The Esoteric Belief of the Bauls of BengalAuthor(s): Charles H. CapwellReviewed work(s):Source: The Journal of Asian Studies, Vol. 33, No. 2 (Feb., 1974), pp. 255-264Published by: Association for Asian StudiesStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2052187 .Accessed: 30/11/2011 08:44

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VOL. XXXIII, No. 2 JOURNAL OF ASIAN STUDIES FEBRUARY 1974

The Esoteric Belief of the Bauls of Bengal

CHARLES H. CAPWELL

A MONG their fellow Bengalis, the Bauls, who constitute a religious sect, are I esteemed because their iconoclasm, disregard of caste, and merger of Hindu and Islamic traditions gives them an enviable freedom to confront life as individuals outside the prevailing social and religious confines. They are loved, too, because they do not preach but rather woo with charming poems set to irresistible tunes that may compel them to dance. Even the hide-bound bigot may find himself thinking his rigid customs a bit pretentious when he hears a Baul sing the ironic questions of Lalon Fakir:

If you circumcise him, he becomes a Muslim, Then what is the rule for women?

I recognize the Brahman by his sacred thread, Then how do I recognize the Brahmani?

That this heterodox spirit is not unique to the Bauls was shown by Kshitimohan Sen's comparison of their ideas with Vedic, Upanishadic, Jain, and Buddhist texts, and with the poetry of the mediaeval saints of North India as well as with that of their Sikh and Vaisnava contemporaries.1 To Sen this shared trait of contrariness is the most valuable secret truth of the Bauls, for it enables them to see without illusion that ceaseless yearning for reunification with the Divine is the real purpose of life. Ossified religious and social customs are of no use in this quest for each man is alone and must find his own way.

To be a Baul, according to Sen, is a matter of inward truth and does not necessarily depend upon formal initiation or adherence to a particular group of beliefs.2 What is required instead is an adherence to the path of Love and a belief that Man is the ultimate measure. This is acceptable as a superficial description of the prerequisites for becoming a Baul, but it does not go beyond the mystical and humanistic aspects of the Baul religion. Other aspects of the religion having more to do with ritual than with belief, Sen saw as more or less regrettable dis- tortions of the faith.

Later writers like Shashibhusan Dasgupta discussed at length the long history of yogic sexual practise associated with cults like the Sahajiya and mention its influence, along with that of Vaisnavism and Islam, upon the Bauls.8 Edward Dimock, in his The Place of the Hidden Moon (Chicago, i966) also admits the tangential relation of sexual practises in the beliefs of a limited number of Bauls. But the opinions of Sen have retained a wide-spread influence on most descriptions of the Bauls and have gained authority by repetition, if not by substantiation.

Charles H. Capwell is a graduate student in Musicology at Harvard University.

1 See bdai2ldr baul (Calcutta, I954); English

trans. Lila Ray, The Bauls of Bengal, reprinted from Visvabharati Quarterly, n.d.

2 Ibid., (Eng.) p. 55. 3 See Obscure Religious Cults (Calcutta, I969).

255

256 CHARLES H. CAPWELL

Dasgupta, for example, ends his chapter on the Bauls by asserting that Tagore was greatest among them because many of his poems express most perfectly the Baul-like yearning of the individual personality for the Divine. The undeniable truth of this appraisal as a literary concept has been well documented by Dimock, who has shown the importance of Baul poetry in the forming of Tagore's own poetic diction and imagery.4 But as a statement descriptive of Tagore's religious orientation, it must be viewed only as an honorary title; no evidence has ever been given that the Bauls consider Tagore one of their number.

The fact that it takes more than inward truth acquired without formal initiation to become a Baul was first consistently stated and supported by Upendranath Bhattacarya whose life-long research among the Bauls led him to alter the view of them popularised by Sen and Tagore.5 According to Bhattacarya, sexual yoga is the sine qua non of the Bauls' religious path. A ritualized coitus reservatus performed on three successive days while the woman is menstruating is at the core of their belief. To become a Baul, it is necessary to receive instruction from a guru who, first seeing that the disciple is worthy of full initiation, teaches by word and by example how one acquires the control of breath and sphincters needed to perform the ritual properly.

