SECTION TWO: VEDIC PARALLELS
It is an illumining exercise to examine the genesis of Ten Thousand Flower-Flames for it discloses a great deal of Sri Chinmoy’s spontaneous method of composition. On October 21st, 1979 Sri Chinmoy competed in the New York City Marathon, a distance of 26 miles 385 yards. From the early stages, he was forced to overcome severe cramps. As a result, the race evolved into a kind of odyssey for him, a metaphoric journey towards a distant goal When he at last completed the race, he remained under the sway of this marathon spirit and resolved to embark on a comparable adventure in another field. In his own words, he became inspired –
… to sow the seeds
Of ten thousand flaming flower-poems
Which at long last I shall place
Devotedly, unreservedly and unconditionally
At the Compassion-Feet
Of my Beloved-Supreme. (1)
Although this calling began as a journey or a quest, it soon assumed far greater proportions than the poet’s outer marathon. It began on the following day, October 22nd, when the poet boarded a plane from New York to Japan. The first seventy poems of the series were composed on this flight.
However, the absence of any gulf of time between the poet’s marathon and his commencement of Ten Thousand Flower-Flames suggests that the poems cannot easily be extracted from the context of Sri Chinmoy’s life. Carried forward on the crest of boundless inspiration, he moves from one field of expression to the next in a smooth transition. Over the past twenty-six years, he has brought the worlds of poetry, drama, art, music and athletics successively into focus, exploring each one to the fullest, modulating existing forms according to the soul’s emphasis and contributing his own innovative ideas where he found they were wanting. At the pinnacle of this creative abundance is Ten Thousand Flower-Flames, a work in which Sri Chinmoy’s remarkable gifts combine to produce a massive compendium of spiritual truths.
The more one reads these poems, the more one comes to realise that they touch on a core of wisdom which is greater that the sum of one man’s beliefs. There is a powerful uplifting force that rolls through the words and, down the reaches of time, memories revive within us of how the ancient Vedic scriptures were also the fruit of such endless, illumined energy and of how they too were great in their mass.
Since the nineteenth century, when the German scholars — pre-eminently Max Muller – began to unlock the secret code of the Vedas and make them accessible to the West, the impact of these works as scriptures or spiritual laws has been more clearly assessed. The difficulties of the highly formalised and polished Sanskrit language, together with the opaqueness of the many symbols in the work had, over the centuries, lessened their connection with the currents of everyday life. Because these ancient poets wrote figuratively, in order to conceal their knowledge from the uninitiated, they were accused of myth-making and their invocations to the gods were classed as mere nature worship. In effect, meaning had been dislocated from language with the result that language itself stiffened into unnatural and artificial forms. By his assiduous study of the Vedic texts, Professor Muller was able to show that they are works of knowledge and revelation which set forth eternal truths and codes of life. He declared that they are among the most important documents from the dawn of civilisation to every man “who has once felt the charm of tracing that mighty stream of human thought on which we ourselves are floating onward, back to its distant mountain sources … to every student of mankind in the fullest sense of that full and weighty word.”