Buddhism in India

The Bhakti Movements 209

and I died that day (2)

Looking both ways,

Tuka is as he is (#1337).^9

Here the emphasis on own experience and on passions and their

control appears Buddhistic. How much Tukaram actually knew

about Buddhism is another question. It would seem little: in one

abhanghe describes the ‘Buddha avatar’ as compassionate, ‘with

mute, countenance fixed attention’ but then refers to his ‘four

arms’ and simply accepts that this is only an avatar of Vishnu.

There is however one significant link with Buddhism. Tukaram

is supposed to have suggested to his famous woman follower,

Bahenabai,^10 that she translate Asvaghosha’s Vajrasucci, a

Buddhist anti-caste text; these constitute numbers 277–294 of her

collected songs (Javadekar 1979: 324–329). In her collection,

however, the Vajrasucciis identified as an ‘Upanishad’ and it

remains an open question whether Bahenabai herself knew that

this came from a radically different tradition. The verses appeal

to reason and provide a simple refutation of the beliefs that

Brahmans represent an essentially different or special kinds of

being:

than an atom, Tuka is as vast as the sky’ (#993) in poems which
seem to proclaim the Vedantic identity of the self and universe,
atmanand Brahman. Most of his poetry refers to a god-experience.
Yet, Tukaram’s twists and paradoxes often seem to indicate that he
(or the ‘company of saints’) in fact commands the god. There are
puzzles about what was obviously a unique spiritual search.
Tukaram, for instance, was trying meditation, which was not in
the Varkari tradition. At first he would go off to meditate in the
forest, but his favourite place became a former Buddhist cave in the
Bhandara hill near his village. But, though he describes many
mystical experiences throughout his poems, his real ‘enlightenment’
seems to have come many years later, towards the end of his life,
when he sat for 15 days and achieved an illumination which in
many ways is as mysterious as that of the Buddha.
Before this, it seems that he wrote a number of ‘god is dead’ poems:

God has died for me,

for others let him be.

Refrain: I’ll not tell his stories or take his name again,

we have killed each other and gone.

Abuse along with praise, that’s how I spent my days.

Tuka says, I’m standing calm

That’s how my life has been (#2349).

The character of his enlightenment experience (or experiences)
can be sensed in the following songs—though it is precisely here
that the problem of translation becomes acute:

My death has died

and made me deathless.

Refrain: The place is erased, the bottom is erased.

The body’s emotions have been stripped.

The flood has come and gone,

I have held firmly to life.

Tuka says, the accumulated store is finished;

truth has come through (#2348)

I gave birth to myself,

I came into my own womb.

Refrain: Enough now of vows,

My yearnings have passed away

It is good that I fell prey

208 Buddhism in India

(^9) See also Chitre (1991: 173, 175, 192) for radically different translations. These
poems in fact illustrate the problem of Brahmanic translations. Chitre’s overall
translations are excellent and beautiful in many ways and his discussion is percep-
tive–except for the following points. One is that he seems to accept uncritically the
official collection of Tukaram without any concern for a ‘critical edition’. Thus he
does not answer Salunkhe’s criticisms about interpolations and distortions, and has
opposed him rather acerbically in the debate that erupted in the Marathi literary
world over Salunkhe’s emphasis on the rebel Tukaram. An important result of this
is that he accepts uncritically such stories as that of Babaji being Tukaram’s guru,
and cannot imagine that Tukaram could have been murdered. Also, like many
upper-caste Indians, he ‘brahmanises’ and ‘Vedanticises’ the interpretations and
thus the translations of a number of poems, e.g. capitalising ‘Other’ to imply a
divine being (see the poems in Chitre 1991: 178, 183, 185). He mysteriously adds a
section describing a mystical experience following the poem about Babaji (1991:
170), suggesting that the mystical experience was part of the supposed meeting.
(^10) Bahenabai was also an important composer of gathasand abhangs, and just as it
was shocking to the Rajputs that Mirabai could take the Chamar Ravidas as her
guru, so Bahenbai’s affiliation was an affront to the orthodox of her time, and she
had to face many family traumas in following Tukaram.