Sanai on Love - Embodiment and Purification

Sanai on Love ...

Twelfth century Persian poet Hakim Sanai is credited with writing the first Persian mystical epic of Sufism, The Enclosed Garden of Truth (حدیقه الحقیقه و شریعه الطریقه). He was a major influence upon Rumi. Here we take a brief tour of the garden in search of Sanai's vision of love.

While Kabir’s path of love deepens our understanding of selflessness and invites us to remember God’s infinite consciousness devoid of “me” and “mine,” Sanai’s path of love advocates a gradual inner purification of the heart through which sedimented views are cleansed and removed. These impurities are obstacles that hinder mystical union.

For Sanai, only through the removal of all dust (i.e., pride, lust, greed, and other sensual passions) lying hidden within our hearts can one expand the limited mind to limitless awareness.

Embodiment

“The highroad by which thy spirit and prayers can travel towards God lies in the polishing of the mirror of the heart” (15) writes Sanai. Here the trope of the highroad stands for an ascent to God, a higher plane of embodiment that is accessible to us to the extent we cultivate to remove the dust of defilements.

Just as a mirror when stained by dust obscures the reflected image, so the limitless self (Allah, for Sanai) is obscured by its sensual contaminants. For Sanai, when the heart is wholly purged of sensual passions, then the brightness of God can be reflected and embodied.

You can better see thy image
In the mirror of thy heart than in thy clay.

Break loose from the chain you have fettered thyself with,
for you will be free when you have got clear from thy clay.

Since clay is dark and heart is bright,
Thy clay is a dustbin and thy heart a rose-garden (17).

In this image, we see the heart likened to a rose-garden and clay a dustbin. Clay stands for any of the heart's contaminants, those impurities that harden around us and weigh us down. Meanwhile, the dynamic of turning away one’s attention from the world to the inner awareness of God signifies that as we slowly empty ourselves of rubbish, sunlight begins to shine through our inner landscape of extravagant gardens, in whose lushness we become alive.

The brightness of God refers to the deeper dynamic dimension of love, our inner being. Clearing the muck and mud of our egocentric habits is a direct way to reclaim embodiment and connection to our inner awareness, for Sanai.

Purification

In the context of Sanai's poetry, purification is undertaken in order transcend our limitations, shifting the practitioner from a narrow framework in which they pursue the immediate gratification of sense pleasures to a panoramic perspective. In peering through a myopic lens, we limit ourselves to the realm of the finite. Our lives in this mode are characterized by duality and filled with dissatisfaction, always seeking something to fill the void. Yet when the seeker recognizes creator (Allah) and creation are one, her perspective widens immensely:

Then when the soul sets forth from the gate,
The old heart becomes new from there on.

His form escapes from the bonds of nature,
The heart gives back its charge to the spirit. (24)

This recognition of unity dissolves body boundaries between self and others. When there is no separation, awakening stirs within us, like the final moments of a dream as it dissolves in the early morning. With our limitations transcended, we are returned to an embodied, non-dual, panoramic awareness that was with us since time immemorial, only obscured by choices of our own making.

Fabrication of Duality

Like Kabir's protest against dualism, feeling that the individual self must be shattered in order to transcend dualistic notions, Sanai similarly asserts that duality is an obstacle on the path of love.

In the face of his belief in the Unity, There exists for him no old or new; All is naught, naught; He alone is. (86)

Sanai thus reflects that God, Allah himself, is beyond dual concepts and notions. Non-dual awareness entails the vulnerability of living with an open heart and risk of having our precious cherished ego bubble burst. To burst the bubble, all notions of self and others and all relativity must be transcended until there is no existence except God, who is undifferentiated and whole.

Cutting through duality, Sanai further urges that we need to cast our conditioned existence into the unconditioned.

O seeker of the shell of the pearl of 'unless',
lay down clothing and life on the shore of 'Not.' (30)

Here, the imagery of clothing conveys our use of garments to hide our limitless self (Allah). In fact, these garments are fabrications, in more ways than one. They are fabrics that are measured, cut, and stitched together to create a finished product in the form of a garment. Just like the fabrics, the faculty of mind, the intellect, stitches together separate names and forms to conceive the world in terms of fixed measurements. The mind has a tendency to fabricate constructs, which in turn cover over our limitless self.



Likewise, Sanai uses clothing symbolically to represent a particular form that we often wear and with which we identify. Such robes disguise our true self. Indeed, we mistakenly hold onto our garments as a false refuge in which to hide. By laying down the clothing and life on the “shore of ‘Not,’” we begin the process of undressing that which lies hidden and disguised.

Our Original Home

We find in Sanai's poetry a liberating narrative, one that depicts the process of inward purification and outward embodiment of the divine, re-inhabiting the abode of God, our original home.

