A Note on the Charyapada

Yes, I keep returning to the Charyapada, considered to be songs of realization, or even "mystical poems," in the "Vajrayana" tradition of Buddhism--songs that were produced in "early" Bengali (and in other languages as well) between, roughly, the eighth and twelfth centuries.

Those self-absorbed aesthetes in our parts of the world--ones who stubbornly harbor the idea that "theory" blemishes, damages, or disfigures "creative" works--might see, if they want to see of course, how the Charyapada themselves enact an easy dialectic between "ars theoria" and "ars poetica."

So is it really possible to theorize pointedly or even elaborately in the space of a single song? The Charyapada would answer in the affirmative again and again. Indeed, one of their persistent theoretical preoccupations is the body (দেহতত্ত্ব)--the body as a site of struggles, material and metaphorical (unlike today's post-structuralist body-fetishism of course).

Here's a couplet from the Charyapada, one which is about how the body as an overdetermined material microsite relates dialectically to aquatic and celestial bodies and to nature at large:

এথ্থু সে সুরসুরি জমুণা এথ্থু সে গঙ্গাসাঅরূ।
এথ্থু পআগ বণারসি এথ্থু সে চন্দ দিবাঅরূ।।
[এই দেহেরই মধ্যে সরস্বতী যমুনা। গঙ্গাসাগরও এই দেহের মধ্যে। এইখানেই প্রয়াগ বারাণসী। চন্দ্রসূর্যও এই দেহের মধ্যে]

And this one concerns the relationships between the body and the truth, between the body and knowledge, even supreme knowledge:

পণ্ডিঅ সঅল সত্য বকখাণই।
দেহহি বুদ্ধ বসন্ত ণ জানই।।
[পণ্ডিতেরা বাইরে থেকেই সত্যের ব্যাখ্যা দিয়ে থাকেন। দেহের মধ্যেই যে পরম জ্ঞান বিরাজ করছে, তার খবর তো তারা জানেন না।]