BAUL
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Bauls are an ancient order of wandering mystic minstrels of immense aesthetic, literary, spiritual and esoteric significance, from the Bengal region which is now divided into Bangladesh and West Bengal.
It is essentially a loosely formed spiritual order, whose members are sometimes householders and sometimes mendicants, joining in from both the established Muslim and Hindu communities of the region.
Baul songs, along with their music, play a major role in the oral communication of Baul ideas and beliefs. These songs were composed by the part of the sect that had reached spiritual maturity, and in turn, tell about their spiritual realization to their disciples in the form of these songs.
An interesting part of the culture of rural Bengal, the songs of these mystic minstrels are known as much for their simplicity, spontaneity and vitality of expression as for the obvious spiritual intensity of the exoterically presented esoteric content, their sublime and subtle sentiments and ideas engaging in an unconventional approach to divinity through an unique fusion of love and piety.
Despite being deeply influenced by the doctrines of various Buddhistic, Sufi-istic and Vaishnavite religious schools, the Bauls themselves reject the accessory baggage of rituals, customs and practices, scriptures and speculative literature.
For them, the ultimate truth or the divine is not cognized but intuited within the individual through love. By various modes of Sadhana, and also using song and dance as a means of achieving a sort of holy communion, the Bauls seek what they call “Moner Manush”, (‘Man of the Heart’) or sometimes “Auchin Pakhi (unknown bird), in an attempt to unite the human individual with the divine, which resides within the temple of the body.
Their songs declare an incessant aspiration to fully know the Man of the Heart, with a tenderness of feeling expressing the pangs of separation from the innermost divinity. Thus the Bauls embody a tradition of living spiritual quest, experience and realization of the individual seeker, the human body standing as a temple housing our true and inner higher self, which is itself nothing less than the ultimate reality. This mysteriously hidden true self is represented in many Baul songs by the “Unknown Bird” or the “Man of the Heart”, singing from within an mesmerizingly sweet tone, tempting everybody listening to it to join in the recognition of his or her own divinity.
[ To Be Continued.... ]