Wilderness Thoughts from the Traditional
Lore of India: Of Concern to Peace, Healing,
and Pleasure
M. A. S. Rajan
Abstract—Wilderness can be the origin of human values. Wilderness projects an image. In citing some ideas and excerpts of traditional Indian lore, two very different images are depicted—wild
nature as a setting for pleasures of the body, and wilderness as
a source of peace and spirituality. What are the benefits that a
wilderness area can provide to humankind? Some are indirect
benefits, which accrue even while leaving the land absolutely
untouched. Others accrue by direct, and let us say benign and
limited, utilization of the natural endowments of the land. Among
various direct uses is the use of wilderness as an aid for the
personal growth of, and therapy and education for, human beings.
For the present purpose, we have to take it that the
wilderness is already there; whatever may be its origin,
good or bad, natural or man-made. As a personal choice
without the backing of desk research, I would define wilderness as a given land area that is protected from, or is
naturally free from, the depredations of human beings, and
supports only that population of life forms, including human beings, which is able to live in self-sufficient synergy
and harmony with the land. Clearly there is imperative need
to be specific about what it is that we wish to extract from
such a wilderness, as a benefit to human beings going there
for personal growth or education, before we disturb or
destroy this harmony.
Omar Khayyam _________________
It is relevant to recite a celebrated Persian poem here.
Wilderness occurs in a stanza of the poetic work “Rubaiyat”
by Omar Khayyam. It went like this (in the translation by
Edward Fitzgerald):
Here with a loaf of bread beneath the bough,
A flask of wine, a book of verse - and thou
Beside me singing in the wilderness And wilderness is paradise enow.
Omar Khayyam was a Persian intellectual of the Sufi sect
of Islam. He is recognized throughout the East as a mystic.
He was not a hedonist, but his mysticism was warmly
In: Watson, Alan E.; Aplet, Greg H.; Hendee, John C., comps. 2000.
Personal, societal, and ecological values of wilderness: Sixth World Wilderness Congress proceedings on research, management, and allocation, volume II;
1998 October 24–29; Bangalore, India. Proc. RMRS-P-14. Ogden, UT: U.S.
Department of Agriculture, Forest Service, Rocky Mountain Research Station.
M.A.S. Rajan is President, Academy of Sanskrit Research (Melkote),
freelance writer, retired bureaucrat, 12th Cross Road, Rajamahal Vilas Extension, Bangalore 560080 India, e-mail: masrajan@alumni.ksg.harvard.edu
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human. To quote a comment of a celebrated Yogic philosopher on the “Rubaiyat” (Yogananda 1996), the poetry of
Persia often has two meanings—one inner and one outer.
The “Rubaiyat” is, on the face of it, a worldly, even profligate
love poem, one written in celebration of earthly pleasures,
but in the style of the Sufi mystics, it carries a deep spiritual
allegory.
The Yogic philosopher has viewed the hidden meaning of
the “Rubaiyat” through the prism of Vedanta. According to
him, wilderness in this quatrain implies the temporary
sense of loss that often precedes true fulfillment. Life then,
at first, may seem a “wilderness” devoid of any herbage of
hope. With the aid of bread, wine, the leafy shade of tree,
book of verse, and the singing of the beloved, the inner void
appears clothed with wildflowers of celestial joy. Bread here
connotes the life force or energy of the body. Wine is god
intoxication, and the bough or tree is the seat of the soul.
Book of verse is the inspiration emanating from the heart
once it has calmed its restlessness. In Sufi mystical teachings, to depict a soul that is filled with infinite love of God,
divinity is given a female form and described as the beloved
of the soul.
Wilderness for the mystic and for the spiritually inclined
is desolation, but a window through which inner happiness
can be attained. But the idea that it can be a base or the home
for a sensual paradise on earth, a palace for hedonism and
the pursuit of physical pleasure would be for them sheer
anathema.
