JETSUN MILAREPA AND WOLE SOYINKA:CONCEPTIONS OF THE GURU

In thoughts of you,Father Marpa,my
suffering is relieved;
I,the mendicant,now sing you a fervent song.

Above Red Rock Jewel Valley,in the East,
Floats a cluster of white clouds;
Beneath them,like a rearing elephant,a
huge mountain towers;
Beside it,like a lion leaping,looms another peak.
..................................................
You may now be teaching the Six Yogas
of Naropa;
If I could be there,I would be joyful and happy.
Though short my diligence,I have need for
learning;
Though poor my perseverance,I wish to practice.
The more I contemplate the more I think of you;
The more I meditate,the more I think of my Guru.
...................................................
I am now tortured by my need to see you.
This fervent longing agonises me,
This great torment suffocates me.
Pray,my gracious Guru,relieve me from this torment.

Jetsun Milarepa,Tibetan Buddhist poet in The Hundred
Thousand Songs of Milarepa,trans.by Garma
Chang.Boston:Shambhala,1999.2-3.

The guru as understood by Milarepa,is both a flesh and blood human being and the symbol of
Milarepa's own potential for wisdom,since he sees the guru as his inspiration.In understanding the guru as a concrete being and as as a symbol,Milarepa's thinking is comparable to that evident in the poetry of the Christian mystical poet St.John of the Cross,some of whose greatest poetry consists of passionate addresses to and accounts of his relationship with a lover whose identity as God is only made clear in John's commentaries to the poetry.

The conception of a guru,therefore,may be adapted by others as one or more of the following:a humanbeing,an ideal,an aspiration or a source of inspiration.

Wole Soyinka adapts to his own use the technique in the poetry of anchorites like Milarepa,of invokinginspiration through visualising symbols as entities and entities as symbols,a central entity/symbolcluster being a figure or figures to whose lineage the individual belongs.This imaginative technique iscentral to the poetry collection Shuttle in the Crypt and he autobiography The Man Died,both of whichemerged from his experience in prison during the Nigerian Civil War,much of the time being spent in
solitary confinement.

This strategy of visualisation and invocation emerges from the first poem in Shuttle in the Crypt,"ORoots",where the incantatory rhythm of the poem climaxes in a visual projection of "they" who awaitthe "seeker",continues in "I Anoint my Flesh"where he calls forth mysterious but empowering figures tobanish darkness,is visible in another poem in the image of the poet's alter ego, the blind hermit whose vision yet penetrates the disguise of the destroyers, and is evident in a less direct form, marked by anironic combination of gravity and comedy in The Man Died,where the hermit tradition is embodied in hisfast,which further concentrates the withdrawal from conventional existence already initiated by solitary confinement.This fast is related to a contemplative descent into the depths of his being,in which healludes to Milarepa's similar voluntary self deprivation,where the Tibetan poet declares "I need nothing.I seek nothing.I desire nothing",lines from Tibet's Great Yogi Milarepa by W.Y.Evans Wetz.

This identification with a religious tradition emerges in terms of both convergences and divergences sincethe Nigerian activist is adapting notions of imprisonment and freedom which are different from hisown situation in their concrete particulars but which are related to his in terms of both the character of his aspiration and the total metaphysical context of the experience,a context that could be understood in terms of the Buddha's characterisation of existence as marked by "dukkha",a term often translated as"suffering", a suffering imagined by the Buddha as aflame that both tantalises and torments,as illustrated in his "Fire Sermon".

Milarepa understands himself as encaged in the prison of ignorance,understood in a metaphysical context,a prison imposed on him by the conditions of human existence,from which he tries to gain his freedom through physical self denial and contemplative disciplines,while Soyinka was in a physical prison imposed on him by those who opposed him,from which he tries to gain his mental freedom through thedisciplines of physical deprivation and contemplation.

Interestingly St.John of the Cross wrote some of his greatest,most passionate poetry in prison,where he was regularly flogged by his jailers,members of his own religious Order who were opposed to the reforms developed by himself and his mentor St.Teresa of Avila, another great writer in the contemplative tradition.The poetry is also remarkable for the fact that the only reference to pain and suffering in them is the pain of desire for his beloved,the divine lover,as in "Noche Oscura",often translated as "Dark Night of the Soul",which begins "On a dark and secretnight/Starving for love/And deep in flame..."

On imprisonment and experiences of the numinous(one of my favourite words-for a definition my best sources have been Webster's Third New International Dictionary and Otto's Das Heilige,The Idea of the Holy) one could see Solitude by Anthony Storr,"Mystical Experiences of the Labor Camps" by Mihajlo Mihajlov in Kontinent 2:The Alternative Voice of Russia and Eastern Europe,Hasidic Tales of the Holocaust by Yaffa Eliach (a wonderful book) and the novel War in Heaven where David Zindell describes Danlo's emergence to mystical awareness through the pain of torture.