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VOLUME VIII, Number 2
July- December 2018 
SWAMI ABHISHIKTANANDA I shall place this important contribution to the publication of the works by Swami Abhishiktananda in the context of my connection with the author and his poems.
I met Swami Abhishiktananda for the first time in Shantivanam, his ashram, in 1963. As I was leaving, he entrusted me with the manuscript of his book Guhāntara, written during his time in the caves of Arunachala. It had been censured by the authorities in Rome, and he did not have permission to publish it. He thought it would be safe to keep it in Europe until such time as it would be possible to publish it. I carried it as a great treasure, and of course read it with deep involvement.
The second time I connected with the author and his poems was in the 1970s. Soon after Swamiji’s samādhi, I gave a few retreats in Austria, using his texts as a basis. I selected the two versions of the long poem “The Further Shore” (translated as “The Other Shore” by the present author) which the participants found very conducive to meditation and to the deepening of their spiritual life.
The third occasion was in the early 1980s, when I was assisting Raimon Panikkar in editing a selection of Swamiji’s Diary for publication, a difficult but immensely inspiring task. While reading the original, I was struck by the fact that whenever Swamiji was in an inspired state after some powerful experience, he would break into poetry. The idea already came to my mind that a selection of his poems could be extracted for a kind of meditative reading.
These inspirations have come to a concrete expression in the book under review. The editor and translator, Jacob Riyeff, has made a laudable effort in selecting poems of Swamiji from different contexts and translating them afresh from the French. In this book are the poems contained in Guhāntara and a section of French adaptations of the Tamil poems on Arunachala by Sri Ramana Maharshi. Both these sections testify to Swamiji’s great attraction to and love for the holy mountain Arunachala. The problem is that this implies a double adaptation—by Swamiji from Sri Ramana’s poems, which have already been translated into English, and then the author’s translation from the French version. Ideally, one should compare all three versions, as well as the Tamil original—for those who know Tamil.
The most important section contains the poems extracted from the Diary.
At this point, one can already raise a question of methodology. Many passages selected are not, strictly speaking, poems. It is true that Swamiji’s prose is often very poetic, and hence the difficulty in lifting a passage from a page that is a mixture of prose and poetry. Naturally, these passages were already translated into English by the translators of the Diary, David Fleming and James Stuart. The present translator has sometimes chosen different expressions, depending on his own style. As a sensitive scholar of poetry, he is conscious of the implications of any translation of poetry (see p.17ff.).
The last section contains “Poems and Poetic Passages from Other Prose Sources”, including the very moving extracts from the letters Swamiji wrote in the very last phase of his life to his disciple Marc Chaduc (Swami Ajatananda). From all these, it is obvious that writing poetry was not Swamiji’s intention; it just happened, a sign that it was simply not possible for him to express his deep experience in prose. Mystic poetry stands at the very limit of what language is able to express. It also avoids the need to arrive at a logical understanding of the very tension that the author lived through, namely the Hindu Advaita and the Christian Trinitarian experience. When it is a case of spiritual love poetry, Swamiji, embedded in the Trinitarian mystery that occupied him during his whole life, addresses it to Arunachala in the first instance and to Jesus in the second.[1] Swamiji’s love for his disciple shows that his is not an abstract love but is incarnated in the non-dual relationship of Guru and disciple, true to the Indian tradition.
For those who doubt that Abhishiktananda has attained a high level of spiritual experience, if not enlightenment, there are “poems” which prove the contrary. I cannot resist quoting an extract of one of these clear expressions of his enlightening experience:
You have seen the lightning –
Keep your secret.
The lightning has torn the clouds asunder
And opened the abyss before you.
The lightning has split the heaven
You have found in your soul.
The lighting has split the firmament –
Gone, the roof above you.
The lighting has split your ego
And did not return.
But you know you’re beyond darkness –
Keep your secret.[2]
…
I find more clarity in the translation in the Diary:
You have seen the lightning …
Keep your secret.
The lightning has rent apart the clouds
And has opened for you the abyss.
The lightning has rent apart the firmament –
You no longer have a roof above you.
The lightning has torn in pieces your I,
It has not returned.
But you know that you are beyond the darkness,
Keep your secret…
The central theme of Swamiji’s search was the true I, aham. To give just one example, which he writes in a letter to Marc of March 1972:
Easter Joy!
Easter Joy! Joy within!
Boundless light.
Radiant in its own splendour!
Radiating eternity from Being.
In the beginning was the Self
In the form of the Purusha.
He looked, saw that Self
And said: “I am”!
Just so, whoever emerges from the darkness
And finds himself in the light Has passed into the self,
Into the unique AHAM. (p. 188)
Cyprian Consiglio’s Foreword situates Abhishiktananda in the Christian context. He finds it difficult to accept that Christians could “worship the deities of Hinduism” (p. xvi), a position that goes against the insight and experience of Abhishiktananda, as is clear from his relationship to Shiva and his symbol, the linga. Consiglio looks for traces of a personal God in the Upanishads, but this also misses the point of Swamiji’s deep understanding of and meditation on the Upanishads as contained in his essay on the Upanishads.[3] However, he admits that Swamiji was “an attractive figure, not only fearlessly delving into the depth experience but ecstatically expressing it” (p. xxi). In his Afterword, Swami Atmananda Udasin writes that “this collection of poems is the crest jewel of Dr. Riyeff’s anthology and expresses the profound turning point of Swami Abhishiktananda’s spiritual journey” (p. 200). These texts, which emerged from the depth of silence, can be meditated upon and lead back into silence. They can help the reader overcome the level of the mind that creates duality, including the duality between traditions and ways of spirituality.
Notes
[1]To Arunachala: “I will sing a song for my beloved”, p. 127; to Jesus: “Jesus was pure, perfectly pure”, p. 147.
[2]P. 152, from the Diary May 9, 1970.
[3]Cf. The Further Shore, Two Essays by Abhiahiktananda, ISPCK 175, pp. 59-111. |
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