Our FBA Dharmabyte today, and#8220;The Buddha as Poet,and#8221; takes an intimate look at poetry as the language of the and#8216;souland#8217;. From the talk and#8220; Sangharakshita In Conversation with Kathleen Raineand#8221; an open conversation between Sangharakshita, founder of the Triratna Buddhist Order, and the renowned poet and scholar Kathleen Raine, one of the founders of the Temenos Academy.
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The Buddha as Poet
[music] Dharma Bites is brought to you by Free Buddhist Audio, the Dharma for your life. Our work is funded entirely by donations from our generous listeners. If you would like to help us keep this free, make a contribution at freebuddhistaudio.com/donate. Thank you, and happy listening. But this is what is this, I think the foundation of this whole thing of the religion of art, regarding the arts, not as a sort of decoration, but as fundamental expression of the spirit. What would you say about that, you want to say about it in your book? Because in the introductory essay, which is on the meaning of Buddhism and the value of art, I do make the point that the Buddha himself, in a sense, was a point, which is not how people usually, in the Buddhist world, at least think of the Buddha. But the Buddha did speak, he did teach, and he often spoke and taught in verse, in poetry. Whether it was very good poetry is difficult to say on these any case to read it in the original. Sometimes it is really quite good. And many of his disciples were placed. I don't know whether you are aware of this, but some of our friends are, but in the Buddhist scriptures, the Polish scriptures, there are two books which are collections of poems, songs, by the Buddha's male and female disciples. The Teragata, the songs, the poems of the elder monks and the Terigata, the songs of the prems of the elder nuns. Recently, there was a poetry reading in knowledge, in aid of our women's retreat center. And I read there poems by women, and I included some English translations of the Terigata. That it was a poems written 2,500 years ago by some of these direct disciples, female disciples of the Buddha himself. And when I included these poems in the program, I thought that may be being so old and also being translated. They wouldn't come across quite so well as some of the actual poems by English women in English recently. But actually they came across, so some of the women afterwards assured me, better than any of the other poems. Because they felt they were so real. At least one of them ended with the woman poet concerned with Teri, ending in 19, the poem culminated in that. The end of the poem was the end of her spiritual quest. That is poetry being used as a way of, of true poetry, isn't whether things in verse or not, is it? It's the language of the soul. I would define poetry as the language, the natural language of the soul, which tends to be rhythmic. Because the higher one goes in the level of consciousness, the more rhythmic it becomes. And of course, prophetic to pre-mperch is the language of the spirit. Our present society doesn't make any distinction. There is only one level. That is the daily level. And if you deny the level of the soul, you are in fact denying poetry. And you cannot call poetry, even if it is in splendid verse, what relates only to the mundane, lower levels in consciousness. It is as you go higher, so it becomes more fully poetic, would you not say? Yes, indeed. In traditional Indian literary criticism, which is neither Buddhist nor Hindu by Jain, but which is, as it were, a common tradition. There is a term kavita, which we usually translate as poetry, but the Indian critics, the traditional critics, make it clear that kavita is neither verse nor prose. It can be expressed, or it can find the expression in terms of verse, but it can equally find the expression in terms of prose. It is where it comes from. It is where it comes from. It is the level from which it comes. The levels, could you please speak a little about that, Sanghara Chital, because you, in your first essay in that book, have very interesting things to say about the Indian view of different levels from which poetry comes. In your poetry or a window whom I also have read that book and very much agreed with what he was saying, so could you perhaps say a little about that? Well, in all the Indian spiritual traditions, and even in Western traditions until recently, it was generally recognized that there were many different levels of consciousness accessible to the individual human being, some lower, some higher. And our window has elaborated on this in a quite interesting way. He speaks in terms of the vital and the lower mental and the higher mental and the over-minded. And he speaks of this mainly, he speaks of these different levels, mainly in connection with the experience of yoga. In Buddhism also we have these different levels. We have, for instance, the levels of the four genres, the levels of higher consciousness, is a set of four lower, higher levels, and has set of four higher, higher levels, and so on, there are other classifications too. But this is common ground to all the great spiritual traditions, especially in the east. But our window, very interestingly, speaks of poetic inspiration, artistic inspiration, as coming from any of these, from the vital, from the