Book Review: The Radiance Sutras
Translation as Rapture: The Radiance Sutras by Lorin Roche
In the fall semester of my junior year of college I embarked on a six-month study abroad program in India. Towards the end of the trip I stayed in Varanasi, the "holiest of the seven sacred cities," where I, a Religious Studies major, earnestly gorged on as many of the city's 2,000 crumbling temples as possible, attended evening fire arthis and dawn ablutions on the great and stinking Ganges, did strenuous Yoga and pranayama, and closet-smoked mango-flavoured beedis on the roof of my hotel.
One night I attended a lecture by Kashmir Shaiva scholar-practitioner Mark Dyczkowski. He played his sitar, propped up a painting of Kali lactating blood into the mouths of tiny Brahmins, and then talked about her body and attributes, the play of the sacred and transgressive in her image and myths. Afterward, I approached him about my own research on Indian Classical dance, and he proposed I meet him at his home the next day.
He lived on Narad Ghat in a building overlooking the Ganges, capped by a massive black mural painted with a red Yantra (or a red mural with a black Yantra - I can't remember which). I'd done interviews with dancers and artists and scholars, had practiced the dance in India and with a teacher back home, and was trying to make their accounts and my experience jive with all the seductively heady theory I'd ingested from books and articles. Or, more precisely, I was trying to shoehorn the theory into the practice because I wanted so badly for it all to be true.
We sat on the floor and, punctuated by a few shouty phone calls conducted in Italian to negotiate a villa rental, Dyczkowski gave a long, layered, funny, slow-winding, relentlessly brilliant, raga-like improvisation on Tantra and the body, performance, and mystical union through rasa.
I can't recall one word or salient idea from the talk. I took notes and it all made sense at the time, but it was a kind of spiralling, intuitive 'sense' held together with the slightest of linear threads that are meant to dissolve like surgical stitches from the mind and release a deeper realisation into the heart and blood. I do remember that he gave me a copy of his translation and commentary on the Aphorisms of Shiva to borrow, and then morphed into a solicitous Englishman and offered me a ride to the hotel on the back of his scooter. I found a shop with a xerox machine where I could make an illegal copy of his book, and upon returning the original a few days later, he recommended I also find a translation of the Vijnana Bhairava Tantra.
So I did. When I returned to Delhi I made a tour of the Motilal Benarsidass publishing company where I scooped the Jaideva Singh translation of the VBT, an edition ‘guided’ by Dyczkowski's own root teacher, Swami Lakshmanju, and a score of other books. It sat entombed in my luggage, along with the dozens of other books and weird Ayurvedic pills and pastes I'd collected, until the end of the trip.
The idea of the Bhairava Tantra, a conversation between lovers extolling 112 practicable and embodied pathways to the Divine was, and remains, compelling to my deepest drives and in sync with my attraction to Yoga and dance: the body as vehicle of transformation; the body as instrument to be cultivated, sensitised, and made conductive of life energy for the purposes of awakening. That journey sounded inherently erotic, and I anticipated finding some of this rasa, this 'taste' of body magic in the text.
Instead, I found the Singh translation parched and clinical, adhering to an academic idiom, and scrubbed of sensuality and the more shadowy allusions to Tantric practice. (The skull cup used by tantrikas is called a "cranium bowl.") It was hard for me to enter the verses or ground them in a practice. Harder still to find the juice. To be fair, the dryness of the Singh translation could be a product of respectability politics; so many aspects of Indian tradition have been commodified, bastardised and sexually freighted - Tantra perhaps most of all. Indian scholars of previous generations had likely learned to ‘stick to the facts, ma’am’ when presenting it to Western audiences.
I offer this big preamble to communicate some of my gratitude for what I discovered in Lorin Roche's Radiance Sutras: the power of a work whose final form is inseparable from the process by which it was made. By the author’s own account, this process was aligned with the deepest heart of the original text. It is, as Roche calls it, "Translation as rapture."
