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  • In a Mansion
  • Translated by Andrew Schelling (bio)

yatrānekaḥ kvacid api gṛhe tatra tiṣṭhatyathaiko    yatrāpi ekastadanu bahavas tatra cānte na caikaḥitthaṃ cemau rajanidivasau dolayan dvāvivākṣau    kālaḥ kālyā saha bahukalaḥ krīdati prāṇisāraiḥ

  • yatra. where

  • anekaḥ. many (none were solitary)

  • kvacit. people

  • api. once (were)

  • gṛhe. in a house, mansion

  • tatra. there

  • tiṣṭhati. stands

  • atha. now

  • eko. one alone

  • yatra-api. in fact where

  • ekas-tadanu. descendants

  • bahavaḥ. many

  • tatra. there were

  • ca-ante. now at the end

  • na ca. not

  • ekaḥ. one

  • itthaṃ. thus, in this way

  • ca. and

  • imau. two people

  • rajani-divasau. night and day

  • dolayan. tossing

  • dvau. two

  • iva. like

  • akṣau. dice, pawns, gambling items

  • kālaḥ. Time

  • kālyā-saha. with Kālī

  • bahukalaḥ. intensely, fiercely

  • krīdati. plays

  • prāṇisāraiḥ. at destruction, extinction [End Page 58]

In a mansionwhere once many dwelta single man stands.Where countless descendants throngedat the last countno one remains.Tossing day and nightlike dicetoppling people like pawns,Time plays with Kālīthe game of ultimate extinction.

The original holds the tossing of dice and the toppling of pawns in a single image. A reader of Sanskrit sees them simultaneously. Kālī is the black goddess, the one who devours her children; she and Kāla (time) play the endgame, bahukala (fiercely or repeatedly), filling the poem’s fourth line with the syllables and la.

To get at Bhartṛhari’s troubled temperament, this poem should be paired with the preceding one. The legend of the seventh-century poet has him tormented equally by a life of worldly, sensuous pleasures and by the hermit’s cool-tempered solitude in the forest. In the world, death and destruction lie just beneath his pleasures; in the woods, he cannot shake sexual hunger or the grinding onset of old age. Legend says that, unable to choose a course, he swung seven times between the two lifestyles.

Eventually, Bhartṛhari fell in love with a woman at court and presented her a magical amulet. She loved another man, though, and gave the amulet to him. This man, yearning for a different woman at court, gave the treasure to her. To complete the cycle, this second woman secretly longed for Bhartṛhari, and returned the treasure to him. He stood contemplating the cycle of thwarted desire, vanity, and ignorance, and departed to the forest for good.

The Tang Dynasty Chinese pilgrim Hsuan-tsang, who visited India in search of Buddhist manuscripts, heard of the poet, and wrote of him as a Buddhist. The poems show Buddhist sensibility—everything’s impermanent—but also invoke Hindu deities. One verse says, mohaṃ marjāya upārjaya ratiṃ candrārdhacūḍāmanau: “Purge delusion, take pleasure through Śiva, who wears the crescent moon in his hair.” [End Page 59]

Andrew Schelling

Andrew Schelling, born in 1953 at St. Elizabeth’s Hospital, Washington, D.C., has written, edited, or translated twenty books. Early opposition to American involvement in Vietnam, plus an encounter with India’s texts, set him on a lifelong engagement with Asian literature. He studied Sanskrit at the University of California at Berkeley, and began to translate from its classical poetry tradition around 1978. His first book, Dropping the Bow: Poems of Ancient India, received the Academy of American Poets translation award in 1992, the first time the Academy had honored work done from an Asian language. Schelling’s own poetry and essays emerge from the Southern Rocky Mountain bioregion in which he lives. Recent books of poetry wrangle with the Arapaho language as a way of reading landscape and the natural cycles; they include From the Arapaho Songbook and A Possible Bag. He has edited The Oxford Anthology of Bhakti Literature and Love and the Turning Seasons: India’s Poetry of Spiritual and Erotic Longing (forthcoming from Counterpoint Press). Living on the Front Range of Colorado, he is active on land-use issues and teaches at Naropa University. He also teaches regularly at Deer Park Institute, in India’s Himalayan foothills.

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