Sanai implores us to turn inward, understand our innate union with God, and lay ourselves bare. As with Kabir's use of the term "God," Sanai can be similarly read as imploring a reconnection with our innate purity, free of the contaminants and clothing in which we dress and thereby disguise it. In mystic fashion, "God" for Sanai is the infinite, not some being separate from us, commanding us from above. Rather, this force implores us from within.

We're curious what you may find worthwhile about Sanai's poetry, either from what we've shared or any other works of his you've encountered. Please feel free to join the conversation in the comments below. Best wishes.



Hakim Sanai’s The Enclosed Garden of Truth. Trans. M.J. Stephenson. Hastings, East Sussex, 2016.

Kabir on Love - Harnessing the Runaway Mind

Kabir on Love ...

An Indian mystic-poet influenced by Muslim and Hindu teachings yet critical of both, Kabir (who is believed to have lived sometime between 1398 and 1518 of the common era) was a powerful contributor to the Bhakti or devotional movement in India. Many supernatural stories surround his early life. At the crux of Kabir's philosophy is union with God through self-discipline.

Here we embark on the first installation of a three part series (also see part two on Sanai and part three on Ghalib) on the mystic love poems of Persian and Indic sages, spanning syncretic and ecclectic Sufi, Muslim, and Hindu visions of union with the divine.

In particular, Kabir's vision of love is informed by a deep appreciation for the divine within each person. Many of his poems urge the reader to turn inward and to regard all human beings as manifestation of God. Perhaps it was this humanizing of the divine, and vice versa, that inspired his poems regarding cosmic union.

The Middle Way

You may recall a previous post of ours detailing the Madhyamaka school's version of the Middle Way, a Buddhist undertaking that, while expounded by the Indian sage Nāgārjuna, in fact traces itself to the earliest of teachings purportedly spoken by the historical Buddha himself from the Pāli Canon.

Why do we mention that here? It appears that Kabir, while not Buddhist and in fact critical of Buddhism, devised his own understanding of the Middle Way. His understanding was framed not in terms of a countermeasure to still the tides of metaphysical speculation, but in terms of navigating the extremes of sensory indulgence and sensory deprivation, a variation on the Middle Way also found in Buddhism.

Before launching into Kabir's poetry, we first briefly examine Kabir's version of the Middle Way, veering neither to the extreme of pleasure hoarding nor ascetic renunciation, given that both may be mistreated as objects of identification. Such an understanding deeply informed his understanding of love and mystic union.



Throughout his poetry, Kabir consistently stresses that the world is bound by objects of desire that function as sense enjoyments. Encumbered by these objects, around which we create false identifications and personalities, we often forget our spiritual goals. At the other extreme, haziness enshrouds those who renounce the householder life and live a life of poverty as ascetics. For Kabir, this is equally problematic as a potential source of identification, in this case with the life of a renunciant. While Kabir leaned toward the renunciant lifestyle, he found it equally unworthy as an object of identification relative to a life of luxury.

According to Kabir, the ideal embodiment of true renunciation concerns herself neither with “me” nor “mine.” The moment we cling to a personal ego, the mind becomes limited by self-centeredness. With a mind free from egoism, we realize pure consciousness in the form of union with Rama or Allah. So long as we allow egoism to take up our mind, the further we are from God.

Kabir’s poetry invites us to surrender the finite ego and to cultivate love for the infinite consciousness of God. This was Kabir's Middle Way.

The Runaway Mind

Sounds simple enough, but not actually so. Several obstacles stand in the way of our actualization of union. For Kabir, our chief obstacle in life is the “runaway mind,” the mind that regresses into the infinitely receding past and unfurls into the yet to unfold future, seeking a sense of safety and security in that which seems to promise but can never provide such comfort.

Kabir describes this runaway mind as a crafty huckster caught in the trap of the ego (wife) and the five senses (children). While such comparisons, wife standing for ego and children standing for the five senses, are problematic from a text critical perspective, they illustrate Kabir's renunciant tendencies.

The mind’s a shortchanging
Huckster with a crafty
Wife and five
Scoundrel children.
It won’t change its ways.

The mind’s a knot, says Kabir.
Not easy to untie. (13).

Here Kabir speaks in the third-person, informing us that the habit energy of the five senses and ego fuels the mind's tendency to run amok, a tendency which inevitably ties us up as if into a knot, thereby constraining freedom of movement.

Perhaps the crafty huckster is caught in the trap of “I,” “me,” and “mine” more than any symbolic manifestations or objects of possession. Wife and children are not to blame. Rather, the issue lies in clinging. For Kabir, wife and children are objects over which one tends to lay claim, which further tightens the knots of suffering. Anything we think we own, we also stand to lose.

