By Roger R. Jackson
Roger Jackson offers actual, obtainable translations of 3 classics of medieval Indian Buddhist mysticism: the ''couplet-treasuries'' of the nice tantric masters Saraha, Kanha, and Tilopa. given that their composition round one thousand CE, those poems have exerted a strong impression on religious lifestyles, in addition to poetry and track, in India, Nepal, and Tibet. Jackson's clean translations permit the poetry to polish via, taking pictures the experience and spirit of the poems within the unique. Jackson bargains an intensive creation that deftly summarizes the newest scholarship, situating the poems of their old context and making them available not just to students but additionally to scholars and practitioners.
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Example text
Tantric treasures 20 Focus on the Innate Whether or not Saraha, Ka¯nfi ha, and Tilopa really equivocate in their criticism of social and cultural traditions, there can be little doubt as to the great theme they do affirm in their songs: it is the innate, sahaja. In all three, it is the most common term for the ultimate, appearing a total of thirty-one times, far more often than such well-known designations as nirva¯nfi a, Buddha, emptiness, or the real. ”23 In its various usages in Indic languages and in Tibetan, it probably denotes or connotes all of these, and more.
A¯nanda) attained through the practice of the Yoginı¯ tantras, that in which one’s inmost nature is revealed, and enlightenment approached or attained. I translate sahaja as “the innate” because I think that this captures best the sense it seems to have for Saraha, Ka¯nfi ha, and Tilopa, namely, of what is most natural to us, what is most fundamentally our own, what is at the root of our experience of the world— and perhaps of the world itself. However general or technical the siddhas’ usages of “the innate” may be (and, in a given instance, it may be one or the other, or both), it clearly is a major way of describing simply what is most important and most basic—that is, what is ultimate—for those with spiritual aspirations.
In the final analysis, anything that leads to the experience of the innate may be celebrated, even if it appears to contravene accepted ideas and practices; and anything that hinders one from reaching it must be rejected, even if it is a hallowed idea, a well-trodden religious path, an unquestioned class distinction, or an immemorial social taboo. And, as we might expect, a practice that is conducive to experience of the innate in one context may be deleterious to it in another, so we should not be surprised that Saraha, Ka¯nfi ha, and Tilopa may, in fact, have done many of things that they criticize others for doing, including performing rituals, going on pilgrimage, engaging in meditation, and, of course, entering into tantric practice—but if they did these things in order to gain the experience of the innate, or from the standpoint of a nondualistic achievement of the innate, then there is no blame attached to their actions.