Abstract
The Ālvārs are the seventh–ninth century Tamil poet saints whose works achieved the status of sacred canon in what became, after the time of the theologian Rāmānuja (1017–1137), the Śrīvaiṣṇava community and tradition of south India. Their poems are honored as excellent poetry, as expressive of the experience of the poets themselves and of their encounters with Nārāyaṇa, their chosen deity, and finally as revelation, the divine Word uttered in human words. This thematic issue of Sophia is interested in investigating the transformations or adaptations that a human language — speaking, writing — undergoes when transmitting a divine message, a revelation expressed in human words. This essay suggests that exploring how traditions have thought and performed the divine in human language can be undertaken usefully; that spiritual charged poetry is a powerful medium of divine communication in human words that both fall short in speaking of God and yet, in that failure, speak eloquently; and that reading intertextually, even interreligiously, is a way to disclose powerfully that divine communication. This essay reflects on all this by studying closely verse 57 of the Tiruviruttam of Śaṭakōpan (c. 700), the greatest of these poet saints. It aims to show how even the outside reader — ‘the pilgrim reader’ who is neither a native nor a tourist — can enter into the interpretive process and find, in the elusive poetic words, a point of access to the revelation of the tradition. Some brief comparison is made with the interpretation of the Song of Songs in Jewish and Christian commentarial tradition.
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Notes
Tiruviruttam (100 verses), Tiruvāciriyam (7 verses), Periyatiruvantāti (87 verses), and Tiruvāymoli (1102 verses).
See Venkatesan’s Introduction for an overview of the Tiruviruttam.
pulakkuṇṭalap puṇṭarīkatta pōrka keṇṭai valli onrāl / vilakkuṇṭu ulākinru vēl vilikkinrana kaṇṇan kaiyāl / malakkuṇṭu amutaṃ curanta mari kaṭal pōnravarrāl / kalakkuṇṭa nānru kaṇṭār emmai yāruṃ kalaralarē All translations are my own except where noted.
For several classic tellings of this myth in ancient Indian literature, see O’Flaherty 173–179.
We notice a small twist here, that the beloved god Kṛṣṇa is the one churning the ocean, and with his own hand, a point rarely made, if anywhere else.
Ordinarily, one finds translations that make the verse perhaps too clear, as does Venkatesan’s recent translation: ‘Her earrings entrance the senses. In her lotus-like face her dark eyes dart like keṇṭai/whose war is blocked by a gently curving creeper / such eyes: wide and sharp as spears. No one can mock me. Those eyes /bewilder me/I am like the ocean with its crashing waves/giving up its nectar/when Kaṇṇan [Kṛṣṇa] churned it with his mountain.’ The great commentators of course make explicit what is not said directly, given their overall understanding of Tiruviruttam in the context of the great Ālvār’s works. There is no basis on my part to disrespect or ignore what they say, but neither am I inclined to read their interpretations back into the verse as we have it.
This is a reference to another famous myth recounted in the Bhāgavata Purāṇa of the butter thief — the boy Kṛṣṇa stealing butter from the churn.
Tulāy in Tamil, tulasī in Sanskrit.
References are to Tiruviruttam 1930, with the commentary of P. B. Annangarachariar. Translations mine.
In turn, for the first line of VIII.8.1, the classical commentator Naṃpiḷḷai detects parallels in Tiruvāymoli VIII.5, where the saint both vividly describes Kṛṣṇa’s face and expresses great longing actually to see him again, in Tiruvāymoli VIII.7.1, where the divine dwarf fulfils the saint’s wish by entering into the saint, vividly appearing in his mind, and holding his mind entirely fixed on the lord, and in Chāndogya Upaniṣad I.6.7, where the radiant person has eyes like deep red lotuses.
There are other references to the Rāmāyaṇa as well. The paradigmatic love of Rāma and Sītā sheds light on how much the young man misses the young woman, since they are meant for one another (Sundara Kāṇḍa 16.5); the young man’s longing is like that of Rāma, who cannot bear to be without Sītā. (Rāmāyaṇa, Sundara Kāṇḍa 66.10).
The most concerted effort to draw parallels between ancient Tamil poetry and the Song of Songs can be found in Mariaselvam. See also Clooney 2013.
As translated in Hoyland 1979. I have used this translation, out of the many available, because it is from the Latin used by Hoyland (likewise rendered in the 1979 translation).
I have previously had some experience in reading medieval commentaries on the Song along with Śrīvaiṣṇava commentaries on Tiruvāymoli. In His Hiding Place Is Darkness (2013), I engaged in a reading of Śaṭakōpan’s main work, the Tiruvāymoli with its commentaries, along with the Song with the three connected medieval Cistercian commentaries of Bernard of Clairvaux (on Song 1–2), Gilbert of Hoyland (on Song 3–4), and John of Ford (on Song 5–8), who read and preached and wrote in accord with the medieval tradition of study loosely termed lectio divina. The point was to intensify pondering and suffering the absence of the Beloved in two traditions of poetry and commentary, intensifying the whole process by diving into the holy confusion of reading both traditions together. Here, in a fuller essay, I would return to Gilbert of Hoyland for inspiration as he interprets the dynamics of seeing and wounding and being wounded in Song 4.9. See his sermon on this verse.
References
Tiruviruttam
Tiruviruttam, Tiruvāciriyam, Periyatiruvantāti, with the commentary of Uttamur Viraraghavachariar. Chennai: The Visishtadvaita Pracharini Sabha, 1971.
Tiruviruttam, with the commentary of P. B. Annangarachariar. Kanchipuram: Granthamala Office, 1930.
Tiruviruttam of Nammālvār. Translation by BSS Iyengar. Bangalore: Sri Parampara Sabha, 2004.
A Hundred Measures of Time: Tiruviruttam. Translated by Archana Venkatesan. Penguin Classics, 2014.
Other References
Francis X. Clooney. “Divine Word, Human Word in Nammālvār,” In Spirit and In Truth. Madras, 1985, 155–168.
Francis X. Clooney. Seeing through texts: Doing theology among the Śrīvaiṣṇavas of South India. State University of New York Press, 1996.
Francis X. Clooney. “God for Us: Multiple Religious Belonging as Spiritual Practice and Divine Response,” Many mansions? Multiple Religious Belonging and Christian Identity, edited by Catherine Cornille. Orbis Books, 2002, 44–60. Reprinted as Chapter 8 of Comparative Theology (Wiley Blackwell, 2010).
Francis X. Clooney. His Hiding Place Is Darkness: An Exercise in Hindu-Catholic Theopoetics. Stanford University Press, 2013.
Fishbane, M. (2015). Song of Songs, Shir ha-Shirim : The traditional Hebrew text with the new JPS translation. The Jewish Publication Society.
Gilbert of Hoyland. Song of Songs. Cistercian Fathers Series translations. Vol. 20 (Sermons 21–32). Translated by Lawrence C. Braceland, SJ. Kalamazoo: Cistercian Publications, 1979.
Mariaselvam, A. (1988). The Song of Songs and Ancient Tamil Love Poems: Poetry and Symbolism. Editrice Pontificio Istituto Biblico.
O’Flaherty, Wendy Doniger. Hindu Myths: A Sourcebook Translated from the Sanskrit. New York: Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 1975.
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Clooney, F.X. On the Power of Imperfect Words: an Inquiry into the Revelatory Power of a Single Hindu Verse. SOPHIA 61, 9–21 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11841-021-00896-8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11841-021-00896-8