.
But here the aesthetic way is something different. It says that those that are inciters to ras, who’re deeply afflicted by love, by passion; they don’t see a difference between the inert world and the living world, it becomes one world. So at this point–and you may take your pick–the yaksha is insane, or he’s seeing something in a deeper and more profound way.
MT: And so he principally beseeches this cloud to hold his message.
RJ: Yes.
MT: And after all, we might are inclined to think that that’s insane. A cloud can’t carry a message.
RJ: Exactly.
MT: And yet, as you’re saying, his heart is so cracked open, he’s so wide open that there’s something deeper than mundane clinical logic happening here.
RJ: Yeah, within the Islamic tradition, it is alleged that Mohammed, Mohammed had a caravan. And in that caravan, there was this one 16-year-old who is very beautiful, 16-year-old boy, actually. And most of the people thought he’s a good-looking young guy. But Muhammad saw this person because the Archangel Gabriel, and that changes all the pieces. Was Mohammed hallucinating? Or was he seeing more deeply into the fact of things? That, I feel, is the query that the Meghaduta asks about language? Can language; can vision; can beauty also take you into that absolute place? Or do you have got to depart it behind?
MT: And it looks as if the reply is firmly: Yes, it could take you into that place, at the least in keeping with the tradition.
RJ: Yes. As a “Buddhist meditator,” how do you are feeling about that? With language, any value in it besides being more mental?
MT: Well, after all, there’s many levels of value to language; for us to learn the teachings in any respect; for us to learn the practices in any respect, we want language; for us to speak with our fellows, our Sangha members, our caravan of co-religionists, or co-meditators, or co-spiritual journeyists, we want all that. But more deeply, the place where you’re asking the query, yeah, I feel it jogs my memory of Yukio Mishima. And I’m remembering this from like, 30 years ago, so I may be barely misremembering it, but he and Kafka talk concerning the way that language could be destructive and get in the best way, but moreover, used properly they usually do mean it, I feel, in a poetic sense, language isn’t , it’s not carrying the reality, but it could be the finger on the moon that basically actually does point at this nonverbal, nonlinguistic, irrational deep truth.
RJ: Okay,
MT: And so it could take you there, it could transport you there, even when you have got to depart the language behind once you get there.
RJ: Okay, to me, that might be the difference between, let’s say, a more jñana path, you permit the language behind, and an aesthetic path where the language, just like the cloud, it jumps beyond itself, and it communicates to the center.
But behind that is one other query, a very interesting one, that different practitioners have a look at in a different way, which is what’s language? When you’re a Buddhist or Western deconstructive philosopher, language is only conventional. When you’re a Kabbalist or Abhinavagupta within the Sanskrit tradition, language is coming out of the body of Lord Shiva, it’s the emergence of the body of God. So language has the power to take you back to that divinity.
When you don’t resonate with the Rama/Sita story, the Meghaduta becomes just a pleasant poem about nature. But when from the primary verse, the creator is pushing you to resonate, that is concerning the ultimate meeting and separation, it takes on a bigger context.
MT: I just need to jump in and say, after all, Vajrayana Buddhism says something quite just like what Abhinavagupta says. So it’s not in some way un-Buddhist to say that. I need to return to the story of Rama and Sita because that’s an enormous a part of my background and training is working with that story. Essentially the most intense moment for me personally of the whole story is correct in the center. It’s not at the tip with the large finale and all that. Essentially the most intense moment is when Hanuman flies alone to Lanka and shrinks himself right down to be a bit monkey so he’s not terrifying, and hides in a tree within the garden of Ravana in order that he can secretly speak with Sita.
RJ: Right
MT: And provides her a message of hope. It’s even called
RJ: Sundara Kanda. Yeah.
MT: It’s just exquisite and heartbreaking and cracks you open, cracks me open, anyway, to something unbelievably deep, but at the identical time form of inexpressible. At the very least I can’t express it. But the purpose being that, I see that within the Meghaduta they’re referring to that moment very often. Are you able to tell us a bit bit more about that?
