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“No Journey is Possible Outside of the Heart”: The Story of King Lavaṇa in Bedil’s Muḥīṭ-i aʿẓam

Hajnalka Kovacs Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, USA [email protected]

Abstract

In his sāqīnāmah, Muḥīṭ-i aʿẓam (“The Greatest Ocean”), Bedil describes the cosmogonic unfolding of the universe from the One as the gradual overflowing of wine, and the spiritual return of the soul as transcending the boundaries of the self in intoxication. This paper examines Bedil’s adaptation of the story of King Lavaṇa, a tale originally from the Yogavāsiṣṭha, showing that within the conceptual framework of the Muḥīṭ-i aʿẓam the story of King Lavaṇa serves to underscore the necessity of transform- ing the heart from its imagined separateness into a state of awareness of its essential unity with the one Reality.

Keywords

Heart – imagination – reality – Yogavāsiṣṭha – Sufism

In his first long mystico-philosophical poem titled Muḥṭ-i aʿẓam or “The Greatest Ocean” Bedil tells a strange story about a king who, as a result of a magician’s tricks, is carried by a wooden horse from his palace to a desert. As he searches for water and food, he encounters a beautiful girl from the local “untouchable” sweeper caste. He marries her in exchange of food, settles in her village, and fathers many children. Strangely, he is content with his new life until a famine forces him and his family to migrate and ultimately to choose voluntary death over starvation. Upon jumping into the fire to immolate himself, the king finds himself back in his palace, and realizes that what he experienced as half of a lifetime only took place within a short span of a dream. Finding no peace, he sets out to find the location where his imaginary adventures took

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2020 | doi:10.1163/25425552-12340011Downloaded from Brill.com09/28/2021 04:01:41AM via free access 74 Kovacs place. To his utmost bewilderment, he finds the settlement of the sweepers who are still mourning him and his family. Confused, he goes to “the prophet of the time” for explanation. The prophet explains that all this happened in order to show him that the world is illusory and is merely the product of the heart’s imagination.1 The story itself is widely known in India and originates in the popular Hindu philosophical work Yogavāsiṣṭha. Apart from the story of King Lavaṇa—as the king is called in the Yogavāsiṣṭha—Bedil retold the similar story of Gādhi the brahmin in his longest mystico-philosophical mas̱navī, ʿIrfān.2 The striking parallels between the two tales and the fact that they are linked even in the Yogavāsiṣṭha, would warrant their discussion together;3 however, since Bedil’s retellings take place in two separate works in different thematic contexts, their comparison would not do justice to Bedil’s overall objectives. Therefore, the present paper focuses on the story of King Lavaṇa and the related discourses on the nature of the heart against the backdrop of the larger conceptual and generic framework of the Muḥīṭ-i aʿẓam, whereas the story of Gādhi is taken up in a separate paper.4

The Yogavāsiṣṭha

Bedil lived in time when men of letters had at their disposal not only a rich body of literature translated from Sanskrit, in particular under the auspices of Akbar (1556–1605) and his successors,5 but also a specialized Persian vocabulary, largely drawn from the technical vocabulary of Sufism, for rendering Indic religious ideas with familiar Islamic terms.6 But of all the Sanskrit

1 ʿAbd al-Qādir Bīdil, Kullīyāt-i Abū al-Maʿānī Mīrzā ʿAbd al-Qādir Bīdil, ed. by Khāl Muḥammad Khastah and Khalīl Allāh Khalīlī (Kabul: da Pohane Wizārat, da Dār al-Ta‌ʾlīf Riyāsat, 1962/1963–1965/1966), 3:147–64. Subsequent page references within parentheses in the body of the text refer to volume 3 of this edition. 2 Bīdil, Kullīyāt, 386–401. 3 See Wendy Doniger’s comparative analysis of the two stories in Wendy O’Flaherty, Dreams, Illusion, and Other Realities (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), 132–205. 4 Hajnalka Kovacs, “Multiverses: The Story of Gādhi Brahmin and Similar Narratives in Bedil’s Mas̱navī, ʿIrfān” (in progress). 5 S.A.H. Abidi, “Indian Stories in Indo-Persian Literature,” Indian Literature 9, no. 3 (1966): 28– 42; Perso-Indica: An Analytical Survey of Persian Works on Indian Learned Traditions, http:// www.perso-indica.net/. 6 Stefano Pello, “Persian as a Passe-Partout: The Case of Mīrzā ʿAbd al-Qādir Bīdil and His Hindu Disciples,” in Culture and Circulation: Literature in Motion in Early Modern India, ed. by Thomas de Bruijn, Allison Busch (Leiden: Brill, 2014), 21–46; Carl W. Ernst, “Muslim Studies

JOURNAL OF SOUTH ASIAN INTELLECTUALDownloaded HISTORY from 2 Brill.com09/28/2021(2019) 73–115 04:01:41AM via free access “No Journey is Possible Outside of the Heart” 75 texts available in Persian translation, why was it the tales of the Yogavāsiṣṭha that ignited his imagination? The Yogavāsiṣṭha occupies a unique place even among Sanskrit philosophical texts, inasmuch as teachings about the ultimate reality, the human soul, the illusory nature of the universe, and the way of achieving liberation are conveyed through a series of interlocking tales narrated by the sage Vāsiṣṭha as part of his instruction to the aspirant prince Rāmachandra. Recent research into the textual history of the Yogavāsiṣṭha has shown that its earliest form, titled Mokṣopāya (ca. 950) originated in Kashmir, possibly in a non-brahmanical milieu, for it represented a unique kind of non-dualistic philosophy that advocated seeking liberation by means of reflection and discernment without renouncing the world—a teaching that particularly suited kings and princes.7 In the course of transmission, however, these teachings were conflated with elements of the dominant brahmanical Advaita-Vedanta philosophy, resulting in a number of different redactions, including the Yogavāsiṣṭha (ca. 12th c.) and the Laghuyogavāsiṣṭha (‘Short Yogavāsiṣṭha,’ ca. 10th c.).8 Of these, it was the latter that served as basis for most Persian translations.9 The ongoing fascination with the Laghuyogavāsiṣṭha10 is attested by a number of successive translations and reworkings during the Mughal era, both in and outside of court circles. While the vivid and often bizarre tales certainly contributed to the work’s appeal, the idea of the compatibility of spiritual and temporal power proved particularly attractive to the Mughal rulers who sought to formulate a novel theory of kingship.11 At the same time, the emphasis

of Hinduism? A Reconsideration of Arabic and Persian Translations from Indian Languages,” Iranian Studies 36, no. 2 (2003): 182–4. 7 Jürgen Hanneder, “The Moksopāya: An Introduction,” in The Moksopāya, Yogavāsiṣṭha, and Related Texts (Aachen: Shaker Verlag, 2005), 14. 8 Walter Slaje, “Liberation from Intentionality and Involvement: On the Concept of Jīvanmukti according to the Moksopāya,” Journal of Indian Philosophy 28, No. 2 (2000):171. On the complicated relationship between various redactions of the Yogavāsiṣṭha and their dating, see Jürgen Hanneder, Studies on the Mokṣopāya (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 2006), 8–55. 9 For accounts of the Persian translations, see Supriya Gandhi, “The Prince and the Muvaḥḥid: Dārā Shikoh and Mughal Engagements with Vedānta,” in Religious Interactions in Mughal India, ed. by Vasudha Dalmia and Munis. D. Faruqui (Oxford University Press, 2014), 78–83; Muzaffar Alam, “In Search of a Sacred King: Dārā Shukoh and the Yogavāsiṣṭhas of Mughal India,” History of Religions 55, no. 4 (2016): 431–450. 10 Subsequently in the present paper the umbrella title Yogavāsiṣṭha will be used when references are made to the teachings or the tales; however, when a particular Persian translation is discussed, the Persian title will be given. 11 Gandhi, “The Prince and the Muvaḥḥid,” 68–70, 77; Alam, “In Search of a Sacred King,” 432–3, 450–59; Rajeev Kinra, “Infantilizing Bābā Dārā: The Cultural Memory of Dārā Shekuh and the Mughal Public Sphere,” Journal of Persianate Studies 2, no. 2 (2009): 172–3.

JOURNAL OF SOUTH ASIAN INTELLECTUAL HISTORY 2 (2019)Downloaded 73– from115 Brill.com09/28/2021 04:01:41AM via free access 76 Kovacs on knowledge as the means to liberation, and the resemblance of certain non-dualistic Indic notions to Sufi teachings facilitated the reception of the Yogavāsiṣṭha as a Sufi work beyond courtly circles as well.12 The extant translations represent a range of approaches to engage the differences or perceived similarities between the Islamic and Indic religious traditions.13 Of these, Bedil was evidently familiar with the newer translation commissioned by Prince Dārā Shukūh in 165614 which, aiming to preserve the core teachings of the work while avoiding digressions and unnecessary details, recasts both the stories and the philosophical discourses in a more concise form. He possibly had access to some of the other Persian renditions as well and may have heard tales of Yogavāsiṣṭha and oral commentaries from adher- ents of various Hindu sects whom he encountered during his travels during his youth.15

The Muḥīṭ-i aʿẓam

Bedil composed his first mas̱navī in 1667, at the age of twenty-three, and dedi- cated it to ʿĀqil Khān Rāzī (d. 1696), governor of Delhi who was also a practic- ing Sufi and author of mystical commentaries and allegorical poetry, during his first stay in Delhi as a way to seek patronage and acceptance in literary circles. Aiming nothing less than to follow in the footsteps of the great Persian mystical poets Rūmī (1207–73) and ʿAṭṭār (1145/6–1221),16 but at the same time exploiting the flexibility of the then fashionable sāqīnāmah genre of

12 Shankar Nair, “Sufism as Medium and Method of Translation: Mughal Translations of Hindu Texts Reconsidered,” Studies in Religion/Sciences Religieuses 43, no. 3 (2014): 393–4. 13 Gandhi, “The Prince and the Muvaḥḥid,” 78–83; Alam, “In Search of a Sacred King,” 431– 50; Fathullah Mujtabai, Introduction to Muntakhab-i Jūg Bāsasht, by Mīr Abū al-Qāsim Findariskī (Tihrān: Mu’assasah-i Pizhūhishī-i Ḥikmat va Falsafah-i Īrān, 2006), 11–3. 14 Dārā Shukūh, trans., Jūg Bashist, ed. by Tārā Chand and Sayyid Amīr Ḥasan ʿĀbidī (ʿAlīgar: Dānishgāh-i Islāmī-i ʿAlīgar, 1968). 15 See the first book of Bedil’s autobiography Chahār ʿunṣur (Bīdil, Kullīyāt, vol. 4). There is no evidence that Bedil would have read the Bhāshā-Yogavāsiṣṭha-sāra, a vernacular Braj rendition of the commentary Laghu-Yogavāsiṣṭha-sāra by the poet by Kavīndra (ca. 1600–1675); on Kavīndra, see Gandhi, “The Prince and the Muvaḥḥid,” 81–82. 16 He mentions both poets in a short poem in his preface to the Muḥīṭ-i aʿẓam: zi jām-i Maulavī gar jurʿah-at bakhshand daryābī / k-azīn maykhānah bū-yi ṭablah-i ʿAṭṭār mī āyad (“If you are granted a sip from Rūmī’s cup / you will perceive that the scent of ʿAṭṭār’s tray is coming from this tavern”). Bīdil, Kullīyāt, 3:4.

