qMonk literal translation — draft, pending review
With the dust off my teacher's feet — feet that are lotuses to me — I polish my own mind, the way you rub a mirror until you can see something in it.
Then I tell the spotless fame of Ram, best of the Raghu family: the telling that hands a person all four of the things a life can be for.
Knowing this body of mine has no wit in it, I call on the son of the wind.
Give me strength. Give me judgement. Give me learning. Take away what hurts me, and take away what is crooked in me.
Two dohās stand at the head of the forty chaupāīs, and they do two different jobs. The first cleans something. The second asks for something.
Guru-caraṇa-saroja-raja — the dust of the teacher's lotus feet. The humblest substance available anywhere is being used as polish, and what it polishes is mukuru, a mirror. Before mirrors were glass they were metal, and a metal mirror that has not been rubbed shows you nothing; the image is not created by the rubbing, it is uncovered by it. Tulsīdās opens his Rāmcaritmānas with the same gesture, bowing to the pollen-dust of his guru's feet before he begins.
Phala cāri, the four fruits, are the four puruṣārthas that classical Indian thought says a human life is for: dharma, what holds things up; artha, the means to live; kāma, desire and delight; mokṣa, release. The claim is not that Rāma hands these over, but that the telling of his fame does.
Then the second dohā, and the word a reader stops on: buddhi-hīna, without wit. This is a convention and it should be read as one. Bhakti poets place their own smallness immediately beside the size of what they are about to attempt — Sūrdās opens a famous pada asking who is as crooked and low as he is, and then sings for another twenty lines. It is a posture the genre takes at the door, not a psychiatric report, and softening the word would lose the shape of the gesture: the poet makes himself small on purpose, because he is about to spend forty verses on somebody very large.
Sumirauṃ is from smaraṇa, remembering — the least dramatic thing a devotee can be doing, and the one this poem chooses to open on. And what he asks for is precise: bala, budhi, bidyā — strength, judgement, learning. Keep those three words. The verses that follow hand all three to Hanumān, one at a time.
What is something you can only see properly once it has been wiped — a window, a screen, a pair of glasses? Who usually wipes it?
qMonk literal translation — draft, pending review·Devanagari checked against two printings·Draft — awaiting reviewer·How these texts were made