Saundarya Lahari

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SAUNDARYA LAHARI

VERSE 7

A KEY VERSE
FOUR-FOLD SCHEMATIZATION

क्वणत्काञ्ची-दामा करि कलभ कुम्भ-स्तननता
परिक्षीणा मध्ये परिणत शरच्चन्द्र-वदना ।
धनुर्बाणान् पाशं सृ॒णिमपि दधाना करतलैः
पुरस्ता दास्तां नः पुरमथितु राहो-पुरुषिका

kvanat kancidama karikalabha kumbha stananata
pariksina maddhye parinata saraccandra vadana
dhanur bhanan pasam srnim api dadhana karatalaih
purastad astam nah puramadhitur aho purusika

O let her appear before us, that proud counterpart of the City-Burner
Resounding with waist belt of jingle bells, recumbent by breasts like frontal bulges of a calf elephant,
Slim of waist, with autumnal full-moon mature face,
Holding aloft bow and arrow, noose and goad.

Verse 7 seems to imply a challenge by the author, and it is meant as a key to the structural dynamism applied to the content of the beauty, having both name and form, at the core of the otherwise empty notion of the Absolute. Its position toward the end of the first ten verses is evidently meant to indicate the covering of the preliminaries in respect of this work. It is an appeal that directly apostrophizes the personification of Absolute Beauty, who is the central figure for the whole of this work: "Let her appear before our eyes in as concrete and real a form as we could possibly expect".

Beauty has to be given some kind of visible form, either as a Lakshmi, or a Saraswati, or even a Kali, as conventionally known to the Indian mind, to confer on it any tangible meaning at all. Such divinities have all to be fused together into one abstracted and generalized dynamic personal expression in which all the levels and four-fold aspects implied in each of them could be brought together into active interplay under a universal concrete perspective. The three previous verses could be seen to have prepared the ground step-by-step for this verse. All the six previous ones are synthetically put together and summarily reviewed here to afford a firm basis for the further elaboration of the wisdom contained in the rest of the work. If we look at the eighth verse in advance, we can see the emergence of a definite personality of the Goddess, seated on a couch and represented in a form suitable for the contemplative purposes of an actual yogi. Here, however, the author takes his stand on a more neutral ground between matter and mind.

Advaitic verity is neither real nor abstract, but something that places itself at the core of consciousness; sometimes real, sometimes amorphous or abstract. The dancing Shiva in his sinuous movement represents the pure verticalized process of the cosmic flux of becoming. He is the City-Burner who descends in all his burning glory onto a situation which is to be ontologically understood at a lower level in the vertical axis. The last line of this verse makes direct reference to the Goddess, meant here to be a counterpart of the City-Burner as a dynamic version at an ontological level. Her dance is not usually that of a masculine tandava, but is filled with a grace natural to the feminine principle, slow and heavy, known as lasya - a dance which has a more gentle, horizontalized grace. Here, however, as she still remains the wife of the City-Burner, a certain degree of masculinity remains grafted on to her, to give a positive revaluation to her personality which is otherwise fully feminine. No contradiction is to be implied here. There are many such features that we have put together in order to enter into the full spirit of this verse, which, as we have said, is both a key and a challenge to us. Thousands of years of accepted Sanskrit as well as Tamil poetic conventions have been telescoped, as it were, into the four lines of this verse.

The paradox of the first verse is only heightened before being abolished at this stage of the work.

The world of fine particles of the second verse is also to be presupposed here to reach the neutral position to be revealed now only in very thin outline. It is as if we see a television screen with streaks of silver light vaguely playing on it, instead of it actually showing us a bright colourful scene. In between the over/under focusing, there is a neutral ground which is neither psychic nor physical. If it is visible at one moment, it is not visible at the next.

The quaternion structure of the third verse is also to be retained here, if what is depicted is to be treated in its totality as representing the structural dynamism that the author has outlined up to this point.

Besides the four-fold nature of the structural ground of the third verse, we have also to include that vertical dimension passing through the whole quaternion, by which cause is given primacy over effect.

Finally, we have to insert the occasionalism implied in the fifth and sixth verses, by which divinities and demiurges could equally attain absolutist status when coming within the purview or aegis of the normalized Goddess, who is meant to be neither too hypostatic nor too hierophantic. She stands on terra firma, while Shiva is the City-Burner placed high above. To get a vision of Absolute Beauty in female form in this thin neutral light, as intended by the author in this verse, one has to place oneself in the same neutral subjective mood, so that the seer could experience the overwhelming upsurge of Absolute Beauty by the sudden cancellation of what the seer represents and what he sees in gleaming outline. When viewed in such a correct perspective, this verse gives up some of its enigmas, without which it may not make any meaning at all, especially to a modern reader.

The first line refers to the sound of the jingling waist-belt of bells as the starting point conducive to making the vision appear to the reader in just that form intended by the author. The vision has only a schematic status, although it is dynamically presented here. Sound belongs to the conceptual side, while the schematic outline is a form. Thus, the dance meant to be revealed before our eyes is, in principle, the same as the well known Nataraja dance, conceived in a more normalized form, at a lower level. The sound of the waist-belt's bells is heightened when the dancing girl plants her feet as she enters the stage for her performance. By the sound of these bells, the onlookers are introduced at once into a world in which concepts and percepts cancel out into sheer beauty expressed through the art of dancing. Touching terra firma first represents the ontological starting point of the dance where sound meets form, and brings the horizontality of the earth into the total schematic situation. This is known in Sanskrit as jhankara (sudden jingling of the ankle bells) at the point where ontology has its impact and participation as between the earth and the mind.

After marking thus the horizontal bottom limit in the very first line, the poet refers us to the heavy breast region, which is to be imagined as a horizontal line, schematically understood, on the numerator side of the situation.

We also know at once that when it comes to their principle function, the necessity of feeding a newborn baby, the breasts of a woman are better when they are big and ponderous, although the breasts of a young maid before her maturity need not have the same ponderousness as in later years of full maternity. These two versions are reciprocal. Time is telescoped here, and intervals tend to be abolished in terms of an eternal present or moment. That is why the author does not stop the dance movement at the transition point, in passing from the recumbent form of the Goddess to one in which her breasts are compared to the frontal knobs of an elephant. This last reference is to lift the status of the breasts to a more hypostatic level of value content. There is a beautiful sinus curve and a torsion as well as an inside-outside transposal to be imagined by us in this transition from numerator breasts to their own denominator aspect. This figure-eight, which results from contraction, transposition, torsion between right and left and front and back, independent of big or small, near or far, can even be accentuated further. The dancing girl's beauty on the stage is meant to fill the whole field of vision intended to be summoned to our view here. Dancing consists mainly of bending and stretching, where the hips and breasts of a woman fuse themselves into a structural yin-yang model, both bright and dark at the same time. The dynamism is meant to be of increasing voltage until an absolute limit is reached, passing necessarily through the second- and third-dimensional perspectives to the full status of the fourth-dimensional version recognizable in the last line. In this last line the dancer and the Goddess attain to the maximum vertical height that it is possible to reach from the ontological side of the situation.

The "Dasakumaracarita" of Dandin contains such a contemplative version of a dancing girl, in which she is first represented as beginning the dance by touching the ground with both her fingers. From this simple standpoint her performance becomes more and more elaborate, as the jingling bells help us to cancel the merely visual with the conceptual counterparts of the dance. Elaborations go on in endless variety and as she is true to her name, Kandukavati, it is a magenta ball representing Eros that she plays with. She described in great detail as dexterously manipulating it by bending and stretching with beautiful torsion movements, so as to fill the whole stage or ground with her beauty.

But the final feat of all is represented as one meant to make the ball go upwards by hitting it with the back of her hands. The leap resembles that of Shiva's tandava, and is inserted there to give it the final touch of positivism in the vertical axis. It is referred to by Dandin as the "musical leap".

The dancing girl represents an ideogram which has been relied upon by a long line of master poets on the Indian soil to reveal the structure of the Absolute, long before Sankara himself adopted it here. It could be called the Kandukavati ideogram, one which has influenced erotic mystical literature throughout the centuries, from Uma of Upanishadic times to what is represented here, and which has been taken up and continued by Narayana Guru in his "Kali Natakam"

When the tempo or voltage of this dance attains to higher levels of expression, we pass from a third-dimensional level to a fourth-dimensional one. Weak reactions in nuclear physics, when influenced by a cyclotron, similarly pass to a perspective that is more fully verticalized, just as magnetism can, as it passes into electromagnetism. Thus the yin/yang structural pattern, with its vestige of duality between the two aspects, can progressively be abolished when electricity prevails more and more over the horizontal expression of weak magnetic fields.

Both the frontal bulges of the calf elephant and the recumbent breasts could thus become absorbed into a central structural locus radiating light equally from all around the circumference. This is the full face of the Goddess, viewed in a verticalized perspective as a conic section. The limitation of paper and description would naturally make the tilting of the face of the Goddess from a vertical to a horizontal view negligible. This is why the mature autumnal moon-like visage of the Goddess is presented to the view of the onlooker without apology. The view thus obtained is a frontal one, resulting from the tilting of a conic section, which, if it needed explanation, would have unnecessarily landed us in the intricacies of three-dimensional conics and geometry, which is thus kept out by Sankara for good reasons. If one should look at a face from the top of a wall, this circular conic section view would be justified.

After getting so far in our vision of the content of the beauty of the Absolute in three-dimensional terms, the remaining task for Sankara is to make this vision fully fourth-dimensional, or even multi-dimensional, in its status. The fourth-dimensional status is revealed in the third line, where the conventional monomarks of Indian iconography are attributed to the Goddess intended in this verse, conforming to the norms of a well-accepted iconographic language which has been developed through the ages and shaped finally by the successive contemplatives who revised and revalued the basic ideogram. The hands holding aloft bow and arrow, noose and goad, are meant to mark the horizontal and vertical structural dimensions of the Goddess, now viewed together in a fully fourth-dimensional perspective. The bow and arrow are aimed at making Shiva fall for her, but the goad and noose have, between them, a fully-verticalized function of normalizing the movement of something of a dark and spatial or earthy order, like an elephant. They are thus the four regulative principles in the grand flux of becoming, to be imagined as taking place within the context of time and space in a fourth-dimensional universe.

Finally, in the last line it is indicated that, although she is a Goddess belonging to the so-called weaker sex, she is still capable of attaining vertical heights in the same way as her husband by means of her direct affiliation to him. They have equality of status in every respect, as we shall see maintained throughout this work.

The question now remains whether the vision presented here is to be treated subjectively or to be taken as objectively positive. We shall see that, in the first part of this work up to Verse 41 inclusive, distinguished as "Ananda Lahari", the descriptions of the Goddess apply to the inner space within the yogi as part of his own personal experience.