RJ: One thing really interesting about that voyage of Hanuman is, within the text of Hanuman’s journey, he’s continually in comparison with a cloud because he’s a shapeshifter. And one other really interesting thing about that verse, it reads, , which Hanuman went along with his mind. It was a shamanic journey, regardless that it’s described as a physical journey. So the cloud is participating on this archetype of Duta of the messenger.
MT: And after all, Hanuman is named Rama Duta.
RJ: Yeah, a messenger of Rama. While you were a child in junior highschool and also you liked a lady or a lady liked you, they might send a messenger to let you recognize that someone likes you. The messenger is an intimate a part of the Shringara tradition, of the tradition of affection and separation, they bridge the gap. So the Meghaduta refers to that verse twice, because Hanuman jumps over the mountain and finds Sita after which shows her Rama’s ring; that he’s true. And, after all, the yaksha is asking the cloud to be like Hanuman, but that is where the Western academic and Indian practitioner traditions diverge, and we call them epic narratives. But from the viewpoint of people that live this, it’s not only that it really happened, it’s that it’s at all times happening.
So Hanuman has Rama’s ring to prove his veracity. In a while, it is alleged that when Rama is on the point of leave the earth, he drops his ring, and he says, Hanuman, Are you able to please get my ring and Hanuman says, Sure, and he looks down, he can’t find it. He goes down deeper and deeper and deeper. And at last, he lands in Patala Lokah which is the very bottom of the universe. And the Lord of Patala Lokah says, Hanumanji, what are you doing here? And he says, My Lord Rama lost his ring, I’m here to seek out it. And the Lord of Patala Lokah says well, which one? and he shows him a field and there are a whole bunch of 1000’s of rings. And he says, At any time when Rama’s Lila is finished, and he’s ready to depart the earth, he drops his ring. So from the angle of the tradition, this story is alive–is at all times occurring. It’s happening now. And we’re all a part of it.
MT: Leveraging off that concept of we’re all a part of it, how do you see this poem tying into a contemporary sensibility of nature, ecology, the role of person-in-world, and so forth?
RJ: That is one more reason I desired to work with this poem and translate it because I see it as a… well, the word that’s coming to my mind is to the isolation of the anthropos, that all the pieces is predicated on human consciousness and nothing else matters. After we expand into what Buddhists might call Sambhogakaya or the Anima Mundi, then all the pieces is alive and speaking, and all the pieces is manifesting in every single place. So what we are inclined to call wouldn’t be external, nevertheless it’s the tapestry of reality. And a method I even have worked this–one in all my teachers, Hilda Charlton once said, she remembered the day in her life, when she realized that she didn’t need to search for love because, quote, “I’m love.” And I’d turn that on the opposite side and say that, from the aesthetic viewpoint, it’s not I’m love, or you’re love, but that is love, or because the Upanishads put it Sarva khalvidam brahma–all of this indeed is the reality.
So I feel it’s expanding the notion of what it means to be in contact literally, and Abhinavagupta used this word in his Tantric texts that the goal was –means to contact, touch, to be touched by the world beyond concepts. And so I feel that this is admittedly helpful.
And I can relate a story that I do mention in . I used to be in Vrindavan which is the bhakti, home of Sri Krishna. And what was I doing in Vrindavan? Reading Krishnamurti, and going into suits because on one hand, there’s his bhakti and, you recognize, the murti and everyone seems to be chanting, and alternatively, here comes Krishnamurti saying it’s all just–it’s all of your mind and don’t, you recognize, get out of it. So Śripada Baba got here along in the future, this Avhadut, an inexplicably charismatic and strange Sadhu, and I asked him, I said, What do you make of this? And, to my surprise, to start with, he had read Krishnamurti. After which he said to me, When Krishnamurti speaks concerning the trees and the clouds, and the air, he said, that’s murti because murti simply means form. In order that form of obliterated this dichotomy between energy and energetic between you recognize, phenomena and an unmoved mover he just said it’s all murti.
MT: And after all, he’s making a bit pun with Krishnamurti’s name, as well.