JOURNAL OF SOUTH ASIAN INTELLECTUALDownloaded HISTORY from 2 Brill.com09/28/2021(2019) 73–115 04:01:41AM via free access “No Journey is Possible Outside of the Heart” 77 wine poetry,17 he organized the Muḥīṭ-i aʿẓam around the cosmogonical narrative of the gradual ‘overflowing’ ( fayż),18 or emanation, of the One Reality into the various levels of existence, and the perfected human soul’s eventual return to the origin—in accordance with the scheme laid out by Avicenna (ca. 970–1087)19 but as uniquely developed by the Andalusian mystic Ibn al-ʿArabī (1165–1240).20 In this context, the title Muḥīṭ-i aʿẓam—“the Greatest Ocean,” or, “the All-Encompassing Ocean”—signifies the One Reality that encompasses all.21 In his preface to the Muḥīṭ-i aʿẓam, however, Bedil refers to his poem as maykhānah-i ẓuhūr-i ḥaqāʾiq, “a tavern for the manifestation of realities,”22 envisioning his poem as a tavern in which the realities of the divine effusion are channeled to the drinkers—the readers—through the intermediary of his words.23 In keeping with both metaphors—“the Greatest Ocean” of wine, and “a tavern” where wine is distributed—the Muḥīṭ-i aʿẓam is divided into eight

17 For an overview of the history and the characteristics of the sāqīnāmah (“poem to the cupbearer”), see Paul Losensky, “Sāqī-nāma,” in Encyclopaedia Iranica, http://www.iranicaonline.org/articles/saqi-nama-book; Sunil Sharma, “Hāfiz’s Sāqīnāmah: The Genesis and Transformation of a Classical Poetic Genre,” Persica 18 (2002): 75–83. 18 The Arabic verb fāḍa means “to overflow, pour out,” “to become abundant”; the noun fayḍ originally means “a river or water that overflows,” and from here “abundance,” “gift, favor.” Lane, Arabic-English Lexicon (http://tyndalearchive.com/TABS/Lane/index.htm), s.v. “FYḌ.” 19 Seyyed Hossein Nasr, An Introduction to Islamic Cosmological Doctrines (London: Thames and Hudson, 1978), 202–10. 20 Ibn al-ʿArabī’s system of thought appears to have exercised influence in the Subcontinent not so much directly as through the works of his commentators and interpreters, such as Farghānī and Jāmī; the works of Muḥibb Allāh Ilāhābādī (d. 1648), an important South Asian interpreter of Ibn al-ʿArabī who was associated with Dārā Shukūh’s circle, have only begun to be studied recently. See William Chittick, “Notes on Ibn al-ʿArabī’s Influence in the Subcontinent,” The Muslim World 82, no. 3–4 (1992): 221 and G.A. Lipton, “Muḥibb Allāh Ilāhābādī: South Asian Heir to Ibn ʿArabī,” Journal of the Muhyiddin Ibn ʿArabi Society 45 (2009): 89–119. There are indications, however, that Bedil read Ibn al-ʿArabī’s works directly; the question is examined in my forthcoming paper. For an analysis of the interplay of the ontological-cosmogonical schemes of Avicenna and in Ibn al-ʿArabī in Bedil’s account of emanation in the first daur of the Muḥīṭ-i aʿẓam see Hajnalka Kovacs, “The Tavern of the Manifestation of Realities”: The Mas̱navī Muḥīṭ-i Aʿẓam by Mīrzā ʿAbd al-Qādir Bedil (1644–1720), PhD dissertation (Chicago: The University of Chicago, 2013), 89–99. 21 Muḥīṭ literally means “that which surrounds,” and from here, “ocean.” Al-Muḥīṭ is one of the attributes of God, whose Being encompasses all created beings. 22 Bīdil, Kullīyāt, 3:3. 23 In addition, in a short poem in the same preface Bedil also calls the Muḥīṭ-i aʿẓam “a commentary that reveals reality” (sharḥ-i kashshāf-i ḥaqīqat)—which is an allusion to Zamakhsharī’s Quran commentary al- Kashshaf ʿan ḥaqāʾiq al-tanzīl wa ʿuyun al-ghawamid fī wujuh al-taʾwīl. Bīdil, Kullīyāt, 3:5.

JOURNAL OF SOUTH ASIAN INTELLECTUAL HISTORY 2 (2019)Downloaded 73– from115 Brill.com09/28/2021 04:01:41AM via free access 78 Kovacs daurs, or “rounds,” daur referring to the wine cup’s circulation among drinkers.24 The titles of the eight daurs are also given in the form of a short poem at the end of the prose preface:

daur-i avval jūsh-i iẓhār-i khumistān-i vujūd daur-i s̱ānī jām-i taqsīm-i ḥarīfān-i shuhūd daur-i s̱ālis̱ mauj-i anvār-i gauhar-hā-yi ẓuhūr daur-i rābiʿ shūr-i sarjūsh-i may-i fayż-i ḥużūr daur-i khāmis rang-i asrār-i gulistān-i kamāl daur-i sādis bazm-i nayrang-i as̱ar-hā-yi khayāl daur-i sābiʿ ḥall-i ishkāl-i kham u pīch-i bayān daur-i s̱āmin khatm-i ṭūmār-i tag u pū-yi zabān

The first round is [about] fermenting the manifestation in the wine cellar of existence The second round is [about] distributing the cup among the drinking companions in the sensory world The third round is [about] the waves of the lights of the gems of manifestation The fourth round is [about] the agitation of the froth of the overflowing wine of presence The fifth round is [about] the color of the secrets of the rose-garden of perfection The sixth round is [about] the banquet of the magical show of the results of imagination The seventh round is [about] solving the difficulties of the intricacies of expression The eighth round is [about] sealing the scroll of the wandering of language.

24 The verb dāra means “to turn, revolve, circle,” hence the primary meaning of daur is “turning, revolving, circling.” Derived meanings include “turning of the skies, motion of heav- ens,” “planetary orbit,” and, in a more abstract sense, “era, epoch, period, cycle.” The eight daurs in this way also signify the spheres of traditional Islamic cosmology, the number of which varies in the various cosmologies between seven and nine; in the Rasāʾil of the Ikhwān al-Ṣafā the ninth, the outmost, sphere is actually called al-Muḥīṭ. Nasr, Islamic Cosmological Doctrines, 54.

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The overall symbolism points to a cosmic drinking party, in which God distributes wine from the ocean that is not other than him.25 The idea that existence or Being (vujūd) in true sense belongs only to God and only in relative sense to contingent beings, who are but a manifestation of the one Being—as famously developed by Ibn al-ʿArabī26—is captured in the Muḥīṭ-i aʿẓam with the symbol of wine. Accordingly, the idea that all contingent beings partake of this vujūd in accordance with their individual capacities is conveyed through the images of wine vessels—a choice facilitated by the fact that in Persian the word ẓarf signifies both “receptacle, vessel” and “capacity.”27 Each of the eight dawrs of the Muḥīṭ-i aʿẓam is devoted to a facet of the one Being’s manifestation in the world of contingency, which in turn is presented from two opposing, yet complementary points of view: first, how the One manifests itself as Many—as symbolized in the poem by the receptacles being filled with wine—and second, how the Many can voluntarily return to the One by transcending the limited self—as symbolized by wine turning to intoxication.28 The dawrs end, or in some cases begin, with invocations of the sāqī, the cupbearer,29 in which the poet, in addition to asking for inspiration to compose his poem and to be liberated from his limited self, comments on the stories, draws conclusions, or sums up the moral. The story of King Lavana is narrated in the sixth daur, “The banquet of the magical show of the results of imagination” (bazm-i nayrang-i as̱ar-hā-yi

25 An allusion to Quran 76:21, saqā rabbuhum sharāban ṭahūran: “their Lord will give to them to drink a drink pure and holy” (Yusuf Ali’s translation). Bedil partially quotes this Quran verse in the fourth dawr; Bīdil, Kullīyāt, 3:51. 26 The term vaḥdat al-vujūd (“Oneness of Being”) itself, despite being commonly ascribed to Ibn al-ʿArabī, originates in the works of his commentators. William C. Chittick, The Sufi Path of Knowledge: Ibn al-ʿArabi’s Metaphysics of Imagination (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1989), 79–81. 27 Capacity or preparedness (istiʿdād) in Ibn al-ʿArabī’s system of metaphysics refers to the pre-disposition of an entity in accordance to which it receives theophany; Chittick, The Sufi Path of Knowledge, 91–4; E. Geoffroy, “Tad̲j̲allī”, in: Encyclopaedia of Islam, 2nd Ed., ed. by P. Bearman et al. (Brill Online, 2013). Although Bedil uses the word istiʿdād as well, in conformity with the wine imagery he prefers the word ẓarf to capture the idea of capacity or receptivity. 28 Hajnalka Kovacs, “The Circulation of the Astonishing Cup: The Many Facets of Wine Symbolism in Bedil’s Sāqīnāmah, Muḥīṭ-i Aʿẓam,” in Passed around by a Crescent: Wine Poetry in the Literary Traditions of the Islamic World, ed. by Kirill Dmitriev and Christine van Ruymbeke (forthcoming, Beirut: Beiruter Texte und Studien). 29 The identity of the sāqī in the Muḥīṭ-i aʿẓam often remains ambiguous. In some cases, Bedil clearly invokes God; in other cases, the sāqī appears to be a mediator of God’s grace. Cf. A. Arazi et al., “Sākī,” in Encyclopaedia of Islam, 2nd ed., ed. by P. Bearman et al. (Brill Online, 2013).

JOURNAL OF SOUTH ASIAN INTELLECTUAL HISTORY 2 (2019)Downloaded 73– from115 Brill.com09/28/2021 04:01:41AM via free access 80 Kovacs khayāl). Comprised of two sets of elaborate descriptions of various wine vessels and musical instruments, this long daur—in fact the longest of the eight daurs—seems to be quite a disparate setting for an intriguing tale and the accompanying philosophical discourses. This paper looks at Bedil’s retelling of the story and the related discourses on the nature of the heart with the following questions in mind: What pur- pose does the story of King Lavaṇa serve in the conceptual framework of Bedil’s mystic-philosophical mas̱navī? What does Bedil do to accommodate the Yogavāsiṣṭha’s teachings on the illusory nature of the world, as exemplified by the story of King Lavaṇa, to the Neoplatonist-Sufi scheme of emana- tory descent and spiritual ascent that underlies the Muḥīṭ-i aʿẓam? How does the apparent tension between the opposing paradigms of finding liberation from illusion through discernment, as emphasized in the Yogavāsiṣṭha, and transcending the limited self by losing awareness of it, as conveyed through the metaphor of intoxication in the sāqīnāmah, play out in the Muḥīṭ-i aʿẓam? How are these processes mapped onto the heart? How does the image of the heart that emerges from Bedil’s retelling relate to Sufi and Indic notions of a personal self or soul vis-a-vis a transpersonal Reality?

Bedil’s Changes to the Narrative

Taking the story of King Lavaṇa out of its original context and setting it into an entirely different generic and thematic context of a Persian poem neces- sitated several changes in the structure, the plot, and the interpretation of the story. First and foremost, Bedil gets rid of the outer frame of the sage Vāsiṣṭha telling the story to Rāmachandra—which had no relevance to the conceptual framework of the Muḥīṭ-i aʿẓam—and narrates the story in first person singular. With this narrative device, common to didactic works such as Saʿdī’s Gulistān or Būstān, by linking the story to himself Bedil claims authority over the subject:

shanīdam dar iqlīm-i hindūstān kih khākash buvad ābrū-yi jahān shahī dāsht az afsar-i āgahī ba-sar nash’shah-i jām-i ẓill-allahī (p. 147)

I heard that in the clime of Hindustan, whose soil is honor to the world,

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there was a king. Crowned with awareness, he was drunk with the idea of being the Shadow of God [on Earth].30

The second, and perhaps the biggest, structural change is that he alters the sequence in which the king’s imaginary experiences among the untouchables and his subsequent narration of these appear. While in the Yogavāsiṣṭha the king loses his consciousness, then shortly regains it and relates what he had experienced during this time, Bedil tells the story in linear time sequence. Thus, the magician brings the horse, the king enters a strange state of mind and finds himself on the horse, is taken to a desert, marries an “untouchable” girl and settles down among her people, flees the village due to a famine, jumps into the fire to immolate himself and finds himself back in his palace. In this way, as opposed to the Yogavāsiṣṭha where it is made clear from the outset that the king’s journey only took place in the realm of imagination, the reader of the Muḥīṭ-i aʿẓam does not realize until the king is back on his throne. As a narrative device, the linear narration serves to heighten the suspense until the climax—the king’s entering the fire and finding himself back on his throne— is reached. To be precise, Bedil does refer, as if in passing, to the king’s slipping into a dreamlike state under the magician’s influence:

fusūngar ba-jaulān-i tawṣīf būd kih shah rā khayālī zi khvud vā rubūd muzhah gard-i laghzish namūdan girift fażā-yi tamāshā ghunūdan girift bahārī zi jayb-i takhayyul damīd kih natvān ba-gird-i khayālash rasīd (p. 149)

As the magician was busy with describing [the horse],

an imaginal form robbed the king of his senses. His eyelashes began to droop with sleepiness, the arena of the spectacle began to slumber.

30 The idea of the emperor being the ‘Shadow of God on Earth’ (al-sulṭān ẓill Allāh fī l-arḍ)— which goes back to an early ḥadīth—played an important role in Islamic theories of gov- ernance. J.H. Kramers, et al, “Sulṭān,” in Encyclopaedia of Islam, 2nd ed., ed. by P. Bearman et al. (Brill Online, 2013).

