The Lotus and the Offering of Hope
Rajanaka News August 17 2024
This is the text offering of this morning’s podcast recording.
Saturday, August 17, 2024
Aho’ Rajanaka,
I hope this finds you well, we’ve been enjoying the ardency of our brief and beautiful summer. The lotuses in the pond remind me it’s a good time also to trade in for a new definition of hope---or at least expand the feeling of hope. You know how hope can feel like it’s little more than hopelessness? Sometimes we make it a placeholder for desperation. Well, that won’t do. We’re going to have to make hope more than that (even if it’s that too)
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Maybe it is time to rise like the lotus from the pond. For that we must acknowledge too the waters and mud. In Sanskrit, there are so many words for lotus---the best known of course is kamala. But there are dozens of others and none more important than ambhuja, water-born, and panka-ja, mud-born.
Here we’re reminded that the lotus emerges beautiful because it is willing to reach into the depths, into murky, dangerous, unknown places where it hopes to share what nurtures and contends with all the facts. The lotus reaching for the sun or rising with the moonlight grows deeper roots. That is possible when we don’t give in to finalities or inevitabilities that are only hopeless. That growth reaches down and up at the same time.
We too often rely on hope when we tell ourselves we’ve run out of choices or feel too much destiny surrounding us. Is “doom” to give it too much power? Let us not shrink ourselves before we reach further, deeper. We’re going to need more lotus.
But to be candid, you can’t alter, extend, grow the experience of hope until you’ve got some new or better facts. This is going to take honesty and work, humility and courage---at least enough to move, to go deeper and further, to be able to aspire with confidence we have to keep it real and keep making more agreements that withstand the alternative.
A better kind of hope---less tragic, less demoralized---will also invite more laughter. We laugh more wholesomely, less ironically, feeling restored, strengthened, even released when the soul touches truth and the heart finds that beat, if only a moment. Truth will not stand forever on falsity, lies, fraud unless we abdicate our commitments to candor and to the facts. Truth is when hope gathers around meaning because it is unafraid of the facts and then we gather the courage to act.
One of the reasons we’ve laughed a lot less over the past ten years is because a hopeful laugh agrees to agree, we’re aiming to agree on the facts. So-called “alternative facts” will destroy this possibility not only with dishonesty but feel-good delusion. In a world such as that even the useful fictions of “agreement” can be rejected for obdurate fantasies. And let’s be honest, we’re all vulnerable to feel good for a dishonest moment when we know it’s time get serious about laughing with the truth as our companion.
We must decide not to prolong our delusion nor to indulge these alternative fact, we must not let this must not happen for it steals our humanity and that is what we must not forsake. If we’re told to believe rather than make the worthwhile and perilous experiment with trust, should we have no serious concern for the experiments of truth, that will prove no laughing matter.
As a culture, as a world we’ve not agreed on much of anything, our divisions appearing intractable, even willfully insoluble. But when truth is an experiment of growth---when the lotus reaches for light and into the mud----we can stabilize and secure and we can change and grow.
This is why the Indian and Tibetan traditions gave us the mantra Om mani padme hum, which literally means the Eternal, a jewel in the lotus. That lotus is our humanity, that jewel reflects light and receives shadow, and that is how it grows. Seated in that lotus is goddess Laksmi, whose name means the marker, the significant, the fact that endures to reveal. We need more of that. We’ll do that together.
But when we become uncooperative with change it’s because we’ve become impervious to the facts or, at the very least, to agreeing on something shared. The lotus needs water and mud, light and air---it does not grow without this sharing, this including, receiving, and claiming of place. Its purpose is its joy.
We might not be able to breakthrough unsound opinions and that’s nothing to laugh about either, but we’ll feel like laughing when our hearts and minds reach for value that mends by reaching down deeper and commends a future by looking up.
We can find our way back to something more restorative, even more corrective when the body acknowledges the effects of toxicity and chooses nourishment, when the soul reaches with its roots, ‘cause “truth” means something more honest and more healing than desiccated fear and aggrievement. We won’t need the fantastical or the supernatural, we’ll need our humanity because, like the lotus, that too is unfinished and flourishes as it learns how to share.
So, there’s a bit of joy in the air if you’ve noticed. The lotus has emerged from the mud. That will not dispel the noxious, but it will create a more salubrious, genuine inclination. When the air is more breathable, the fetid is rendered a false absolute, neither final nor inevitable.
We’re not stuck with that; we can feel and act on the more auspicious claim that what we want is a more soulful life.
