Compelling Charm of A Tantric
A
thousand years ago or more, a solitary yogin walks out of the Bengali
jungle just
after sundown and sits cross-legged under the canopy of a village
banyan tree.
He is dressed in little more than a loincloth. His beard and mustache
are unkempt,
and his long, matted hair is tied up in a bun. He carries a
mendicant’s staff and a double-headed hand drum. His eyes shine in
the torchlight. His reputation has preceded him, and an audience
quickly gathers at his feet, mostly young village men but some women,
too. They’ve heard that he mocks the elders, teaches a way to live
freely in the world, and sometimes will perform a miracle, like
turning base metals into gold or flying through the sky. Older men
cast suspicious glances from the edge of the crowd. They’ve heard
that he’s a dropout from the monastic university, lives near a
cremation ground with a low-caste woman, participates in debauched
rites, works at a low-class occupation if he works at all, and is out
to subvert the social and religious order.
The
silence of evening is broken by the barking of dogs, the lowing of
cattle, and
the screeching of birds; the scent and haze of home fires fills the
air. When
his audience has settled down, the man starts slowly to beat out a rhythm
on his drum, and then he begins to sing. His voice is untrained and his
melodies rough, but his lyrics are sharp and aphoristic. In rhyming
verses, using
words from the common tongue, he celebrates the ecstasy of
enlightened awareness and the free-roaming life, while mocking the
pretensions of ritualists, scholars, contemplatives, ascetics, and
anyone who claims that realization can be found anywhere but within
oneself. His words are simple, but his meanings complex and full of paradox. He sings of the sky and stars and sea, of animals and
plants, of husbands and wives and kings and commoners, but in ways
that seem to point below the surface. He says the mind is pure but
that we have to do without it; he suggests we can live sensuously in
the world but warns against the traps of pleasure; he damns obsession
with religious rites but hints at mystical practices of his own; he
rails against experts of every sort but venerates his guru without
reserve. When he is finished, he gets up, turns his back to the
crowd, and walks back alone into the jungle.
The
next morning, the village work resumes as it always does, but now
some of the young people, and the old men, too, find that they’ve
got the yogin’s songs stuck in their heads, a phrase here, a rhyme
there, which they try to puzzle out. At odd moments during the day,
and even more so at night, they find their thoughts turning to the
jungle, to truths that might be discovered beyond
the village clearing, to the sound of that strange troubadour’s
voice, the
rhythm of his drum, the look in his eyes.
From
Tantric Treasures by Roger R. Jackson
