Thursday, February 21, 2013

You are the sun, you are the moon

This semester, I'm taking a class about North Indian classical music. We've been learning all about different Indian music traditions, which are all really interesting, profound, and tied up in spirituality. Half of the class is singing, and today we learned a song with this poem that really struck me:

Sthayi
Tu hi surya tu hi chandra
Tu hi pavan tu hi agan
Tu hi aap tu akaas
Tu he dharani Yajamaan

Sthayi
You are the sun, you are the moon
You are the wind, you are the fire
You are yourself, you are the sky
You are the earth and the conductor of activities

Our teacher, Pooja, prefaced this song by telling us that it's over 200 years old and is about the Almighty. It's always so cool how music can unite us in our search for the Almighty/Transcendence/the Sublime/the Divine/God/the Universe/whatever else  you want to call it. That which is beyond our understanding yet for some reason so much a part of us.
So, what struck me so much about this poem? The word for you. Pooja told us that "tu" is the word they use in Hindi for friends/other people you are informal with. They use "ap" for parents and grandparents and so forth. What is so incredibly interesting is that this poem uses "tu" to address the Almighty... because it's a part of yourself and you are familiar with it. Honorifics are always something that I think about because they are so much a part of Korean, which has complete different levels and ways of speaking to people depending on how much respect you owe them. What is so interesting for me is that the Korean Bible is notoriously hard to understand, especially for non-native speakers, because of the super high honorifics it uses to address God... yet this poem addresses God in the informal way.

What do you think?

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