RJ: Exactly, yes. You recognize, James Hillman used to make the purpose that the word environment is already a creation of separation. Why can we call it environment? Why don’t we call it place? And as an alternative of considering of it , that we’re a part of the place, you recognize, the place predominates, not the me. And I find that the Meghaduta, and the best way it views nature, can offer a corrective to this concept that’s been bred into us that the natural world is a Monopoly board that we just walk on.
MT: We’re taught that the world is just something that we travel through, hopefully as quickly as possible, and may exploit in various ways.
RJ: Yeah. And we get so hung up on this query, Who am I? I mean, it could be a Koan, in case you’re Ramana Maharshi. It could actually be a misapprehension in case you’re a very good ideological, Buddhist. Bhakti would see it you recognize, you’re a Das, you’re a servant of God. However the aesthetic tradition–it form of takes you thru the backdoor. It’s not who’re you? It’s what’s all this? And you’re a part of all this. And that’s what I like about Akiva. He saw all this and it was enough. Could it’s that we are able to’t see nature because we’re too busy? And I even have found that reading Meghaduta has helped me see–not only clouds, but trees and the earth that I’m walking on, and that I’m a part of this. It’s not only a painting that I’m taking a look at.
MT: The concept of environment is nearly like opposite the thought of in-context.
RJ: Yeah, remember the old books?
MT: I never read them. But yes.
RJ: Well, there’s one thing in there, which has at all times stayed with me where whoever Seth could also be, says that the weather is non-different from emotions, just like the weather, it’s the emotional body of the planet. And the one thing we didn’t mention–that the Meghaduta takes place within the rainy season, the primary day of month of Oshaja, because within the rain, you’re often separated out of your lover. It was a time once you couldn’t turn home. In order that’s once you write poetry.
MT: The rainy season the monsoon is so intense in India, you may’t travel since the roads all turn to knee-deep mud, yeah.
RJ: Mush with miles of dead insects and all that. Yes.
MT: And so this cloud is the primary cloud of the monsoon coming in.
RJ: Exactly. The opposite thing, the brilliance of Meghaduta, is the entire poem he’s talking to the cloud, he’s giving exquisite details of the voyage and only one example, when the cloud involves Kailash within the Himalayas, the cloud is instructed to do puja to Shiva, worship Shiva, along with his drum, well, Where is Shiva? Where’s the drum? Well, the upraised arms of the trees are Shiva’s arms, and the sunshine of the evening twilight coming through his arms is Shiva’s red drum, and the thunder is the beating of the drum. And what I got from reading Meghaduta is that that is greater than metaphor, that in case you could be with nature, you may hear the song of nature, you may see the ceremony happening. It’s happening on a regular basis. We’re just too busy to see it.
MT: Yeah, too busy to see it, and too dissociated from it.
RJ: Dissociated. Yes.
MT: Right? Something that touches me each day, I’m going for long walks within the park or within the woods, almost each day. And something that’s so poignant is just there are numerous birds, and one in all the places I walk large jackrabbits, and plenty of animal beings on the market. And it’s so obvious to me that they’re sentient and engaged and that they usually are not in some way different, or lower than us. And nothing about our culture wants you to think that way.
RJ: Right.
MT: And it’s excruciating, to be so objectifying of nature since it turns us into some form of weird object as well. And by denigrating an animal’s consciousness, it equally denigrates our own.
RJ: Animals and water and earth.
MT: You’re right. It’s not only animals. It’s the water and the trees and the sky.
RJ: Once I witnessed a native woman pray for an hour and a half over a pail of water, I can never have a look at water the identical way. And within the Bhagavad Gita, no less of being than Krishna says, I’m the taste of water. So yeah, it’s the re-ensouling of the natural world. That’s what I’m after.
MT: So you recognize, this poem comes from a practice that’s all about love poetry. And it is ready in this sort of frame of the lovers being separated like we were talking about. But do you think that that he just used that–Kalidasa used that as just form of a fast frame? Or is there some deep connection between this sort of nature aesthetic and love?