Beyond the 41st verse, the title becomes "Saundarya Lahari", where the presentiment is on the side of the non-self rather than the self. We should, therefore, after the schematized dynamism has been presented in this verse, expect to see verses clothed in more realistic terms, so that they are to be placed inside or outside. This can be noticed in the very next verse. The last line refers to the "proud counterpart of the City-Burner", where we have to suppose that sex limitations are abolished and cancelled out.

Shiva, as Ardhanarisvara, is androgynous, a half-woman male god. Conversely, Shakti is here the proud Purushika, where the word Purusha, though normally applied to the male, is here permitted to be applied to the female on the same reciprocal principle as above.

One more point remains, which is the reference to the slimness of the waist. In other Sanskrit poems of Kalidasa and Sankara we have this same feature more directly referred to as mithyakalpita madhye - as the middle region having a false conceptual status only. The Absolute Goddess is said not to have any waist at all. It has to be abolished in the name of her schematic status, because here, schematically speaking, the meeting point of the apexes of two triangles is implied, one representing the hypostatic or metaphysical, and the other representing the hierophantic or the physical. Like the sand particles in an hourglass, the delicate passage or osmotic interchange between existence and essence that is taking place between the two is both nothing and something at the same time. This is a secret aspect of the structuralism to which Kalidasa and Sankara adhere throughout this and other works. Although abolished mathematically by its slim nothingness, we know that this waist region is the very part out of which everything is born. The paradox here is to be understood with its two rival structural reference points; one placed at the ontological end and the other at its opposite teleological limit. Ontologically, the double cones are to be placed base to base; while teleologically they are placed apex to apex. Both positions are equally valid. It is the ineffable nothingness of the vertical axis, which passes from ontology to teleology without interruption, that represents the Absolute Value factor called "Beauty" here. When such a parameter is produced positively or negatively, upwards or downwards, we attain to the fourth-dimensional or even multi-dimensional value-worlds within ourselves or in the cosmos outside of us. Cross-sections taken at any point on this vertical parameter will reveal various Mandalas or Chakras, which could be of infinite variety. Here we are more concerned with Chakras; while in Tibetan Buddhism the four-sided Mandala language is favoured and adopted. The very next verse gives us a picture of the Goddess seated within a structure which is suggestive of both a Mandala and a Chakra.

(Hypostatic union (from the Greek: ὑπόστασις, hypóstasis, sediment, foundation, substance, or subsistence) is a technical term in Christian theology employed to describe the union of Christ's humanity and divinity in one divine hypostasis. ED)

(Hierophantic, from hierophant, a person who brings religious congregants into the presence of that which is deemed holy. The word comes from Ancient Greece where it was constructed from the combination of ta hiera, "the holy," and phainein, "to show." ED)

("Kanduka" in Sanskrit means both "a ball" or a kind of time in music.

(Further comments on Kandukavati can be found in Saundarya Lahari / Notes: 1972/ File slp2. ED)

ADDITIONAL COMMENTS WITH STRUCTURAL DIAGRAMS RELATED TO THIS VERSE FROM SAUNDARYA LAHARI/NOTES.

WORD FOR WORD
kvanat kancidama - resounding with belt of jingle bells
kari kalabha kumba stananata - recumbent by bulging breasts like the frontal bulges of a young elephant
pariksina madhye - slim of waist
parinata saraccandra vadana - with autumnal full moon face
dhanur banan pasam srnim api - holding aloft bow with arrow, noose and goad
dadhana - bearing
karatalaih - within the grasp of hands
purasatad astam - let her appear
naha - for our sake
puram adhitur - of the City-Burner
aho purushika - o wonder, the proud counterpart

The Devi is here called Purushika - (a bold, virago-like figure) the counterpart of Shiva.
Her breasts are compared to the bumps on the forehead of a baby elephant.

(Purushika is a feminine form of the Sanskrit word "purusha" which originally meant "man" - it implies a woman with masculine qualities as well. "Aho" is an expression of wonder. ED)

She has a jingling waistband (a belt with bells).

She is slightly bent, implying torsion.
The breasts are like the bumps on an elephant's forehead, again shown with torsion; the waist is very thin.
The face is radiant, like the moon in spring.

She is the counter-ego of the City Burner, one of the names of Shiva.

He is proud on the Numerator side; She represents the Denominator aspect of this, with breasts like the knobs on the head of an elephant.

The most important factor is the jingling of the bells on the belt.

In this verse Sankara gives notice that he is going to structuralize boldly.

The Numerator breasts with the pride of an elephant balance the Denominator breasts, which are heavy in order to feed a baby.

(There is a counterpart of the face and breasts on the negative, denominator, side of the structure. ED)

Here there is an absolute balance between male and female.

The Devi is here called purushika (cognate with purusha - a man): the term implies a kind of pride - the Devi is as much masculine as feminine. She is neutral, like Joan of Arc.

Another version:

TRANSLATION
with waist-belt jingling
bent by breasts resembling the frontal knobs of a young elephant
slender at middle (waist)
having face like the full moon of early spring (sarat)
bow, arrow, noose, goad also (for the Devi's functions)
bearing (aloft)
by hands
before (as presented to the view of the devotee)
for us
of the city-burner
what wonder this purushika

The Devi's waist is slim; there is a Purushika pride.
The waist is also bent. She has a full, round face (in the bindusthana or central locus).

A prayer is made, coming from the down-and-out person at the Alpha Point at the negative pole, desperate for a four-handed Purushika.
This vision is seen when the man is about to die.
The weapons of the Purushika appear held aloft in her four hands as seen by the person who is making the prayer as he is about to die.

(A disciple of the Guru's once read him a quotation: "Death is a falling asleep and a forgetting".

The Guru vehemently said: "No, no! Death is a remembering and an awakening!". ED)

The weapons are the last things to be seen.
Human beings want a saviour; this is a natural desire.

The devotee is having a vision, meditating on the Devi.

1) This verse is completely structural, the gist of the Guru's structuralism.
2) (These two are blank in the original manuscript. ED)
3)
4) A logical parameter passing through the waist; faces in phases.

FILM MATERIAL
The Goddess is to be stretched (Numerator and Denominator factors separated), making the waist a thin vertical parameter; the two halves of the Goddess are to be rejoined.
The S-shaped figure will change into a figure-8, also into Yin-Yang counterparts eating one another. (This could introduce a screaming woman).

The face of the Goddess is to appear as a moon with its different phases.

Appropriate music is to be chosen for each phase of the action.

There will be four elephants preceding all this: their trunks to become the legs of a girl, the knobs on their foreheads to become her breasts.

Then pass her through a ring, when she begins to become thin.
Purushika should be wanting to kill you from the other side.

Her pride and glory, with very loud drumming and the trident of Shiva, is a numerator glory.

Medea

Woman must be screaming in her heart - show perhaps Medea killing her children or Kannagi burning Madurai - these are real tragedies; all of human life has suffering at the core.

(Kannagi, a legendary Tamil woman, is the central character of the Tamil epic Silpathikaram (100-300 CE). The story relates how Kannagi took revenge on the Pandyan King of Madurai for a mistaken death penalty imposed on her husband Kovalan, by cursing the city and causing it to be burnt down. ED).

The moon in different seasons can be imagined here, with clouds, but also without.
Here come light effects.

Also, she must shoot arrows in two different directions, because she is Purushika.

Another version:

Let that dominant counter ego-form of the City-Burner, with full moon-like face,
Through the jingling of Her waist band, bending by the bosom,
Resembling bulges on an elephant's front, very thin at waist,
Appear before us, holding aloft in Her hands, bow with arrow, noose and goad.

The bulging breasts of the Devi are like the two knobs on the forehead of a young elephant.

She is slim of waist with a face like the autumnal full moon.

Here Sankara is laying the foundation for the schemas. What has the pride of Shiva got to do with all this?

The knobs or protuberances are a kind of pushing of the ego.
They are the hardest and most egoistic part, when compared to the heavy breasts.

The Omega Point (Shiva) descends, burning the three cities.
The parameter from above is pride.(A woman does not want any reference to the vagina etc..)

The pride of Shiva from above is meeting the pride of the Devi from below.

Why is there reference to the jingling girdle? - this is to mark the horizontal line.
The breasts have both a numerator and a denominator aspect.

So we have the descending pride of Shiva and the ascending pride of the Devi.
Why is she bent under the weight of the breasts?
The face should be put in the centre.

The elephant means the Numerator side - pride
Heavy means the Denominator - existence.

Bow and arrow mean that She will punish someone, she is not defeated.

The noose means "to attract".

The goad is something to prod with.

So Sankara says:
"Let that image stand before me with all of its aspects and functions, fully self-sufficient with her pride - for the purpose of my meditations".
The beauty of the face is in the centre
Shiva descends to give beauty to the face.
The waist is thin, to indicate the vertical parameter or axis, bent to indicate the sinus curve.
The Numerator and Denominator sides are clearly demarcated by the waist.
"I have rediscovered mystical language": Nataraja Guru
By Herself, She can have heavy breasts - but how can she show the firm proud breasts without meeting the pride of Shiva?

In Verse 7, the Devi appears as "Purushika": do not try and copulate forcefully with Her: the Absolute cannot be defeated.

Kvanat kanchi dhama....
Why are the breasts like the frontal bulges of a calf elephant?
How does the change from slimness to heavy breasts take place?
It is an ascending dynamism, not descending.
The purushika (positive version of the Devi) emerges because of the change to the fourth dimension.

THE FOUR OBJECTS HELD BY THE DEVI IN VERSE 7:

The goad and noose regulate vertical progression.
The sugar-cane bow and flower arrow are for piercing the hearts of people.
The bow and arrow are symbolic monomarks frequent in the Upanishads.
Occasionalism is the interaction and participation of mind and matter.
(see Descartes)

Her hair is like a wriggling worm, becoming a figure-eight, and turning into monomarks.
The lower side becomes pure line, suggesting breasts or legs.
The positive function triumphs in the end.
It is like the weaving of a cane chair, it is made up of figure-eights tied in the middle, with the torsion holding it together.

The conical breasts imply triumph, like the protuberances on an elephant's forehead.

She holds up the flag like Joan of Arc; on the flag is Shiva meditating, then everything disappears.

A Brahmin appears performing agnihotram (the fire sacrifice).
The verse says "let it appear", implying magic and thaumaturgy.
Beauty is the value-factor, it gives tangibility to the Absolute.
It is something you can hold in your hand.
(Certitude is described in Vedantic tradition as "like holding a gooseberry in the fist" ED).

Shiva should not wear a necktie; Shiva's snakes should bite and should not be respectable.
Shiva and Parama Shiva (supreme Shiva): Parama Shiva should be raised still more and the parameter should become very thin.

Shiva's glory is a mounting vertical parameter.
Parvati's glory is the horizontal Ganges, flowing for the benefit of humanity.

The horizontal Ganges ascends and emerges vertically from Shiva's forehead.