The dictionary gives to the concept of wilderness a tinge
of desolation and distress. When we begin to use a territory
that is devoid of habitation and human presence as a substrate for some human benefit, what happens to it? That
depends on which one of two readings of Omar Khayyam we
choose. One is the wilderness evoked by a literal reading of
the “Rubaiyat.” The other is the allegorical view of wilderness seen through the prism of Vedanta. If our choice is the
former, the territory will cease to exist as a wilderness.
Shuka-Rambha Dialogue _________
An old Sanskrit work comes to mind (Manuscript [n.d.]).
This is a poem well known among students and connoisseurs but little known elsewhere. It is skillful poetry, full of
prosodic artifice, and interestingly it mentions several
forest plants and products. The imagined scene is set in the
middle of the forest. Rambha, the temptress from Heaven,
and Shuka, the revered sage, are engaged in a duel of words.
She has been sent down to earth by the powers in Heaven
expressly to subvert the sage’s penance, and she presents
her wares by holding forth on the attractions of woman. He
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counters by extolling the beauty, the power, and the munificence of the Divinity. A feature of the repeating refrain in the
poem is that both sage and siren use the identical lament!
“Oh, how futile it is for man to come to this forest if….”
The temptress describes the sights and sounds of the
sylvan surroundings, like the cooing of cuckoos and the
fishlike eyes flashing desire through moonlit creepers, as
invitations to amorous couplings—PR of the God of Love.
The sage describes groups of the devout chanting hymns
along the jungle paths, bathing in the holy streams of the
surroundings, and holding discourses on the scriptures as
the instrumentality to let the love of the Divinity enter one’s
heart. (Is one permitted to juxtapose these groups with
wilderness trekkers of today?)
Rambha then recites stanzas extolling the endowments of
a variety of amorous damsels, and, stanza after stanza,
Shuka-muni counters with a panegyric on the glories of God.
Says Rambha, a damsel in the forest, “…aroused with desire,
with a face like the full moon, lips like the bimba fruit, and
a delightful voice …sweet of speech, waist adorned with a
girdle of golden champak flowers, skilled in the art of
love…lovely, kind, with erect breast anointed with sandal,
desire-filled eyes…” (and so on in the same vein); who is not
“…tightly clasped, closely embraced, shoulder to
shoulder…kissed on her pretty belly button…,” (etc.) by the
man coming into the forest; such man’s life is verily a waste.
Shuka-muni is an enlightened soul who is able to witness
the Divinity in anything and everything that he sees. Responding to Rambha stanza for stanza, he says to observe
the images, visages, and glories of the Divinity; the man
who seeing the forest cannot visualize them and “in his
heart grasp his love for the Divinity even for an instant…
intensely pray to the Divinity at the moment of enlightenment…cherish the Divinity in his mind when in meditation
or penance…,” that man’s life, exhorts the sage, has passed
away wastefully.
Rambha persists in her line and the dialogue goes on
bitterly. How did it end? Legend, rather than the poem, has
it that the temptress failed, and the effort to thwart the
sage was foiled.
In a way, the poem depicts two extremes. The wilderness
can be a tantalizing invitation to sensual enjoyment. It can
also be the means of sublimating your feelings and moving
your thoughts towards the Divinity. It is all in the mind.
When we turn to the traditional texts of Sanskrit belonging to the Vedanta tradition, we perceive an approach to wild
lands that is not purely homocentric. Deep jungles, high
mountains, and the like are typically the spaces in which
sages and seers chose to set up their tiny habitations. The
sages who desired such spaces were typically savants on a
quest for inner peace and greater knowledge of the inner
self. There are several passages and texts in old Sanskrit
literature that describe the qualities and requirements to be
met by these hermitages. The specifications, essentially,
were tailored to support and enrich the spiritual effort. For
example, places conducive to Dhyana Yoga that is meditation, it is said, should be on plain ground free from stones,
sand, and fire, and above all should be pure and sacred,
stimulating placidity of the mind without disturbing or
agitating it.
