मेघदूत: "नीचैर्गच्छत्युपरि दशा चक्रनेमिक्रमेण"

समर्थ शिष्या अक्का : "स्वामीच्या कृपाप्रसादे हे सर्व नश्वर आहे असे समजले. पण या नश्वरात तमाशा बहुत आहे."

G C Lichtenberg: “It is as if our languages were confounded: when we want a thought, they bring us a word; when we ask for a word, they give us a dash; and when we expect a dash, there comes a piece of bawdy.”

C. P. Cavafy: "I’d rather look at things than speak about them."

Martin Amis: “Gogol is funny, Tolstoy in his merciless clarity is funny, and Dostoyevsky, funnily enough, is very funny indeed; moreover, the final generation of Russian literature, before it was destroyed by Lenin and Stalin, remained emphatically comic — Bunin, Bely, Bulgakov, Zamyatin. The novel is comic because life is comic (until the inevitable tragedy of the fifth act);...”

सदानंद रेगे: "... पण तुकारामाची गाथा ज्या धुंदीनं आजपर्यंत वाचली जात होती ती धुंदी माझ्याकडे नाहीय. ती मला येऊच शकत नाही याचं कारण स्वभावतःच मी नास्तिक आहे."

".. त्यामुळं आपण त्या दारिद्र्याच्या अनुभवापलीकडे जाऊच शकत नाही. तुम्ही जर अलीकडची सगळी पुस्तके पाहिलीत...तर त्यांच्यामध्ये त्याच्याखेरीज दुसरं काही नाहीच आहे. म्हणजे माणसांच्या नात्यानात्यांतील जी सूक्ष्मता आहे ती क्वचित चितारलेली तुम्हाला दिसेल. कारण हा जो अनुभव आहे... आपले जे अनुभव आहेत ते ढोबळ प्रकारचे आहेत....."

Kenneth Goldsmith: "In 1969 the conceptual artist Douglas Huebler wrote, “The world is full of objects, more or less interesting; I do not wish to add any more.”1 I’ve come to embrace Huebler’s ideas, though it might be retooled as “The world is full of texts, more or less interesting; I do not wish to add any more.” It seems an appropriate response to a new condition in writing today: faced with an unprecedented amount of available text, the problem is not needing to write more of it; instead, we must learn to negotiate the vast quantity that exists. How I make my way through this thicket of information—how I manage it, how I parse it, how I organize and distribute it—is what distinguishes my writing from yours."

Tom Wolfe: "The first line of the doctors’ Hippocratic oath is ‘First, do no harm.’ And I think for the writers it would be: ‘First, entertain.’"

विलास सारंग: "… . . 1000 नंतर ज्या प्रकारची संस्कृती रुढ झाली , त्यामध्ये साधारणत्व विश्वात्मकता हे गुण प्राय: लुप्त झाले...आपली संस्कृती अकाली विश्वात्मक साधारणतेला मुकली आहे."

Wednesday, April 14, 2021

बौद्ध धर्माची पाली, टी एस इलियट, श्रीपाद कृष्ण बेलवलकर आणि दुर्गाबाई...Buddha, T S Eliot, The Waste Land, Pali, Durga Bhagwat

"...

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.