The jingles on the Devi´s belt:
The sound is on the Numerator
The bells are on the Denominator
The belt is the horizontal parameter.

FILM MATERIAL:

The smoke from the agnihotram fire by torsion turns into the breasts feeding a baby, becomes undulating countryside - Parvati's horizontal glory.
Purushika has a boy-like figure like a majorette - She is proud of the flag.

Show a Spanish dance with a tambourine, a scarf dance with the design coming out of the scarf.

One must give content to the Absolute - here this is the role of the Devi - and not talk about it ad nauseam on a Sunday morning.

Fill your mind completely with overwhelming beauty and you are a mystic.

Is the Absolute an old man like Jehovah?
Is it a female figure?

The psyche is a woman.

A woman is a complete psyche

First appears a belt of jingle bells, then torsion verticalizes the line and turns it into heavy mother's breasts, then into the breasts of a young girl like the bumps of an elephant's forehead, then into a cloud, then lines of hair.

The figure becomes a Yin-Yang sign,
Then there are drum-beats and a strobe light effect.

Then a circle, with bow and arrow, noose and goad.
The elephant is inner space, inside the circle.
The goad and noose are for restraining the elephant and urging it forward.
The horizontal figure-eight and the Yin-Yang sign become resolved into a range of mountains.

Bergson describes how a master tailor has to cut the suit properly, putting dots on the horizontal stuff on the table, from which he makes a vertical suit.

Pure action and love are vertical.
Shiva is called Chandra Chuda which means "moon-wearer"
The Most High God has to be thin as a crescent moon.

The vision of the Absolute is the cancellation of the Most High God and Goddess through beauty.

Mother-worship is a more ontological, more tangible starting-point than a Father God.

Ontology itself is materialism - horizontal, but beauty gives it value - vertical.
Contemporary philosophy is returning to hylozoism.
Heraclitus, when he states that you cannot enter the same river twice, is describing the flux of becoming or the élan vital.

(Hylozoism is the philosophical point of view that all matter (including the universe as a whole) is in some sense alive. This may include the view that "inanimate" matter has latent powers of abiogenesis, a widely held position in the scientific community. The term dates to the Milesian School of pre-socratic philosophers. ED)

The galaxy is moving helicoidally towards Hercules.
Religion should develop from the basis of modern science.
The days of hallelujahs are over, the hippies are putting rude questions to the pope.
(The bearded god of the Sixtine Chapel is a woman.)

PUT THE BEAUTY OF YOUR GIRLFRIEND TOGETHER WITH THE SUNSET AND YOU GET GOD.

The torsion in this verse is like a moebius strip.

A bitch rolling on its back to feed puppies produces a mystical feeling.
Every height is a value.
The feeling of beauty, to be absolute, must contain an "Oh!" or an "Ah!".

Horizontality is a gleaming fish jumping on a misty river at sunrise.
The sheen of the river is a thin film separating concepts from percepts.
The jumping fish are the vitality of horizontality - sex, etc.

Contrast a truck taking stones to a radio sending a message.
THE TRUCK IS HORIZONTAL = TRANSPORTATION
THE RADIO IS VERTICAL = TRANSMISSION

A child refusing to go to a stranger's hands is both horizontal and vertical - its hesitation is a figure-eight.

A frightened deer forgetting to eat grass and running away is horizontal - the neck is a sinus curve.

A girl hesitating to be made love to, consenting and refusing at the same time, makes a sinus curve, a figure-eight.

EXAMPLES OF STRUCTURE

Occasionalism - a butterfly on a trumpet-like flower.

Complementarity - dishevelled women pursue an old man blessed with the Devi's side-glance.

Reciprocity - an old professor with an admiring young wife - the old butler of a judge - loyalty, because they shine by reflection.

Reciprocity - Shakuntala's beautiful body is clothed in rough bark cloth.

Villagers have no pomp but are glad of the king's horses and chariots, see Kalidasa.
In Kalidasa's "Shakuntala" the fisherman caught with the ring is the chief of the fishermen, but admits the policeman as his superior - he has no feeling of rivalry and is willing to submit.

THERE ARE FOUR WOMEN IN VERSE 7

1) One is feeding a baby.
2) One has breasts like the bumps on an elephant's forehead.
3) Virtuality.
4) One is like a majorette.

SEE THOMAS DE QUINCEY IN HIS "CONFESSIONS OF AN OPIUM-EATER":
THERE ARE FOUR MOTHERS:
1) Mater Dolorosa weeping in hospitals
2) One who kicks open doors and makes you mad
3) One who frequents burial places
4) (Missing in the original manuscript. ED)

REVERSIBLE EQUATIONS:
When you say something about God, you are also saying it about yourself.

1. Shakuntala refuses to take a flower - she says she will not disturb the flower's blossoming, as she is also getting married herself.

2. Two babies are biting an apple - one takes a bite and passes it, the other bites too much - the first one cries - they are only happy when they bite equally.

3. A mother with a dead child in church passes a mother with a baptized baby - both cry. (Victor Hugo)

4. A banana tree is pulled up by an elephant: there is an equilibrium between an ontologically stable banana tree and the elephant's trunk.
One is smooth and the other rough-skinned.

The bumps on the elephant are on the right side (of virtuality? ED).

Purushika stands on the elephant's head, and thus gains numerator status.

This is a dynamic picture of the Goddess, as abstract and as concrete as possible.

Verse 7 uses both algebraic and geometric language.
This is a cyberneticaly-conceived version of the Absolute.
First there is the jingle of bells on Her belt.
It begins on the conceptual side with sound, then four compartments develop around the sound.

The elephant is a cloud, it is space, and it is Numerator.
The breasts originate in the Numerator - this is not vulgar or one-sided eroticism.
She is slim of waist - it has a mathematical status.
At the O Point there is nothing, the O Point is absent, it is not real, and it is a mathematical abstraction.

Eros is below the navel O Point, when he goes above the O Point he is burned by Shiva, who represents morality and austerity.
On the negative side the mother is feeding the child.
Her face is described as an autumnal full moon.
Autumnal means cloudy, not earthly.

The noose stops the elephant.
The bow and arrows attract Shiva.
The goad pushes the elephant
Turn the structure forty-five degrees and the dynamism is slightly altered.

Details: Written by Patrick Misson; Parent Category: Content; Published: 20 October 2008; Created: 20 October 2008; Last Updated: 26 September 2015; Hits: 22423

SAUNDARYA LAHARI

VERSE 8

AN INNER BEAUTY UNIT INVERSION

A VERTICAL TRANSFORMATION

सुधासिन्धोर्मध्ये सुरविट-पिवाटी-परिवृते
मणिद्वीपे नीपो-पवनवति चिन्तामणि गृहे ।
शिवकारे मञ्चे परमशिव-पर्यङ्क निलयाम्
भजन्ति त्वां धन्याः कतिचन चिदानन्द-लहरीम्

sudha sindhor maddhye suravitapi parivrte
mani dvipe nipopavanavati cintamani grhe
sivakare mance paramasiva paryanka nilayam
bhajanti tvam dhanyah kati ca na cidananda laharim

Seated on a couch of Shiva form and having the Supreme Shiva for cushion,
Placed within a mansion wafted round by the perfume of blossoms of Kadamba trees,
Located within a celestial grove on a pearly-gem island in the midst of a nectar ocean,
Some fortunate ones contemplate you as the upsurging billow of mental joy.

It is natural for wisdom seekers to aspire for a quiet place, far from the ignoble strife of common human life. This desire only means that they want to keep company with themselves, seeking a happiness that is more than the pleasure that could be derived from society. In aspiring thus for loneliness, some aspirants might think of a cave in the Himalayas, as Shiva is intent on finding in Verse 78. Others think of an island situated far away from disturbing contacts. We have already had a hint about this kind of natural aspiration in the third verse, where a city of light placed in mid-ocean corresponds to the dear dream of an ignorant man who strongly feels that he needs the consolation of wisdom or philosophy. This same idea is carried over for elaboration in this verse where the third line alludes to a "pearly-gem island in the midst of a nectar ocean". It describes in greater detail a Mandala-like structure in which the Goddess is seated in dignity and grandeur on a couch. The island evidently has a well-furnished and well-ordered household situated in a mansion, surrounded by many varieties of trees laden with fragrant blossoms and ripe fruits. The grove itself is a holy place. The water of the ocean is not the usual salt water, but consists of rich life-giving nectar in great abundance. Poverty or indigence cannot touch such a place.

There are three familiar words in the context of Yantra, Mantra and Tantra, which are Mandala, Chakra and Adhara. In Tibetan Mandalas we find four walls or steps leading to four doors. A Chakra would rather suggest a space enclosed by concentric circles, some more peripheral than others and generally three in number. The term Adhara is more specifically used in yogic literature proper. There are six of them, excluding the Muladhara and the Sahasrara which bring up the lower and upper limits. We can see, by glancing at the succeeding verses, that this verse prepares the ground for viewing these contemplative units within the consciousness of the yogi in a more compactly understood form, marking specific states of consciousness as they could vary vertically or horizontally in a series, or in a hierarchy of sets or subsets. We shall have occasion to go into such details when we come to the verses dealing with them.

For the present, we must note here that it is the state of mind within the consciousness of a yogi, meditating with shut eyes, which is the subject here. This island thus represents rather a state of consciousness than a bit of geographical land. India itself is sometimes referred to as jambu dvipa (an island of black berries) for contemplative reasons outside of mere geographical considerations. The yogi thus meditating on the personification of Beauty within the scope of his own wisdom-awareness, in the first instance finds the most precious personification of Absolute Beauty seated comfortably on a couch.

She is far removed from indigence or want. A yogi who feels that he is poor cannot meditate freely on the highest of values beyond all riches, which is represented by Absolute Wisdom. It is for this reason that the seat of the Goddess here is at the very core of a situation from which all the sense of necessity of everyday life is excluded. There is a level on the negative side of the lower cone where necessity can have its place, but the island here is to be imagined as occupying the position just between the bases of the two cones, placed slightly apart in close juxtaposition.

The walls of the mansion could be considered a square or four-sided orthogonal figure, but the island itself should preferably be imagined as a circle, because contemplation within consciousness is comparable to a torch in misty darkness, which clarifies only a globe of light around it.

A burning lamp sheds its umbra and penumbra in circles. In spite of this circular, or rather global, shape in consciousness, when we think of the neutral level at which the mansion here is to be located, a square motif is not to be ruled out, because the world here is one that is viewed through lattices or matrices, as in graph paper. Television techniques and cybernetic matrices, as also gratings, microscopically studied, reveal a square shape based on the principle of orthogonality. The impossibility of squaring a circle in mathematics also indicates that the square fits into an actual context of full horizontality, while the circle is more contemplative. Reference to actuality of this kind brings the status of the Goddess into a fully realistic perspective. Vedanta is not, as some people wrongly think, a form of idealism. The idea of the universal concrete is to be respected to its very limit, as when the Chandogya Upanishad says that the nail scissors are made of steel without graduation in the homogeneity of its substance. Just as the steel completely fills the shape of the nail scissors, so Brahman fills the whole universe. The soul of man is supposed to fit, by both its existence and its essence, like the steel to the very tip of the hard nail scissors, or as a razor fits tightly in its leather case. Nothing should be explained away as not being real or being merely mental.