We need to become like the lotus that reaches for light and warmth and fresh air too, undaunted by surrounding waters and graciously determined because there is necessity in reaching further into the mire too. This is auspicious hope, the kind worth having. We to reach and to extend, both to the joyful places and those that by definition will challenge us.
Next thing you know, you’ve might have a moment to dance with aspiration, dreams instead of waking nightmares, and if we can tip the scale towards inclination than we can forsake submission and defeat. It’s going to take intention and action. It’s going to require commitment, that’s what yoga is.
When there’s a chance, an opening, we’ve got to keep stepping steadily while we dance. Try not to skip (unless skipping is dancing too). If you trip, we’ll lend a hand. If you tumble, we’ll help you up. That is what the truth feels like when we embrace our incomplete and often perilous human experience that hankers for better facts and more joyful prospects. That is what happens when the lotus becomes the jewel of truth pursuing honest facts and a sweeter, more generous laughter. Wanna give this a go?
· We’re going to India if you’re going.
We need a few more people to make this work. This will be a special year because we will literally get to dance with the Dancer at Chidambaram. For more information look to Rajanaka Substack for the link or click here: https://rajanaka.substack.com/p/india-pilgrimage-december-2024-january
· We will resume Rajanaka Sessions in September.
There will be Thursday Practicum Evenings Live at 7pm, Saturday Sessions and Sunday Mahabharata at 5pm. I will have more details about the courses content next week. We’ve got a plan. We’ll be studying the Lotus Goddesses of the Tantra, the Buddhist Tantric Traditions, and the Great Epic. We’ll have Zoom, we’ll have all of the recordings, and we will make this accessibly affordable. I promise to show up prepared, with all my heart. Wanna come?
Okay, all for now. There’s still a little more summer to love. School is on the horizon and India, oh yes, there is India. Please take care and maybe take some of this to heart. Write to me if you like, I would like that. There’s more conversation ahead.
Saprema, with affection,
Douglas with Susan and Sadie
Bristol, New York
Query about Pronouncing Kamala
This all begins by noticing that in Sanskrit Kamala, when it is a feminine noun, is Kamalā (कमला, thus “Lotus”).
Here is my email reply to this query as to why the name is pronounced KAH-ma-la (say, “comma-la”) where the stress is on the first syllable and the final long syllable while having duration does not receive the stress.
So let's talk about Kamala's name.
Of course, as a feminine noun it must end in a long vowel. But the pronunciation is not wholly determined by vowel length. Vowel length is an essential feature. Sanskrit follows a pronunciation pattern comparable to older Indo-European languages. (We will leave that matter aside, that’d be historical digression.) Lemme get all technical 'cause that's the only way to explain it. When a word has three syllables (or more) the emphasis or stress falls on the ante-penultimate (the next to next to the last) syllable unless both final vowels are long. This is what we say saRASvatI (like this: saRasvatee) and NOT SarasVAtI. This is why we say in Sanskrit himAlaya, not as we say it in English HimaLAYa. (The English pronunciation isn’t “wrong,” it’s English not Sanskrit!)
Thus, we would say in Sanskrit KA-malA (where the final vowel being long does not receive the stress nor does the penultimate syllable (-ma). Rather, because the word has three syllables (ka-ma-la) the stress falls on the syllable two from the end (antepenultimate), so KA-ma-la and the final long vowel -a (A) receives length but not stress.
Okay, so why don't Americans in particular find her name difficult to pronounce? This has been covered before but let me make it clear again.
The answer is basically twofold. First, we don't generally follow the stress rule that I outlined above. (What the Nerd Brigade of Comparative Indo-Europeanists call the Rule of the Antepenultimate.) Why do we not follow this rule?
Grammars have rules but languages actually do not have to follow their own grammatical rules. You can't make language without grammar but you don't have to follow grammar to make language. This means that language follows usage and often disregards or breaks the rules of grammar. Usage is tied to speech patterns, dialect, all sorts of further complications born of practice. So chalk up the kaMAla crowd to usage. But what usage since the Sanskrit word “kamala” itself does not frequent English usage? Second, our usage with respect to similar sounding words places the stress on the second syllable. Think of koala or impala. So when we hear kamala our brains as American English speakers are likely to make this same connection even if it is unconscious. Thus we're likely to say kaMAla like impala or koala because that is sound familiarity. Humans use language the same way they use most things: aiming for the easy, resorting to the familiar, unlikely to think that they need to consider what their subconscious thinks they already know. So we say it the way we do primarily because we are creatures of habit.
So excited for the Lotus Goddesses!