RJ: To me, it’s so deep that it’s scary because Kalidasa is exquisitely aware of the contradiction that he’s coping with. How can a cloud carry a message? How can language lead you to pure love or any love? The exquisite part is that the cloud within the poem never goes anywhere, the meeting never happens. Kalidasa could be very clear that that is all a fantasy within the mind of the yaksha. We’ve all had the experience, or perhaps not everyone, but lots of us, where you have got an entire fantasy about being in love with someone. After which it seems that the opposite person is just not sharing that fantasy in any respect.
MT: It’s actually a typical experience for all of us. Yes.
RJ: And I see the aesthetic tradition as one in all the antidotes to the romantic fallacy that the love we’re looking for is just not this one other person, who’s the one-person-in-the-world-who’s-going-to-make-me-whole form of thing. But reasonably Kalidasa is using that separation to incite the vision of the natural world, where you realize sooner or later that that is–all of it’s not I like you, and even I’m loved, literally, as Dante says, at the tip of the Divine Comedy, love is popping the celebrities, the ocean is love. And plenty of indigenous traditions talk about this and discuss this. And may we get back to being re-enchanted by the world we live in? As an alternative of attempting to get out of it?
Yeah, all of us fall in love. And all of us have this, and all of us have heartbreak, and all of us have wonderful moments. But on that journey, what number of things did you notice? Right and your circle? And did you’re keen on the sparrow that got here up in your porch this morning? Or did you appreciate the exquisiteness of the daylight today, and that becomes an overwhelm of appreciation. And the Sanskrit word for that’s one in all the nine principle rasa’s is named, which implies wonder. And there are places–and also you and I even have each been there–literal physical places on the planet, Vrindaban, where people walk around all day using the mudra of wonder, like we’re living wonder. That’s where I feel it’s priceless in re-directing our like to the wonder around us, to not the exclusion of anybody, but to the inclusion of everybody.
MT: This aspect of wonder is admittedly pointed to in among the nondual traditions whether it’s called a nondual Shiava Tantra type stuff or Dzogchen, we now have our practices that we are able to do in our meditations, and all our very intense sadhanas, and so forth. And/or you may simply walk around in a state of wonder. And that’s seen as almost like an equal path or an end run that takes you to the identical place of pristine awareness, seeing the entire world as this divine expression of either; awareness as deity, or the Buddha nature or Samatha Bhadra or whatever, but that mood of wonder seems to be just like the secret key.
RJ: In order that’s awesome. You recognize, there’s an interesting practice with this. When you were a Sanskrit student in India, you’d read the Meghaduta over and once again and it will open the center. What Hilda Charlton used to ask us to do sometimes is return to your favorite songs, pop songs, and only a slight tweak, just see that it’s all about god, and it should open your heart in a latest way.
MT: Did you discover that worked for you?
RJ: It did. All of the songs that I used–Oh, I can’t live without you, you recognize, once I put absolutely the in the middle, all of them made rather a lot more sense.
MT: There’s the wonderful moment, or horrible moment when one is a youngster and the hormones hit good and the situation comes together where you suddenly understand what love songs are about.
RJ: Yes.
MT: And Hilda anyway, is suggesting a second tier of that.
RJ: And you recognize, more singing and dancing. Not show. One thing that basically pained me and perhaps I’m only a spiritual snob but I once went to a retreat center and there was going to be a kirtan and someone was talking to me at this kirtan congregational chanting. And so they asked me, Do you recognize who the performers are? And I said, What? It’s not a performance. It’s absolutely not a performance. And I even have been within the temples in India where singing is a component of–you’ve been there too–the each day practice. And so they’re very clear that what makes the singing priceless is the intention and who you’re singing it for, and so forth and so forth.
MT: Yeah, exactly. Most of the places I’ve been in India, there was wonderful, unbelievably, virtuoso musicality happening. But there have been also many villages where the singing was painfully out of tune, and just non-musical in every possible way. And yet, the mood was there, right? The bhav, the ras was actually there, and you would feel it.