Thus a square mansion placed within a circular island is not repugnant to the ideal doctrine of Advaita Vedanta, as understood through Sankara's commentaries. The numerous criticisms of Sankara's Advaita as tending to treat the world as unreal, are seen to be false when correctly understood in this way.

There is one special particularity in this verse which has to be examined more closely. The very first line seems to suggest that Shiva became a couch and that a superior grade of the same Shiva (Paramashiva) became a cushion for his wife to sit on. This offers a puzzle and an enigma which has to be explained before we proceed.

In the common prayer of Christianity, "Thy kingdom come. Thy will be done on earth, as it is in heaven", reference is made to two worlds placed at the two limits of the same vertical parameter. Heaven is hypostatic, at the positive limit, while the earth is its hierophantic counterpart at the negative limit. What is there as a value is also here as a value, but there lurks within these two sets of values a subtle inversion which makes the one-to-one correspondence topsy turvy. Ancient Hermetic symbolism, as in the Tarot cards, alludes to this structural secret of "topsy-turvydom" by the picture of a man hanging head downwards. There is an inversion involved in the very structure of space, which is referred to as "mirror reflection" horizontally and "handedness" vertically. These are two kinds of symmetries that have been noted by physicists within the basic structure of space. Ontological existence and teleological subsistence have to belong together within the total scope of absolute space. Here a subtle ambivalence, a reciprocity, a compensation and a complementarity become evident. Existence and essence belong to two dichotomous poles of the total situation. What is called the phenomenological epoche or ghost is to be contained within brackets, so as to enclose the value content within the inverted curves of the two brackets which, facing opposite ways, are turned obversely and conversely. A blind man might take a water jug and, holding it upside down, say that it is useless because it has hole at the bottom. He might then touch the top and say that nothing can be poured into it. Though the Absolute has to be contained as a value within consciousness, it has to avoid falling into the double errors of tautology and contradiction. This epistemological requirement is referred to as impossibility (asambhava) and tautology (atmasraya). (See Narayana Guru's "Darsana Mala", Chapter 2, Verse 6.)

The difference between existence and essence, which has been the subject matter of much disputation between modern existentialists and the earlier scholastic philosophers who emphasized essence, is a problem that has been faced and solved by Vedantic tradition long ago. When Vedanta refers to sat-cit-ananda, the first term, sat, refers to existence or ontological reality, while the term ananda corresponds to the essence of God as known in Western theology. It is between these two limits that logic, cit, rules supreme. In scrutinizing the meaning of satyam jnanam anantam brahma, Sankara takes much trouble in his commentary to point out that sat is neutralized by cit in its meaning-content, and cit is again modified by ananda in its meaning-content.

Thus between sat-chit-ananda there is what Bergson would call a "back-to-back correction" which we must apply to the situation. According to this correction, Bergson would even go so far as to say that accidents do not happen to us, but that "we happen to accidents". If this enigma could be understood, the enigma here of Shiva becoming a cushion would be considered as quite in keeping with the views of such a modern pragmatist philosopher as Henri Bergson.

The hypostatic value of Shiva, when transformed on the denominator side, would become a couch or cushion. What is there is also here in a transformed or translated form, one as teleological essence and the other as ontological existence. As we have indicated already, Shiva comes down from the peak called Kailasa, looking for a cavern for his austerities. He descends from the top of the structure to the middle of the parameter. The Goddess, on the other hand, has her reference at the bottom of the negative parameter. She ascends to the structural mid-region, and thus goes beyond all necessity into the neutral ground between the base sections of the two cones, where the palace on a gem-set island in a nectar ocean is to be placed contemplatively by the votary. If this verse is read with this kind of double perspective in one's mind, most of the enigmas become self-explained. The fortunate contemplative of the last line gives us a standpoint in which we are to place the Absolute Goddess of Beauty at the Bindusthana or core of the contemplative situation to serve the purpose of fruitful yogic meditation. Shiva has only a conceptual status; it is his name that is more important than his form. Transposed to the negative side, he becomes a value that helps contemplative verticality to be promoted within consciousness. A couch and a cushion are objects which have their everyday value, which should not be excluded from the contemplative set of values. The fragrant blossoms of special sacred trees and the sanctity of the grove itself, referred to in the second and third lines, could easily be fitted into the structural context at the mid-region, when we remember that they belong to the world of intentionality and not actuality. Cleanliness and godliness are sometimes used interchangeably. The sweet smell of flowers and a grove of trees are presences or influences which give to life an interest and a zest, lifting or merging it within higher or lower stratifications of the total setup of values. The peripheral trees, forming a circle, are more existential than essential; while the central trees, with the perfume of blossoms wafted by the breeze, mark an essential, hypostatic level. While heavenly kadamba trees, which are actual, are referred to in the context of perfumed blossoms; gems are mentioned in the lower stratification. Their values are to be treated as interchangeable, whether they are placed hypostatically or hierophantically. When cancelled out vertically, they give homogeneity to Absolute Value, in which gem beauty and flower perfumes enter as equal partners, to cause the upsurging billow of mental joy referred to in the last line. When sivakare mance is taken to mean that the gods become the legs of the couch of the Devi, there is evidently a challenge staring us in the face. The pictorial representations by Mogul and Rajput schools of painting, printed in the edition of professor Brown of Harvard, do recognize that the transformation of the gods into the legs of a cot is meant seriously by Sankara, but to this day, no justification of such a transformation has been suggested, at least to the knowledge of the author, by the commentators of this work. We believe, therefore, that only through a protolinguistic structural approach could such a transformation be even barely understood. A similar image of the gods becoming the legs of the throne of Prajapati can be found in the Atharva Veda.

(A mirror image is a horizontal, two-dimensional left-right counterpart of the original; handedness is the three-dimensional inversion involved between, say, a right- and left-handed glove. ED)

ADDITIONAL COMMENTS WITH STRUCTURAL DIAGRAMS RELATED TO THIS VERSE FROM SAUNDARYA LAHARI/NOTES.

This is a Yogi's vision of Beauty as an island.

The island is located in the yogi's mind .
The Bindusthana (central locus of meditation) is an island.

WORD FOR WORD
sudha sindhor madhye - in the midst of an ocean of nectar
suravit api vati pari vrte - surrounded by celestial trees
mani dvipe - on a pearly-gem island
nipopavana vati - having within her precincts a grove of Kadamba trees
cintamani grihe - in a house made of contemplative gems
siva kare mance - on a couch of Shiva-form
paramasiva paryanka nilayam - with Supreme Shiva for cushion
bhajanti tvam dhanyaha - those rare fortunate ones worship you
kati ca na cidananda laharim - as the upsurging billow of mental joy.

A Mandala comes in here, also seen in conics.

Here, we have a conic section as a Mandala.

The Omega Point has two degrees: Shiva and Parama (Supreme) Shiva.
There is one-to-one correspondence between Numerator and Denominator.

The ocean of value is plenitude itself: Ananda or bliss
- the crystal is formed therein for our meditation..

Above is the same Mandala, seen from above.

Vertical transformations take place in this verse.
Shiva is made into a cot, and the Supreme Shiva (Paramashiva), who is even higher at the positive pole of the vertical axis, is called a cushion on the cot.
The cot is stable - the numerator Shiva is here changed into a denominator cot.
The cot and cushion are for the Devi to sit on.

An earlier, tentative, version:

TRANSLATION
mid ambrosial nectar ocean
by grove of celestial arbours surrounded, within a gem island
in a mansion of thought, with a garden of Kadamba trees around
in a cot representing Shiva form
placed on a cushion of Paramashiva
they adore
certain persons of religious merit adore You
as the upsurging billow of the bliss of understanding

What is true of the Numerator side is not true of the Denominator
- this is the secret.

Sartre rejected essence, which belongs on the numerator side, in favour of existence on the negative side, but the transfer from Numerator to Denominator is not an easy one.

(Jean-Paul Sartre 21 June 1905 – 15 April 1980, was a French philosopher, playwright, novelist, screenwriter, political activist, biographer, and literary critic. He was one of the key figures in the philosophy of existentialism, and one of the leading figures in 20th Century French philosophy and Marxism. ED)

Existence and essence belong to the same Absolute - and the Absolute is a flux, flowing in one direction or another.
You can reverse the current, and thus revise the direction.

Numerator values are not of the same nature as denominator values, although they are reciprocal parts of the same whole.

What is a value in the Numerator can become transformed in the Denominator into a complementary factor.

In the previous verse, the Devi is seen as positive or Numerator - as Purushika.
Here, Shiva is brought to the Denominator

MATTER FOR THE FILM

There is one-one correspondence between Numerator and Denominator.

Conic sections are implied; the footstool is interchangeable with Shiva:
how to justify this? See VERSES 22, 27, 25, 30.

Method: A Pujari (priest), who waves ritual lights here and there and then downwards, showing you how to see the Numerator and Denominator as the same, with an intersubjective and transphysical relation between them.
Applications of these lights have somehow to be shown.

.
.

This verse describes a beautiful woman in a garden, surrounded by Kadamba trees.

Placed in the midst of a nectar-ocean is the abode of the Devi, a fool's paradise for the audience to melt into; a place of luxury.

The Devi is to be presented, not as a sanyasini (female ascetic), but as a full-blooded, buxom, healthy woman.

The point is that numerator and denominator factors - back-to-back and by double correction - are interchangeable. This is a secret.

The footstool is as good as Shiva. This is also found in the Tarot: that which is above is analogous to what is below, etc., and both are component and integral parts of the whole.

Inversion in the Tarot - the Hanged Man.

In the Gita, the inverted tree refers to the same great secret of inversion.

This is represented by the Pujari priest (a performer of Puja - ritual worship) and his waving of lights. (This is the secret of temple ritual).

Here, bring in some Tantra, as also the throwing of baskets of flowers for so long that the Pujari falls down for some time as if dead from overwhelming devotion.

Another version:

TRANSLATION
Some lucky men contemplate thee as the upsurging billow of mental joy
Seated on a couch of Shiva form and having the supreme Shiva for cushion
Placed in a mansion wafted round by perfumed blossoms of Kadamba trees
In a pearly-gem island, mid-ocean placed.

COMMENTARY
One should imagine several concentric circles and try to place the supreme value of Absolute Beauty at the very core.

One should then introduce the Shiva principle as having its ontological counterpart representing the basis of existence on which any value has to make meaning.