Harnessing Habit Energy

Kabir further reminds us that these knots can be undone by transforming our maladaptive habit energies into behaviors conducive toward liberation. Powerful habit energy accumulated since time immemorial triggers our disembodiment, conditioning us to view the world through the notion of separateness. Thus we find ourselves constricted and bound by our conditioning. Once we take back control of the mind and cease being pushed around by our habit energy, an unbinding occurs. To quote Kabir:

Listen carefully,
Neither the Vedas
Nor the Qu’ran
Will teach you this:
Put the bit in its mouth,
The saddle on its back,
Your foot in the stirrup,
And ride your wild runaway mind
All the way to heaven. (14)

Reflecting his free-thinking tendencies, Kabir here reminds us that our own mind is what both shackles and unbinds us. By giving our mind over to external sources of presumed authority, we become enslaved. By indulging its habit energy, which orients us toward pursuit of sensual pleasures and material objects, we are shackled. By taking charge and rising above habit energy, we become fully alive, present, relaxed, connected, and re-embodied.

Shifting the direction of our habit energies, we come to witness the unity of God. For Kabir, love is all that makes sense. He thus dismantled his loom and sacrificed weaving, his career, for God’s love. One may wonder what triggered his radical departure from a conventional form of livelihood. Perhaps he felt an absence, an incompleteness or lack of wholeness, which led him to seek union with God. Perhaps he awakened to the realization that his sense of a separate self was nothing more than a false appearance, a dream manifested by egoic habit energy.



Love may serve as a cure of sorts for the mind that is enmeshed in habit energies and reluctant to surrender its egoic tendencies. When the idea of individual self shatters, we come to transcend any dualistic notions such as “me” and “not-me.” All separateness vanishes into the unitive nature of phenomena.

Open the inward eye, says Kabir.
It’ll make the well disappear;
The water carriers too. (41)

In the Indian subcontinent, ritual bathing in holy water, such as the River Ganges, has long been practiced. Perhaps the well and water carriers stand for a similar sort of ritual ablution. Reflecting the dissolving of impurities and the embrace of unity with God, when one gazes inward, the well (physical body) and the water carriers (five senses) are “emptied” insofar as they are realized to be an illusion and thus unworthy of identification. Consequently, when the water of life runs dry, the unity of God can move and flow into us. Likewise, once the outflow of the mind and conditioned body via the five senses cease, one experiences an inflow of unconditional love, pouring inward via mystical union with the divine.

A Dynamic Process

As usual, we return here to the relevance of such reflections to us today. With so much of the world's population preoccupied with profit and prestige, why should one even consider looking into the poetry of a fifteenth century Indian mystic?

For Kabir, awakening to God's presence is a dynamic process that requires constant awareness and continual remembrance. God is the home of our infinite consciousness, a home where we may always return despite long forgetting its unconditional embrace. Kabir emphasizes that continual remembrance of the name of God (Rama) is necessary to fuel and nourish the recognition of God.

No matter what one's religious background, or lack thereof, Kabir's use of the term "God" can be understood to stand for connection, much like "religion," from the Latin religare, to re-bind. When we remain forgetful, we grow disconnected from ourselves and our surroundings. Through remembrance (mindfulness or smṛti in Sanskrit, from smara स्मर, to re-mind or remember) we become reconnected. Through this reconnecting, remembering, re-minding, re-binding, we are in actuality un-bound, free.

Songs of Kabir. Trans. Arvind Krishna Mehrotra. New York Review Books, 2011.

Aggregates and Chariots - Greco-Buddhist Contemplations on the Nature of "Self"

Greco-Buddhist Contemplations ...

You may recall one of our previous posts entitled "Intro to Emptiness" outlining a set of five overlapping factors of experience that are often mistaken for a metaphysically substantial self or what pertains to a self. While that may be a bit of a mouthful, perhaps biting off more than one can chew in a single article, we wish to follow up on this subject here in simpler terms.

Understanding these "aggregates," as they're called, in terms of emptiness and dependent origination may feel like an abstract endeavor. Fortunately, however, several useful similes from the Buddhist tradition exist (conventionally) to help contextualize the nature of these so-called aggregates, the building blocks of our experience, and their relationship to a presumed self.

Here, we thus examine a segment of the Milinda Pañha, a nexus of Greco-Buddhist contemplative philosophy and practice. Considered canonical in Burmese Buddhism, it claims to document an exchange between the Buddhist sage Nāgasena and a king of the Indo-Greco empire, Menander the First of Bactria - spanning modern Afghanistan, Uzbekistan, and Tajikistan. A historical figure, Menander ruled from roughly 160 to 130 BCE. His name is "Pāli-cized" as Milinda. Among their dialogue's major motifs is the image of the chariot, tracing itself to the Kaṭha Upaniṣad, now widely used as an analogy for the concept of "self" in Buddhism.