Little attention has been payed to Bhattacarya's discoveries, and the Bauls are still generally thought to acquire their humanistic convictions by a vaguely defined grace, while their songs are thought chiefly to consist of lyrical, plaintive expressions of man's grief at separation from the Divine, with no further meaning than this universally understood one.

As part of a musicological project, I recorded about seventy-five songs from about twenty-five Bauls during a fifteen-month period succeeding a year of learning Bengali in Calcutta, and in casual, unrecorded conversation with five among these Bauls, I discussed some elements of their secret sadhana. Of the latter five, at least three had disciples, three lived in two separate small communities with other Bauls and their families, and all seemed generally respectable to other Bauls, suggesting their ideas were not alien or repugnant. This limited personal contact with the Bauls supported exclusively Bhattacarya's description of them.

The Bauls' preoccupation with the physiological and psychological methods for gaining spiritual ends does not necessarily invalidate those ends. The Bauls, on the contrary, believe their humanism is all the more firmly grounded for having perceptible support in their own bodies and that their desire to experience the bliss of non-phenomenal reality has the means of practical accomplishment in their physical ritual. To a large part of the society on which the Bauls form some of the fringe, the idea of using the sexual act as a spiritual means would be thought of as at least eccentric if not degenerate. For this reason, the Bauls do not publicize the sexual part of their practise but keep it hidden. The public aspect of the Bauls' belief, namely the democratic regard for all classes of men and the intensely emotional relationship with the Divine, are also eccentric enough by general societal standards for them to be thought of as the "secret truths" the Bauls are known to profess, but this term ought perhaps to be reserved for the esoteric part of the Bauls' belief.

4"Rabindranath Tagore-The Greatest of the Bauls of Bengal," this journal, Nov. '59 (XIX, no.

I). 5 In baimldr bdzl o bdul gdn (Calcutta, I97I).

THE BAULS OF BENGAL 257

Interpretations of the Bauls' songs which do not include an attempt to under- stand the esoteric meaning (if present), as well as the exoteric, are incomplete. Dasgupta seems to have become more aware of this after Bhattacarya's book had been published, as may be deduced from the introduction he wrote for a collection of songs by Lalon Fakir,6 the most famous Baul. There he wrote that the editors had discussed only the exoteric meaning of Lalon's songs but that symbols like the "unknown bird" and the "Man of the Heart", made so popular by Tagore and Sen, had a basis in secret religious practices explained elsewhere by U. Bhat- tacarya.7

As the Baul songs still continue to receive interpretations glossing over their ritual and sexual implications, I would like, as a start at correcting this tendency, to consider mainly the esoteric meanings of the poems I translate below. The Bauls, of course, compose and sing types of songs other than their own peculiar type-the previously mentioned collection of Lalon's songs, for example, puts three hundred under the heading "Baul songs" and another seventy-three under the heading "In the Vaisnava Manner". The songs given below have been selected as being indicative, in one particular or another of the Baul type. This is not an arbitrary act meant to support an argument since the different types of songs may be sung by individual Bauls; they are not exclusively sung by one or another subsect of Bauls according to the type of the song.

Tagore has written that the first Baul song which struck his imagination and seemed to speak to him so directly was the now well-known "Where shall I find him, the Man of my Heart?" (kothay pabo tdre amdr maner manus ye re),8 to whose tune he had already in 1905 published the words "My Golden Bengal" (dmdr sondr bdamla), now the national song of Bangladesh.9 The lonely, melancholy search of the individual for the lover of his soul, sung to a haunting Baul melody, still can arouse in the hearer the feelings which Tagore undoubtedly experienced and which attracted him to the Baul idiom. This experience of bereftness, which has been attributed to the influence of the Sufi devotional concept of the individual as mad lover and the Divine Being as the unnattainable Beloved, is the elementary, spontaneous initiation that may lead into the Baul path of the novice.