Natural endowments like rivers, hills and their caves, the
seas and their coasts, were taken as visible manifestations
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of the power that created the Universe and thus were
objects to be venerated. They were given the aura of sacredness as places of pilgrimage, and the act of going to them
became an important religious practice. The nature of pilgrimage was Prayaschitta, a religious act to atone for sin. A
person who goes on pilgrimage with purity of mind, leaving
behind his sinful acts and worldly attachments, is relieved
of sin, it was said. In some instances the groves were given
an extraordinary sacredness. For instance, one legendary
forest was worshipped as a Deity itself, as the Creator was
believed to have taken abode there. The place was given a
name symbolizing the lotus wherefrom the Creator himself
arose. Likewise, prominent, uninhabited hills were imbued
with personalities and divine powers.
Even trees in the forests were similarly bestowed with
holiness. There are chapters in the Puranas that say how
each particular tree is associated principally with a Deity,
and give the legendary basis for that belief. The most
prominent of these legends naturally refers to the principal
deities in the Pantheon, namely Shiva and Vishnu. The Vata
tree is regarded as the symbol of Shiva, and the Asvattha
tree that of Vishnu. To this day, sacred rituals echoing the
ancient legends are performed around these trees.
In the tradition of the Puranas, trees have been imputed
with personalities. Trees singly or in a grove in the forest
have been said to be able to perform good deeds in support of
good people. In one place in the Ramayana, a grove of trees
surrounding a hermitage was implored to provide protection
and safety to the heroine who had to be left all alone there.
In short, forests, mountains, caves, seas, and such are
seen as entities with an organic relationship with human
beings, typically as objects of reverence and worship, treating them as places that are manifestations of the Creator.
Their common base and foundation is the Earth, and the
Vedantic tradition was especially reverential toward it.
A morning prayer recited on rising from bed says this:
O, Mother Earth, adorned by the garb of ocean, with
mountains as your breasts, bear with me as I place my
feet on you.
The injunction in the Upanishads is for Man to regard
himself as subservient to the system—not its master. From
this was derived the principle of non-accumulation; Man
must take from Nature what he needs, not less or more, but
shall desist from hoarding to satisfy his greed or gain
advantage over Nature. The mental construct about a
territory and its endowments is akin to a helper, a protector,
and a cleanser of sins. The image is touched with not sadness
or desolation, but with spirituality, even if that is at the
level of symbol worship.
Food for Thought _______________
One can conceive of an array of different Nature-endowed
components of wilderness as forming inputs, and many
varieties of “benefits” from each such component constitute
the possible outputs. We could thus describe an input-output
framework with many kinds of inputs and many kinds of
desired outputs. A particular set of desired outputs help
define wilderness.
What is a desired output? We know what it would be if one
left it to the temptress or to the sage. A selection has to be
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made for this modern day and age. Each choice can be linked
to an element, or elements, of the wilderness’s natural
endowments.
Incidentally, what does one do when particular desired
outputs fail to mesh with any input from the natural endowments of the given wilderness? It depends on one’s
readiness or reluctance to disturb Nature. Typically, available endowments are altered or manipulated to generate
the required inputs, or the inputs are brought in from
outside. Land use in such cases corrupts wilderness.
Finally, what can one make out from this look at one
fragment of the traditional lore? Wilderness, or Nature in
the wild, needs to be treated as a sentient rather than
nonsentient entity, one that is organically related to Man;
and is to be taken as helper, a protector, a cleanser of sins.
As a manifestation of the Creator in its (nearly) pristine
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state, an approach marked by respect and restraint would be
in order. One has perforce to recognize that the mode of
usage of wilderness, concretized as a bundle of desired
outputs, should focus on the mind of the user rather than the
user’s bodily wants. In this view, it would be appropriate if
the modalities of usage are suffused with other-worldliness,
and desirable indeed if gross physical land use is altogether
avoided.
References _____________________
Manuscript (author and date unknown) Rambhashukasamvadah,
Mysore: Oriental Research Institute, Mysore. Acc No. 566 Stock
No. E 26382.
Yogananda, Paramahansa. 1996. The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam
explained. New Delhi: UBS Publishers Distributors Ltd.
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