Book Review – Life Lessons from Lal Ded (Edited by Shonaleeka Kaul)

‘Ekam Sat Vipra Bahuda Vadanti’ is a Sanskrit saying that every human in our country once learnt and lived by, but has conveniently forgotten now in these hate-filled modern times. Put in plain terms, it means ‘The Truth is one. The learned call it by various names’. This was meant to teach us all that the Supreme Godliness pervades all through the universe, permeating through all beings, animate and inanimate, big and small, young and old alike. Myriad saints and savants that walked this holy land kept reiterating the same, but we humans, the naïve ones that we are, keep forgetting that lesson.

‘Life Lessons’ from Aleph Book Company is a commendable effort to give us an introduction into the lives and realizations of the many holy personas from our glorious past. There are five

books in the series that tell us about the lives and lessons from Adi Shankara, Guru Nanak, Mahavira, Lal Ded and Moinuddin Chishti. This book by Lal Ded is the fourth one in my collection, with only the book of Chishti pending to adorn my shelf yet.

Lal Ded, or Lalleshwari as she was formally known, was a Shaivite saint from the 14th Century Kashmir. Said to have had a simple beginning and a failed marital life, she turned to spirituality to find the root cause of her suffering and seek liberation from it all. After she succeeded in her quest by following the Shaivite method of seeking the truth, she went around, alone, on foot, urging her fellow humans to seek liberation from all the illusions and travails that kept them bound to their mundane lives.

This book contains her ‘vaaks’ (wise sayings) on how we are bound by earthly emotions, how we can see through that all and attain the Supreme Consciousness that is all around us, unnoticed and unsought. A good to have book for those who are open to seeking the various ways that all lead to the single destination – the Supreme God. Will be a good gift for children too, if you want them to grow up understanding that God is only one, and all the bickering around in His (or, is it a Her?!) name is, simply, bollocks!