JOURNAL OF SOUTH ASIAN INTELLECTUAL HISTORY 2 (2019)Downloaded 73– from115 Brill.com09/28/2021 04:01:41AM via free access 82 Kovacs

From the bosom of his imagination a spring blossomed, a spring impossible to conceive of.

The immediately following vivid description of the desert and the king’s plight, however, perpetuates the illusion that all of this is taking place in reality. Third, Bedil further tightens the plot by leaving out the philosophical discourses that interrupt the story in the various Yogavāsiṣṭha recensions.31 Instead, the entire explanation for the king’s strange experiences is placed after the story and is given by the mouth of “the prophet of the time”32—an Islamized but vague term with which Bedil replaces the sage (r̥ṣi) Vāsiṣṭha of the Sanskrit original. In addition to these major structural changes, Bedil departs from the original plot in several minor details. More important, however, is his distinct approach to certain elements of the story, such as his sympathetic portrayal of girl and her community, the “untouchable” sweepers.33 While he does repro- duce some of the pejorative phrases in his initial description of the sweepers as corpse-eaters resembling crows and kites, dressed in rags, and speaking in unidiomatic language, he depicts the girl as a dark beauty, a charming fairy,34 and as having a certain pride despite her lowly social status. He even gives in the mouth of the girl a mini-discourse on the illusory nature of differences:

31 Even in Dārā Shukūh’s already simplified translation, a longer set of discourses is inserted after the king’s account of his imaginary experiences, while a shorter explanation is given after the description of the king’s revisiting the settlement of the kannās; Dārā Shukūh, Jūg Bashist, 119–127, 128, respectively. 32 The two expressions used are payghambar-i ʿaṣr (lit. “the messenger of the time”) and rasūl-i ḥaqq (“the messenger of the Real (God)”). 33 The word kannās, “sweeper,” already appears in Dārā Shukūh’s Persian translation, to replace obscure caste denominations in Sanskrit that would have made little sense to Persianate readers. It does not, however, appear to signify the profession of the “untouchables,” who in the text are described as farmers, and their settlement as being in the wil- derness, far from cities. In Niẓām Pānīpatī’s Persian translation the Sanskrit word caṇḍāla (chandāl in the Perso-Arabic script) is used, which Apte explains as “a general name for the lowest and most despised of the mixed castes originating from a Śūdra father and a Brāhmaṇa mother” (Vaman Shivaram Apte, The Practical Sanskrit-English Dictionary, s.v. “caṇḍāla”). The Sanskrit text has pukkasa. Wendy Doniger uses the word “untouchables.” 34 In Niẓām Pānipatī’s version, too, the girl’s beauty (as opposed to the repulsiveness of her father and the other sweepers) and the king’s attraction to her is emphasized. Niẓām Pānīpatī, trans. Jūg Bāsisht: Dar falsafah va ʿirfān-i Hind, ed. by Sayyid Muḥammad Riżā Jalālī Nāʾinī and N. S. Shukla (Tihrān: Iqbāl, 1360 [1981]), 113.

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jahān chīst āyīnah-yi iʿtibār kih dārad zi ʿaks-i tafāvut ghubār tavahhum ba-chashm-at ḥijāb ast u bas v-agar nah gauhar qaṭrah āb-ast u bas nigāh-i taʿammul agar raushan ast chih tīgh u chih āyīnah yak āhan ast khirad har kujā ẓāhir-andīsh nīst chih ḥusn u chih qabḥ az yakī bīsh nīst (p. 152)

What is the world? A mirror of your mental landscape,35

35 The word iʿtibār is one of the most difficult words to translate, even more so since Bedil uses it in many different meanings, literal as well as technical. Derived from the root ʿBR, “to cross (something), to pass (over a river etc.), to travel, traverse (a road etc.),” its primary meanings in Arabic are “respect, regard, esteem; consideration; reflection, contemplation; outlook, view, point of view” (Hans Wehr, A Dictionary of Modern Written Arabic (Arabic-English), 4th ed., s.v. “ʿBR”). In Persian, it also has the following meanings “confidence, faith, belief; honor, reverence, veneration, respect; credit, authority, credibil- ity; weight, importance” (Steingass, A Comprehensive Persian-English dictionary, https:// dsal.uchicago.edu/dictionaries/steingass/ s.v. “iʿtibār”). In addition, iʿtibār is also used (in Persian, only in combination with particular verbs) in the same meaning as ʿibrat, “admo- nition, counsel, advice, warning, lesson [to learn], example.” As a specific way of knowing, iʿtibār signifies taking what has been witnessed or seen or beheld to be an indication or an evidence of what is concealed (Lane, Arabic-English Lexicon, s.v. “ʿBR”). Al-Jurjānī explains it as “seeing the world as belonging to annihilation ( fanā), those who are active in it as belonging to death, and its flourishing state as belonging to ruin;” and “seeing the transience of the entire world by contemplating the transience of its parts” (ʿAlī ibn Muḥammad Jurjānī, Kitāb al-taʿrīfāt, ed. by Muḥammad ʿAbd al-Raḥmān al-Marʿashlī, Bayrūt, Lubnān: Dār al-Nafā’is, 2003, s.v. “iʿtibār”). However, in certain schools of Islamic philosophy, such as the Ishrāqiyyah, iʿtibār denotes “a subjective or mental construct,” as contrasted with an empirical reality (cf. Buṭrus Bustānī, Muḥīṭ al-muḥīṭ, https://ejtaal.net/aa/ 572; ʿAẓīm Sarvdalīr, Farhang-i iṣṭilāḥāt-i ʿirfān va falsafah-yi Islāmī: Fārsī bih Ingilīsī, Ingilīsī bih Fārsī (Mashhad: Nashr-i Marandīz, 2010), 40–41; Maḥmūd Mūsavī and Seyyed Hossein Nasr, Farhang-i iṣṭilāḥāt-i falsafah va kalām-i Islāmī: Fārsī-Ingilīsī, Ingilīsī-Fārsī (Tihrān: Daftar-i Pizhūhish va Nashr-i Suhravardī, 2008), 60–61; Muḥammad Zauqī Shāh, Sirr-i dilbarān, jismen iṣtilāḥāt-i taṣavvuf par tashrīḥī baḥs̱ kī ga⁠ʾī hai (Karāchī: Maḥfil-i Zauqīyah, 1969), 55–60). The adjective iʿtibārī means “relative, based on a subjective approach or outlook” (Wehr, s.v. “ʿBR”). Zauqī Shāh in his dictionary of Sufi terms adds that compared to God, the only real substance, everything else is iʿtibārī: relative or unsubstantial (Zauqī Shāh, Sirr-i dilbarān, 55). Bedil predominantly, in particular in the context of the present tale, uses iʿtibār and iʿtibārī in this latter sense; e.g. in the Kayfīyat-i dil (discussed in detail below): jahān nīst juz iʿtibār-i dilī / chakīdah-st rang-i bahār-i dilī; “the world is nothing but a subjective construct of a heart / color dripped from the spring of a heart” (Bīdil, Kullīyāt 3:146). In the above verse, too, iʿtibār signifies a subjective, imaginary, or mental construct that lacks substance.

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covered with dust: the reflections of differences. It is just delusion that veils your sight— if it were not so, the pearl is nothing but a drop of water. If the eye of contemplation is filled with light, whether it is a sword or a mirror, it is the same iron to it. Wherever the intellect is not concerned with the appearance, whether it is beauty or ugliness, it is one and the same to it.

The girl’s words at this early stage in the plot in fact anticipate two important points that are emphasized in the “prophet’s” explanation: first, that what we take to be empirical reality is nothing but a mental construct, and second, that those who possess insight can perceive that the fabric of the world of multiplicity is woven from one and the same material. While Bedil’s applying these teachings of the Yogavāsiṣṭha to caste differences is something that would not have been possible within the Hindu worldview,36 one should be careful not to take it to be more than an expression of his deep humanism.37 Further, in Bedil’s interpretation, it was the king’s love for the girl and the children they had together in the dream that sends him on a quest to find the settlement of the “untouchables.”38 Although in the explanation he follows the Yogavāsiṣṭha in interpreting love as a form of attachment to the illusory world, his vivid and emotionally charged description of love in the manner of the great Persian romances, such as Niẓāmī’s Laylá u Majnūn, is indicative of the importance that love, especially love for one’s family, holds for him.

36 As Wendy Doniger points out, “the philosophical point of the story, that the caste distinc- tions between the king and Untouchable are just as illusory as all the other mental struc- tures that man imposes arbitrarily upon the universe […] is not the point that the story is designed to convey. […] The doctrine of illusion could have been used to challenge the baseless strictures of the social system, but it was not; it was used, instead, to preserve the stability of the socioeconomic and political status quo, rechanneling whatever discon- tent there might be into abstract formulations.” O’Flaherty, Dreams, Illusion, and Other Realities, 158. 37 In Soviet era scholarship Bedil is often portrayed as a progressive, skeptical thinker, a proto-socialist philosopher; see e.g. Jan Rypka, History of Iranian Literature (Dordrecht: D. Reidel, 1968), 517–8. 38 In the Yogavāsiṣṭha a more technical interpretation is offered, attributing the king’s quest to ignorance, which is the root of all illusion. Cf. Niẓām Pānīpatī, Jūg Bāsisht, 121–2; Dārā Shukūh, Jūg Bashist, 127–8.

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The Prophet’s Explanation

The choice to place the explanation after the entire narrative unit made it possible for Bedil not only to refashion the story of King Lavaṇa in accordance with the tradition of the Persian romantic mas̱navī, but also to consolidate the several philosophical discourses that intersperse the story in the Yogavāsiṣṭha into one. This naturally meant selection, reduction, restructuring, as well as adjustment to the topoi and imagery of the poem; consequently, detecting exact correspondences between Bedil’s distinctively imaginative interpretation and the—often very technical—explanations of the Yogavāsiṣṭha, or even Dārā Shukūh’s already reductive interpretation, would be difficult. At the same time, certain key concepts of the Yogavāsiṣṭha philosophy remain central to Bedil’s discussion. First and foremost, there is the notion that the heart is the originator and perpetuator of the world-illusion through its power of imagination. It should be pointed out that in the Sanskrit recensions of the Yogavāsiṣṭha the original term is manas, “mind,”39 but in Dārā Shukūh’s Jūg Bāshist it was rendered as dil, “heart”—a choice facilitated by the fact that in the Islamic worldview the notion of the heart and the mind to an extent overlap. The heart is thought of as a subtle substance which is connected to the physical heart and governs all the limbs of the body. It is that by which the human being perceives, feels and knows. Specifically, it is the faculty and locus of man’s knowledge of God; as such, it is also the seat of moral and spiritual responsibility.40 The complex image of the heart that emerges from Bedil’s retelling of the story of King Lavaṇa, however, as we shall see, appears to have been informed by other notions as well, including Sufi and Indic notions of the individual soul or self as related to a transpersonal Reality. Similarly, imagination for Bedil signifies a power much larger in scope and effect than imagination as defined in philosophical treatises as one of the soul’s

39 The manas, “mind” is considered the internal intentional faculty that, engaging with the five senses and five organs of action, conveys the experiences to the self. In later Vedantic thought, however, manas is often used synonymously with citta, mental processes in general. On the different notions of mind in the various schools of Indian philosophy, see T. S. Rukmani, “Consciousness and Mind,” in: Brill’s Encyclopedia of Hinduism Online, ed. byKnut A. Jacobsen et al (Brill Online, 2018). 40 Abū Ḥāmid Muḥammad al-Ghazālī, Kitāb Sharḥ ʿajāʾib al-qalb=The Marvels of the Heart: Book 21 of the Iḥyāʾ ʿulūm al-dīn, the Revival of the Religious Sciences, transl. by Walter James Skellie (Louisville, KY: Fons Vitae, 2010), 5–11; 39, 46–50; on the heart in the Quran and hadith, see James Winston Morris, The Reflective Heart: Discovering Spiritual Intelligence in Ibn ʿArabī’s Meccan Illuminations (Louisville, KY: Fons Vitae, 2005), 46–53.

