MEDITATIONAL POETRY FROM INDIA

The flowering of Indian poetry is first visible in the scriptural verses of the Rig Veda (third millennium BC). If we go back in time, we will notice that this ancient poetry originated in the Proto-Indo-European era, which was already beginning to bear the fruits of meditation among the highlands of Central Asia and the mountains of the Hindu Kush. The poetic descriptions of the Rig were born in sublime landscapes, clear water, glacial lakes, mountain canyons, torrents and the fertile beauty of foliage. The worship of the spirits of nature and the feelings that move it could only reach us from a distant place inaccessible to the footsteps of man, to the arrogance of humanity. These verses are like elegies or hymns to the gods of a generous universe and a full nature. The poet worships with elemental offerings of oil, fire, or seeds and reflects on the horizon beyond the sky, on the worlds that separate life from death; time from eternity; being from nothingness.

These earliest verses of Indian sacred poetry in the Rig Veda were written in Sanskrit much later by Vyasa, probably in the early first millennium before Christianity came into the world, and were written in the geographic north or northwest of India. The earliest verses share common references with the scriptural verses of the Avestan language, an Indo-Iranian language spoken in the contiguous regions of northwest India, in countries such as Iran, Tajikistan, and Afghanistan. Orientalist scholars of the 19th century recognized the existence of a common set of verses in the region south of the Pamir range, and in the Hindukush, at least 4 or 5 millennia in the past. Sanskrit was never spoken as a language: it is not known in spoken form. It was only a literary language and has been so for the last three thousand years, as a means of knowledge, prayer and commentary. The verses were transmitted orally for a long time before the time when they were systematically written down around 3000 BC.

The poets of the Vedas, and specifically of the Rig Veda, such as Vaishwamitra or Meghatithi Kanva, composed hymns of worship to the gods and spirits who were believed to preside over the sublime expanses of nature. The Rig, meaning “truth,” “reason,” “dharma,” etc., constitutes the earliest written poetry in the world; it essentializes life to its smallest dimension, but also creates a sense of infinite power and abundance. We can call it poetry of subsistence images. However, not only the Rig, but all other poetry inspired by those early known verses appearing later during the first millennium BC, for example, those of scriptures like the Isha Upanishad, and thus in a tradition of worshipful and non-mythological narrative, consists of a tribute to the memory of ancestors and divinities in successive strata of the universe.

If the earliest poetry is founded on a spirit of worship, then this idea of ​​a happiness in worship is visible in the poetry of the first millennium BC. The reason why we decided to call this collection of poems “meditational” is because in them one can see the psychic roots of the original Indian culture. It is more significant to begin with this more secular, merely psychological spirit of worship in early Indian poetry. The search for the quiet restoration of the spirit has forged enduring topics for all civilizations of the world. Perhaps the only privilege that this volume of poetry claims is its selection of texts that represent tradition as well as the future, through paths that connect them to our planetary culture. Indian poetry offers a liberated vision of life, a belief in karma, ethical and human values, and a transcendental freedom of the spirit. It is difficult to isolate in a single defining motif the verses of people whose existence is manifested in a history of more than 4,000 years of civilization, but there is the emergence of an impulse from their soil and the birth of consciousness, of feelings, anchored to the taste for the divine.