I, Lalla by Lal Ded

Author:Lal Ded
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd
Published: 2013-06-24T04:00:00+00:00

1. G: 36 | K: 108

prathuy tīrthan gatshān sannyās

2. K: 87

latan huṅd māz lāryōm vatan

These vākhs, 1 and 2, contain the kernel of Lal Děd’s spiritual practice. Her concern is with inward and inner-directed evolution, not with the pursuit of shrines and pilgrimages, rituals and scriptures, observances and sacrifices. She argues that there is no reason to seek the Divine in places specially designated as holy, since the Divine, or the Self, is the core of one’s own being. Parenthetically, we may note the scepticism expressed by many Indian mystic-poets towards pilgrimage sites, which often function as staging posts in an economy of faith that replaces the elusive possibilities of grace with the more tangible practicalities of commerce. The faraway grass of poem 1, the luxuriant dramun, is the durva grass used in Hindu rituals.

In poem 2, we find Lalla in her persona as the wanderer, intimate with the landscape and a stranger to domestic settings. Since the Divine pervades the universe, Lalla teaches, an experience of realisation or enlightenment is potentially available anywhere. As Joseph Campbell observes, in The Hero with a Thousand Faces: ‘[A] great temple can be established anywhere. Because, finally, the All is everywhere, and anywhere may become the seat of power. Any blade of grass may assume, in myth, the figure of the saviour and conduct the questing wanderer into the sanctum sanctorum of his own heart’ (2008, 35).

The ‘secret’ that lies at the heart of wisdom teachings is usually a simple yet compelling and often ignored truth: here, it is the understanding of the omnipresence of the Divine, which Lalla distils from a ‘hundred pieces of talk’, from discourses and doctrines.

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