Shiva as an Absolute Value has Parama Shiva (the supreme Shiva) co-existing with him as a value-factor, thinkable both hypostatically and hierophantically with reference to a vertical parameter traversing the plus and minus levels of the total situation analogically pictured here.

The four-legged couch lends its existential stability as a value for the goddess here and the cushion is only a more easy or thinner version of the same Shiva principle, upgraded teleologically.

Beauty is justly placed at the centre of a circle representing the infinite plenitude of immortal bliss which contemplation of the value of Absolute Beauty must necessarily bring.

The celestial trees form the most peripheral circle of the island and the core is surrounded by an inner circle of more ineffable or subtler values, analogous to the perfume of the Kadamba trees (said to be the favourite of Parvati in Sanskrit traditions, the actual species is of no importance).

The couch must be supposed to have four legs to give it stability and support and it is suggested that Brahma, Vishnu, Rudra and Ishvara are the supporting legs.

The analogy need not be stretched so far, but elementals are implied here as vertical principles supporting the notion of the negative factor of Absolute Beauty as a value.

Brahma and other gods have an ontological reference besides their hypostatic status in the Vedic heaven.

The pearl-gem island and mansion consisting of thought suggest subjective consciousness centrally, while peripherally the celestial trees represent universal concrete values.

STRUCTURAL ANALYSIS
The structural analysis of this verse involves both solid and plane geometric constructions.

Three-dimensional solids with conics must be kept in mind and one normal conic section representing the horizontal reference of workaday realistic value has to be inserted between two cones placed base-to-base for purposes of double reference and correction back to back.

These structural and epistemological features have been explained at length in various parts of our previous writings.

The Colour Solid.

The colour solid with the Chakras (wheels) with triangles having apexes pointing upward or downward is an attempt by the Tantra Shastra to schematise protolinguistically the contemplative values and existent and subsistent factors involved.

Ontology here counts above teleology, and it is Shiva and Parama Shiva that have been reduced to the universal concrete status of cushions or cots.

The vertical parameter passing through the centre and apexes of the two inverted cones is the non-dual correlating principle integrating physical value factors with metaphysical ones in the structural totality of the Absolute.
Other implications in this are clarified in the diagrams above.

Kalidasa has woven a fabric, showing that the ideal of feminine beauty emerges out of this quantitative (horizontal) mass called the Himalayas.

Kalidasa has done this with Parvati - daughter of the Himalayas - providing a consort for Shiva, who is admired by the Munis (sages).
All of this must be presented in the first twenty minutes of the film.

The Colloquy of the Gods refers to Uma Haimavati, "Uma, the daughter of the snow mountains" - note that "Uma" means "light" or "splendour" - see Kena Upanishad at the bottom of this page.)

The beauty of a woman is the best way to give content to the Absolute.
It provides an inspiring standard by which to regulate our lives.

A woman represents the counterpart of man - abstract and generalize for a woman who worships her husband like a god -
she becomes the Self, he becomes the Non-Self.

She is so directly related to nature that there is a one-to-one correspondance between the cosmos and the micro-cosmos. (See the Kural).

(Tirukkuṟaḷ also known as the Kural, sometimes spelt Thirukkural, is a classic of 1330 rhyming Tamil couplets or kurals. Sometimes known as the Tamil Veda. It was authored by Thiruvalluvar, a poet who is said to have lived anytime between the 2nd century BC and 5th century AD. ED)).

Another version:

TRANSLATION
Some lucky men contemplate thee as the upsurging billow of mental joy
Seated on a couch of Shiva-form (Shiva is reduced to a hierophantic character, i.e. a couch.)

And having the Supreme Shiva for cushion
Placed in a mansion wafted round by the perfumed blossoms of Kadamba trees
In a pearly-gem island mid nectar-ocean placed.

One should imagine several concentric circles having Absolute Beauty at the central core.
The four legs of the couch lend ontological stability to the Goddess.
The celestial trees represent the peripheral circle of the core (the outer circle).
The couch must have four supporting legs, perhaps Brahma, Vishnu, etc., representing the elementals.
There is a pearl-gem island and a mansion of thought.

Chidananda Lahari means an upsurging of mental bliss.

Derive woman from the Himalayas.

The Shiva form and the Supreme Shiva, as couch and cushion, are ontological factors of stable existence which have a one - one correspondence with the hypostatic Shiva and the Supreme Shiva principles.

One should then represent the Shiva principle as having its ontological counterpart representing the basis of existence on which any value has to take meaning.

Shiva as an Absolute Value has a Parama or supreme Shiva co-existing with Him as a value factor, thinkable both hypostatically and hierophantically, with reference to a vertical parameter, having thus the plus and minus levels of the total situation analogically pictured here.

The cushion is only a more easy or shinier value version of the same Shiva Principle as the couch, upgraded teleologically rather than ontologically.

Beauty is justly placed at the centre of the circle, representing the infinite plenitude of immortal bliss which the contemplation of Absolute Beauty must necessarily bring.

Celestial trees form the outer circle, and the inner is of ineffable or subtler values analogous to the Kadamba trees, said to be the favourite of Parvati.

It is suggested that Brahma, Rudra, Vishnu and Ishvara are the supporting legs.
The Elementals (the gods) are implied here as verticalized principles supporting the notion of the negative factor of Absolute real Beauty as a value.

The pearly-gem island and mansion of thought suggest subjective consciousness centrally, while perceptually the celestial trees represent universal concrete values.

The above structure is provisional and may need revision.

People wrongly say that Sankara was the "Dravida Sishyu" (as mentioned in Verse 75) only through the 41st verse.

Sankara says "I am a Dravida Shishyu", and "I am a Vidyarthi" or seeker of wisdom.
In Verse 75, by drinking the milk of Saraswati, he becomes a great poet:

Verse 75:

"Your breast milk, I consider, O Maiden born to the Earth- Supporting Lord,
As if it were word-wisdom's ocean of nectar, flooding from out of Your heart
Offered by one who is kind, which, on tasting,
This Dravidian child, amidst superior poets, is born a composer of charming verse."

("Dravida" - Dravidian - in this context, implies South Indian, dark-skinned, humble, low-caste - as contrasted with the vidyarthyi - a wisdom-seeker who is by implication an upper-caste person or brahmin. ED

Even today, according to traditional laws (smriti) it is all right to kill a shudra (low-caste person) for repeating the Vedas of the Aryans.

(Guru explains the background of the Mahabharata war.)
Krishna goes personally to the Pandavas, lends qualitative strength to the.....

(this passage is obscure and incomplete in the original manuscript.ED)

The change from Ananda Lahari to Saundarya Lahari after Verse 41 is of an epistemological nature. The same subject can be treated as a Mandala (Ananda Lahari - up to Verse 41 ) or realistically as Beauty (Saundarya Lahari - after Verse 41).

This Verse 8 with its mandalas sets the style for the rest of the verses up to 41.

The Indian philosophical tradition and Mother temples come as a result of the mixture between Aryans and Dravidians.

Sankara calls himself "Dravida Shishyu" because he is the follower of a primitive Goddess.

The Mandala structure exists through the first 41 verses.
Sankara incorporates Tantra Shastra, the Vedas and Buddhism, and restates them all in terms of Vedanta.

Dravida Shishyu (the "Dravidian child") and the Vidyarthi (the wisdom seeker) are shown worshipping Saraswati (a revalued Kali), the Goddess of Wisdom, representing the final stage of the Goddess acceptable to Vedanta.

Saraswati.

Narayana Guru also established a Saraswati Temple.

HINDUISM IS A WOMAN

- so a woman's beauty is idealized, as in Sankara.

There were some women in ancient times who came from North India, were treated as Gurus and had temples made for themselves, or began Mother temples on the Kerala coast. The women had the money when they came down from the North.
They had certain hangers-on to manage their affairs and these men often became Brahmins.

(A reference to Phumala Bhagavati Temple on Ezhumalai island. The Guru was at this time staying at the Gurukula on Ezhumalai Island of the coast of Kerala in South India. ED)

Ezhumalai is the epicentre of this kind of spirituality.
It is a numinous presence, "a magic place".

In Verse 8, the Mandala of concentric circles begins, going on through Verse 40.

How does it happen that there are Sanskrit scholars among the peasants of Kerala?
It is explainable by the population movement from the North, along the coast, because there are paddy, coconut, fish and spices there.
They can thrive with no money.
Why does Sankara call himself a Dravidian and a Wisdom-Seeker - not an orthodox religious man?
There is a great tradition of Sanskrit pundits on the Kerala coast, by the will of the ordinary coolies.

In Verse 8, the verse talks of "cidananda lahari - an "upsurging billow of mental joy" - the first part of the poem up to Verse 41 is called "Ananda Lahari" - "lahari" meaning bliss or joy, an inner experience - this is subjective, with Mandalas.

After Verse 40 the poem is called "Saundarya Lahari" - "saundarya" meaning beauty, which is outside the mind - it becomes objective, describing the beauty of the Goddess.

A FILM SCENARIO FOR VERSE 8
The island is a gem at the centre of the ocean. Just show a real island, with a nice park, within a lake, actually seen. You can show one or two varieties.

Then introduce the romantic element of a woman living there. Then reduce it into a Taoist painting - a first-degree reduction.

Then change the lake to a milk ocean, bring in Vishnu - here there must be some mythological pictures.

Then reduce further so that the island is a beautiful gem seen from far away, in a milk ocean.

Then reduce still further, playing with colours, finally reduce it to a Mandala - where it is a drawing, not the outline.

In the studio, show horizontal, vertical and conical cross-sections.
Cross-sections must have a real view and a celestial view = two views.
There is always a lower and a higher version..

The Goddess sits at the lower hierophantic and at the higher hypostatic levels - again, two conic sections - brings in the cushion.

Then conic sections give way to play with the 1st, 2nd, 3d and 4th dimensions, finally reducing to a single point of light bursting and becoming dim, like fireworks.

There is a picture of a yogi meditating and the Chakras he sees must be shown in the form of Mandalas.

To take the viewer to the depths of the meaning, he must see each of the various steps.

This needs a group of artists to be trained in preparation of these Mandalas.

With Verse 8 a review of the Chakras begins. Begin to memorize two verses a day, to be recited each morning.

In this way the levels and correlations between the verses may be comprehensively absorbed.

There must be a professor who understands mathematics and an Indian swami who understands Vedanta, who will open the book and read in Sanskrit, devoting not more than one minute to each..

Galaxies - red shift - Universes expanding and contracting - Big Bang - Genesis - Rigveda 10, Hymn CXXIX etc. i.e. "In the Beginning" after showing some of these hypotheses, with some film taken from planetaria.

Red Shift.

The Big Bang.

Then you come to the Himalayas - India - showing (then) a king in full regalia being worshipped - then fade out to the Himalayas, or vice-versa.

Then show Vishnu, then Brahma; include some semi-divinities, showing a logarithmic spiral between the two.
Then we proceed to Shiva as Mahesvara.