JOURNAL OF SOUTH ASIAN INTELLECTUAL HISTORY 2 (2019)Downloaded 73– from115 Brill.com09/28/2021 04:01:41AM via free access 86 Kovacs faculties.41 His view is primarily derived from Ibn al-Arabī’s idea of khayāl as an intermediary realm of existence, but in the present context appears to have also been colored by Indic speculations on māyā, “illusion,” considered both a creative force of the divine and a deceptive appearance of the world.42 In the latter sense, māyā is thought to be intrinsically linked with erroneous perception or delusion—a notion that Bedil sometimes conveys with the words vahm and tavahhum,43 in contradistinction with the more positive khayāl and takhayyul.44 At other times, however, he uses the two in the same meaning, just as in the phrase vahm u khayāl (“delusion, illusion”). It should be kept in mind, however, that technical terms are not used with the same precision in Bedil’s poetry as they are in discursive philosophical or mystical writings. Depending on what the metric and rhyme scheme requires, a term can be substituted with a synonym or near synonym, an Arabic/Persian

41 Imagination (khayāl, takhayyul) is defined in Hellenistic and Islamic philosophy as the retentive faculty of the soul which transforms the sensory information into a mental representation. Deborah L. Black, “Faculties of the soul,” in Encyclopaedia of Islam, 3rd ed, ed. by Kate Fleet et al., (Brill Online, 2018); for the differences in Ghazālī’s views of the place of imagination among the five internal senses, see the chart in Skellie, Translator’s Introduction to al-Ghazālī, Kitāb Sharḥ ʿajāʾib al-qalb, xxiv–xxvi. 42 Thomas Forsthoefel, “Māyā,” in: Brill’s Encyclopedia of Hinduism Online, ed. by Knut A. Jacobsen et al (Brill Online, 2018). 43 The dictionary meanings of the verb wahima include “to imagine, fancy, suppose; to believe (erroneously), to be misguided, mistaken, to commit an error in reckoning;” similarly, tawahhama means “to presume, surmise, suppose, to be under the delusion of something.” The noun wahm denotes “a thought or idea occurring to the mind” hence “presumption, surmise, supposition, conjecture” and more negatively “self-deception, self-delusion.” The verbal noun tawahhum is used in the sense of “suspicion,” but also for “imaginative power, imagination.” Wehr, Dictionary of Modern Written Arabic and Lane, Arabic-English Lexicon (Supplement), s.v. “WHM.” In Islamic philosophy, wahm denotes the “estimative faculty” as one of the internal faculties of the soul. In Sufi writings, however, it is predominantly used in the negative sense, to signify conjecture, delusion, or illusion. “More profoundly still, illusion, the fundamental wahm, consists from the Ṣūfī point of view in believing that existence and, a fortiori, human activities, exist indepen- dently of God, outside Him. Men assume an illusory existence (wud̲j̲ūd wahmī), when this is entirely dependent on pure divine existence (wud̲j̲ūd ḥaḳīḳī).” P. Lory, “Wahm,” and in Encyclopaedia of Islam, 2nd ed., ed. by P. Bearman et al. (Brill Online, 2013); see also I.R. Netton, “Wahm,” ibid. 44 The dictionary meanings of the verb khāla are “to imagine, fancy, think, believe, suppose”; takhayyala in addition to these also means “to imagine a thing in the mind, to form an image in the mind.” The noun khayāl denotes “an incorporeal form or image,” such as “phantom, apparition,” or “the form of anything imagined”; in more abstract sense it means “imagination, fantasy,” as well as its product; the verbal noun takhayyul signifies “imagination, fantasy”, also as the faculty of imagination. Cf. Wehr, Dictionary of Modern Written Arabic, and Lane, Arabic-English Lexicon, s.v. “KhYL.”

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kih ay māndah az markaz-i aṣl dūr nadārī khabar az ṭilism-i ẓuhūr ba-rūyat dar-i rāz vā kardah-and ba-ramz-i khvud-at āshnā kardah-and dar ān-dam kih shauqat zi ahl-i hunar ṭalab kard ʿilm-i farīb-i naẓar taqāżā-yi nayrang-i dil jūsh dāsht gul-i rāz tamhīd-i āgūsh dāsht birūn rīkht dil ham as̱ar-hā-yi khvīsh ba-khūn-at nishānd az hunar-hā-yi khvīsh fusūngar nabūd ān farīb-āfirīn dil angīkht gard-i hidāyat-kamīn (p. 160)

O you who are far removed from the center of origin, you are unaware of the magical show of manifestation. The door of the mystery has been opened to you: you have been acquainted with the riddle of your own self.

45 In Niẓām Pānīpatī’s version, which follows the Sanskrit original more closely: … īn devatāʾī az ʿālam-i bālā būdah kih ba-īn ṣūrat bar āmadah va pīsh-i rājah āmad va rājah rā dīdah-i dil raushan kard, va aḥvāl-i ʿālam va kār u bār-i ʿālam bar rājah badīn tams̱īl ẓāhir gardānīd kih numūdī bī-būd ast, “… it was a god from the higher world who appeared in this form, came to the king and opened the eye of his heart, and illustrated the state and affairs of the world with this example, namely that it is an appearance that lacks reality … (Niẓām Pānīpatī, Jūg Bāsisht, 116). In Dārā Shukūh’s version, the mysterious magician is called, instead of a god, “a secret of God”: … īn sirrī-‑st az asrār-i ilāhī kih shumā rā bar ḥikmat-i ẓuhūr-i ʿālam muṭṭaliʿ sākhtah, tā bidānīd kih hamah ʿālam-i ẓāhir mis̱l-i ʿālamī ast kih shumā muʿāyanah kardah-īd; hamah sākhtah va pardākhtah-i dil ast, “… this was a divine secret which made you acquainted with the wisdom of the manifestation of the world, so that you know that the entire external world is just like the world that you had witnessed: constructed and created by the heart” (Dārā Shukūh, Jūg Bashist, 119).

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The moment your desire was seeking an eye-deceiving art from those skilled in those arts, the demands of the magical working of the heart came into ebullition, the rose of secret was prepared for your bosom. The heart poured out the results of its working, throwing you in affliction with its art. It was not the magician who created this deception: the heart stirred up a dust in which guidance was lurking.

From the outset, Bedil presents the heart as having a dual potential—an idea that he will explore from different angles throughout his discussion. In these opening lines, however, instead of contrasting the heart’s power to create deception with its capacity for guidance, presents the former as a means to the latter. The heart deceives only to guide: by staging a small-scale deception it leads to the awareness of the cosmic-scale deception. The dreamer who wakes up and realizes that what he has seen and experienced and thought to be real was just a dream, however, does not automati- cally arrive at the conclusion that his current waking state, similarly, is not more than a dream—a spiritual guide is needed to help him take this leap. The prophet—who in Bedil’s version replaces both the king’s counselors and the sage Vāsiṣṭha of the Yogavāsiṣṭha—however, aims to take the king through not one but two leaps to the realization that it is not someone else but he himself who is weaving the dream of what he thinks to be the reality of his waking state:46

dilat ṣūrat u maʿnī-i ʿālam ast v-agar-nah vujūd u ʿadam mubham ast mis̱āl-at agar shud badal bā shuhūd dil asrār-i taḥqīq-i hastī gushūd dil ānjā kih bāshad ghubār-i khayāl buvad jumlah manqūsh-i lawḥ-i mis̱āl ba-har jā muṣavvar kunad naqsh-i ghayb namūd-i jasad sar bar ārad zi jayb […]

Your heart is the form and meaning of the world— if it were not so, existence and non-existence would be indistinct. If the image has turned into the sensory for you,

46 Due to space constraints, some verses need to be omitted from the analysis.

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it was because the heart revealed to you the secrets of the reality of existence. When the heart is covered with the dust47 of imagination, all of it becomes engraved on the tablet of the world of images. Wherever it designs a form in the Unseen, the physical copy lifts its head from the bosom. […]

Bedil conveys the idea of the heart giving rise to both the imaginary and the sensory forms—as exemplified by King Lavaṇa’s imaginary journey which in the end turned out to have a physical dimension as well—using the technical terms of Islamic cosmology, such as shuhūd (for ʿālam al-shahādah), “the World of Witnessing” i.e. the sensory world, its opposite, ghayb (for ʿālam al- ghayb), “the World of the Unseen” i.e. the suprasensory world, and mis̱āl (for ʿālam al-mis̱āl) “the World of Images,” also called ʿālam al-khayāl, “the World of Imagination,” conceived as an intermediate realm between the two. The first two terms originate in the Quran48 and are common to Islamic theologi- cal and philosophical works; the notion of an intermediary realm of imagination, however, is a characteristic of the Ishrāqī and Akbarian cosmologies.49 In Ibn al-ʿArabī’s view, khayāl operates on three levels of existence: on the cosmic level, existence itself, being an intermediary between the Absolute Being and nothingness, is nothing but imagination; on the macrocosmic level, the World of Imagination is a realm between the sensory and the suprasensory worlds, while on the microcosmic level its equivalent is the soul, the intermediary between the spirit and the body.50 Within this scheme, the term mis̱āl is often used synonymously with khayāl to refer to the realm of images or imagination, but never to refer to the power of imagination, for which khayāl (or takhayyul) is used.

47 As a technical term, the word ghubār, “dust,” refers to a fine, minuscule type of Perso-Arabic script. The hemistich may thus be translated as “when the heart is covered with the fine script of imagination,” an image which is congruent with the image of “engraving” in the second hemistich. 48 The two terms are used in conjunction in the Quran in the phrase ʿālim al-ghayb wa-al-shahādah, “the knower of the unseen and the visible,” referring to God (Quran 6: 73 etc.). See D. Gimaret, “S̲h̲ahāda,” and D.B. MacDonald and L. Gardet, “al-G̲h̲ayb”, in Encyclopaedia of Islam, 2nd ed, ed. by P. Bearman, et al. (Brill Online, 2013). 49 Kojiro Nakamura, “Imām Ghazālī’s Cosmology Reconsidered with Special Reference to the Concept of “Jabarūt,” in Studia Islamica, no. 80 (1994): 43–4; for Ghazālī’s use of the term khayāl, “imagination” as opposed to mis̱āl, “ideas-images,” see also 44–6. 50 In addition, Ibn al-ʿArabī sometimes also uses the word khayāl to mean the faculty of imagination. Chittick, The Sufi Path of Knowledge, 116–7.

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Bedil uses the two terms in a similar manner, sometimes as synonyms, but sometimes distinguishes between the two. In the above lines, mis̱āl signifies the realm of images or imagination, while khayāl signifies imagination as a power of the heart—which, however, is cosmic in scope. The process of imagination has two stages, corresponding to the two parts of King Lavaṇa’s experiences. When the heart imagines something, first it appears as an imaginal form in the intermediary World of Images, and then as a physical form in the sensory realm—with or without time intervening between the two. The idea that the forms of the World of Images are blueprints for the forms of the sensory world is conveyed through the metaphor of the tablet (lauḥ) covered with writing—or in this case, images. In connection with the tablet (lauḥ can denote a clay tablet, slate, or stone slab), the word manqūsh signifies engraved images. The word lauḥ, moreover, especially in this context, calls to mind the Preserved Tablet (al-lauḥ al-maḥfūẓ), a heavenly tablet considered the heavenly prototype of the Quran, and also to contain God’s decrees regarding the world.51 In Bedil’s description, however, both the tablet engraved with archetypal images and the corresponding empirical forms are contained within the heart.

darīn dāyirah ẕihn u khārij yakīst tafāvut agar hast juz vahm nīst (p. 160) […]

tū az dasht u dar pukhtah-ī vahm-i ghayr valī khārij az dil muḥāl ast sayr (p. 161) […]

In this circle, the mind and the outside world are one and the same— if there is any distance, it is just delusion. […]

You were under the delusion that the desert was other than your heart, but in reality, it is impossible to journey outside of the heart. […]

51 A.J. Wensinck and C.E. Bosworth, “Lawḥ,” in Encyclopaedia of Islam, 2nd ed., ed. by P. Bearman et al. (Brill Online, 2013); for the lawḥ in Ibn al-ʿArabī’s cosmology, see William C. Chittick, The Self-Disclosure of God: Principles of Ibn al-ʿArabī’s Cosmology (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1998), xxix, 153.

