"...
III. The Fire Sermon
…
Burning burning burning burning
O Lord Thou pluckest me out
O Lord Thou pluckest
Burning
…
V. What the Thunder Said
…
I sat upon the shore
Fishing, with the arid plain behind me
Shall I at least set my lands in order?
London Bridge is falling down falling down falling
down
Poi s‘ascose nel foco che gli affina
Quando fiam uti chelidon— O swallow swallow
Le Prince d’Aquitaine à la tour abolie
These fragments I have shored against my ruins
Why then He fit you. Hieronymo’s mad againe.
Datta. Dayadhvam. Damyata.
Shantih shantih shantih
" (The Waste Land, 1922)बा सी मर्ढेकर:
"कणा मोडला निश्चलतेचा
ह्या पालीच्या आवाजाने;
'धम्मं सरणम्' कुणी बोललें
पाषाणांतिल बुद्ध-मिशानें,
सरणावरती सरण लागलें,
जिवंत आशा पडे उताणी;
गया गोपीचा उतरे राजा.
'सुटला', म्हणती सारे, 'प्राणी' !"
(कविता क्रमांक: ३७, 'कांही कविता', १९५९/१९७७)
(टीप : वरची कविता मर्ढेकरांना वेस्ट लँड वाचून तर स्फुरली नसेल?)
मला खालील उतारे वाचून विलक्षण कुतूहल वाटायला लागले: हे सगळे दुर्गाबाईंना माहित होते का?... कारण त्यांचा अभ्यास बुद्ध धर्माचा, पाली भाषेचा, पाली साहित्याचा, संस्कृत भाषेचा, उपनिषदांचा, गीतेचा, कदाचित बायबलचा सुद्धा ....
'Young Eliot: From St. Louis to The Waste Land' by Robert Crawford, 2015:
"...Around this time, pondering world religions, Tom authored a fragment that draws on the Bhagavad Gita and ends, glancing towards sacred sacrificial ‘ghee’ butter, ‘I am the fire, and the butter also’. This tries to juxtapose Christ’s words from the Gospel of John 11:25, ‘I am the resurrection, and the life’, with allusions to the Gita; but the lines risk bathos: ‘butter’ to many readers sounds a bit comical. Nonetheless, Tom hung on to this fragment, which clearly signals his continuing interest in religious rites, and forms part of the drafts from which The Waste Land would emerge.
Fired up by Paris, he now excelled in demanding areas of graduate scholarship. The following session he took two further Lanman courses on Pali, the language of the earliest Buddhist scriptures. ‘These courses in the language of the sacred books of Buddhism’, Harvard’s Official Register explained in 1913, were intended ‘for students interested in the history of religions and folk-lore’, of whom Tom was certainly one. He obtained a catalogue of books, published by the Vedanta Society in New York, on topics including ‘Reincarnation’ and the ‘Theory of Transmigration’. In Indic Philology 4 and 5, there was one other student. Shripad Krishna Belvalkar, a Hindu, had come to Harvard intending to edit Pali texts after he had met another of Tom’s professors, James Haughton Woods, in India. Together Tom and Belvalkar read selections from the sacred books of Buddhism, the Jataka and Buddhagosa’s commentary on the Anguttara Nikaya – lives of the Buddhist saints – as well as a selection of dialogues of the Buddha himself...
...For Indic Philology 4, Tom and Shripad Belvalkar read through the first eighty-one pages in Part I of Copenhagen librarian Dines Andersen’s Pali Reader. It contains ‘The Fire Sermon’ in which the Buddha maintains all things are afflicted with burning (in the Pali text the word ‘addita’ is repeated hypnotically); the noble disciple, disgusted with all these things, becomes divested of passion: the Pali word ‘nibbinhah’ (disgusted with) recurs again and again. Encouraged by Lanman and Woods, Belvalkar (graded ‘A’) would become a distinguished editor, publishing in Lanman’s Harvard Oriental Series. Tom, too, was a favoured, straight-A student. Within a decade his use of ‘The Fire Sermon’ with its sense of disgust and repeated ‘Burning burning burning burning’ would make this piece of preaching the best-known Pali text in Western literature.
Lanman liked Tom. During the academic session before they read ‘The Fire Sermon’ in class, the great scholar presented his student with a 1906 Bombay edition of the Upanishads, inscribing its flyleaf, ‘Thomas Eliot, Esq., with C. R. Lanman’s kindest regards and best wishes. Harvard College, May 6, 1912’.27 Inside Tom kept a sheet of headed notepaper from 9 Farrar Street, Cambridge, Lanman’s family home. Dated ‘May 22 1912’, it is a handwritten list of passages from the Upanishads, including one (which has been ticked) from the Brihadaranyaka Upanishad, an ancient mystical and philosophical text about unknowability and the Absolute. In one passage thunder and lightning are envisaged as consciousness interrupting the darkness of sin. Lanman has listed a section where, as he notes, ‘Da-da-da = damyata datta dayadhvam’. Thanks to The Waste Land, along with the concluding utterance ‘Shantih’ (‘a formal ending to an Upanishad’), these words would become known to readers of poetry around the world...."
(note: Shripad Krishna Belvalkar 1881-1967. Many of his books are still available on Amazon.in)
The Fire Sermon / Ādittapariyāya Sutta: In this discourse, the Buddha preaches about achieving liberation from suffering through detachment from the five senses and mind.
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