RJ: Bhav means the deep feeling. Ras is when that deep feeling gets so strong that it transcends time and space. And that’s, you recognize, Raso Vai Saha. The Divine is the Ras, which I like. And I even have good reason to wish to stay on the planet a bit bit longer because I asked Shrivatsa Goswami–who’s my colleague, friend, mentor, and runs the Radha Raman Temple in Vrindavan–if he thinks that there would ever be a possibility if I could chant within the temple, only once? He wrote me back, he said, Radha Raman could be delighted. So I see that because the apotheosis of this lifetime; if I can get there.
MT: Yes. And also you’ve taken me to that temple before what a tremendous place. Yeah. So now that travel restrictions are lifted, and so forth, are you fascinated about going there?
RJ: Actually fascinated about this summer going to Badrinath, where I’ve never been. That’s like my first pilgrimage.
MT: I’ve been there. It’s amazing. Rick, you teach religion at Vassar. And so forth.
RJ: Used to.
MT: You only retired. That’s right. Congratulations. But that’s very recent, extremely recent, so long as I’ve known you, which is greater than 20 years now, you’ve been a professor of faith. So how have you ever attempted to speak or share this feast of each heart-opening poetry and connection to nature and all these themes along with your students? And the way successful or unsuccessful has that been?
RJ: That’s really interesting. I created a course just a couple of years ago, called “Spirituality, Environment, and Ecology.” And my rationale for creating this course was: Vassar has an enormous environmental studies program and plenty of people giving courses on so-called the environment they usually’re all science-based. And I haven’t any problem with that if you have got the opposite side to the aesthetic side. So for the ultimate exam, students needed to walk from Vassar College right down to the river, the Mahicantuck or Hudson River, the river that flows each ways. It’s a 2.5-mile walk, and the task was to walk to the river and see what you observe along the best way.
MT: Now, you gave one other name for the Hudson River. What was that?
RJ: That’s the native name, which I at all times mispronounce, nevertheless it means the river that flows each ways Mahicantuck or Mahikannituck, which is the Lennape/Wappinger name for the river. And it flows each ways since it’s an estuary, the water flows up from the Atlantic and down from the St. Lawrence within the mountains.
MT: So it has interaction with the tides.
RJ: Yes.
MT: And so here’s the scholars walking from Vassar right down to the Hudson.
RJ: And what was amazing to me was how little people observed. It just highlighted our poverty of taking note of anything outside of our own mind. There’s a ravishing poem about this by the late Lew Welch. You recognize, Gary Snyder’s friend, the Beat poet.
MT: Yeah.
RJ: Step out onto the planet.
Draw a circle 100 feet round.
Contained in the circle are 300 things no person understands,
and perhaps no person’s ever seen.
What number of are you able to find?
MT: Oh, nice practice there.
RJ: Yeah. So within the course, we read stuff by Gary Snyder, and Robin Kimmerer, , which is a ravishing book about contemporary indigenous practices with the earth. We took people out. We spent as much time as we could out of the classroom. So all of this has led me within the last 10 years, my tenure at Vassar to give attention to things like embodiment and so forth and so forth. That’s form of how I’ve done my best to do it.
It’s been very difficult since it has led me to query the whole culture of reading itself. And fortunately, or perhaps not, in case you’re a literary person, is gone. You recognize, all the pieces is interwoven in a synesthesia of sound, image, and sense. But in case you think concerning the act of reading, as we are inclined to do it; silently inside ourselves, you’re sitting here and your mind is someplace else. It’s almost just like the antithesis of mindfulness.
MT: Yeah, you’re generating an entire mental realm, that’s not where you’re at.
RJ: Exactly. So those are among the things I attempted to do at Vassar.
Taking a clue from the best way reading is practiced in a liturgical setting. In India, in case you go to an ashram, for instance, you read with others, you don’t read for volume, you read one verse, and then you definitely sit down and let it wash over you, and what does it do to you? That’s one thing.