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The idea that the world perceived as objective reality is a mere projection of the mind52 is one of the key concepts of the Yogavāsiṣṭha and is expounded in several places in connection with the story of King Lavaṇa in the chapter Utpattiprakaraṇa.53 There is an inherent tension, never really resolved, between this idea and the view that the world is a manifestation, devoid of any reality on its own, of the divine consciousness.54 In Rāmachandra’s discussion with Vāsiṣṭha, questions pertaining to the ontological status of the mind/heart emerge now and again. Does it possess any reality on its own? Is it the originator or is it originated? If it is originated, how can it be conceived of as the originator of the world?55 Such questions, however, remain outside of Bedil’s concern, at least in the present context of a story which is meant to illustrate the heart’s role in the appearance of the world-illusion. Yet, even as he cautions against the heart’s trickery, a certain degree of admiration for the creative power of imagination can be seen in the way he depicts it, deploying wine, writing, spring, and aquat- ic imagery characteristic of the Muḥīṭ-i aʿẓam:

dū ʿālam ṭapishgāh-i andīshah ast khayālāt ṣahbā-yi īn shīshah ast siyāh ast dar chashm-i ahl-i kamāl dabistān-i imkān zi mashq-i khayāl nadārad hujūm-i bahār-i numūd ba-ghayr az khayāl-at gulī dar vujūd darīn baḥr ṭūfān-i ghayr-i tū nīst darīn kūchah juz gard-i sayr-i tū nīst (p. 161)

52 Slaje, “Liberation from Intentionality and Involvement,” 178. 53 See e.g. the beginning of Vāsiṣhṭha’s explanation in Dārā Shukūh, Jūg Bashist, 119, quoted above. 54 E.g. Barhaman dar azal ṣāniʿ-i ʿālam nabūd; baʿd az ān khvāst kih khvud rā bisyār numāyad. Īn khvāhish bāʿis̱-i ān shud kih ba-ṣūrat-i ʿālamī kih dar ẕāt-i ū mundarij būd ẓāhir gardad … “In pre-eternity, the Brahman was not the creator of the world; then he wanted to show itself as many. This desire became the reason for its manifestation in the form of the world that had been contained in itself … (Dārā Shukūh, Jūg Bashist, 57–9; the remaining part of the passage will be discussed below in the section Kayfīyat-i dil). See also Hanneder, Studies in the Mokṣopāya, 159–61, 169–71; B.L. Atreya, The Yogavāsiṣṭha and Its Philosophy (Moradabad: Darshana Printers, 1966), 32–5; Ram-Prasad Chakravarthi, “Brahman,” in Brill’s Encyclopedia of Hinduism Online, ed. by Knut A. Jacobsen et al. (Brill Online, 2018). 55 E.g. Dārā Shukūh, Jūg Bashist, 65, 113.

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The two worlds are the place for thoughts to surge; ideas are the wine in this flask. In the eyes of the perfect ones, the school of possible existence is blackened with the writing-practice of imagination. The assault of the spring of manifestation does not bring into existence any rose other than your imagination. In this ocean there is no storm other than yours: in this alley there is nothing except for dust stirred by your journey.

Imagination, however, does not operate in a vacuum. Feeding on the desire (shawq) and attachment (taʿalluq) that arises in the heart, first it creates an image of the desired thing within the heart, and then makes it appear in the sensory realm —just as Bedil conveyed with the image of the lawḥ earlier:

zi parvāz-i shauq-at gushūdah-st bāl tū khvāhī jahān gūy khvāhī khayāl khayālat ba-har jā guẕar mī-kunad ba-qadr-i taʿalluq as̱ar mī-kunad nakhustīn taʿalluq ba-dil parvarad digar harchih khvāhad ba-ʿarż āvarad (p. 161)

Whether you call it the physical world or the imaginal, it is from the soaring of your desire that it has spread its wings. Wherever your imagination passes, commensurate with your attachment, it leaves a trace. First, it cultivates attachment within the heart, then it brings all that it desires to the outer plane.

The idea that the attachment of the mind to things and affairs of the world56 perpetuates the illusion of an objective reality and causes the entanglement of the soul in it is another of the key teachings of the Yogavāsiṣṭha, just as its correlative, the idea that correct understanding of the true nature of things is

56 In the Yogavāsiṣṭha attachment is conceptualized as latent mental impressions (vāsanā) that keep the mind involved in the world. Hanneder, Studies in the Mokṣopāya, 216–9, and Slaje, “Liberation from Intentionality and Involvement,” 174–80. In Dārā Shukūh’s translation vāsanā is explained as taʿalluq-i khāṭir ba-maḥsūsāt, “attachment of the mind to sensory things” (Dārā Shukūh, Jūg Bashist, 94–5). However, in the story of King Lavaṇa detachment as the means to liberation is given more weight than discussions of the nature of attachment.

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hanūz-at taʿalluq nagardīd kam kih dānistī ān ḥāl rā mughtanam ba-sharṭ-i taʿalluq chunīn ṣad nuzūl ba-miʿrāj ārad barāt-i qubūl pay-i sūkhtan tā nabastī kamar nashud ṣūrat-i muddaʿā jilvah-gar ba-vārastan az dām-i ummīd u bīm ʿiyān shud kih bar jā-yi khvīsh-ī muqīm (p. 161–2) […]

As long as you were content with your state your attachment did not diminish. In proportion to your attachment, a hundred such descents at last bring you the edict: now you are accepted for ascent. Until you girdled your loins for immolating yourself that which you were seeking did not unveil itself.

57 The idea of jīvanmukti (“living liberation”), namely that liberation is not contingent upon ascetic practices or withdrawal from the world and that the liberated person can con- tinue to be involved in worldly activities without being attached to them distinguishes the Mokṣopāya-Yogavāsiṣṭha from most soteriological traditions of India and has without doubt contributed to its wide appeal. Slaje, “Liberation from Intentionality and Involvement,” 172, 176–7. 58 Dārā Shukūh, Jūg Bashist, 122–3, 125–6; on avidyā, see Hanneder, Studies in the Mokṣopāya, 212–5. 59 Along with the philosophical explanations, the Yogavāsiṣṭha gives another, a more mun- dane explanation. According to this, once King Lavaṇa undertook the performance of the elaborate Rājasūya sacrifice, which entails that its performer has to undergo all kinds of trials for twelve years. Since the king only performed the ritual mentally and not physical- ly, he only experienced the consequences in his mind (Dārā Shukūh, Jūg Bashist, 124–5). Bedil dispenses with this explanation as completely irrelevant to the moral of the story.

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Only when you freed yourself from the net of fear and hope it became evident that you have always been in your own place.60 […]

At the same time, Bedil does not fail to point out that both the lowly and the kingly state—both the dream and what is thought to be the “real-life” experience—belong to the realm of illusion that the heart perpetuates through attachment. In the remaining part of the prophet’s explanation, however, the perspec- tive shifts from the ‘subjective illusionalist’ to an ‘objective idealist’ point of view, inasmuch as Bedil attributes the manifestation of both the imaginal and the sensory worlds to a mind/heart that appears to be something else than the subjective heart discussed so far. In an enigmatic image, he compares the existence or being (vujūd) of man to an idea in the mind of the writer which can assume different written representations (the word lafẓ here signifies both):

vujūd-i tū lafẓī-st ḥayrat-raqam kih taḥrīr yābad ba-chandīn qalam numāyad zi ṣad ṣafḥah-i iʿtibār ba-khaṭṭ-i khafī u jalī āshkār ba-khārij agar dād ʿarż-i shuhūd khayālī-st az jilvah-ash dar numūd najunbīdah ān lafẓ aṣlan zi jā nagardīdah az ẕihn-i kātib judā agar ḥak shavad ānchih naqsh-i namū-st dil-i kātibash lauḥ-i maḥfūẓ-i ū-st tū īn lafẓ-i maʿdūm hastī madān ba-ghayr az ghubār-i tavahhum makhvān (p. 162) […]

Your being is a word in astonishing script that gets written in so many pens. It appears on a hundred pages of relative existence in both hidden and manifest scripts.61

60 The simple past tense verbs in the last four lines can also be interpreted as expressing a general truth, in which case they would be translated into English in the present tense. On the basis of the obvious references to the plot of story of King Lavaṇa, however, I chose to translate the verbs in past tense. 61 As technical terms, khaṭṭ-i khafī and khaṭṭ-i jalī denote small-format and large-format writing, respectively.

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If it shows as a sensory form on the outer plane, it is just an idea that it unveils in that appearance. In reality, that word did not leap from its place, it never left the mind of its writer. If the apparent form gets erased, the heart of its writer is the Preserved Tablet for it. Don’t take this nonexistent word to be existence— Don’t call it other than the dust-like imprint of imagination. […]

Notwithstanding that an idea can assume many different written forms— “hidden script” (khaṭṭ-i khafī) appears to be an allusion to the World of Ideas, whereas “manifest script” (khaṭṭ-i jalī) to the sensory realm—it does not does not possess any reality outside of the mind (ẕihn) of its writer. But who is the writer Bedil is referring to? His use of third person singular, in contrast with the second person of “your being” (vujūd-i tū), as well as the overall image suggests that it is not the delimited heart but rather an undelimited consciousness which encompasses the realities of all existent beings. These realities are called nonexistent because they do not exist outside of the absolute consciousness.62 While in the present context of the story of King Lavaṇa, it is tempting to take metaphors like “so many pens” and “a hundred pages of relative existence (iʿtibār)”63 to be allusions to tanāsukh, the transmigration of the soul, they may well be interpreted within the Neoplatonic-Sufi framework that underlies the Muḥīṭ-i aʿẓam as the various stages of the journey of the soul through the ever- changing divine manifestations. The ‘objective idealist’ view becomes even more apparent in the last lines of the prophet’s explanation where Bedil switches from a second person ad- dress to the reader, or to himself, to third person to describe the many colorful manifestations of God’s names—of which he is but one—as contrasted with the colorlessness of the essence:

chih-miqdār ḥayrat-fusūn raftah-ī kih ham dar khvud az khvud birūn raftah-ī zi ẕātat nashud ghayr-i ism āshkār

62 The idea of the entities lying hidden in God’s consciousness is elaborated in the Kayfīyat-i dil as well; see below. 63 Here I translate iʿtibār as “relative existence” (interpreting it as an abstraction from the adjective iʿtibārī, “relative”) as in the present context “mental construct” does not work well with the image of “hidden” and “manifest” scripts.

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ʿiyān gashtah būʾī zi ḥusn-i bahār ẓuhūr-i bahār ast dar har chaman ba-ism-i gul u sunbul u nastaran chaman rang-i iẓhār-i asmā-yi ū-st valī bāgh-i bīrangiyash jā-yi ū-st zi āghūsh-i bīrangī afshānd bāl ba-chandīn ṣuvar rang u bū-yi khayāl (p. 162) […]

How confounded you have become under this spell That even while being in yourself, you have gone out of yourself. From your essence nothing but a name appeared— a bit of fragrance from the beauty of the spring. In every flowerbed, spring is manifest in names such as the rose, hyacinth and narcissus. The flowerbed is the colorful manifestation of His names but His garden of colorlessness is His place. From the embrace of colorlessness, the color and fragrance64 of imagination took wing to all these forms. […]

From here, the interpretation of King Lavaṇa’s journey merges into a series of addresses to the sāqī, with which Bedil, in keeping with the conventions of the sāqīnāmah genre, concludes this unit. Adapting a voice that is much more inward-turned and emotionally charged than in the preceding discourse, he applies the moral of the story to himself, naming his own heart as the cause of his distress. He begs the sāqī to polish the mirror of his heart from the rust of ignorance (nādānī) and neglect (ghaflat) of the One Reality and to liberate him from the prison of his self—for which here, in keeping with the story, and also punning on his pen-name (bī-dil, “heart-less”), he deploys the word dil, “heart,” rather than nafs, “soul, self,” or the pronoun khvud or khvīsh, “self”—by grant- ing him a glance as well as a cup of wine. By alternating between stressing the necessity of becoming aware of the true nature of the self in order to attain an awareness of Reality—the method advocated in the Yogavāsiṣṭha—and giving voice to his desire to transcend the limited self by losing awareness of it, as expressed through the metaphor of intoxication—Bedil seamlessly integrates the prophet’s explanation into the generic framework of his sāqīnāmah.