When a Baul attempts to do something about the separation from his Beloved,

6 Ldlan-gitikd, ed. Motilal Das and P;yiiskanti Mahapatra (Calcutta, I958).

Four years later, in the revised edition of his Obscure Religion Cults (I962), Dasgupta, after hesistatingly crediting Bhattacarya's attempts to "establish that the distinctive feature of the religion of the Bauls is represented by the doctrines and practices of a secret cult involving sexo-yogic rela- tions," goes on to qualify the significance of those attempts: "But it seems that out of their doctrines and practices their search for the 'unknown bird' that mysteriously comes in and goes out of this cage of the human body emerged as the most strik- ing feature. This life-long search for the 'unknown bird' got itself mingled with the Vaisnavite and Sfifi-istic devotional approach to the divinity;" having discussed Vaisnava and Buddhist Sahajiyavad earlier in the book, Dasgupta decides that, "We shall not, therefore, in the present context, deal

with Baul songs referring to such secret practices; we, on the other hand, shall restrict our study to the Baul songs that celebrate the 'Man of the Heart' and speak of the mystic love these Bauls cherish for this 'Man of the Heart'." (all quotes pp. I6I-2). Dasgupta himself says in the Ldlan-gitikd preface that the secret sadhana discussed by Bhat- tacarya underlies the concepts of the 'unknown bird' and the 'Man of the Heart', yet in not revis- ing his chapter on the Bauls according to this view, he gives the impression that it is not significant in comparison to the Siifi/Vaisnava devotional basis for the Bauls' songs.

8 See introduction to Ray's translation of K. Sen's monograph. This is a translation of an excerpt from Tagore's introduction to hairamani: loksahgit san- graha, ed. Mahammad Mansur Uddin (Calcutta, 1942).

9 In bdul (Calcutta, 1905), p. 9.

258 CHARLES H. CAPWELL

however, he leaves behind the influence of orthodox Sufiism which views the gap as unbridgeable; to become a Baul siddha he must be reunited with the beloved object.

0 forgetful mind, in this man, Man's play is taking place. If you can, why don't you take hold of Him at this moment? Man is in the house, Man is outside, Man is in the entire creation. I sought for but haven't gotten the Man of the Heart. What burning I suffered! He hears everyone's voice-if another calls, then He becomes deaf.

Beneath heaven, earth, and hell there is mortal, natural man. Man has mixed with man-Khir dissolved in water.

Kubir says, "Having worshipped at the last hour, May I get the dust of His feet."

The Man of the heart is within this man: look at Him, mind, with the eyes of knowledge and know Him.

The enlightened will know; how will the unenlightened know?

Water and khir stay mixed in one place; if one becomes the enlightened swan, one gets the khir, removing the water.

But just as the jackal doesn't eat the ripe mangoes, look! the mind keeps up its worthless eating.

The sea is filled with gems; if one becomes an enlightened diver, he takes the gems up.

But like the fisherman who has thrown a net into the water, the mind remains concerned only with catching fish.

With this syrup, brother, some make molasses; if one becomes an enlightened confectioner, he causes rockcandy to set.

Khapa Madan says, "If one becomes enlightened, he knows all about the pair-principle."10

The state of separation apparently need not be permanent-"If you can, why don't you take hold of Him at this moment?" The Man is present in man after all; but He is inseparably mixed with him like khir dissolved in water. In the second song, however, we are reminded of the traditional story about the capacity of the swan to drink only the milk poured into water and to leave the water behind. If we become enlightened like the swan, we can then separate the khir from water and derive nourishment from it; i.e., we will capture the Man of the Heart and be sustained by Him. All the images in this song imply that an effort must be made to isolate the Man who is inseparably mixed with man and that there is much to be gained by doing so. If we do not isolate Him, it is like beitng satisfied with getting only fish from the pond when precious gems are to be had, or being content

10 Songs #5I9, p. 9I5 and #5i8, pp. 9I4-I5 in Bhattacarya, op cit. Khir is a milk-based sweet.

THE BAULS OF BENGAL 259

with making only gooey molasses from syrup when, if we only knew how, we could make the more dainty and palatable rock-candy.

