Where Is The Light?
In his bouquet of
songs called Gitanjali which won him Nobel Prize in 1913, Rabindranath Tagore
((1861-1941) asks: Light, oh where is the light? And then answers: “Kindle it with the burning
fire of desire! There is the lamp but never a flicker of a flame, -------is
such thy fate, my heat!
Towards
the end of this song, he says: The night is black as a black stone. Let not the hours pass by in the dark. Kindle the lamp of love with thy life.
In
poetry as well as in religion , light is stated to be a symbol of knowledge,
reason, understanding, deep comprehension, discovery of inner reality , mental
illumination, access to the avenues of
goodness, beauty and truth and in Buddhist doctrine, the source of the ultimate
reality, which leads to transcendence and
ultimately to Nirvana. Light of this
type is equated with that of the SUN which acts as the avenger of evil forces
and darkness.
In day to day life, light
also symbolizes positive attitude and optimism.
In the Bible, light
is defined as goodness and righteousness, which are two essential qualities of
a true son of God.
Our concern here is
with the holy light, not the one which is produced by bulbs, lamps, candles and
the burning of wood and charcoal. In his poem “Auguries of Innocence”, English
poet William Blake (1757-1827) says:
He who doubts from
what he sees/Will ne’er believe, do what you please. If the Sun and Moon should
doubt,/They’d immediately go out…..
God appears, and God
is Light, /To those poor souls who dwell in night; /But does a Human Form
display/To those who dwell in realms of Day.
Another
English poet who had a mystical mindset says: “Heaven lies about us in our
infancy! Shades of the prison-house, i.e. this world, begin to close upon the
growing boy, but he beholds the light, and which it flows, he sees it in his
joy; the youth, who daily farther from the east must travel, still is Nature’s
Priest, and by the vision splendid is on his way attended; at length the Man
perceives it die away, and fade into the light of common day.
The
light of the common day mentioned by Wordsworth is the material light of
desires and appetites which gratify the body but causes stress to the soul
because man gets extremely involved in the darkness of the world and gets
removed from the light of God whom he has to confront after losing his
existence here and now.
The light of the body
is not continuous; it is interrupted by periods of darkness. Contrarily, the
light of the soul is everlasting and once its lamp is lit b y any individual with
an irreversible resolve, it does not fade but continues to increase and
accumulate. Such an individual becomes a Buddha, an enlightened one. Redeemed
from all worries and anxieties, doubts and apprehensions.
An American
spiritualist, William Ellery Channing (1894-80), rightly says: Science and art
may invent splendid modes of illuminating the apartments of the opulent; but
these are all poor and worthless compared with the light which the sun pours
freely, impartially, over hill and valley, which kindles daily the easer and
western sky; and so the common lights of reason and conscience and love are of
more worth and dignity than the rare endowments which celebrity to a few.
The ‘sun’ mentioned
in this quotation is no different from the SUN mentioned as one of the symbols of
light in Para 3 above.
----G. R. KANWAL
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