Mirabai
Hindu Mystical Poet (1498-1547)

Living in India some 500 years ago, Mirabai was quite a rebel, believing passionately in a woman's freedom to choose her own life’s path and religion.  Consequently, she suffered many punishments and hardships.  Knowing how women still struggle with similar injustices, it is not surprising that her story and poetry still resonate today.

Born into a noble family, Mirabai was only 4 or 5 years old when her mother died. Moving in with her grandmother, the child became enthralled with and intensely devoted to Lord Krishna.  At age 16, by her uncle’s arrangement, Mirabai was married to a prince, who died just three years later.  She enraged her in-laws by openly disdaining wealth, refusing to worship the family deity, and defying their expectations to immolate herself on her husband’s funeral pyre.  Narrowly escaping attempts on her life by members of her husband’s family, Mirabai went on to live the life she desired.  She wandered among those of all castes as an ecstatic, singing and dancing in public temples, writing her poetry, and making pilgrimages in dedication of her life to the love of Lord Krishna.

- Margaret Wakeley

     All I Was Doing Was Breathing

Something has reached out and taken in
    The beams of my eyes.
There is a longing, it is for his body,
    For every hair of that dark body.
All I was doing was being, and the
    Dancing Energy came by my house.
His face looks curiously like the moon, I
    Saw it from the side, smiling.
My family says: “Don’t ever see him again!”
    And implies things in a low voice.
But my eyes have their own life; they laugh
    At rules, and know whose they are.
I believe I can bear on my shoulders
    Whatever you want to say of me.
Mira says:  Without the energy that lifts
    mountains, how am I to live? (1)

Mirabai and Resurrection as Internal Union

Mirabai was a devotional poet of thirteenth-century India.  She hears the call of resurrection, the transmutative Divine Lover, and drops the mediocre to follow the light of life.  All of her poems are autobiographical, and the integrity of her spirit comes through in the last line of the poem:  “Without the energy that lifts mountains, how am I to live?”

Mira has no choice; she is an embodiment of the mystical lover archetype of such historical figures as France’s Jeanne d’Arc and Iraq’s Rabi’a al-Adawiyya.  Robert Bly makes the comment that this integral spiritual mysticism of lovers even made it to Emily Dickinson’s house, blowing in the window through the wind at Amherst:

Wild Nights-Wild Nights! 

Wild Nights—Wild Nights!
Were I with Thee
Wild Nights should be
Our luxury!

Futile—the Winds—
To a Heart in port—
Done with a Compass—
Done with the Chart!

Rowing in Eden—
Ah, the sea!
Might I but moor –Tonight—
In Thee! (2)

We are struck by the contrast between Emily Dickinson, the delicate New England solitary and the wild, free-floating Mirabai, her ankle bells singing, her family’s horror following her with murder attempts and evil intentions, the mild American whose fire burned interiorly resonating the wild bhakti poet openly defying social convention.  All of this reality is resurrectional, if not directly, certainly containing the call to change, to be, to develop, to be free.  Mirabai moves us by her remarkable and genuine freedom.  She carried the circle of self on all her travels, during her meetings, and in her work, those glorious poems.

The Music 

My friend, the stain of the Great Dancer
   has penetrated my body.
I drank the cup of music, and I am
   hopelessly drunk.
Moreover I stay drunk, no matter what I
   do to become sober.
Rana, who disapproves, gave me one basket
   with a snake in it.
Mira folded the snake around her neck, it
   was a lover’s bracelet, lovely!
Rana’s next gift was poison:  “This
   is something for you, Mira.”
She repeated the Holy Name in her chest,
   and drank it, it was good!
Every name He has is praise; that’s
   the cup I like to drink, and
Only that.
“The Great Dancer is my husband,”
Mira says, “rain washes off
   all the other colors.” (3)

“The Great Dancer” of mystical consciousness “wash[ed] off all the other colors.”  Rana was Mira’s brother-in-law.  He really did send her a snake and poison, so outraged was her family by her nonconformity.  It seems that she knew how not to be a victim of small-mindedness!  “Mira folded the snake around her neck, it was a lover’s bracelet, lovely!”  Mull over her words and how powerfully she handles poison.

It is interesting and empowering that Mira is not a martyr; she uses the evil around her and turns it, through her ecstatic joy and play, into loveliness and goodness.  Even an advanced martial artist would hope for this transmutation, taking someone’s anger, hatred, and fear and flipping it into such obviousness that the negativism turns into bracelets, a drink, maybe a wake-up call to the perpetrator.

Sincere thanks to Maria Jaoudi
for permission to use this chapter from her book Christian Mysticism East and West: What the Masters Teach Us.

(1) Mirabai, Mirabai: Versions, translated from the Rajasthani by Robert Bly (Penland, N.C.:  Squid Ink, n.d.).
(2) Robert Bly, ed., The Soul Is Here for Its Own Joy:  Sacred Poems from Many Cultures (Hopewell, N.J.:  Ecco Press, 1995), p.183.
(3) Mirabai: Versions