《美食祈祷和恋爱》Chapter 52 (111):咏诵

The biggest obstacle in my Ashram experience is not meditation, actually. That's difficult, of course, but not murderous. There's something even harder for me here. The murderous thing is what we do every morning after meditation and before breakfast (my God, but these mornings are long)—a chant called the Gurugita. Richard calls it "The Geet." I have so much trouble with The Geet. I do not like it at all, never have, not since the first time I heard it sung at the Ashram in upstate New York. I love all the other chants and hymns of this Yogic tradition, but the Gurugita feels long, tedious, sonorous and insufferable. That's just my opinion, of course; other people claim to love it, though I can't fathom why.

事实上，我的道场经验之最大障碍并非禅坐。禅坐自然不容易，却不是深重的灾难。有件事对我而言更为困难。最要命的是，每天清晨禅坐之后、早饭之前的事（天啊，这些早晨可真长）——一种叫“古鲁梵歌”（Gurugita）的咏诵。理查称之为“声乐”（TheGeet）。“声乐”给了我不少麻烦。我一点也不喜欢，也不曾喜欢，打从我在纽约上州的道场头一次听见它的曲调就不喜欢。我喜爱这个瑜伽传统的其他吟唱，然而古鲁梵歌给人的感觉却是冗长、累赘、铿锵、难受。这当然只是我的看法，有些人宣称喜爱它，尽管我不明白为什么。

The Gurugita is 182 verses long, for crying out loud (and sometimes I do), and each verse is a paragraph of impenetrable Sanskrit. Together with the preamble chant and the wrap-up chorus, the entire ritual takes about an hour and half to perform. This is before breakfast, re-member, and after we have already had an hour of meditation and a twenty-minute chanting of the first morning hymn. The Gurugita is basically the reason you have to get up at 3:00 AM around here.

古鲁梵歌有一百八十二节之长，必须大声吟唱（有时我真这么做），而每一节都是不容探知的梵语篇章。加上序曲的吟诵和总结的合唱，整个仪式的进行大约会花费一个半小时。别忘了，这可是在早餐之前，在我们已花了一小时禅坐、二十分钟咏唱第一段晨祷之后。古鲁梵歌基本上是待在这儿的你必须清晨三点起床的原因。

I don't like the tune, and I don't like the words. Whenever I tell anyone around the Ashram this, they say, "Oh, but it's so sacred!" Yes, but so is the Book of Job, and I don't choose to sing the thing aloud every morning before breakfast.

我不喜欢其曲调，我不喜欢歌词。每回跟道场哪个人这么说，他们总说“喔，可是它非常神圣哪！”没错，但《约伯记》也很神圣，我可没选择每天早餐前大声吟唱。

The Gurugita does have an impressive spiritual lineage; it's an excerpt from a holy ancient scripture of Yoga called the Skanda Purana, most of which has been lost, and little of which has been translated out of Sanskrit. Like much of Yogic scripture, it's written in the form of a conversation, an almost Socratic dialogue. The conversation is between the goddess Parvati and the almighty, all-encompassing god Shiva. Parvati and Shiva are the divine embodiment of creativity (the feminine) and consciousness (the masculine). She is the generative energy of the universe; he is its formless wisdom. Whatever Shiva imagines, Parvati brings to life. He dreams it; she materializes it. Their dance, their union (their Yoga), is both the cause of the universe and its manifestation.

古鲁梵歌的确有个令人敬畏的神圣血统；它节自瑜伽经典《塞犍陀往世书》（SkandaPurana），此经典大半已流失，从梵语译成其他语言的部分寥寥无几。如同多数瑜伽经典，是以对话形式书写而成，一种类似苏格拉底的对答模式。对话者是女神巴瓦娣（Parvati）和全能全容的湿婆神。巴瓦娣女神与湿婆神是创造（女性）与知觉（男性）的化身。她是宇宙的生殖能力；他则是无形的智慧。不论湿婆想什么，巴瓦娣都能赋之予生命。他想象；她则予以实现。他们的舞蹈，他们的结合（他们的瑜伽），是宇宙的起因及其表现。

In the Gurugita, the goddess is asking the god for the secrets of worldly fulfillment, and he is telling her. It bugs me, this hymn. I had hoped my feelings about the Gurugita would change during my stay at the Ashram. I'd hoped that putting it in an Indian context would cause me to learn how to love the thing. In fact, the opposite has happened. Over the few weeks that I've been here, my feelings about the Gurugita have shifted from simple dislike to solid dread. I've started skipping it and doing other things with my morning that I think are much better for my spiritual growth, like writing in my journal, or taking a shower, or calling my sister back in Pennsylvania and seeing how her kids are doing.

在古鲁梵歌当中，巴瓦娣女神请湿婆神告诉她世俗成就的秘密，于是他告诉她。这首赞诗教我讨厌。我原以为自己对古鲁梵歌的感觉在入住道场期间能有所改变。我原本希望在印度的背景下，能让自己学会如何喜爱它。事实上却适得其反。我在此地的这几个礼拜，对古鲁梵歌的观感从单纯的嫌恶转变成心惊胆颤。我开始逃开它，把早晨用来做自己认为更有益心灵成长的事情，比方说写日记，或淋浴，或打电话给宾州的姐姐，问她的孩子们好不好。

Richard from Texas always busts me for skipping out. "I noticed you were absent from The Geet this morning," he'll say, and I'll say, "I am communicating with God in other ways," and he'll say, "By sleeping in, you mean?"

德州理查老是逮到我逃课“我发现你今天没去吟诵‘声乐’。”他说。我答：“我用其他方式和神沟通。”他说：“你是说，睡懒觉的方式？”