Thought, Deed and Word

qMonk literal translation — draft, pending review

Saṃkaṭa comes apart into sam, together, and a root meaning to press: a narrow place, a pass with walls on both sides, and then trouble. English keeps the same picture in straits and in a tight spot. What the word names is not grief and not loss. It is constriction — no room to move. And chuḍāvai is the causative of chūṭnā, to be let go: not erased, not paid off, but got loose. Something held fast comes free.

Then the condition, and it is an odd one to meet in a promise. Mana krama bacana — thought, deed and word — is an old triad, and it is a completeness formula: it names the three places a person can be divided against themselves, and asks for all three at once. That is what keeps the couplet from being a transaction. A payment can be made with the mouth alone, and a mouth is one of the three things named here, which leaves two unaccounted for.

Dhyāna is sustained attention — the word that travelled east and became jhāna in Pali, chan in Chinese and zen in Japanese. Lāvai, from lānā, is to bring or to apply: attention is carried over and laid on something, the way a lamp is brought to a thing you want to see rather than switched on from across the room.

So the chaupai states what Hanumān does and names a condition, and the condition is the striking half. It is not a quantity. There is no count of repetitions, no day of the week, no hour. It asks for a whole person's attention, which is harder to give than anything that could be counted, and much harder to fake. Both halves sit on the page together — what he does, and the whole of what is asked.

The Awadhi ablative in the first line is printed tai in some texts and teṃ in others — one word for "from", two spellings; the reading followed here has tai, while the same little word in the chaupai about his splendour is printed teṃ.