Then Apsaras, Kinnaras (the celestial flute-players).

Cosmology according to Eddington and Jeans.
Without the Trimurti (the three gods) you cannot understand.

Then cut to the Himalayas once again.
The Himalayas of the Kumarasambhava of Kalidasa: to bring out Parvati; the last trip was for Shiva.
The first 10 or 12 verses of the Kumarasambhava will give stratifications.
Create a world of fairies and divine gods as per Kumarasambhava.

Finally bring the life of a certain tribe of simple people.
The object will be to create the Devi.

Show the Colloquy of the Gods (See bottom of this page) - after the Kumarasambhava.
The numerator functions of the gods must be shown.
The gods must be a wonder in the Numerator, finally being filled to give Saundarya Lahari.

There is a series of subjects dealt with in these first verses:

VERSE 1 - The Paradox is posed

VERSE 2 - A double action spiral, back to back, with three zones on the vertical axis.

VERSE 3 - A quadrant of value, on the part of four types of people: The dull-witted, the destitute, those submerged in the world of births, etc. Each person has one of these three value-worlds.

VERSE 4 - Stresses the importance of the feet of the Devi - "I do not care for all your gods" - The bottom of the vertical axis is important as the square root of minus-one.

VERSE 5 - Eros, as horizontal, is brought in, also virtual beauty, not yet verticalized. (Read the Puranas (legends) and find out where Vishnu took the form of a woman).

VERSE 6 - Ananga (Eros, "the limbless one") = Beauty. Ananga rules. Although he is a passion, he still rules. (See Othello).

VERSE 7 - A picture of the Devi - very slim of waist - a kind of double structure - the slim waist is to show there is no real existence, there is only a slim horizontal parameter.

VERSE 8 - There is a progressive building up of schemas until we come to Verse 8 which is a circle or Mandala. Conics and Mandalas are introduced.

VERSE 9 - "Broken through..." - earth consciousness becomes a flame, breaking through the various stratifications.
Alpha and Omega are sleeping together - but not in a bedroom. Kundalini Shakti is bursting through.

VERSE 10 - A serpent of three and a half coils - this must be some of the basic Chakras.

In VERSE 6 half of the Devi's body is filled with eroticism; eroticism is normal bliss. You cannot throw eroticism out of the picture as Christianity does. The Absolutist picture gives Eros a place in the Devi's legs.

In VERSE 7, the Devi as "Purushika" (a bold, virago-like figure, the counterpart of Shiva) : do not try and copulate forcefully with Her: the Absolute cannot be defeated.

In VERSE 8, the Yogi has to meditate on something: a gem-island.

In VERSE 9, stable positions of cancellation ascend on a vertical axis.

In VERSE 10, there are two "trees of Porphyry"- one spreading upwards, the other downwards.

(THERE IS A POSSIBLE AMBIGUITY IN THIS STRUCTURE, IT SHOULD BE COMPARED TO OTHER STRUCTURES OF VERSE 8. ED)

On the Denominator we have:
A couch of Shiva-form.
Name is hypostatic, form is hierophantic.
The cushion is Shiva himself.

On the Numerator we have:
The perfume of Kadamba trees.

At the horizontal limits we have a nectar ocean.

"some fortunate ones..." means those trained in meditation - that is, those who place themselves in the same frame of reference - c.f. Bergson.
Ambrosia is mother's milk - an absolute necessity.
Jewels are interesting and beautiful.
Trees and flowers

This is a yogi's view of Beauty as an island.
The island is located in the yogi's mind.
The island is the Bindhusthana (locus).

THE COLLOQUY OF THE GODS

FROM KENA UPANISHAD

Once upon a time, Brahman, the Spirit Supreme, won a victory for the gods. And the gods thought in their pride, 'We alone attained this victory, ours alone is the glory;

Brahman saw it and appeared to them, but they knew him not. 'Who is that being that fills us with wonder?' they cried.

And they spoke to Agni, the god of fire: '0 god all-knowing, go and see who is that being that fills us with wonder.'

Agni ran towards him and Brahman asked: 'Who are you?' I am the god of fire,' he said, the god who knows all things.'

What power is in you?' asked Brahman. 'I can burn all things on earth.'

And Brahman placed a straw before him, saying: 'Burn this.' The god of fire strove with all his power, but was unable to burn it. He then returned to the other gods and said: 'I could not find out who was that being that fills us with wonder'

Then they spoke to Vayu, the god of the air. '0 Vayu, go and see who is that being that fills us with wonder.'

Vayu ran towards him and Brahman asked: 'Who are you?' 'I am Vayu, the god of the air,' he said, 'Matarisvan, the air that moves in space.'

'What power is in you?' asked Brahman. 'In a whirlwind I can carry away all there is on earth'

And Brahman placed a straw before him saying: 'Blow this away.' The god of the air strove with all his power, but was unable to move it. He returned to the other gods and said: 'I could not find out who was that being that fills us with wonder.'

Then the gods spoke to Indra, the god of thunder: '0 giver of earthly goods, go and see who is that being that fills us with wonder.' And Indra ran towards Brahman, the Spirit Supreme, but he disappeared.

Then in the same region of the sky the gods saw a lady of radiant beauty. She was Uma, divine wisdom, the daughter of the mountains of snow.

Details: Written by Patrick Misson; Parent Category: Content; Published: 20 October 2008; Created: 20 October 2008; Last Updated: 26 September 2015; Hits: 25904

SAUNDARYA LAHARI

VERSE 9

THE KULA PATH
A SERIES OF VERTICAL VALUE-SYSTEMS

महीं मूलाधारे कमपि मणिपूरे हुतवहं
स्थितं स्वधिष्टाने हृदि मरुत-माकाश-मुपरि ।
मनो‌உपि भ्रूमध्ये सकलमपि भित्वा कुलपथं
सहस्रारे पद्मे स हरहसि पत्या विहरसे

mahim muladhare kam api manipure hutavaham
sthitam svadhisthane hrdi marutam akasam upari
mano'pi bhrumaddhye sakalam api bhitva kulapatham
sahasrare padme saha reahasi patya viharase

The earth placed in the Muladhara, water in the Manipura,
Fire in the Svadhisthana, air in the heart, with space above,
And amid eyebrows placing the mind, and breaking through the whole Kula-path
You do sport with your lord secretly in the thousand-petaled lotus.

After placing the absolute principle of Beauty, presented in the most realistic, universal and concrete form, in her proper position at the core of the total structural setup, in the eighth verse, this verse carries over the same into the other grades of stable positions on the vertical parameter, where a natural equilibrium of psycho-physical forces could be expected. As we have pointed out, the classical dancing girl, Kandukavati, begins at the proper ontological starting point by respectfully touching the firm earth before elaborating the graded varieties of her art at more and more perfected levels which fill the whole field or ground with magenta glory.

Here also the most stable ground for an equilibrium to be established between psycho-physical forces, introspectively or intuitively understood, is the earth principle, which is the rich ontological basis where the consciousness of the contemplative can naturally find repose and be at ease.

In contemplative literature we know of various grades of value-systems, some of which are "of the earth, earthy" while others are placed in essences at higher hypostatic levels. The Puranas (traditional heroic or epic lore), which have a popular philosophical appeal , speak of "twice seven worlds" of such values, totalling fourteen; seven being above while seven are below. Names are given to each of these value worlds. When we include the subjective self or the objective self as an additional point of psycho-physical equilibrium, we get eight worlds which are subjective and eight worlds that belong to the objective or non-self side. The Bhagavad Gita marks out just these sixteen possible stratifications in Absolute Consciousness in Verse 4, Chapter VII. Buddhism knows of the "Noble Eight-Fold Path", and the Patanjali system of Yoga has its astangas (eight grades or divisions). In the opening verse of his play "Shakuntala", Kalidasa gives importance to this way of dividing the whole of the range covered by the vertical parameter by marking eight points, one set of which is in the descending scale and the other in the ascending, which latter alone figures in the opening verse. The subjective series is omitted evidently because the onlookers of the play themselves bring the subjective side to bear on the total situation, while the players represent the objective side. The joy of the play results from the interplay of the subjective and objective sides.

There is also in the "Vivekacudamani" a reference to this graded unit consisting of eight items, there called puryastakam (eight cities), which make up the eight levels describing the subtle body, referred to there as the sukshma sarira. The number eight thus seems to be a normal figure when the whole range of literature is considered; but in this verse there is only reference to six positions.

Sankara, in his bhasyas or commentaries, comes up against this kind of difference between text and text, and votes there in favour of a bigger number, saying that having some extras is always safer than being strictly limited, as for example in the number of players in a game. In his "Epistemology of the Gnosis", Narayana Guru analyzes the same question, and comes to a fairly conclusive version of the epistemological problem involved. Knowledge is either of things present to the senses or of elements experienced from inside oneself, and these two aspects could be broadly divided by putting a horizontal line between the self and the non-self; that is, between the knower and the known. We can go upward in an ascending scale of stable positions, rising gradually into the region of the non-self, or sink introspectively to the source within, starting with the most stable ontological pole marked by the firm earth. The question of inserting your own self (atman) as the eighth item on the objective side to complete the series of eight, could be done last of all, in the manner of 7+1, 5+3 or 6+2.

We are concerned with explaining the problem of only six positions being discussed in the present verse. We could easily add one more below the Muladhara, which would mark the position of the Kulakunda of Verse 10; and in this verse there is the Sahasrara, the thousand-petaled lotus, which does not seem to be included in the six. Thus the puzzle is cleared without us having to suggest some modification of what is identified in this work in very clear terms as the six Adharas, or stable positions. We enumerate them in an ascending series, as given in this verse:

Muladhara
Manipura
Svadhisthana
the Heart (Anahata: not named here) the Space above (Visuddhi: not named here)
the Mind, between the eyebrows (Ajña: not named here)

In the Patanjali system, which is based on the dualistic Samkhya philosophy, the dynamism of yoga is in terms of a gradual process of spiritual progress, in eight grades of discipline, ascending to what is marked by the word kaivalya, aloneness, at the culminating point attained by yogic ascent, taken step by step. This kind of gradual process of spiritual progress between two points, representing ends and means, is repugnant to the more dynamic unitive view proper to Advaita Vedanta, where no vestige of duality could be tolerated, whether in ends or means, which have to be treated together. This is the correct Advaitic approach of the Upanishads and the Bhagavad Gita.

The "Kula path" here is a reference to those who follow the Shakti cult, whether known as Kaulins or Samayins; the latter being considered more respectable than the former. We have explained the difference in our "general remarks", elsewhere. The words "breaking through the whole Kula path" imply the revaluation of those two kinds of esotericism in terms of the more radical or absolutist approach denoting this work. The dynamism of this verse is complemented and completed in the next verse as both an ascent as well as a descent.