64 The text here has been emended from rang-i bū-yi khayāl to rang u bū-yi khayāl.

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The Exordium of the Story: Kayfīyat-i Dil (“The Characteristics of the Heart”)

The story of King Lavaṇa and the subsequent explanation, however, is not where Bedil’s exploration of the notion of the heart begins; the story is in fact prefaced with a short discourse specifically titled Kayfīyat-i dil, “The characteristics of the heart.” In these two thematically related discourses that in a way frame the tale however, Bedil presents the heart in rather different lights. While the story and the prophet’s explanation serve to reveal the intrinsic link between the heart, attachment, and the illusion of an objective reality, the Kayfīyat-i dil, a rhapsodic, approximately eighty-line description punctuated by the phrase dil ast īn kih …, “the heart is that which …,” brings to light the ontological and the epistemological capacities of the heart stemming from its intermediate status between the One Reality and the world of the Many. In the opening lines, Bedil envisions the heart as a musician who, with time and space as his instrument, composes the symphony of the universe, which at the same time is encompassed within it:

dil ast īn kih kaun u makān sāz-i ū-st dū ʿālam zi khvud raftah āvāz-i ū-st bisāṭī kih az kāf u nūn chīdah-and mapindār k-az dil birūn chīdah-and dilī būd k-az pardah āvāz dād jahān rā ba-īn shuʿlah parvāz dād65 zi sāzash ẓuhūr u khafā dar khurūsh nihān ʿilm u dānish ʿiyān chashm u gūsh (p. 144)

The heart is that which has time and space as its instrument; the two worlds are its sound passing beyond itself. Don’t suppose that the expanse spread by the “kāf” and “nūn” [kun!]66 was spread outside of the heart. It was a heart that called out from behind the veil,67

65 The Kabul edition has pardāz (used in compounds in the meanings “performing” “com- pleting,” “adorning”), which appears to be a typo for parvāz, “flight”; parvāz dādan means “to cause to fly, to make fly.” Manuscripts IO Islamic 410 and Salar Jung Ms. 890 have parvāz. 66 “Kāf” and “nūn” are the two letters that make up the word kun, “Be!” Quran 2:117 (“When He decreeth a matter, He saith to it: ‘Be,’ and it is.” Yusuf Ali’s translation) and other loci. 67 The polyvalence of the word pardah (literally “veil,” but as a technical term also “fret of an instrument” and “musical mode”) is frequently exploited by Bedil, especially in

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and with this flame, put the world into orbit. Through its instrument, the hidden and the manifest are in uproar— concealed: knowledge and awareness; apparent: the eyes and the ears.

The image suggests that the heart is a reality beyond time and space, encompassing the entire creation brought into existence with the divine command kun! (“Be!”). At the same time, it remains ambiguous who the giver of the command is. Is the heart’s “calling out from behind the veil” an allusion to the logos kun? Or, does it point to the heart’s capacity to receive and differentiate the primordial sound of creation into the web of sounds that make up the universe? The imagery and the grammatical construction—third person singular verbs used with dil as the subject, and third person plural verbs with an unspecified subject, here translated in passive voice—suggests that the heart, despite encompassing the universe, is not the primary source but rather a recipient and transmitter of the divine command “Be!”. That Bedil conceives of the heart as an intermediary becomes clearer in the following lines, in which he deploys one of his favorite images, the mirror,68 to convey the idea of the heart being both the locus in which the Divine reveals Himself 69 through His Names and Attributes and the locus of the human being’s knowledge of God:70

dil āvard mirʾāt-i taḥqīq-i ẕāt kih ūrā nayābī magar dar ṣifāt chih vaḥdat tamāshā-yi yaktāʾiyash chih kas̱rat khayālāt-i raʿnāʾiyash

combination with the music imagery. 68 The Iranian scholar Shafīʿī-Kadkanī actually dubbed Bedil in the title of his book shāʿir-i āyīnah-hā, “the poet of mirrors”; Muḥammad Rizā Shafīʿī-Kadkanī, Shāʿir-i āyīnahhā: Barrasī-i sabk-i hindī va shiʿr-i Bīdil (Tihrān: Āgāh, 1366 [1988]). For an analysis of few ex- amples of Bedil’s use of the mirror, see Riccardo Zipoli, “Âyine (Mirror) in Bidel’s Ghazals (part II). Lexical Solidarities: Âyine (Mirror) and Dâgh (Brand)” (Paper presented at the meeting of European Iranologists in Vienna, 2007); for a comparative study of the mirror in the three main styles of Persian poetry, see Riccardo Zipoli, “Semiotics and the Tradition of the Image,” Persica 20 (2005): 155–72. 69 While the presence of abstract philosophical terms would warrant the translation of the third person pronoun and pronominal enclitic with the impersonal “it” and “its,” here the personal “He” and “His” work better with the imagery. 70 For a discussion of these notions in Ibn al-ʿArabī’s oeuvre, see Chittick, The Sufi Path of Knowledge, 33–46.

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ba-andīshah tims̱āl-i vaḥdat-numā71 ba-guftār ṭūmār-i asmā-gushā […]

The heart presents a mirror for realizing the Essence, for you don’t find Him, except in His Attributes. What is Unity? Beholding His singularity. What is multiplicity? His coquettish thoughts. In contemplation, it is a likeness appearing as One; in expression, it is a scroll unfolding the Names. […]

Physical and functional aspects of mirror, in particular its capacity to reflect, have been frequently exploited in philosophical, mystical, and literary works to illustrate characteristics of the heart, mind, or the soul. While intertextuality is as much at play in Bedil’s poetry as stylistic and poetic preferences, the particular way he deploys the mirror, in combination with a specific vocabulary, to convey ontological and epistemological notions, betrays his indebtedness to Ibn al-ʿArabī. Even if the mirror is also a recurrent image in the Yogavāsiṣṭha, the teachings it illustrates already appear in Dārā Shukūh’s translation through the mediating lens of Ibn al-ʿArab’s system of thought and terminology. Michael Sells has shown how Ibn al-ʿArabī exploits the grammatical and semantic ambiguities of language and the semiotic possibilities inherent the mirror-metaphor to approximate the inexpressible notion of the fusion of the subject and object, of self and other, in the divine act of God revealing Himself to Himself and the human being passing away from himself in the higher awareness of the divine.72 Although different in language and scope, these lines of Bedil exhibit some of the same features. He actually deploys not one, but three different metaphors to captures the idea of the divine Essence (ẕāt) becoming manifest, through His Names and Attributes (asmā u ṣifāt), in the multiplicity of phenomena: the multiple reflections in the mirror,73 the manifold coquettish display of the beautiful beloved,74 and the unfolding scroll revealing the

71 The Kabul edition has ashyā-numā, “appearing as things,” which is less likely given the expressed contrast between the one Essence and the many Names. 72 See Michael Sells, “Ibn Arabi’s Polished Mirror: Identity Shift and Meaning Event” in his Mystical Languages of Unsaying (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), 63–89. 73 The double function of the mirror in reflecting the Names and Attributes and refracting them into various individuations is discussed in Sells, Mystical Languages of Unsaying, 73. 74 I interpret the iżāfah compound khayālāt-i raʿnāʾiyash as “thoughts/ideas/images stemming from His coquettishness”; here translated, for better understandability, as the

JOURNAL OF SOUTH ASIAN INTELLECTUAL HISTORY 2 (2019)Downloaded 73– from115 Brill.com09/28/2021 04:01:41AM via free access 100 Kovacs many names of the same Named. Through the words mirʾāt, “mirror,” tamāshā, “beholding,” and tims̱āl, “image, likeness”—all three of which belong to the conceptual domain of sight—the three images, however, are fused into one. The unifying symbol of the mirror, at the same time, also points to the reverse process: the possibility of beholding the single Reality behind all appearances. The terse, nominal sentence structure in the last two verses, however, leaves it ambiguous who the subject and who the object is. Is it the human being who is beholding His oneness in the mirror of the heart, or is it the Absolute who is beholding His own oneness? Is it the human being who, through contemplation, attains an awareness of the unity underlying multiplicity, or does contemplation refer to the One in the state of nondifferentiation, in contrast with the multiplicity that his divine “speech” engenders? The grammatical construction and the mirror-metaphor allows for both. In the following unit Bedil continues exploiting the same mirror-metaphor, but complicates the idea by replacing the word “Essence” (ẕāt) and “Attributes” (ṣifāt) with “nonexistence” (ʿadam) and “existence” (hastī):

dil-ast īnkih dar bazmgāh-i shuhūd ʿadam rā ba-nayrang-i hastī numūd v-agar nah darīn ḥayratistān-i vahm hamān dar ʿadam būd sāmān-i fahm azū jūsh zad hāy u hūʾī kih nīst damīd az gulash rang u būʾī kih nīst dar-i ʿarż-i asmā u ashyā gushūd bah tauṣīf-i āʾīnah khvud rā sutūd (p. 144) […]

The heart is that which in the banquet-place of the sensory realm made non-existence appear in the form of a magical show of existence. Otherwise, in this astonishing, illusory realm the apparatus for knowing would still be in nonexistence. From the heart an uproar boiled forth which does not exist; from this rose a color-and-fragrance blossomed that does not exist. The door opened up for the appearance of the Names and things: through His representation in the mirror, He extolled Himself. […]

adjectival phrase “coquettish thoughts.” The image in the background is that of the beautiful beloved displaying her beauty through coquettish gestures—a common topos in lyric poetry which here signifies the self-disclosure of God in the multiple loci of phenomena.

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The mirror accurately reflects the object facing it, provided that all the necessary conditions are met.75 The reflected image, however, despite its likeness to its source, is only a representation without possessing any reality on its own. In these lines, however, the case appears to be exactly the opposite, inasmuch as it is nonexistence that is said to be reflected in the heart-mirror as existence—more precisely, reflected as something that appears as existence but is in reality not more than a “magical show” (nayrang): a clamor, a display of color and fragrance that has no reality. What kind of ‘nonexistence’ does Bedil have in mind? His restatement in the last quoted line of the idea of God revealing Himself through His Names in the manifest things, as expressed earlier, suggests that nonexistence needs to be interpreted within the same framework. Ibn al-ʿArabī envisions the appearance of multiplicity as the entities that lie hidden in the divine knowledge becoming manifest in the things of the world.76 The hidden entities (aʿyān s̱ābitah, “fixed,” or “immutable” entities) can be considered nonexistent from two points of view: from the absolute point of view, they are nonexistent because they are only a possibility in God’s knowledge; from the relative point of view, they are nonexistent as long as they do not become manifest. Here Bedil appears to speak from the absolute point of view: that which is eternally nonexistent cannot in reality become existent; even if it becomes manifest, its existence is no more than of a reflection in the mirror. At the same time, as Bedil adds—alluding to the oft-quoted saying, attributed to the Prophet in Sufi texts, according to which God declares, “I was a hidden treasure, so I loved to be known; hence I created the creatures that I might be known”77—were it not for the appearance of this reflection in the heart- mirror, ‘knowing’ (here fahm, “understanding, comprehension”) itself would be nonexistent. But who is the subject and the object of ‘knowing’ that Bedil is referring to? The ambiguity, perhaps deliberately, is not resolved here either. By seeing Himself in the divine Names and Attributes as reflected in the mirror of the heart, God comes to know His “hidden treasure;” by seeing His reflection

75 For a list of factors that can prevent the mirror from reflecting, see Ghazālī, Kitāb Sharḥ ʿajāʾib al-qalb, 36–9. 76 Ibn al-ʿArabī actually speaks of two manifestations, called taʿayyun (“entification” in Chittick’s translation; Sells variously uses “instantiation,” “determination,” “individual- ization,” and “actualization”) by his commentators. The first taʿayyun takes place within the divine knowledge; through the second taʿayyun the entities enter the manifest world. Chittick, The Sufi Path of Knowledge, 83–8. 77 See M. Afnani, “Unraveling the Mystery of The Hidden Treasure: The Origin and Develop- ment of a Hadith Qudsi and its Application in Sufi Doctrine,” PhD Dissertation (Berkeley: University of California, Berkeley, 2011).

JOURNAL OF SOUTH ASIAN INTELLECTUAL HISTORY 2 (2019)Downloaded 73– from115 Brill.com09/28/2021 04:01:41AM via free access 102 Kovacs in the mirror of the heart, contingent being can become aware of God. That ‘knowing’ in fact works both ways, is spelled out more clearly in another place in the Kayfīyat-i dil:

azū chashm-i mumkin ba-nūr āshnā azū fikr-i vājib shuʿūr-āshnā (p. 146)

Through it, the eye of the contingent is acquainted with light; through it, the thoughts of the Necessary Being are acquainted with consciousness.

