Music – The Food of Love

'If music be the food of love, play on,' says the lovelorn Duke in the play 'The Twelfth Night', of Shakespeare. Yes, music is the food of love, say the saints too. Saints such as Tyagaraja, Purandara dasa, Sadasiva brahmendra, Mira Bai, Surdas and a host of others were drunk deep from the springs of love for God. Narada, in his very opening aphorisms on bhakti, defines devotion as supreme love in God, love for love's sake, not for any benefit. It is the fast track to realise God. Bhakti is categorised as rasa. The word rasa literally means 'juice'. Anything which moves the mind and melts the heart is called rasa in poetics. Sage Bharata had counted nine rasas, but it is surprising that he did not count bhakti, devotion, as rasa. But all devotional poets in all Indian languages made great use of this rasa to purify the hearts of devotees.

Just as love for a person takes the lover away from all other activities, so does the love for God. All the devotee's actions, personal or social interactions, stand defined in the realm of love for God. All our saints like Tyagaraja, Dikshitar, and a host of others used music as a substitute for Vedantic meditation.

Vedanta says that liberation is the dissolution of the individual self in the universal self, by enquiry into the nature of self, and secondly, by detachment to sense objects. It involves purifying the heart and educating the mind. A person would not get liberated by merely studying all the polemical texts. Liberation involves self-purification. A person has to become God-like in all his relations. Hence a seeker is compared to a bird, for whom enquiry is one wing and self-purification the other. Just as a bird cannot fly with one wing, the seeker cannot fly and reach the rooftop of the mansion of liberation with one wing, says Vivekachudamani.

Here comes the role of music. When Tyagaraja asks his mind, 'tell me, O mind! Is wealth lovable or is the service to Rama is lovable', or when he repeatedly says to himself, 'O who can save me, riddled with so many infirmities of character', the infirmities get weakened. Such contemplation is not different from the contemplation described in Vedanta. In fact, it is a powerful tool leading to detachment. Music attenuates our quest for material possessions and brings in contentment and inner harmony. Such nature is called sattva. Music engenders sattva in a person, which is the most important means for enlightenment. We are blessed to have had such saints who gave us divine music.

(Writer is former DGP,

Andhra Pradesh)K Aravinda Rao