A Stanza in Samskritam that Drove Away the Log Demon

(Real life anecdote involving Sanskrit)

DKM Kartha

In my childhood, I had a classmate called M.N. at my rural school in Kerala State.

We had the shift system i those days, and one afternoon, after school, we walked home together around noon, and MN planted a fear in my heart: "there is a demon who loves to roam around during the noon time. It walks behind you, and as soon as you look around, it will turn itself into a log, and you would see only an inert piece of wood. But it is really an evil demon. It never goes away."

In those times, there were small logs lying around nearly everywhere from tree cutting, etc. Firewood was not that scarce.

After planting this fearsome story in the heart of a 10-year old, MN turned off the main road and went to the path leading to his house which was closer to the elementary school than mine.

I had to walk another three fourths of a mile to get home. I was worried that the Log Demon might be walking behind me. And when I turned around, I saw plenty of logs lying around. Were they just logs or Log Demons ?

Then I got the "golden fruit," the result of my sitting with my Mother at every dusk and listening to her sing samskr^ta (and Malayalam) hymns and learning some of them by heart. By the way, my mother had studied up to Grade 7, and she had had to study the immortal RaghuvamSam's two sarga-s in the 1930's! So she must have been able to tell me the meaning of the hymn that was going to save my life: the famous aRddha-nAreeSvara hymn: to be precise, its last stanza:

अन्तर्बहिश्चोर्ध्वमधश्च मध्ये
पुरश्च पश्चाच्च विदिक्षु दिक्षु ।
सर्वंगतायै सकलङ्गताय
नमः शिवायै च नमः शिवाय ॥
antarbahiścordhvamadhaśca madhye
puraśca paścācca vidikṣu dikṣu ।
sarvaṃgatāyai sakalaṅgatāya
namaḥ śivāyai ca namaḥ śivāya ॥
(I bow my head to Shiva and Shivaa, who are present inside me, outside me, above and below me, in front of me, behind me, under me and in all the main directions and in all the intermediate directions.)

When I recited it silently, I had some peace, I remember. I knew the general meaning in the hymn that God is not just in KailAsam or VaikuNTTham but behind me and all around me, actively protecting me. Reciting the stanza repeatedly must have driven my fear away slowly, and I reasoned that with God being there all around me how can a puny demon who is not bigger than a small log hurt me? I stopped looking constantly behind me, and got home in course of time. By the way, there were not very many people on the road, it being the noon time, when the sun was blazing right above the head.

I never told anyone about this incident. Perhaps I had forgotten it soon, until this writing time.

While writing down this memory, I realized that the Kerala mind, if there is such a thing, must have gained a similar kind of peace as a result of Sanskritization, which involved the subjugation of belief in all kinds of rAjasic and tAmasic demons and spirits and ghosts by the belief in the pan-Indian pantheon who had compassion for their devotees and who used their own destructive power against evil forces and entities.

My gratitude to the power of the vision of the all-pervading Divine encapsulated in a beautiful stanza !

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