《美食祈禱和戀愛》Chapter 52 (111):詠誦

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.

事實上，我的道場經驗之最大障礙並非禪坐。禪坐自然不容易，卻不是深重的災難。有件事對我而言更爲困難。最要命的是，每天清晨禪坐之後、早飯之前的事（天啊，這些早晨可真長）——一種叫“古魯梵歌”（Gurugita）的詠誦。理查稱之爲“聲樂”（TheGeet）。“聲樂”給了我不少麻煩。我一點也不喜歡，也不曾喜歡，打從我在紐約上州的道場頭一次聽見它的曲調就不喜歡。我喜愛這個瑜伽傳統的其他吟唱，然而古魯梵歌給人的感覺卻是冗長、累贅、鏗鏘、難受。這當然只是我的看法，有些人宣稱喜愛它，儘管我不明白爲什麼。

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.

古魯梵歌有一百八十二節之長，必須大聲吟唱（有時我真這麼做），而每一節都是不容探知的梵語篇章。加上序曲的吟誦和總結的合唱，整個儀式的進行大約會花費一個半小時。別忘了，這可是在早餐之前，在我們已花了一小時禪坐、二十分鐘詠唱第一段晨禱之後。古魯梵歌基本上是待在這兒的你必須清晨三點起牀的原因。

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.

我不喜歡其曲調，我不喜歡歌詞。每回跟道場哪個人這麼說，他們總說“喔，可是它非常神聖哪！”沒錯，但《約伯記》也很神聖，我可沒選擇每天早餐前大聲吟唱。

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.

古魯梵歌的確有個令人敬畏的神聖血統；它節自瑜伽經典《塞犍陀往世書》（SkandaPurana），此經典大半已流失，從梵語譯成其他語言的部分寥寥無幾。如同多數瑜伽經典，是以對話形式書寫而成，一種類似蘇格拉底的對答模式。對話者是女神巴瓦娣（Parvati）和全能全容的溼婆神。巴瓦娣女神與溼婆神是創造（女性）與知覺（男性）的化身。她是宇宙的生殖能力；他則是無形的智慧。不論溼婆想什麼，巴瓦娣都能賦之予生命。他想象；她則予以實現。他們的舞蹈，他們的結合（他們的瑜伽），是宇宙的起因及其表現。

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.

在古魯梵歌當中，巴瓦娣女神請溼婆神告訴她世俗成就的祕密，於是他告訴她。這首贊詩教我討厭。我原以爲自己對古魯梵歌的感覺在入住道場期間能有所改變。我原本希望在印度的背景下，能讓自己學會如何喜愛它。事實上卻適得其反。我在此地的這幾個禮拜，對古魯梵歌的觀感從單純的嫌惡轉變成心驚膽顫。我開始逃開它，把早晨用來做自己認爲更有益心靈成長的事情，比方說寫日記，或淋浴，或打電話給賓州的姐姐，問她的孩子們好不好。

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課“我發現你今天沒去吟誦‘聲樂’。”他說。我答：“我用其他方式和神溝通。”他說：“你是說，睡懶覺的方式？”