lower mental, the higher mental. And he seems to believe that the higher the level, the greater the poetry. But, of course, with this proposal, which I'm not sure that he actually makes, that it is poetry to begin with. Because I think I know what they were thinking. The auto-bindo's theory is excellent, but his actual practice as a poet doesn't let us say quite come up to his own artistic standards. He was into a carving. But in India, don't you find, I've read poetry in quite a number of times now, I always find that the Indian audience is sort of antennae saying what level is it coming in. They don't hear the sort of things to notice how it is structured, how well made the poem is, or if it's realistic, or if it relates to social realities, or if it's a Marxist or whatever. You see, not so in India, there is always this double listening taking place. There's this sensualia, and there's also the other era. It's a piping to the spirit, it is of no tone. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. There is very well of that. And really excellent, I mean poets that in England pass for, you know, the sort of thing that people go for, doesn't get anywhere in India. Because they're listening from where does it come from? Because one must reflect that even now in India, so many people are illiterate. I mean, I'm very aware of this because when I go to India, when I give lectures, I know that three-quarters of my audience is illiterate. And therefore, the oral medium is very important. It's the main source of education for a lot of people. And this perhaps helps to explain why in India they do have so many of the what one can only call per tree mix. They're not per tree readings in our western or at least our English sense. You get vast crowds of people. Just as them was to hear how it's read their own poems. This is especially so in the traditional or do poetry. And you might have 10,000, 20,000 people and as I'm fast, Shami Arna. And you get the poet standing up and he usually knows his own poem by heart. He doesn't read it. He pronounces it. He evokes it. And a wave of emotion just passes over the whole fast audience. It's a very special thing. A couple of India is it's so westernized. You get so many Indian poets who are writing sort of a secular way. But of course, I have also heard readings in Hindi of the Mahabharata and of the Ramayana. And people assemble to hear these. These are the traditional sources of poetry and teaching. Both teaching and lifting the story onto the level of the, not to the sensibility, but to the spirit. And this keeps the whole consciousness, or did because it's all becoming very secularized. But it kept the consciousness of the whole people attuned two things of the spirit. I don't know what corresponds to that in Buddhism. The reciting... Well, in all Buddhist countries, there are different ways of reciting Jataka stories. That is to say the legends of the stories of the Buddhist previous lives. And you get it done in all sorts of ways. Sometimes it's dramatized. And sometimes you get two monks sitting on either side of the altar. And they do a sort of double act, recreating the whole story and playing on the feelings of the audience. This is very common in Thailand, I believe, very popular. But a more recent development in Indian Buddhism, which is very interesting, I don't know if you've heard of it, is what is called Dalit for literature. Dalit means depressed. Not depressed in the psychological sense, but in the sociological sense. The depressed classes are the untouchables. Many of whom have become Buddhists. And there's a whole movement of Dalit literature, which is sprung up quite spontaneously among these Dalit people, mainly around Bombay and Kuna, giving expression to their deepest feelings as not only untouchables and depressed people, but as Buddhists, you get the two things working together. And there's a whole very live literary movement. Well, literacy has nothing to do whatsoever with spirituality. Literacy in our country is a sort of terrible deception. It enables people to read advertisements for aftershave literature. And you know, all the rubbish comes from literacy. Well, Kumara Swami wrote a famous essay. Did the Bhagavara literacy? Bhagavara literacy. Bhagavara numeracy. The illiterate people, and I used to know them a bit in the hebrides, now they're all literate, of course. But they too have an oral tradition, which preserves the, as it were, qualities of the soul of that particular people. I'm afraid I'm not very interested in readings of modern poetry. It all seems to me to belong to the secular decline of our civilization. And I feel that the loss of oral tradition, my mother came from Scotland, not the highlands. But she had a wealth of oral poetry, the border ballads, the songs of burns, which of course were traditional songs gathered. All this embodied and preserved, and you get it in Ireland, to this day, the wealth of that whole culture is within it. And modern poetry is highly individualistic, it's self-expression, it's mostly on the level of the external world. And yes, of course, was a great exception. There are great poets who rise above this. We hope you enjoyed today's Dharma Bite. Please help us keep this free. Make a contribution at freebuddhistaudio.com/donate. And thank you. [music fades out] [music fades out] [BLANK_AUDIO]