Among present-day Bauls, Vaisnavism has had the greatest influence on the imagery of their poetry and the language they use in discussing their ideas. The kernel of the Bauls' beliefs seems, chameleon-like, to be able to adapt itself to its religious surroundings so that it has acquired external resemblances to other beliefs like Sufiistic Islam and Gauriya Vaisnavism. A Baul can say now, for example, that all mankind is female and represents Radha in her relationship to the only male principle in the universe, Krishna. In this way he is like many similarly believing Vaisnavas. Where he departs from the broader stream of Vaisnavism in his private belief, and where he may perhaps have something in common with the Vaisnava Sahajiyas, is his belief that Krishna is in semen. Such a belief explain the need not to ejaculate during ritual coition. To a Baul who accepts this esoteric truth, ordinary men carelessly allow themselves to be separated from the Divine element residing within them and are misled into thinking it is to be found in external ritual and idols, in temples and mosques.

In the two products of the human generative organs, the Divine is manifested in its two forms as the pair-principle, the active and the passive. The active form appears during a woman's monthly periods to take part in the life of men, and it is for this reason the ritual coitus occurs then. It is only in this form that the Man of the Heart can be regained and made to reunite with its passive form within the bodies of men and women.

Like the confectioner and the fisherman of the previous songs, the Baul must learn to be competent at what he is about or he will suffer loss. By following the instructions of the guru, he seeks to recognize the "uhknown bird" or the "elusive Man" and to capture Him. The Divine in man resides in the highest yogic center of the body but regularly descends and abandons those who are ignorant of the esoteric truth. By yogic control of breath and sphincters, the Bauls seek to reunify and thus immobilize the pair-principle in their highest yogic centers, thereby obtain- ing reintegration in bliss with the non-phenomenal mode of existence.

O my mind, take the part of prakrti take on the character of prakrti, practice,

O then the body's desires will be sublimated.

And turn upside-down that which is in the six-petals.

If that goes to the two petals, the light will burst forth.

Then wrong will cease; desire will become devotion.

Take that which is in the muilddhar to the one-thousand petals.

You will go to the banks of the Viroja; with her there will be union.

That youthful, sportive, greatly wanton image, having given such sweet desire to a being, makes one gain Krishna's company.

260 CHARLES H. CAPWELL

Rupcand has said, "First self, take hold of that Self. In that Self you will get to see the likeness of the light of a crore of moons."11

As this song makes explicit, the Bauls' use of sex is not for the physical satisfaction of desire but for its sublimation. By turning upside-down and taking along the ulto path (reverse path) that which has descended to the lowest psycho/physical state (the muilddhar or six petals) and raising it to the highest (the two petals or thousand petals), enlightenment ensues and desire becomes devotion. The physical act in this song is itself transformed into a meditation since the singer asks his mind to take the part of the female partner (prakrti) in sadhana (religious practise). Once he has achieved self-recognition and reunification, the Baul no longer needs to depend on external aids, but can maintain his new state with a purely internalized sadhana. This is not to say the process of interiorization may be spontaneously achieved without the sexual sadhana. The interiorized awareness is based upon the previously ex- perienced ritual.

The Baul preoccupation with the body is derived not from simple hedonism but from a wish to change man's mode of perception from one bound by the phe- nomenal to one cognizant of the noumenal. The only means to effect this change is the body, which explains the Baul obsession. Even songs which seem devoid of any concern with the cultivation of bodily means to enlightenment may reveal it when explained by a Baul.

O my mind-boatman, my friend, let us countrymen return to our countryland.

I left home, and I came to a foreign land; I have no friends in this country.

I came to row my boat of desires; I'm worn out with rowing.

I've made an account of my receipts and expenditures and see nothing in the balance.

Docile Sarat says, "I didn't take care of the boat I rowed. It has gotten salt-rot. In this country there are no repairmen at all."'12

This song is easily interpreted along the lines of "Swing low, sweet chariot" as an old man's yearning for death. He is physically decrepit (the boat has salt-rot), fed up with the daily round (I'm worn out with rowing), and feels he has accom- plished nothing (nothing in the balance); therefore, he wants to return to the Beyond from whence he came (let us countrymen return to our countryland). To the Baul who commented on this song after hearing it sung by another, the essen- tial line was "I didn't take care of the boat I rowed," i.e., "I didn't cultivate my body." For it is through knowledge of the body and its proper sadhana that one obtains spiritual goals. To understand the song as a yearning for death in order to slough off the impedimenta of the material world and to unite with the Supreme

11 This song has been recorded for Nonesuch in album H72035 entitled "Indian Street Songs" by

Lakshman Das Baul. The translation given here is slightly revised.

