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  • Reader, Open Your Heart
  • Translated by Andrew Schelling (bio)

śrījayadevavacasi rucire hṛdayaṃ sadayaṃ kuru maṇḍaneharicaraṇasmaraṇāmṛtakṛtakalikaluṣabhavajvarakhaṇḍane

  • śrī-jayadeva-vacasi. Jayadeva’s speech, words

  • rucire. pleasing

  • hṛdayaṃ. heart

  • sadayaṃ. merciful, kind

  • kuru. (second-person imp.) make, take to heart

  • maṇḍane. well-crafted

  • hari. Krishna

  • caraṇa. feet, wanderings, deeds

  • smaraṇa. recollection, memory

  • amṛta. ambrosia, drink of immortality

  • kṛta. made

  • kali-kaluṣa-bhava. the Kali Yuga, an evil era

  • jvara. fever, disease, pestilence

  • khaṇḍane. dispels, cuts [End Page 122]

Reader, open your heartto Jayadeva’s well-crafted poem. Through itKrishna’s deeds have entered your own memory-stream—amṛta to cureKali Yuga’s contagion.

It is hard for me to tell whether Jayadeva means to say Krishna’s deeds or his own poem dispels the jvara (the fever or infectiousness) of the Kali Yuga. Clearly he means that the drama now resides in our smaraṇa (memory). In India’s spiritual traditions, smaraṇa does not simply mean a cluster of stored detail. It can refer to one’s full stream of memory through life—through many lives—or to the recollection of one’s essential being, much like Zen’s original face. This latter meaning is reinforced by caraṇa (deeds or adventures). Literally it is feet, walking, or “way” in the spiritual sense. Krishna’s way is now your own spirit.

In India’s cosmography, the world passes through four yugas (epochs), a catastrophic collapse ushering in each successive age, which is more chaotic, degraded, unethical than the previous. Our own, the fourth and final yuga—the dark one—is named for Kali or Kālī, Time personified as the death goddess. The Kali Yuga was brought about by the war described in the Mahābhārata. Devotion to Krishna seems the final refuge in this age of warfare, social collapse, and natural disaster.

At risk of sounding mundane and technical, here in the Kali Yuga, when ecocide, incessant war, epidemic, and injustice matter so much more, I want to point out that this two-line stanza has an end rhyme: maṇḍane and khaṇḍane, adjectives that describe Jayadeva’s vacasi (words or speech or poem). End rhyme is a technique that virtually never showed up in Sanskrit poetry. Jayadeva lifted it from vernacular street song, fit it to his poem, and prefigured the next step in India’s art. His eloquent Sanskrit remains impeccable throughout. Objects of affection, longing, or devotion go into the seventh, or locative, case—something like “place your heart in Jayadeva’s words.”

The second line is a bahuvṛhi compound, one long adjective describing the full poem: “made of amṛta from recollecting Krishna’s feet (and) which dispels the Kali Yuga’s pestilence.” Again, hard to say if it is Krishna’s deeds or Jayadeva’s song that is amṛta to allay the dark menace. [End Page 123]

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...

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