ॐ नमः शिवाय ॐ

JK/NKK 119
Who sleeps, and who is awake?
The water seeps from what lake?
What should be offered to Shiva in worship?
What supreme state may we reach?

JK/NKK 120
The mind sleeps and the higher Self is awake.
Water always seeps from Five Senses Lake.
We offer the water of Self-meditation.

Shiva-consciousness is the state to be reached.

I had already included these two vakhs in blog entries of 6 October 2016. Unfortunately, they were in separate entries, and in reverse order.

Lalla is here teaching us by asking riddles and then giving us the answers. My translations are quite accurate, so I'll let Lalla's words speak for themselves, even in translation. It is Lalla who is the teacher, not me.

A few words of explanation about this project are in order. First of all, the JK/NKK numbers refer to the numbering of Jayalal Kaul, who applied an interesting set of criteria to several hundred supposed "lalvakhs," in an effort to determine which were likely to have actually been written by her. In this way, he came up with a collection of 138 vakhs that he thought were probably genuine.

Jayalal Kaul's collection, with its numbering, was in turn adopted by Nil Kanth Kotru, in his 1989 book LAL DED, Her Life and Sayings. It was this book that convinced me that the current project was actually feasible. One of Kotru's innovations was to present Lalla's original texts in a modified system of Devanagari, which allowed him to represent all of Kashmiri's many vowels. Neither standard Devanagari nor the standard Perso-Arabic script can do this (nor can the Sharada script, in spite of some claims).

At any rate, I transliterated NKK's modified Devanagari (in which the diacritical marks were written in by hand) into a special romanization, which also represented all the vowels, but could be typed on a computer keyboard. When I publish my complete collection of translations of Lalla's vakhs, that romanized text will be included with each poem. The collection that I publish will likely include about 150 vakhs, since there are some from other sources that I accept as genuine. Typographical errors in NKK's Kashmiri text will also be corrected, so far as I am able to do that.

Lalla wrote in an old form of Kashmiri, which for speakers of modern English would be analogous to Chaucer's Middle English. She included a lot of Sanskrit words, which actually helps. Lalla's poems are the oldest surviving Kashmiri literature. So far as I know, there are no books to teach one how to understand Lalla's old form of Kashmiri. Lalla herself has been my teacher, through her poems. I always work from a Kashmiri text, also consulting other translators whose translations I have found to be literal enough to be of use. My finished translation is thus a kind of consensus as to the meaning of Lalla's Kashmiri, expressed in suitable English by a native speaker.

While I owe huge debts of gratitude to many people in the Kashmiri Pundit community, my most important help and teacher has been Lalla herself, and it is she that now drives the work forward.

ॐ नमः शिवाय ॐ