The paradox of the manifestation is presented in Dārā Shukūh’s Jūg Bashist towards the beginning of Utpattiprakaraṇa in a strikingly similar manner, albeit without the mirror-metaphor, using predominantly Akbarian terminology78 and even including a paraphrase of the hadith of the “hidden treasure”:

“The visible world, before its manifest existence, was ‘causeless’—that is, it did not have a creator, for the reason that it was on the level of knowledge, and the forms in the knowledge of God Most High, on which the “immutable entities” and realities (aʿyān-i s̱ābitah va ḥaqāʾiq) are meant, are not created by anyone. Since the pre-eternal Will demanded that this world become manifest, God Most High became its creator with the name ‘Visible.’ […] Thus, whatever is seen from the world, it is the existence of the Real and not the world, except for that which enters the intellect and conceptualization and has no existence. Thus, the reason for the manifestation of the world is God’s love for His own manifestation.”79

While passages such as this demonstrate how elements of the Yogavāsiṣṭha’s teaching that resemble Neoplatonic-Sufi notions become even more “do- mesticated” in Dārā Shukūh interpretative rendering, in themselves are not

78 The few Sanskrit terms used in the passage are indicated with single quotes in the translation. Since in the text they are transcribed in the Perso-Arabic script according to their vernacular pronunciation the correct Sanskrit forms are given in square brackets in the quote below. 79 ʿĀlam-i mashhūd pīsh az vujūd-i ẓāhirī mis̱l-i ḥaqq taʿālá akāran [akāraṇa] būd yaʿnī ṣāniʿ nadāsht, az jihat-i ānkih dar martabah-yi ʿilm būd; va ṣuvar-i ʿilmīyah-yi ḥaqq taʿālá kih ʿibārat az aʿyān-i s̱ābitah va ḥaqāʾiq ast āfarīdah-yi kasī nīst. Chūn irādah-yi azalī muqtażī shud kih īn ʿālam ba-ẓuhūr biyāyad, ḥaqq taʿālá ba-ism-i prataksh [pratyaksha] ṣāniʿ-i ū shud […] va ānchih az ʿālam dīdah mī-shavad vujūd-i ḥaqq ast, ʿālam nīst, illā chīzī kih dar ʿaql va taṣavvur dar mī-āyad va vujūd nadārad. Pas sabab-i ẓuhūr-i ʿālam dūst dāshtan-i ḥaqq ast ẓuhūr-i khvud rā … Dārā Shukūh, Jūg Bashist, 58–9 ; part of this passage is quoted above in footnote 54.

JOURNAL OF SOUTH ASIAN INTELLECTUALDownloaded HISTORY from 2 Brill.com09/28/2021(2019) 73–115 04:01:41AM via free access “No Journey is Possible Outside of the Heart” 103 sufficient to determine whether Bedil had these in view or just relied on his Islamic learning when he composed his account. Following this introduction of the heart in the Kayfīyat-i dil as the intermediary between the Absolute and the multiplicity of appearances, the focus shifts from the heart’s capacity to attain awareness of the One Reality to the negative potential inherent in such a status. Notwithstanding that it is the “hidden treasure” of God manifested in the heart-mirror, the beholder may actually get caught up in the multiplicity of appearances and lose sight of the One who is their source. Paradoxically, as Bedil shows through the following image, it is the heart’s own capacity to reflect that can turn into the biggest obstacle to reflecting Reality as it is:

dil-ast īn kih bar mā qafas gashtah ast chu āʾīnah dām-i nafas gashtah ast nah ṣayyād paydā u parkāriyash nah ṣayd āshkār u giriftāriyash (p. 144)

The heart is that which has become a cage for us, like the mirror, covered by the net woven by breath. No hunter can be found, nor its snare; there is no prey manifest, nor capturing.

This complex image containing metaphors within metaphors is built on the analogy between the heart filled with the images of multiplicity and the mirror covered with vapor. Just as a mirror covered with the vapor of breath can only produce a distorted image or no image at all, the heart filled with reflections of multiplicity is incapable of reflecting Reality. On the next level, the vapor over the luminous surface of the mirror is likened to a net; the net is a snare for the mirror. At the same time, covered with a net, the mirror itself turn into a snare. By analogy, the reflected images in the heart form a cage, entrapping the heart and at the same time turning the heart into a cage for the soul.80 It is an act of entrapping in which the hunter, the trap, and the prey are fused into one, while none of these has any reality81—as indicated on the level of the metaphor by

80 In this metaphor, breath and reflections are also equated, albeit implicitly. On the idea of an intrinsic relationship between “breath” (nafas; the word also signifies “word” or “speech”) and the manifest world of multiplicity, and silence and the nonmanifest One, see Kovacs, “The Tavern of the Manifestation of Realities,” Chapter 4 (“The Foundation of Existence Rests on Sound: The Problem of Speech and Silence in the Muḥīṭ-i aʿẓam”). 81 The second verse in fact encapsulates the moral of an anecdote from the Yogavāsiṣṭha that Bedil retells toward the end of the Muḥīṭ-i Aʿẓam. In this, a hunter attempts to track a deer which he wounded, until a wise man instructs him that both the deer and

JOURNAL OF SOUTH ASIAN INTELLECTUAL HISTORY 2 (2019)Downloaded 73– from115 Brill.com09/28/2021 04:01:41AM via free access 104 Kovacs the ephemerality and insubstantiality of the breath-vapor and the reflections. Once the heart realizes that cage is no more than an illusion, it is freed from it. In the following lines of the Kayfīyat-i dil, Bedil illustrates, through a series of binaries, the two opposing ways that the heart can take, depending on whether it is cleared of the images of multiplicity or not:

darī kūft k-īn bazm-i āgāhī ast ba-ʿaks-ash rahī zad kih gumrāhī ast azīn dar yakī ʿaql-i āgāh shud azān rah yakī nafs-i gumrāh shud gumān yakqalam jūsh-i talvīn-i ū yaqīn-hā gul-i bāgh-i taskīn-i ū (p. 144) […]

chih kufr u chih islām nayrang-i dil chih rūz u chih shab gardish-i rang-i dil hidāyat ba-rāh-i vafā raftanash żalālat hamān rāh gum kardanash (p. 146) […]

It knocked on the door of the banquet of awareness; with the reflection it took the path of deviance. Through this door, one became an intellect full of awareness; through that path, one became a misled ego. Doubt is nothing but the effervescence of its coloration;82 certainty83 is a rose of the garden of its tranquility. […]

hunting were the products of his imagination (Bīdil, Kullīyāt, 239; cf. Dārā Shukoh, Jūg Bashist, 249). 82 Here the word talvīn refers to the “coloration” of the mirror by the reflected images, whereas taskīn to the clarity of mirror. In Sufi manuals, the terms talvīn (“coloration” or “fluctuation”) and taskīn (“stability” or “tranquility”) refer to two spiritual stations, of which tranquility is regarded the higher. Chittick, The Sufi Path of Knowledge, 108. In the Yogavāsiṣṭha, fluctuation and tranquility are given as the two opposing qualities of the mind (e.g. Dārā Shukūh, Jūg Bashist, 252; the heart that changes color moment by moment is compared to the salamander; 65). 83 The word yaqīnhā (“certainties”) is plural in the original; it denotes the three stages of certainty as defined in Sufi treatises: ʿilm al-yaqīn (“knowledge of certainty” or “certain knowledge”), ʿayn al-yaqīn (“vision of certainty” or “essence of certainty”), and ḥaqq al-yaqīn (“truth of certainty” or “real certainty”). E.g. Abū al-Qāsim Qushayrī, Al-Qushayri’s Epistle on Sufism=Al-Risala al-qushayriyya fi ‘ilm al-tasawwuf, transl. by Alexander D. Knysh

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Whether Islam or unbelief, it is the magical show of the heart; whether day or night, it is the changing color of the heart. Guidance is taking the path of the fulfillment of the promise;84 deviation is losing that very path. […]

The heart (qalb) is characterized, on the basis of the etymology of the word— as a verbal noun, qalb means “reversal, overturn, transformation, change”—as well as ḥadīth that refer to God as the ‘Turner of hearts,’ by Ibn al-ʿArabī and some other authors as being in the state of constant change and fluctuation between God and the world.85 In Sufi theoretical writings the various layers or stations of the heart (qalb, fuʿād, and other terms), and its relationship to the pure soul or spirit (rūḥ) and the base soul (nafs) are conceptualized in different ways, but typically the heart’s capacity to follow the divine guidance or to deviate from it is explained with reference to its association with the base soul.86 Quranic verses addressing the dual potential of the heart or the soul (nafs) gave rise to a sophisticated theory of Islamic ethics and the Sufi praxis of the “purification of the soul” (taẕkiyat al-nafs).87 Similarly to the idea of the heart’s incessant transformations, in the Yogavāsiṣṭha the mind is described as fluctuating between the ātman (Soul or Self) and the world, capable of assuming the qualities of both.88 In contrast

(Reading, UK: Garnet Publishing, 2007), 107–108, 193–6; ʿAlī bin ʿUsmān Hujvīrī, The Kashf al-Maḥjúb: The Oldest Persian Treatise on Ṣúfiism, transl. by Reynold A. Nicholson (Leiden, E.J. Brill, 1911), 381–2. 84 The “fulfillment of the promise” (vafā) is an allusion to the primordial covenant, referred to in poetic texts as “the day of alast,” when the souls accepted God’s lordship by an- swering the question a-lastu bi-rabbikum? (“Am I not your Lord?” Quran 7:172) in the affirmative. 85 Chittick, The Sufi Path of Knowledge, 106–107; cf. Ḥakīm Al-Tirmidhī in Bernd Radtke and John O’Kane, The Concept of Sainthood in Early Islamic Mysticism: Two Works by Al-Ḥakīm Al-Tirmidhī; an Annotated Translation with Introduction (Richmond, Surrey: Curzon Press, 1996), 219. For the relevant ḥadīth,, see Morris, The Reflective Heart, 52–3. Cf. Wehr, Dictionary of Modern Written Arabic, and Lane, Arabic-English Lexicon, s.v. “QLB”. 86 E.g. Abū al-Qāsim Qushayrī, Al-Qushayri’s Epistle on Sufism, 109–110; Radtke and John O’Kane, The Concept of Sainthood, 218–23, 226–9. On the concept of nafs as related to other spiritual substances see Gavin N. Picken, Spiritual Purification in Islam: The Life and Works of al-Muḥāsibī (Abingdon: Routledge, 2011), 128–31. 87 On the centrality of the Quranic verses 91:7–10 to the concept of the dual nature of the soul and to taẕkiyat al-nafs, see Picken, Spiritual Purification in Islam, 139–49. 88 See for example the following part of Vāsiṣṭha’s explanation of King Lavaṇa’s imaginary experiences: … dil darmiyān-i dānā va ṣad hazār nādān uftādah ast, yaʿnī darmiyān-i ātmā va kāʾināt. Agar ātmā ba-quvvat-i himmat ū rā ba-ṭaraf-i khvud bikashad va ū bā ātmā muttaḥid mīshavad va dar as̱nā-yi murāqabah payvastah taṣavvur kunad kih man ʿayn

JOURNAL OF SOUTH ASIAN INTELLECTUAL HISTORY 2 (2019)Downloaded 73– from115 Brill.com09/28/2021 04:01:41AM via free access 106 Kovacs with the strongly ethics-oriented nature of the Sufi theories of the soul/heart and its purification, rooted in the revealed law as embodied in the Quran and the sunna of the Prophet, the Yogavāsiṣṭha’s view of liberation places emphasis on reflection as the means of freeing the mind from the illusion of the world and the “I” and attaining an awareness of the soul’s identity with the ultimate cosmic Consciousness.89 While Bedil conveys his snapshots of the dual potential of the heart/soul in a characteristically Sufistic idiom, he does not seem concerned with its ethical or practical implications other than the role of discernment in aligning the heart with its heavenly source. In the remaining part of his account, alternating between different views and semantic domains, he portrays the heart as the locus of love, revisits the notion of the heart being the originator of the world, describes the organs and the faculties of the body as the delimitations of the heart, and once more reiterates the idea that nothing exists outside of the heart—including himself, the ‘heart-less’ one (bī-dil, i.e. Bedil):90

man-i bī-navā ham dil-andīshah-am ba-dil chūn nafas mī-ravad rīshah-am sarāpā dil-am gar hamah bīdil-am ḥaq-i ū-st dar pardah-i bāṭil-am (p. 146) […]

This destitute, too, is pondering on the heart: “My roots run into the heart, like breath—

ātmā-am, ʿayn ātmā mīshavad va ṣifat-i dānāʾī lāzim-i ū mī gardad; va agar kāʾināt ū rā ba-ṭaraf-i khvud bibarad, mis̱l-i sang mī shavad kih dar nādānī mas̱al ast. Wa ʿajabtar ānkih har kirā ḥirṣ va ārzū dar girdāb-i tafriqah-yi ʿālam andākhtah, kishtī kih sabab-i najāt-i ū tavānad shud hamīn dil ast. “The heart is fallen between the knower and a thousand ignorant ones—that is, between the ātmā [ātman] and the world. If the ātmā, with its spiritual power, pulls it towards itself, it becomes united with the ātmā. If in the process of meditation, it imagines that ‘I am the ātmā,’ it becomes the ātmā, and knowledge will be its necessary characteristic; if the world pulls it to its direction, it becomes like the stone, which is an example of ignorance. But even stranger is the fact that the same heart is the ship of salvation for all those who had been thrown into the whirlpool of the world by their greed and desires.” Dārā Shukūh, Jūg Bashist, 121. 89 Dārā Shukūh, Jūg Bashist, 120–22. Cf. Atreya, The Yogavāsiṣṭha and Its Philosophy, 37–39, 50–51. On the mind and its relationship to the ātman in the various school of Indian philosophy, see Rukmani, “Consciousness and Mind.” 90 The word bī-dil (Bedil) means “heartless,” but can also be interpreted as “heart-lost,” i.e. who lost his heart to someone.