12 Author's collection.

THE BAULS OF BENGAL 261

Being in the spiritual one would be to completely reverse its meaning for the Baul. Of course, it is just such a reversal of the commonsensical which has earned the Bauls the reputation of being ulto pathiks, followers of the reverse order of things.

It is only while one has a material body that spiritual progress is possible, but one has to cultivate it with the help of a guru and a human partner and not let it decay through ignorance. Such a belief is hardly new, having been the basis of the Sahajiya sects' aspirations as is intimated in the now frequently quoted couplet of Saraha: "I have visited in my wanderings shrines and other places of pilgrimage,/ But I have not seen another shrine blissful like my own body." This faith of the Buddhist Sahajiyas that the body constitutes the true place and paraphernalia of worship has been kept alive by the Bauls to the present day.

An extant song of this same Saraha in the oldest known form of Bengali gives further reason to believe there is more than superficial continuity between the Sahajiyas and the Bauls. It is a typical example from the collection of fifty caryd- padas stemming from the late period of tantric Buddhism and uses, like contemporary Baul songs, homely imagery to convey esoteric principles.

The body is a small boat, the mind is the punting-pole. Hold the helm by the instructions of the guru. Steadying thought, take hold of the boat; By no other means does one get across. The boatman tows his boat with a rope. Merging again and again with the Innate, one may not go any other way. On the way there are fearful, strong pirates. In the tornado of existence, the possessions are lost. Hugging the shore, it goes upstream against a strong current. Saraha says, "It enters the sky."'13

The boat metaphor is found in many of these carydpadas as well as in contem- porary Bengali songs of all sorts. The emphasis upon the guru's instructions as the rudder to a man's conduct is a familiar concept among the Bauls who are guided by the guru in the performance of sadhana, and the yogic implications of merging with the Innate is equally familiar as the Baul concept of capturing the Man of the Heart by a yogic reversal of the sex act. The parallels between the caryapadas and the Baul songs (as well as the divergences) become more evident with every caryi examined, but there is not space to continue such an examination here.

Although the sadhana of the Buddhist tantrics, as symbolized in their poems and explained in the tantras, bears some points of resemblance to that of the Bauls, it is not possible to my knowledge, to show that, like the Bauls', the Sahajiyas' sexual sadhana took place during menstruation. It is clear, however, that they performed, as do the Bauls, a ritual ingestion of menses, as well as of semen, faeces, and urine.'4 Of the two Bauls with whom I felt I could broach this subject, both

13 Translation after Sukumar Sen's in "Old Ben- gali Texts: Caryagiti-Vajragiti-Prahelika", in re- print of Vol. III of Indian Linguistics published jointly by Centre of Advanced Study in Linguistics and the Linguistic Society of India (Poona, I965), p. IIO, #36.

14 See for example, David L. Snellgrove, The Hevajra Tantra: A Critical Study, London Ori- ental Series, Vol. 6 Part I, Introduction and Trans-

lation (London, I959), p. 99 where the term catuhsama, a potion of four ingredients is ex- plained as a sandhyabhasa term for faeces; kasturika, musk, is urine; sihlaka, frankincense, is blood; karpura, camphor, is semen. And then on p. IOI:

"There we eat meat and drink wine in great quan- tity . . .we take the fourfold preparation and musk and frankincense and camphor...."

262 CHARLES H. CAPWELL

admitted that these elements were known as the "four moons" but said that only the guru could explain their use. Bhattacarya gives the information that they are ritually ingested."5

The importance of menses in the Baul ritual is, of course, another example of their contrary ways, since menstruation is generally viewed as causing unfitness for many everyday acts, not to mention ceremonial ones. To Bauls, the presence of menses consecrates a woman who is only then able to achieve and to help her partner achieve union with that being which permeates menses as khir dissolves in water.

In Vrindavan bloom three flowers of three colors: blue, yellow, white.

In which flower is Sri Krishna, in which flower Srimati Radha?

The flower blooms after twelve years, month after month that flower falls.

To whom shall I speak about that flower? Except for the enlightened, it is forbidden to say.

