Shiva, Rabindranath Tagore, and Satyajit Ray

-by Keith Adams (Composer)

Happy belated Maha Shivaratri!
Thursday evening, at the Kali Temple in Burtonsville, MD,
I celebrated the annual Hindu festival, Maha Shivaratri (The Great Night of Shiva),
with my friends by watching devotees pour milk over a linga,
honor the Lord Shiva through offerings, songs, and prayers,  
and receive their tripundras: three lines of ash across each forehead.

As the ash (vibhuti) is a remnant of a physical deconstruction,
[and the product of a consecrated fire (homa) 
symbolic of the sun burning in eternal heat,
illuminating the universe in penance for God]
the tripundra is a physical sign of one's spiritual bonds with Shiva--
a reminder of the transitory nature of the material and the eternal purity of divinity.
These three lines represent the states, concepts, or actions called anava, karma, and maya
that one finds in spiritual knowledge, purity, and penance.

A sanyasi's goal is to reach these bonds through spiritual liberation
by dedicating his entire life
to detachment from the physical and
to unify himself with the eternal divine: 

"The stars, like sparks of fire, flown from the anvil of time, are extinct;
and that joy is mine which comes to the God Shiva, when, after aeons of dream,
he wakes up to find himself alone in the heart of the infinite annihilation.
I am free, I am the great solitary One." (p.3)

Heavy.

Check out this informative documentary I found on the life of the playwright, Rabindranath Tagore.
It was made by one of my favorite, and certainly one of the best Indian film directors ever: Satyajit Ray.

http://vimeo.com/3838865

Also, I've gathered, especially from here, that Sanyasi is an obscure reworking of one of Tagore's more widely known Bengali works, Prakritri Pratisodh (Nature's Revenge), which he had written when he was only 22 years old. In 1917, while living in England at the polished age of 56, Tagore completely reconstructed Nature's Revenge into English as Sanyasi. So, as we read Sanyasi, we are experiencing Tagore's intended language and his experienced revisions of a play that he valued so much in his memoirs: "This Nature’s Revenge may be looked upon as an introduction to the whole of my future literary work; or, rather this has been the subject on which all my writings have dwelt—­the joy of attaining the Infinite within the finite."