There is a reference to a snake that sleeps in the hollow of the lower limit called kulakunda. This is the much-talked about Kundalini snake. Kundala means a hoop or ring. It is thus sometimes thought of as a circle enclosing an Absolute Value ideogram. An improved version is when we think of it coiled up like a viper, rather than a cobra, appearing like a spring of three and a half coils, as specifically indicated in the next verse. This snake is not only sleeping in its most easy-going state, but can uncoil itself with a hissing noise, as mentioned in some yogic texts, to become a verticalized and rigid version of the same without coils. By this verticalizing ascent, another hole at the top of the psycho-physical setup is reached, passing through, if possible, what is referred to as an "Absolute Passage" situated somewhere below the pituitary gland at the soft palate, behind the uvula. When the head of the snake touches this highest of plexuses or points of psycho-physical synergism or syndromes, the yogi is supposed to experience an exaltation that makes him, in principle, attain the Absolute Vision. These upper and lower limits have to be clearly visualized by us in studying Verses 9 and 10. Here we are only explaining how "breaking through the whole Kula path" is a dynamism to be understood as resembling the sudden increase of electric voltage, rather than any slow process, as in the case of slow nuclear reactions.

"Sporting secretly" only means that the yogi's whole dynamism has a public and a private reciprocity in terms of enjoyment. What is private on the minus side is public on the plus side, and vice-versa. The secret alluded to here is to be understood as having a minus-side reference.

(Bhagavad Gita, Chapter VII, Verses 4 and 5:

"Earth, water, fire, air, sky, mind, reason also, and
consciousness of individuality: thus here is divided
My eightfold nature.

This is the non-transcendental (apara = immanent).
Know the other to be my nature, which is transcedental,
constituting life, 0 Mighty-Armed (Arjuna) by which the
phenomenal world is sustained".)

(THE NANDI, OR BENEDICTION FROM SHAKUNTALA.

"That which is the first creation of the creator,
That which bears the offering made according to due rites,
That which is the offerer,
Those two which make time,
That which pervades all space, having for its quality what is perceived by the ear,
That which is the womb of all seeds,
That by which all living beings breathe:
Endowed with these eight visible forms, may the supreme Lord protect you."

This is the translation as found in the Motilal Banarsidas edition, see the bottom of this page for further comments on this text. ED)

(Click here for a commentary by Nataraja Guru on Kandukavati, the prototypical dancing girl, as described in the Dasakumaracharita ("The Tale of the Ten Princes") by Dandin, a classic of Sanskrit Literature. ED)

(See the bottom of this page for the text of Narayana Guru's "Epistemology of the Gnosis". ED)

ADDITIONAL COMMENTS WITH STRUCTURAL DIAGRAMS RELATED TO THIS VERSE FROM SAUNDARYA LAHARI/NOTES.

WORD FOR WORD
mahim muladhare - the earth placed in the Muladhara
kam api - the water also
manipure - in the Manipura
hutavaham - the fire principle (receptacle of sacrificial offerings)
sthitam svadhisthane - established in the Swadhisthana
hrdi - in the heart
marutam - the winds
akasam upari - the sky placed above
mano api - the mind also
bhru maddhye - between eyebrows
sakalam api bhitva kulapatam - breaking through the whole Kula path
sahasrare padme - in the thousand-petaled lotus
saha rahasi patya viharase - you do sport with your lord in secret

In this verse we have an ascending series of elementals.

(Elementals are the traditional series of Earth, Water, Fire etc. as also known in Greek and other European philosophies. ED)

Parvati ascends and meets Shiva in the Sahasrara at the top of the vertical series.

Digital and binary are horizontal.
Analog is vertical.

(Analog - in an analog audio signal, the instantaneous voltage of the signal varies continuously with the pressure of the sound waves. It differs from a digital signal, in which a continuous quantity is represented by a discrete function which can only take on one of a finite number of values.relating to or using signals or information represented by a continuously variable physical quantity such as spatial position, voltage, etc.

Binary - relating to, using, or denoting a system of numerical notation that has 2 rather than 10 as a base.

Digital - of signals or data expressed as series of the digits 0 and 1, typically represented by values of a physical quantity.

It seems that digital and binary are horizontal because they are a language using signs - numbers are signs - while analog is vertical because it uses a one-one correspondence between two factors.

A sign is like a letter of the alphabet - "r" represents one particular sound and no other - it has only one meaning - it is "semantically monovalent".

A symbol is like the colour red on a traffic light - it means "stop" in this particular case, but can have many other meanings - it can symbolize danger, blood, in India it symbolizes mourning for the dead etc.

In mathematics, a bijection (or bijective function or one-to-one correspondence) is a function between the elements of two sets, where every element of one set is paired with exactly one element of the other set, and every element of the other set is paired with exactly one element of the first set.

THIS IS A VERY TENTATIVE INTERPRETATION. ED)

One-to-one correspondence or bijection.

The action in this verse is taking place inside the yogi.

"Breaking through all these, sporting with thy Lord".
There is interpenetration here between the Chakras: it is the same thing happening, at whatever different level.

Cancellation happens in every Chakra and cancellation is cancellation, it is the same Absolute Value at every level

You must break through all these chakras to arrive at the 1000-petaled lotus at the Omega Point at the top of the vertical axis.
Here Sankara revises Patanjali, author of the authoritative Yoga Sutras (q.v.)
He is anti-Samkhya.

(The Yoga Sūtras of Patañjali are 196 aphorisms that constitute the foundational text of Yoga, which is one of the six orthodox schools of Indian Philosophy; it is paired with the Samkhya school, which is dualistic, and both are thus rejected by Vedanta. ED)

Non-dual Yoga and Patanjali´s Yoga are here revalued.
Here the Chakras are taken together, and dealt with in one stroke - burst through.

Do not say at any point that there are two realities - anyone who sees more than one, "he goes from death to death".
The Advaitic approach is to burst through all the six Chakras at on stroke.
Duality between ends and means is not admitted.

When we say Kundalini, we refer only to the denominator side.
Khecari Mudra, on the Numerator, must be dealt with at some other time.

(Khechari Mudra is dealt with in Narayana Guru's "Darsana Mala", in the chapter on Yoga, where it is translated as a "space-freedom attitude." ED)

"When meditation with gaze fixed between the eye-brows
And the tongue-tip touching beyond the uvula takes place
Then happens that space-freedom attitude
Of drowsiness and fatigue - dispelling capacity."

Another version:

TRANSLATION
the earth
in the lowest of the series of Adharas (stable positions)
(Muladhara)
the water
in the second of the Adharas from below (Manipura)
fire
established
in the third (Swadhisthana)
in the heart
the air
space
above that (it is) in the fourth
also the mind
between the eyebrows
everything breaking through the Kula path
in the thousand-petalled lotus
together, secretly, with Your lord
You do sport

THE REVOLUTIONARY APPROACH IN THIS VERSE IS THAT WE BURST THROUGH ALL THE CHAKRAS AT ONCE, INSTEAD OF TREATING THEM AS PROGRESSIVE STAGES TO BE CROSSED ONE-BY-ONE, AS IS USUALLY THE CASE.

ABOVE ALL OF THEM IS THE SAHASRARA - THE THOUSAND-PETALED LOTUS

Then, in descending order, we have:

6) AJNA CHAKARA, Manas, or mind

5) Above the heart - space - VISUDDHI

4) Heart - air - ANAHATA

3) Fire - SWADHISTHANA

2) Water - MANIPURA (SWADHISTHANA and MANIPURA are inverted here)

1) Earth - MULADHARA

There is complete reversion in this verse: there is no ascent here, the Absolute is sufficient unto itself, at any level.

(Patanjali's Yoga, generally accepted as the most authoritative by non-Advaita Vedantins, envisages progressing upwards, in stages, through the Chakras. This is a consequence of its dualistic approach. (See above). ED)

There are three ideas of Yoga:
1) Patanjali's eight-stage Yoga,
2) Samkhya,
3) Kapila.

(For a brief discussion of these schools of Indian Philosophy, see Nataraja Guru's comments on the six schools of Indian Philosophy. A more detailed study of this subject may be found in An Integrated Science of the Absolute. ED)

SHAD-ADHARAS (The six Adharas or Chakras) - these are six levels or ways of looking at things; a hierarchy of syndromes, c.f. psycho-somatic medicine and the Weber-Fechner laws of psychophysics.

One has to go "up the tube" through the Chakras - ascending like the Kundalini snake - between the snake and the tiger - there are two nadis or passages rising vertically - one is actual, the other is virtual or subtle.The nearest thing to this in physiology is the sympathetic nervous system, c.f. Holt Mc Dougal.

Here the process of gradual ascent through the Chakras favoured by the Samkhya school is eliminated at one stroke.

(The Weber–Fechner law combines two different laws. E.H. Weber (1795–1878) was one of the first people to approach the study of the human response to a physical stimulus in a quantitative fashion. His law states that the just-noticeable difference between two stimuli is proportional to the magnitude of the stimuli. G.T. Fechner (1801–1887) later offered an elaborate theoretical interpretation of Weber's findings, in which he attempted to describe the relationship between the physical magnitudes of stimuli and the perceived intensity of the stimuli. Fechner's law states that subjective sensation is proportional to the logarithm of the stimulus intensity. ED)

(The sympathetic nervous system is the part of the autonomic nervous system originating in the thoracic and lumbar regions of the spinal cord that in general inhibits or opposes the physiological effects of the parasympathetic nervous system, as in tending to reduce digestive secretions, speeding up the heart, and contracting blood vessels. ED)

There is no process of evolution here.

MATTER FOR THE FILM
The four kinds of Yoga must be shown here - almost as a lesson.

(The four kinds of Yoga are, traditionally, Karma, Jnana, Bhakti and Raja Yoga. The Bhagavad Gita and Narayana Guru state that there are TWO varieties of Yoga - Jnana and Karma - wisdom and Action. ED)

Four kinds of Gurus can be shown as the method.
Fifteen minutes can be given for this section, due to the widespread interest in the subject.

Each philosophy plays with certain categories.
There are six basic categories ("schools") of Hindu philosophy: they reach their glory in the Advaita of Sankara. (c.f. Brahma Sutras)

(The Brahma Sutras are, together with the Bhagavad Gita and the Upanishads, the Prasthanatrayi, or three foundation texts of Vedanta. ED)

The Mahavakyas (great sayings), aphorisms such as tat tvam asi ("You are That (the Absolute)")
- these are the basic dicta of Advaita.

Transcend and generalize and abstract;
if you are good at this, you attain the Absolute.

There is a progression in this series of verses:

VERSE 4 - Stresses the importance of the feet of the Devi - "I do not care for all your gods" - The bottom of the vertical axis is important as the square root of minus-one.

VERSE 5 - Eros, as horizontal, is brought in, also virtual beauty, not yet verticalized. (Read the Puranas and find out where Vishnu took the form of a woman)

VERSE 6 - Ananga (Eros, "the limbless one") represents Absolute Beauty in this verse. Eros rules. Although he is a passion (and thus horizontal. ED), he still rules. (See Othello).

