qMonk literal translation — draft, pending review
— Yama, who meets every living thing at the end; Kubera, who keeps the treasure of the world; the guardians who stand at each of its edges: where would even they begin?
So where would a poet begin, or a scholar who has read everything there is?
Jahā̃ te and kahā̃ te are the same construction twice — "from where," an ablative. The question is not how much could they say, and not how well. It is where a person would put the first word. Anyone who has had to speak about something too large has stood in exactly that place.
Yama is the first mortal to die, and so the one who knows the road and keeps it. Kubera, king of the yakṣas, holds the wealth of the world. A dikpāla is a direction-keeper, one of the eight who hold the quarters and the points between them — and Yama and Kubera are two of those eight, south and north. So the chaupai names two of the guardians, then names all of them, which loses nothing and gains a kind of thoroughness: the ones you would have thought of, and then the rest.
Kavi is the poet; kovida, from vid, to know, is the one who has learnt. Craft and scholarship, the two things you would send at a difficult subject, and both are set aside in half a line — by a poet, about poets, in a poem. Tulsīdās puts himself out of the running before he begins.
And then he goes on for twenty-five more chaupais. That is not a contradiction; it is what a stuti is. Praise that could be completed would be a description. The admission that it cannot be finished is the reason to keep going, and the deeds that follow — the ocean, the ring, the sun — arrive already framed as a fraction of what there was to say.
If you had one sentence to describe your best friend to a stranger, where would you start?
qMonk literal translation — draft, pending review·Devanagari checked against two printings·Draft — awaiting reviewer·How these texts were made