Like Dyczkowski, Roche is a scholar-practitioner. They are both also, it would appear, creatures of intense devotion. By his own account, Roche put himself into living relationship with this text, played and danced with it for decades until it was ready to live and dance “through” him. The result is accessible poetry in the 'Banter,' 'Yukti' and 'Insight' verses, and a 'Transmission' commentary - riffs on the Sanskrit lifted from each of the Yuktis.
Other Tantric and Sanskrit scholars have balked at the sudden popularity of this text, as it is not a direct and ‘faithful’ translation of the original VBT. Roche has some mastery of Sanskrit’s lexicon, but not of its grammar; nor is he drawing from any contextualising works of the period or tradition that might offer a more direct and nuanced reading. The VBT, by most accounts, was intended for more advanced practitioners who had undergone the rigours of Tantric sadhana and could now safely apply a more creative and liberated approach.
For this reason, serious practitioners should read this as an ‘inspired’ work - one writer’s loose, contemporary improvisation on a complex philosophical text whose treasures need an informed guide to be fully revealed. Radiance is a text born out of intimacy and play, and as such, takes its liberties - but lends them as well. The primal elements of the poetry become palpable, the ‘practices,’ while not true to the original VBT, come alive. It loses in depth and gravitas but gains in charm. Radiance gives permission.
Like Dyczkowski's lecture/transmission, Roche’s work appeals to the intellect while bypassing it at the same time. It asks for another kind of attention, open and game; it asks to be read as one would read poetry or fiction, in willing submission to whatever spell it might cast. Roche’s transparency about his process helps to dissolve old binaries between theory and practice, idea and experience, between what is written and previous and what is sensed and now, between what you think you should want and what you really do. (Or between dutifully ujjayi-ing on a yoga mat and happily sucking down beedis on the hotel roof.) Roche's interpretation seems to want to make the work an expression of Devi, a feminine movement, descending down and in and through the body, instead of floating above, at the altitude of the mind's choosing.
Deep scholarship, painstaking study, diligence and proper contextualisation are vitally necessary to the tradition, and require years of dedicated work. Radiance is more like a historical novel, a fiction that tells the truth - or ‘a’ truth - sideways, through empathy and invention. It privileges and revels in the associative zone where an individual psyche bumps up against a complex - and at times fathomless - phenomenon.
In this spirit, here’s a little play on Roche’s text:
The final structure of the work as a whole is similar to a cycle of worship, wherein, as you stand before the altar, you might encounter a many-armed god or goddess. The attributes of the deity are encoded with wisdom: the arms held up and back tell you something about the nature of the universe. Bhairava's Banter verses constitute this 'backdrop' philosophy:
"I am beyond space and time...There are no directions to me...I am the nourishing state of fullness...I am not covered up, not even by a billion galaxies..."
The arms placed in front, often held in a mudra or grasping some tool or instrument - a book, a mala, are showing you skilful means, or what you can do about those other arms, the immutable truths of the universe. Those hands in front Roche’s Yuktis, the instructions or practice:
"The instant a thought springs up/ Abandon it and move on. / Don't let the mind rest anywhere./ In this way gain entry to the bliss/ Of the silent depths beneath the surf."
The Insight verses are the darsan, or the loving and penetrating gaze of the deity. After you have offered your gifts and prayers, you are beheld - literally 'being held' by divine sight. It’s an intimate and personal gaze meant to develop your relationship with the deity and the private orientation of your devotion:
"The real transmutation,/ The most sacred offering,/ Is to pour the elements of your body/ All of your sensual impressions,/ Into the fire of the Great Void."
And finally, Roche's Yukti Transmissions, are the prasad, the offering that has been digested through the body of the deity and is being offered back - a plump coconut laddu or a kaju katli, a final sweet gift - to take on your journey:
"On Bhakti: Bhakti yoga says that you can be in an erotic, passionate relationship with God; you can be friends and equals with God; you can even feel parental and protective of God. All rivers flow to the ocean."