Others' is the desire for the fruit; the enlightened immerses himself in the flower.

In Madhuvan, Vraja's Balai Dada is inebriated with drinking honey.

My lord Gurucand says, "The flower blooms on that qualityless branch;

If you hear the story of that flower, Radhasyam, you will be puzzled."16

In Benigali, "phul," "flower," may also mean "menses." The flower in the above song, which blooms after twelve years and falls monthly, is certainly this latter type of "phul." It is of three colors because one color is associated with each of the three days during which the sexual sadhana is performed. Only the enlightened, that is, the Baul instructed by his guru, knows the real worth of the flower and how it is to be used-the ignorant desire the fruit, perhaps meaning children. A notable characteristic of Baul families is their smallness; mally have no children, others have them only as "accidents," the results of imperfectly performed sadhana, and still others limit the number of conceptions.'7

Although metaphor is used in the previous sonlg to disguise the meaning, it is nevertheless easily penetrated. Usually the metaphors referring to secret aspects of the Bauls' belief are mort abstract and farther removed from the esoteric meaning, like that in the following song.

O my mind-fisherman, why do you perish in vain throwing your net;

L5pp, 57-8. 16 Author's collection. 1-7 Compare the statement of Melville T. Ken-

nedy found on p. 215 of his T/2e Chaitanya love- ment: A Study of the Vaisnavism of Bengal (Cal- cutta, I925): "Procreation is looked upon as evil,

leading to rebirth. By means of a revolting drink, compounded of the excreta of the cow, they seek the so-called power of Krsna, i.e., sex-union without issue." This revolting drink is perhaps related to the "four moons" dliscussed above.

THE BAULS OF BENGAL 263

The Krishna love-fish is extremely difficult to catch- he doesn't fall suddenly into the net.

You came into the world with a net for nothing- you didn't see that.

Having torn your net in the river of scriptures, the fish has fled; and you remain sitting in confusion.

First of all, your net is torn; and in it only rubbish has accumulated.

The ill wind of bad deeds having struck, the times are out of joint.

Spreading, turning the net, shaking out snails- this has been your fate.

Though you have a desire to catch the fish, you didn't learn to toss the net.

Seeing the water, you toss the net all bunched up; it doesn't spread out.

You are giving the toss onto the shore; the fish has remained in bottomless water.

Ananta, sitting, thinks this: "You haven't learned to toss the net.

Such a fisherman is wanted who can recognize the fish upon seeing the water.

"Where are you; where is the moon? If you stretch out your hand, you will get it?"'18

Here the ineptness of the unenlightened man who causes his own ruin by not knowing the worth of a properly performed act of sex, is impersonated by the fisherman who has not learned to use the net. The Krishna love-fish will forever elude his grasp. This is the essential meaning of the song, but on another level, it may be pointed out that the net has been "torn in the river of scriptures," and the song may be viewed as a satire on those who needlessly fetter themselves with adherence to tradition in their quest for the ultimate. Though this is undeniably an aspect of the song, the importance lies in the line "You haven't learned to toss the net," that is "You didn't learn the proper sadhana froin the guru." As for the possibility of attaining the desired goal without this training, the poet succinctly expresses his opinion in the last couplet: "Where are you; where is the moon? If you stretch out your hand, will you get it?"

As an outsider and musicologist, what I was able to learn of the Bauls' beliefs has led me to follow Upendranath Bhattacarya onto the "ulto path" and to reverse the commonly accepted description of the Bauls as a conglomerate of sects charac- terized by a humanistic creed free from ritual observance in which a few individuals, nevertheless, perform sexual yoga, probably under the influence of another sect. I would suggest that consideration ought to be given to the hypothesis that the Bauls are a humanistic sect characterized by the performance of a ritual coitus reservatus during menstruation for the purpose of experiencing the bliss of non-

18 Author's collection.

264 CHARLES H. CAPWELL

phenomenal consciousness, in which they greatly resemble their probable ancestors in late tantric Buddhism; like the sects of the latter, they have undergone varying degrees of change due to the influence of Gauriya Vaisnavism and Sufiism which may have resulted in the abandonment of the sexual sadhana by some of their number.