VERSE 7 - A picture of the Devi - very slim of waist - a kind of double structure - the slim waist is to show there is no real existence at the horizontal level. There is only a slim horizontal parameter.

VERSE 8 - There is a progressive building up of schemas until we come to Verse 8 which is a circle or Mandala. Conics and Mandalas are introduced.

VERSE 9 - "Broken through..." - the earth consciousness at the base of the vertical axis here becomes a flame, breaking through the various stratifications.
Alpha and Omega are sleeping together - but not in a bedroom. Kundalini Shakti is bursting through.

If one should take a backward glance at the two previous verses, it will be noticed that there is a progressive use of structural language. The duplication of the form of the Devi in VERSE 7, with reference to symbols held in the duplicated four-fold hands of the Goddess pushed realistic representation to the very limits of pure structural expression.

In VERSE 8 the conic-sectional version is introduced.

In the present VERSE 9 the Shad Adhara Chakras or structural units, placed serially from the Alpha to the Omega Points of the vertical axis, are passed in review in summary fashion. Of all the elementals, the earth is the richest factor in terms of ontological reality or existence.

The earth as such, in a real workaday sense, is not the earth-factor abstracted and generalized with contemplative intentionality implied in it, which is referred to in this verse.

In other words, here it is a verticalized version of earth as prime matter or as the unmoved mover, as Aristotle would call it, that we have to think of.

The same holds good for the other elementals mentioned later in the verse, such as water, fire, air and ether, which become thinner in ontology, but richer in teleological import - both comprised under Absolute Value as a normalizing reference.

After fire as an elemental principal, those higher in the scale, such as air, space and the mind principle, tend to have a conceptual rather than a perceptual status. In his revaluation, the author seems to omit the names Anahata, Visuddhi and Ajña which are generally applied to the principles of air, sky and mind respectively.

All these can be on the two ambivalent limbs of the vertical axis; the numerator being conceptual and the denominator side perceptual.

The thinnest mathematical or mystical value-factor is like a parameter passing through and linking all gradations of value-units and is conventionally referred to as Sushumna, symmetrically placed at the middle of the bilateral functional factors called the two nadis: Ida and Pingala.

At each of the Adharas or stable points or Chakras (structuralized representations as units placed at different psycho-physical levels) there is to be imagined a neutralized version of a value-system proper to the level implied, but any two of them cancel out into a higher third till the highest, in the thousand-petaled lotus called the Sahasrara, is reached.

There the cancellation of counterparts becomes complete and thus the Alpha meets the Omega with parity between them. The mind, being the seat of willing, is placed in between the eyebrows.

Each of the Adharas or Chakras named here represents a stabilization, like the notes of music made by the frets of a guitar.

Six such Chakras are usually named and recognized, although it is possible in principle to add more intermediate stabilized positions.

The six Adharas are stable stages or serialized steps of epistemologically equal status, representing existent, subsistent and value systems. Thus, structurally, they take positions on a vertical parameter, each point compensating, reciprocating or cancelling by neutral absorption. The serial pluralism is only for schematic purposes without intrinsic difference or gradation.

The lower Chakra absorbs the higher in the ascent that is implied here. Other later verses will stress further structural peculiarities. There could be ascent as well as descent and normalisation at the central points of origin. Numerological indications are also possible.

A REVIEW OF THE CHAKRAS
The Chakras are supposed to begin at the base of the spine - earth, which is placed in this verse at the base of the spine - is matter in its purest form, in which the Devi plays a part, as it belongs to the negative, existential side of the structural situation.

When you shut your eyes in meditation, feel matter at the base of the spine and light at the top.

To know this axis, and to have everything melt into it, this is the secret of yogic mystical practice.

The music goes inside the vertical column, at six intermediary levels - the Chakras - producing variance in octaves (stillness?) (illegible).

It is an axis with two ambivalent limits: matter at the bottom and consciousness at the top.

It is below what is known and beyond what is known (See Upanishads).
There is no sound beyond the upper and lower limits.

The Goddess is flirting with her consort. She at the bottom of the axis at the Alpha Point and Shiva at the Omega Point at the top.

You have gone from the ground floor of a building and have passed through mysticism in an ascending series of stages.

She goes straight to the top, stopping at no intermediary levels.

Although the Chakras are in a serial order, they must be taken as a trans-finite series of ordinal numbers, 1st, 2nd, 3rd..etc.

These are not distinct or separate - finite or cardinal - they are to be considered as just a part of a series.

(Trans-finite numbers are numbers that are "infinite" in the sense that they are larger than all finite numbers, yet not necessarily absolutely infinite. The term "transfinite" was coined by Georg Cantor, who wished to avoid some of the implications of the word infinite in connection with these objects, which were nevertheless not finite. Few contemporary writers share these qualms; it is now accepted usage to refer to transfinite cardinals and ordinals as "infinite". However, the term "trans-finite" also remains in use. ED)

Only five Chakras are mentioned here, there must be six - an error of the pundit. The Guru will use his intuitive structuralism to place it correctly.

The whole of this is known as the Kula Path - from the heart onwards it changes from the elemental to the conscious: i.e. the heart (air), space (ether), and mind.
Interpenetrated, the Kula Path is seen as a unified whole.

The fire chakra has to be placed in the heart.

A tentative earlier translation:

"You remain secretly sporting with Your lord in the thousand-petalled lotus.
Having broken through the earth principle of the Muladhara,
The water principle of the Manipura and the fire principle placed in the Svadhisthana,
In the heart, the air, with space above, as also the mind between the eyebrows and breaking through these,
Transcending thus the whole Kula Path".

Why did he not use the names of the three upper Chakras?
These are not existential factors but intelligent factors.

The function of space is to allow anything else to exist within it without contradiction - (Space = Akasha).

Anyway, we approach space by a negative process
- as Sankara, so Einstein.

(Akasha in Sanskrit means "Aether" in both the elemental and metaphysical senses. ED)

(See the difference between demi-relativity and real relativity, also the Michelson - Morley experiment, Fitzgerald-Lorentz Contractions etc.).

The heart - "never killed" is the centre of life (intermediary?).
The mind, ether, breath or breeze - are both material and immaterial.
But the three existential Chakras have been mentioned, and not the three conceptual ones.

This eliminates the duality between mind and matter.

This Kula Path began to thrive as an esoteric doctrine with the fall of Buddhism.
The Devi here is called Mula Prakrti (root nature), bursting out from the vertical axis.

Horizontally, space is impermeable but, as you become verticalized, there is a process of inclusion, as opposed to exclusion.

The physical heart is the centre of vitality, thus it corresponds to air or prana, which has an intermediate position in this series.
The heart has a locus, seen vectorially.

The Six Chakras:
Muladhara - Earth
Manipura - Water
Swadhisthana - Fire
Anahata - Air
Visuddhi - Ether
Ajna - Mind

In VERSE 6, half of the Devi's body is filled with eroticism; eroticism is normal bliss. You cannot throw eroticism out of the picture as Christianity does. The Absolutist picture gives Eros a place in the Devi's legs.

In VERSE 7, the Devi as "Purushika": do not try and copulate forcefully with Her: the Absolute cannot be defeated.

In VERSE 8, the Yogi has to meditate on something: a gem-island.

In VERSE 9, stable positions of cancellation ascend on a vertical axis.

In VERSE 10, there are two "trees of Porphyry"- one spreading upwards, the other downwards.

Beauty is an Absolute value.
Abstract and generalize and you will get the ultimate adorable Absolute.

The word "Absolute" has no fixed content, it varies with each discipline - it is also known as a constant or a universal.
Anything that persists unvaried through time and space is the Absolute.

("The Absolute is that to which all other things are relative.", Nataraja Guru. ED)

Taking some one existent thing as an idol, to the exclusion of all others, and treating it alone as holy - this is idolatry.
The relativistic idol-worshippers make an idol both subsistent and existent.

How to give a tangible content to the Absolute so that it is acceptable to all?

Sankara says in the Saundarya Lahari: what we adore is not an object - it is a valuable idea, sufficiently real and tangible.
This idea is Beauty, the tangible form of which is colour.
Beauty is both outside and inside the mind.

Shiva is not sufficiently mixed up in the phenomenal world - he has no function.
Shakti, however, is manifested force.

Wherever vegetation is luxuriant, the Mother Principle is exalted.
The Advaitin fuses the two together.
Sankara represents the cult of Shakti or the Devi in its revised and revalued form.

AS A CLASSICAL EXAMPLE OF A VERTICAL SERIES OF VALUES SIMILAR TO WHAT IS DESCRIBED IN THIS VERSE:

FURTHER NOTES ON KALIDASA'S SHAKUNTALA

THE NANDI, OR BENEDICTION FROM SHAKUNTALA.

The benediction is a masterpiece of structuralism: a god with eight visible forms, both cosmology and psychology together.

1. The first creation is fire, the centre, as with Thales etc.

2. That which bears the fire (what is put into it or sacrificed) according to a certain order in the universe: some grains.

3. The Hotri, or sacrificant, who makes the offering.

4 and 5. "Those two who make time" the sun and moon are to be verticalized so as to rise and set in your consciousness as if presented to the five senses.

6. The visible world - i.e. attainable in a schematised form.

7. Whatever you call the horizontal world - the womb of all seeds.

8. That by which all things live - breath.

ALL THESE FALL INTO A VERTICAL AXIS.
ABSTRACT AND GENERALIZE AND YOU GET STRUCTURE, THAT IS, FORM.

THE NANDI FROM SHAKUNTALA
One god is praised here: Ishana.
A Puranic or mythological interpretation of the eight forms would be wrong, it should be understood structurally.

Kalidasa must be read as a Vedantin.
Quote the Gita, Brahma Sutras, and Upanishads in support.

Shabda Pramana means that "the words" (e.g. The words of an authority or scripture. ED) are taken as being true.

Other Pramanas (sources of valid knowledge. ED) are:
1. Pratyaksha - what is given to the senses.
2. Anumana - inference (where there is smoke, there is fire).
3. Upamana - analogy between two examples.
4. Sastrimitva - all Shastras would be wrong if there were no Brahman.
This is Shabda Pramana.

These are four of the ten Pramanas ("commonly accepted in Vedanta" see Science the Absolute on this website)

In the Nandi, we find:

1. Fire.

2. Ghee (Clarified butter, used as an offering. ED).

3. The Brahmin sacrificer (these two - "That which bears the offering made according to due rites, that which is the offerer" - are interchangeable: "ya cha hotri...")

4 and 5. Time as sun and moon. There is an alternating figure-eight dynamism here.
Time mounts the vertical axis, like S and S' (see Bergson in the Science of the Absolute on this website).

Advaita Vedanta

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Saundarya Lahari