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from head to toe, I am heart, even though I am completely ‘without a heart’! It is His reality within this unreal veil of I.”91 […]

As if he were apologizing for having provided, instead of a comprehensive and accurate picture of the heart, only partial and potentially distorted views, like those of the proverbial elephant in the dark,92 Bedil concludes the section Kayfīyat-i dil with an outburst, urging the reader—and his own self—not to inquire into the unsolvable mystery of the heart:

zi nayrang-i īn ramz-i mushkil mapurs kas īn ʿuqdah nagshūd az dil mapurs baqā mī-furūshad fanā mī-kunad mapurs īn qiyāmat chihā mī-kunad (p. 146–47)

Don’t ask about the enchantment of this convoluted mystery: no one has opened this knot—don’t ask about the heart! It displays subsistence, it brings about annihilation— don’t ask what kind of things this calamity does!

It is at this point that Bedil narrates the story of King Lavaṇa, as an example for the mysteries of the heart. His rhetorical confession of his inability to capture this elusive concept, however, echoes Hujvīrī’s comments in his Kashf al-maḥjūb on a saying of Abū al-Ḥasan Isfahānī:

“From the time of Adam to the Resurrection people cry, ‘The heart, the heart!’ and I wish that I might find some one to describe what the heart is or how it is, but I find none. People in general give the name of ‘heart’ (dil) to that piece of flesh which belongs to madmen and ecstatics and children, who really are without heart (bedil). What, then, is this heart, of which I hear only the name?” That is to say, if I call intellect the heart, it is not the heart; and if I call spirit the heart, it is not the heart; and if

91 These verses contain other untranslatable puns as well: bī-navā, “unprovided for,” “destitute,” “helpless,” also means “voiceless”; in the latter meaning, there is a congruity between bī-navā, andīshah (“thought,” “pondering”) and nafas (“breath,” but also “word, speech”). As a noun, ḥaqq can mean “right, claim,” “truth,” and can refer to God as the True or Real. Accordingly, ḥaq-i ū-st can be interpreted variously as the heart’s truth/reality/claim/right or His [the Real, God] truth/reality/claim/right etc. 92 The story is narrated, among other works, in Rumi’s Mas̱navī (III:1259–74).

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I call knowledge the heart, it is not the heart. All the evidences of the Truth subsist in the heart, yet only the name of it is to be found.93

What Hujvīrī appears to imply here is that anyone who attempts to explain what the heart is inevitably falls back on defining it in terms of the other subtle substances—the intellect (ʿaql), the (sublime) soul or spirit (rūḥ), and the (base) soul (nafs)—while the reality of the heart, due to its mysterious connection to the Real (ḥaqq), escapes any such definition. This may be the reason why Ghazālī proposed two sets of definitions for each of the four terms qalb, ʿaql, rūḥ, and nafs, out of which the second set is identical for all: it is “a subtle tenuous substance” which is “the real essence of man,” “the part of man that perceives and knows and experiences.”94 With this point in mind, let us evaluate the different views of the heart that emerge from the two discourses that frame the story of King Lavaṇa. While Ghazālī’s “anthropocentric” view of the heart is one of the threads interwoven in Bedil’s descriptions, it is not the most prominent one. It comes into focus mainly in the latter part of the Kayfīyat-i dil, where Bedil portrays the heart an intermediary between the body and the soul, sharing in, or having the potential to assume, the qualities of the base soul (nafs), the intellect (ʿaql), and the spirit (rūḥ). Overtaken by the characteristics of the base soul (nafs)—such as desires, attachments, and ignorance of reality—it becomes entangled in the world. Through reflection, understanding, and discernment (qualities also attributed to the ʿaql, intellect), it becomes like the (sublime) soul or spirit (rūḥ), aware of the divine Trust that God placed in it. While in this way Bedil does see the heart as the locus of man’s experience, perception, and knowledge of himself, the world, and potentially, God, at the same time he presents it as encompassing also that which man perceives and knows and experiences or has the potential to perceive and know and experience—that is, the entire universe. As for the cause and manner of this encompassing, Bedil actually has two different views. According to the first view, exemplified with the story of King Lavaṇa, whatever man perceives, knows, experiences, and thinks to be real, is encompassed within his heart in the sense that does not have any reality outside of the heart

93 Nicholson’s translation. The quotation marks do not seem to be in the right place; they should only enclose the first sentence, which is in Arabic in the original, and is followed by Hujvīrī’s paraphrase and comments in Persian; Hujvīrī, The Kashf al-Maḥjúb, 144. 94 There are minor differences in wording. In the definition of the heart, Ghazālī adds: “it is addressed, punished, rebuked, and held responsible;” these particular aspects, however, seem to be outside of Bedil’s concern in the present context. Ghazālī, Kitāb Sharḥ-i ʿajāʾib al-qalb, 5–11.

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(mind in the Yogavāsiṣṭha). The world, just as the notion of a separate ‘I,’ is no more than a projection of the mind, rooted in the heart/mind’s erroneous perception of reality. Once man, through reflection, realizes this, he is freed from the illusion—not in the sense that the world ceases to exist or that he no longer perceives the world, but rather that he is no longer attached to it, even if he continues to live in it.95 The mind, cleared of ignorance and attachment, gives way to the pure consciousness of the soul or self (ātman), which itself is not different from the cosmic Consciousness. This view of the mind resembles the Sufi notion of the nafs (self or base soul) in that the mind/self is held responsible for the entanglement of the human soul in the world through its (imagined) separateness from its source. In contrast with the first view, the second view, expressed mainly in the Kayfīyat-i dil, places the emphasis on the heart’s connection with the Real in that it presents the heart as the locus in which the Divine reveals Himself, through His Names and Attributes, in the multiplicity of the world. While the concept of the heart being the carrier of the divine Trust and the locus of man’s knowledge of God is common to Sufi writings, the unique ontological status that Bedil attributes to the heart appears to originate in certain ideas of Ibn al-ʿArabī. In describing the heart as an intermediary (barzakh) not only on the microcosmic level between the body and the soul, but also on the cosmic level between the Absolute and the universe, in some places Bedil comes very close to what Ibn al-ʿArabī calls the “Supreme Barzakh” (al-barzakh al-aʿlá), the highest intermediary between the Absolute and nothingness, and variously identifies it with notions such as the “Breath of the Merciful” and the “Reality of the Perfect Man,” to name but a few.96 In the present context, however, Bedil’s view may have been colored by the Vedantic concept of the individual soul’s identity with the absolute Soul, expressed in numerous places in the Yogavāsiṣṭha.97 At the same time, as Bedil’s imaginative and kaleidoscopic account of the heart is anything but a systematic metaphysical exposition, one should be careful not to read too much into it. Even if he speaks of the heart’s infinite capacity, he does it from the point of view of, and with reference to, the

95 Hanneder, Studies on the Mokṣopāya, 160. 96 Chittick, The Sufi Path of Knowledge, 125–43. 97 The same word, ātman denotes both the individual soul and the absolute Soul; Hanneder cautions that “the ātman is, it should be emphasized, not the ‘I’ within the experience of the individual but a synonym for the absolute in which no differentiation between ‘I’ and ‘world’ exists.” Hanneder, Studies on the Mokṣopāya, 159. In the latter sense the ātman is named variously in the Yogavāsiṣṭha as brahmātmā (“the Brahma-soul”), paramātmā (“the Supreme Soul”) chidātmā (“the Soul as Consciousness”). E.g. Dārā Shukūh, Jūg Bashist, 100, 144.

JOURNAL OF SOUTH ASIAN INTELLECTUAL HISTORY 2 (2019)Downloaded 73– from115 Brill.com09/28/2021 04:01:41AM via free access 110 Kovacs human “possessor of the heart” and his yearning for finding the One Reality behind all appearances. While the above two views appear intertwined in many places in Bedil’s account, in the prophet’s explanation he primarily draws, albeit in a selective and reductive way, on the discourses that intersperse the story in Yogavāsiṣṭha, whereas in the prefatory Kayfīyat-i dil he appears to be much less constrained by his source. Overall, in his poetic retelling Bedil even goes a step further than Dārā Shukūh in his effort to assimilate the “foreign” philosophical discourses to the Islamicate worldview that underlies the Muḥīṭ-i aʿẓam. He greatly simpli- fies the line of reasoning, leaving out many details, especially discussions of a technical nature that are peculiar to Hindu philosophy or religious practice. By rendering all foreign ideas with familiar Sufi terms, underscoring them with numerous references to Qurʾān and ḥadīth, he seeks to ground his discourses in Sufi metaphysics. Even so, it is evident from his choice for, and treatment of, this story, that he found certain key notions of the Yogavāsiṣṭha’s teaching to be suitable for and congruous with the thematic framework of a mystical mas̱navī. To assess the role of the story of King Lavaṇa and the related discourses in the Muḥīṭ-i aʿẓam, however, they need to be interpreted and eval- uated against the backdrop of the generic and the conceptual framework of the poem.

The Immediate and the Larger Context: The Sixth Daur and Beyond

The immediate context—the sixth daur of the Muḥīṭ-i aʿẓam, titled “The banquet of the magical show of the results of Imagination”—presents a puzzle, inasmuch as the story of King Lavaṇa and the accompanying discourses on the nature of the heart are situated in between two long-winded descriptions of various wine vessels and musical instruments with which they have no apparent thematic or logical connection. I argue, however, that the structural setup of the daur is governed by two basic considerations: the generic conventions of the sāqīnāmah, and the symbolic framework of the poem. The description of the heart (here titled Kayfīyat-i dil) is a common element in Safavid-Mughal sāqīnāmahs; it is usually found together with an account of love in the context of the description of the setting, characters, and parapher- nalia of a good drinking party, such the tavern, the garden, the sāqī, musicians, drinkers, wine vessels, and, of course, wine. In placing the unit on the characteristics of the heart in between the description of wine vessels and musical

JOURNAL OF SOUTH ASIAN INTELLECTUALDownloaded HISTORY from 2 Brill.com09/28/2021(2019) 73–115 04:01:41AM via free access “No Journey is Possible Outside of the Heart” 111 instruments, Bedil is drawing on this established pattern. At the same time, he departs from it in several respects, most importantly in that he portrays the heart not as the organ of love, as in most sāqīnāmahs, but as we have seen, a spiritual substance with infinitely larger ontological and epistemological significance. The idea of the inclusion of illustrative anecdotes—especially such an unusually long tale with such an unusual theme—may have come from the tradition of the mystical mas̱navī; in the sāqīnāmah, however, it appears to be Bedil’s innovation. While the description of the wine vessels and the musical instruments in the sixth daur, on the basis of its thematic unity and length, could in itself constitute an independent sāqīnāmah, with the insertion of an elaborate third unit on the characteristics of the heart in between Bedil gives an entirely new significance to these conventional elements. On the symbolic level, the connection is achieved through the metaphorical identification of the heart with the wine cup, and to a lesser extent, with the musical instrument; both of these metaphors remain in the background throughout the poem.98 Within the larger context of the narrative of the cosmogonic unfolding of the universe from the One and the (voluntary) return of the soul to its origin, in the first half of the Muḥīṭ-i aʿẓam the focus is on the many ways in which the One becomes manifest in the world of multiplicity, while the second half is mainly concerned with the epistemological problem of the realization the Unity behind the illusory forms of multiplicity. Since the heart, as the locus of both the divine self-manifestation and the knowledge of God, is in the center of both processes, Bedil’s description of the heart, instead of being a mere descriptive unit spiced up with the Indian tale of King Lavaṇa and loosely connected other descriptive units, as it is the case in most sāqīnāmahs, occupies the central place in the conceptual framework of the Muḥīṭ-i aʿẓam. In the context of a poem which to a great extent is a celebration of the manifold manifestations of the one divine Being in the multiplicity of the world, the story of King Lavaṇa serves not so much to demonstrate that this world is an illusion devoid of reality but rather to underscore, in keeping with the emphasis in the sāqīnāmah on transcending the limited self, the necessity of polishing the mirror of the heart from all appearances so that it can reflect the single Reality.

98 In addition, the description of the wine vessels is linked to the description of the heart through two anecdotes in which Bedil deploys the symbol of the mirror to convey the idea of the illusory duality of the seer and the seen. For a detailed discussion see Kovacs, “The Tavern of the Manifestation of Realities,” 159–63.

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