India has produced some of the world's greatest religious leaders, sages, saints, philosophersand spiritual thinkers. They were monks, nuns and renunciates, nationalists and reformers.No one religion had a monopoly on them. They range from Mahavira and Buddha, who livedover 2,500 years ago, to medieval saints like Chishti, Avvaiyar and Guru Nanak, to morerecent philosophers and religious icons such as Vivekananda, Ramakrishna, Saint Teresaand many others. The spiritual and philosophical heritage they left behind is India's gift toall Indians and the world.In the 'Life Lessons' series we publish the essential teachings of some of India's best-knownspiritual teachers, along with commentaries and biographical notes. Each book will be ahandy companion to help the reader along the difficult pathways of life. ***Lal Ded (Granny Lal), as Lalleshwari was known, was a Shaiva mystic saint who lived inKashmir, probably in the fourteenth century. Born into a Brahmin family of Pandrethan (nearSrinagar), she is said to have had an early bad marriage and faced many domestic hardships,prompting a turn to spirituality. She renounced her marriage and material life and becamea wandering mystic. She shared her wisdom in the form of vaakhs (sayings or utterances).These vaakhs (originally in the Kashmiri language) have seeped far and wide into popularusage and are part of the collective memory—through songs, proverbs and hymns—ofKashmiris of all stripes, through the generations. In these vaakhs, Lal Ded talked about thewoes of the human condition, her disillusionment with the world, her anguished search forGod, and, ultimately, her realization of God as pure consciousness. She rejected outwardrituals, ostentation and extreme asceticism as paths to reach the truth. Her observations onthe transience and futility of material pursuits and the emotions they generate, like greed,anger, pride and fear, apply to us all. While her sayings are deeply profound, her humanismmakes it easy to relate to Lal and her teachings.Translated and edited by Shonaleeka Kaul, the aphorisms in 'Looking Within' represent LalDed's core teachings.
About the Author
Shonaleeka Kaul is a cultural historian of early South Asia, specializing inworking with Sanskrit texts. She is associate professor in the Centre for HistoricalStudies, Jawaharlal Nehru University, and currently visiting professor at the SouthAsia Institute, Heidelberg University, Germany. She was also the Malathy SinghDistinguished Lecturer in South Asian Studies at Yale University, USA, and the JanGonda Fellow in Indology at Leiden University, The Netherlands. She is the authorof The Making of Early Kashmir: Landscape and Identity in the Rajatarangini, amongother books.
Loading...