Play invites play. Through Roche’s translation I was able to experience the eroticism of the initiating conversation between Devi and Bhairava. Aligned with the conventions of classic bhakti poetry and narratives, the Banter Verses begin with the aspirant/lover (Devi) in a state of viraha, or protracted, overwhelming desire - a metaphor for the ache of longing for union with the divine. The Shaivite myths describe the god and goddess getting down to love, but Bhakti poetry revels in elaborate foreplay. I recall one text in which Siva takes on the feminine role; he adorns himself with Devi's earrings and rouge and dress and dances for her. Devi makes a coordinate change, sitting in a meditation pose and enjoying the show. This honey-held-on-the-tongue-tip feeling is the the duende, the aliveness that comes from unmet desire. Or in the words of a sevdalinka musician, (sevdah is the Bosnian verison of duende) you are "feeling good because you feel like shit."
In more conservative translations of the text, Devi is at first a demanding student; she’s done her homework and interrogates Shiva, offers argument, demands truth - and Shiva lauds her for it. In Roche's translation Devi's initial question, "Yet still I am curious./ What is this delight-filled universe/ Into which we find ourselves born?" plays not as genuine inquiry, but erotic appeal; it’s an expression of her desire to start their play. Devi knows the nature of the universe, just as Siva is intimate with manifest creative power, or Shakti. But she's inciting him, signalling her openness by taking up the polarity - Shiva plays Master, Devi plays dumb - as a prelude to their "embrace." It is Devi's version of, "Can you help me with my zipper? I just can't seem to reach back there..."
The Transmissions, basically an infusion of Roche's own voice into the text, is framed more as the bi-product of immersive focus that spontaneously gave rise to impressions harmonious with the VBT itself. But doesn’t one need to know the rules before one can transcend them?
In a recent interview, Kashmir Shaivite scholar, Paul Muller Ortega, describes the "modes of knowing" laid out in Indian philosophical texts: the perceptual and the inferential. But he delineates a third category, bhavana, or the "knowledge reality has of itself."
This spontaneous knowing arises from the body and cannot be "born of our surface intellect or cleverness," but emerges "fully shaped." It occurs after a process of profound psychic cleansing, at which point the aspirant has created the terrain where they might "invite sequences of insight" by placing their inquiry at the "door of the absolute." This intimate spring of insight and knowledge - and its improvisatory freedom - has to be earned. It comes from committed study and years of steeping oneself in the niceties of a text or practice.
Roche’s technique seems more aligned with a technique of literary criticism that has been used in China for centuries. Yi Jing is a process whereby a writer or viewer intuitively ‘collaborates’ with another artist to unearth the true meaning of their work. Yi means 'mind or consciousness' and Jing means 'space or environment.' One first ‘records’ what is called the "pictorial environment" of a text or piece of art in the mind. Only after the work has been deeply imprinted - imbibed whole and on its own terms - does one blend into this understanding their mental reflections on the text or work. The intent is an intuitive, full-body and generous way of seeing, a blending of one's consciousness with that of the artist in order to create new forms. It’s a kind of next-level fan fiction, with some hardcore spiritual prep. Yi Jing, like bhavana, requires a great emptying and opening, a willingness to let go and be taken over.
I recently did a search for Mark Dyczkowski, and by the grace of Vimeo, there he was, white-haired now and plushly bearded, giving a teaching from his Aphorisms called "The Heart." I was listening while making a big pot of soup and my ears pricked up when he said in his ragbag accent, "We don't have this alternation between theory and practice in India. We have the alternation between attention and inattention."
Roche's method, his rapture, his particular way of attending to this work bears with it an implicit promise: if we listen openly and devote ourselves to paying attention - if we play hard and love harder - a text, like the world, like the universe, might invite us in and body forth its full revelation. In light of other scholarship of the VBT, however, Radiance invites another conversation about the distinction between truth and what - to our modern, fragmented ear - simply feels true. Right or wrong, the liberating lure of this translation is the idea that we needn’t bother with the difference.