Aggregates and Chariots

The simile of aggregates and chariots surfaces in a series of questions posed by King Milinda to the sage Nāgasena. Most of these questions orbit around the notion of selfhood. Prompting the chariot simile, in the middle of this discussion, Nāgasena remarks that "Nāgasena" is but a name, while in actuality, there is no Nāgasena. Befuddled, the king presses further, to which Nāgasena responds by employing the simile of the chariot. Their dialogue unfolds with Nāgasena asking King Milinda how he was able to come to their present location in the first place.

"How did you come here, by foot or in a chariot?"

"In a chariot, venerable sir."

"Then, explain sir, what that is. Is it the axle? Or the wheels, or the chassis, or reins, or yoke that is the chariot? Is it all of these combined, or is it something apart from them?"

"It is none of these things, venerable sir."

(trans. Bhikkhu Pesala)

Here, we find Nāgasena pressing King Milinda to identify exactly what it is that he calls a chariot, positing each of its parts as possible identifiers. The king is unable to pin it down. Nāgasena asks if the chariot is the sum of its parts, or if it extends beyond them. Seemingly elusive, the king replies with none of the above.



Clearly the wheels of thought were set in motion here. As the king searches for a rational response to give to his questioner, he arrives fully to their present exchange, prompting his invocation of the chariot as simile. Certainly he had some notion of what made the chariot a chariot despite his struggles to put it into words. After a brief interlude, the chariot again takes center stage as the king, after much reflection, finally formulates an answer.

"It is because it has all these parts that it comes under the term chariot."

"Very good, sir, your majesty has rightly grasped the meaning. Even so it is because of the thirty-two kinds of organic matter in a human body and the five aggregates of being that I come under the term ‘Nāgasena’. As it was said by Sister Vajīra in the presence of the Blessed One, ‘Just as it is by the existence of the various parts that the word “Chariot” is used, just so is it that when the aggregates of being are there we talk of a being’."

(trans. Bhikkhu Pesala)

Importantly, the sense of self arising from the aggregates is comparable to a constellation, assemblage, conglomeration. A whole comprised of parts, "self" serves as a conventional appellation for an aggregation of bodily form, feeling, perception, volitional activities, and consciousness. "Self" is an at-times useful tool that humans have constructed (like a chariot) to serve conventional ends, but need not be mistaken for an ultimate identity or ultimate reality.

Given that the self is constructed, it has only a conventional existence. In the same sense that a chariot consists of its component parts - which alone are not the chariot and even together amount to no ultimate chariot - the conventional self is likewise made up of five aggregates: form, feeling, perception, volition, and consciousness. Like a chariot, explains the Buddhist nun Vajīra in the Vajīra Sutta (SN 5.10) referenced by Nāgasena, the self is a conventional designation for an assemblage of parts, a heap of phenomena.

"Just as, with an assemblage of parts,
The word 'chariot' is used,
So, when the aggregates are present,
There's the convention 'a being.'"

(trans. Bhikkhu Bodhi)

Indeed, Vajīra's remarks here are the origin for the chariot analogy within Buddhism. The image also traces itself to the Kaṭha Upaniṣad, a text of the Vedanta tradition, a precursor to and modern Hindu schools. It's unclear where its exact origins lie, but the chariot is nonetheless a familiar image with significant symbolic value in Indic contemplative circles.

As we can observe from the Buddhist nun Vajīra's remarks, a distinction is drawn between conventional language and ultimate reality, although the latter is not mentioned explicitly. Acknowledging the widely accepted worldly usage of "chariot" and other terms to refer to compounded objects, Vajīra clarifies that no one is denying the utter existence of chariots all together. Rather, the chariot does not exist as it appears to exist.

The Nature of "Self"

Unpacking the nature of "self" can be a thorny issue in Buddhism, for these very reasons. On one hand, the self is a conventionally experienced process, but on the other, it is not an ultimately existing thing. Notice the difference, which we hope to draw out through these key terms.

• Conventionally
• Experienced
• Process

vs.

• Ultimately
• Existing
• Thing

The second set of descriptors (ultimately existing thing) helps convey that what we grasp as self appears relatively unchanging, a lasting identity, some kind of persistent entity that remains the same from moment to moment.

The first set of descriptors (conventionally experienced process) helps convey that upon scrutinizing its supposed solidity, the sense of self is in actuality instantaneously arising and subsiding, changing from moment to moment, flowing onward like a stream.

Certainly not all see it this way. The Buddhist theory of self (or theory of "not-self") is definitely an outlier among other philosophies and world religions. Further, it has been variously interpreted throughout history and up to the present. We offer these reflections as a means of framing the question differently, not as whether there is or is not a self, but by offering two angles from which one may contemplate the situation, consistent with the "two truths" of conventional and ultimate reality.



We now turn the question to you. Does the chariot have a driver? Who or what has hold of the reins? Let us know below.