AdvaitaVedanta

tatitvantam saktya timiraparipanthi sphuranaya
sphurannana ratnabharana prinaddhendra dhanusam
tava syamam megham kam apin manipuraika saranam
niseve varsantam haramihira taptam tribhuvanam

As found in certain contemplatives who take full refuge in your Manipura,
I adore that dark cloud of yours as traversed by forceful lightning,
Banishing darkness and shining, bursting into sparks with the varied gem-decked maturity of Indra's bow;
While over the three worlds agonized by the heat of Siva-sun, it sheds its showering waters.

In Verse 40 we find a description of a cloudburst in a thunderstorm, familiar to anybody in any part of the world. The name Manipura adds to the real event pictured with a slight embellishment, to the minimum required as a literary flourish. Mani means “precious gem”, and pura means “fullness”. Thus Manipura suggests a plenitude of gems.

The sky and the stars have been compared to a box of gems by other philosophers, including Kant. The jewel box is the counterpart of the sky, especially when beautiful shining gems are displayed against a dark background which could stand for the box, sometimes described as made of ebony, as in Verse 94. A rainbow that could dominate a dark cloud is one of the most beautiful of natural sights which could make the heart of the beholder, young or old, leap up in joy. If we put a circle around such a picture and insert streaks of lightning, accompanied by thunder, we have all the parts that make up a Chakra or Adhara, even in the world of natural phenomena. Nothing need be left to the imagination. Lightning traverses a cloud at right angles as a rule, and if we treat ramifications in it as incidental, we get as between the lightning and thunder a vertical link or parameter, of which the dark cloud itself could be considered the body, while thunder and lightning together constitute its soul.

Thunder descends while lightning ascends to meet it or vice versa. The principle of action and retroaction is somewhere implied in this situation. Rain is a double blessing that descends onto terra firma, and all living beings welcome it with gratitude. It blesses him that gives and him that takes, as Shakespeare puts it more dialectically. Let us now examine the implications of the expressions in this verse.

1. “Certain contemplatives” (kam api)
This reference is to suggest that not all contemplatives will arrive at the full understanding of this vision of Absolute Beauty. Most contemplatives are likely to make a personal fetish of their own approach to the high value of the Absolute, thus having a tendency to remove such a value by abstraction and generalisation from everyday reality. Sankara, being true to the spirit of the Brahma Sutras on which he has profusely commented, is conscious of this tendency to fetishism. He therefore underlines that an actual cloudburst or thunderstorm could contain elements of wonder and overwhelming beauty adequate to give significant content to the notion of the highest of absolutes.

In full-fledged Vedanta nothing real is to be explained away in favour of mathematical or schematic abstractions. There is nothing to be added or subtracted from the Real, as it is in itself, when it is properly understood in the light of Sankara's Advaita Vedanta.

2. “Traversed by forceful lightning” (tatitvantam saktya)
Lightning traversing a dark cloud suggests at once that it cuts through the cloud at right angles. Thus, as we have already said, the vertical parameter and its positive and negative aspects have been inserted into the Chakra as an important linking relational feature.

3. “Varied gem-decked maturity” (nana ratnabharana parinatam)
A rainbow seen in the sky is sometimes faint and sometimes clear. Sometimes above a rainbow a second, fainter rainbow can be distinguished. The fainter colours of the second rainbow, which are inverted in spectral order by double refraction, would justify the aptness of the term “maturity” as employed here. A rainbow could suggest fireworks, especially when we think of the chemical elements, which represent colours of the spectrum according to the periodic law. Such stars as white dwarfs and red giants could be thought of as having their elemental peculiarities, as could different coloured gems.

The implications of the term “maturity” (parinata) have been explained previously under Verse 38. The rainbow has been named in the various vernaculars of India by popular agreement as the bow either to the god of love, Kama, or the king of the gods, Indra. When attributed to Indra it has a more absolutist status, because Indra is the chief of all the gods.

4. “ The three worlds” (tribhuvanam)
Physiographically, we cannot think of rain moistening three worlds, but contemplative cosmology permits of three levels of value called “bhur, bhuvah, svah” (earth, mind-region and heaven). Bhuvar loka represents the intermediate world of air between bhur loka and svar loka, which represent terrestrial and celestial regions, respectively. Modern cosmology admits of millions of miles of empty space between our own planetary system and that of the truly celestial bodies in the Milky Way or in other galaxies. The principle of heat and the principle of cold prevail not only physiographically, but also in the large extended cosmology known to modern physics, which talks of black and white holes, matter and anti-matter etc.

5. “Shiva-sun” (hara mihira)
The sun is the source of energy in our solar system. As a logical consequence it must necessarily have a negative counterpart at an opposite limiting pole, by virtue of which the energy gained is balanced by an equal loss, in order to maintain the equilibrium of the cosmos. “Shiva-sun” marks the Omega Point limit of the total situation as a source of positive energy. Modern theoretical terms like entropy and negentropy justify such notions.

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