There is a story told about the wife of Jayadev, the poet of the Sanskrit age whose Ashtapadis have been sung for centuries with unfailing interest. The story tells that Jayadev's wife visited the court of the queen to offer sympathy according to custom, after the queen's sister had died in Sati. Jayadev's wife remained silent before the queen, who began to feel insulted that she did not express admiration for the great ideal that her sister had shown, or console with her for her own loss. "Does it not seem to you a great and noble proof of love?" asked the queen. "Indeed, yes . . ." answered Jayadev's wife, but she seemed to hesitate as if she had no words and the queen kept this in her mind.

Some time later the king happened to be away with Jayadev on a tiger-hunt; and the queen sent word to his wife to say that the poet had died on the expedition. "What?" said she, "Is Jayadev dead?" and she sank unconscious, and never recovering consciousness thus died.

For a youth to prefer death to dishonor is a great and generous ideal, but when this ideal becomes a custom, then the ideal has become an idol. It seems more terrible than the custom of Sati that a young man should kill himself for an ideal at the very threshold of life. But indeed that the human being should hold life cheap in comparison with his ideal has nothing of terror or horror in it; the horror begins when custom enforces such a sacrifice upon the individual who cannot understand or willingly accept it.

The joy or devotion to one alone, the joy of loving someone so much as to feel entirely loyal and true, is such that it cannot be compared in its fullness to any other in life. It is a joy that cannot be known except to the pious in the path of love. The virtue of this plant of truth and constancy reared in the heart spreads through its branches into each part of life in ever-springing virtues that are constantly blossoming and bearing the fruits of every happiness and blessing.

There is a verse of Hafiz which says, "My heart is so pure in its love for you, that indeed it shows no purity; for save you it loves no one."

The apparent confusion of this thought lies in this: that to love sincerely one cannot love more than one; and yet love must grow, for to cease to grow means but to wither and to die.

And to love one alone, and that one truly, is to expand and respond to all the beauty of life. The real lover laughs at him who says, "I have loved, but my beloved failed me and therefore I love no more." The real lover, like Aladdin, has his magic lamp, and he creates his vision of beauty. The real lover cries like Majnun, "To see the beloved you must have my eyes." He says, "O you who blame, you who despair, and you who hate, you cannot see."

An English poet, writing of the sun, has said:

When the sun begins to spread his rays He shows his face ten thousand ways; Ten thousand things do then begin to show the life that they are in.

The poet Shams-i-Tabriz has written:

When the sun showed his face
Then appeared the faces of the forms of all worlds;
His beauty showed their beauty;
In his brightness they shone out;
So by his rays we saw, and knew, and named them.

A flame of pure and sincere love is as a torch upon the path of the lover. It reveals to him the mysteries of life, as it awakens the answering gleam of light, the soul, in each created thing.

Vol. 3, Life's Creative Forces: Rasa Shastra

15. Monogamy

ii

Vol. 3, Life's Creative Forces: Rasa Shastra

15. Monogamy

ii