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‘Looking Within’
by Lal Ded
4.5
4.5 out of 5
Creators
AuthorLal Ded
PublisherAleph Book Company
Synopsis India has produced some of the world’s greatest religious leaders, sages, saints, philosophers
and spiritual thinkers. They were monks, nuns and renunciates, nationalists and reformers.
No one religion had a monopoly on them. They range from Mahavira and Buddha, who lived
over 2,500 years ago, to medieval saints like Chishti, Avvaiyar and Guru Nanak, to more
recent philosophers and religious icons such as Vivekananda, Ramakrishna, Saint Teresa
and many others. The spiritual and philosophical heritage they left behind is India’s gift to
all Indians and the world.
In the ‘Life Lessons’ series we publish the essential teachings of some of India’s best-known
spiritual teachers, along with commentaries and biographical notes. Each book will be a
handy companion to help the reader along the difficult pathways of life.
***
Lal Ded (Granny Lal), as Lalleshwari was known, was a Shaiva mystic saint who lived in
Kashmir, probably in the fourteenth century. Born into a Brahmin family of Pandrethan (near
Srinagar), she is said to have had an early bad marriage and faced many domestic hardships,
prompting a turn to spirituality. She renounced her marriage and material life and became
a wandering mystic. She shared her wisdom in the form of vaakhs (sayings or utterances).
These vaakhs (originally in the Kashmiri language) have seeped far and wide into popular
usage and are part of the collective memory—through songs, proverbs and hymns—of
Kashmiris of all stripes, through the generations. In these vaakhs, Lal Ded talked about the
woes of the human condition, her disillusionment with the world, her anguished search for
God, and, ultimately, her realization of God as pure consciousness. She rejected outward
rituals, ostentation and extreme asceticism as paths to reach the truth. Her observations on
the transience and futility of material pursuits and the emotions they generate, like greed,
anger, pride and fear, apply to us all. While her sayings are deeply profound, her humanism
makes it easy to relate to Lal and her teachings.
Translated and edited by Shonaleeka Kaul, the aphorisms in ‘Looking Within’ represent Lal
Ded’s core teachings.
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