And the following thing is what I’m doing now at home, as you recognize, I’m working on a book about being at home, just taking the time to pay as exquisite attention as possible to each item that you just “own,” that has constellated itself in your life. And what’s your relationship to it–getting out of the concept that we now have things and into the concept that we’re with the things?
MT: And so how does that practice begin to affect you?
RJ: Well, to start with, you would like less things since you’re paying more attention to the things that you have got. Second of all, you would like less entertainment, since the things that you have got are so beautiful and deep and nuanced, form of like at the tip of , where Thoreau has this woodcarver carving a stick and it goes on for eons. So I feel that re-constellating our attention away from the intermediary of mind and going back into direct contact with whatever’s there. In poetry, it’s words, as beings, not words is something I exploit. The words are a present, we’re like a chalice, and the words are available. So what can I do? It’s form of an aesthetic type of mindfulness. And the best way I do it is thru the consciousness of offering. Cooking is an offering. Writing is an offering. And so is walking down the road. And that’s my very own practice, not a proper offering, I’m not constructing a temple and following a selected scripture, but I’m honoring whatever’s in that 100-foot radius of my little life, and really honoring it.
One thing that Kalidasa shows me and also you get this in Apache culture is also that each place has a story. There is no such thing as a such thing as an objective world. Every place has these narratives around them, you may call them song lines, or whatever. So in case you don’t know the story of your ring, or the story of your watch, or the story of your shirt, you’re form of impoverished because these stories wish to be expressed. And once you gift something, you’re gifting, not only an object, but all of the stories which are imbued in that object.
Now plenty of us have been trained to say, Oh, that’s only a story, transcend story to pure consciousness. But when Rūpaṃ śūnyatā śunyataiva rūpam – if form and emptiness are inter-distinguishable, or because the Sanskrit people said, inconceivably and concurrently one and different, then the cloud, the tree is as necessary as the sensation in the center, they usually are not different. That for me is the work or re-ensouling the objects in your world.
And folks do that. Sometimes people give their automobile a reputation, they really have a relationship with the automobile. It’s not only a machine that I’m driving around till it breaks. The way in which we now have people fascinated about the Earth without delay. We’re going to drive it around till it breaks after which we’ll go to Mars. That story doesn’t encourage me in any respect. What inspires me is, what happened on this street is very important. And the lineage of stories. It’s very interesting. Within the yoga sutra, memory is alleged to be a klasha or an obstacle.
When TS Eliot wrote , he was considering of each Chaucer and the Buddha, “April is the cruelest month, lilacs within the dead land, mixing memory and desire.” The word for memory in Sanskrit smarta is word for Cupid, for desire. If we make this the enemy, we’re back within the ascetic modality of trying to depart the Earth, attempting to elevate ourselves. Whereas there are alternatives. And one in all them is seeing memory in its capability for opening, reasonably than closing. And the quintessential to me, essentially the most beautiful verse in all
ramyāṇi vikṣya madhurāṃśca niṣamya śabdān
paryutsuki bhavati yat sukhino ‘pi jantuḥ
yaccetasā smarati nūnam abodha pūrvaṃ
bhāvasthirāṇi jananātarasauhṛdāni
Hearing something beautiful, and seeing beautiful sights, even perhaps a completely happy person becomes uneasy, because they remember loves from one other life buried deep of their being. That’s a distinct form of memory. Meghaduta awakens a memory, a distinct form of memory, on the time once we were flying with the clouds, once we were at home on the planet. And that’s the worth, I feel, in memory and language when it’s used poetically and excuse the word but spiritually.
MT: And isn’t it ironic how the very word for mindfulness and Sanskrit Smriti means to recollect.
RJ: That’s so amazing. Yes, that is actually amazing. As you recognize, Gurdjieff used the word remembrance, self-remembrance. So similar to there’s different sorts of language. Perhaps there’s different sorts of memory of remembering.
MT: Rick, thanks a lot for joining me on the Deconstructing Yourself podcast today.
RJ: Oh, it’s my pleasure to hang around with you.
MT: Confer with you soon.
RJ: Thanks, Michael. Thanks a lot. Thanks
