Lal Das (Bawa Lal Dayal)

A prince rode into Lahore in the last weeks of 1653 carrying a defeat he could not put down. Dara Shikoh, eldest son of the Emperor Shah Jahan and heir presumptive to the Mughal throne, had marched south to retake the fortress of Kandahar and had come back beaten, his army thinned, his pride worse than thinned. He did not go first to a mosque or a court astrologer. On the advice of his own Persian secretary, Chandra Bhan Brahman, who had seen something in the old ascetic that the prince badly needed, Dara Shikoh sent word to a barefoot Vaishnav mendicant camped at Kotla Mehra on the edge of the city, and asked to be received. The mendicant's name was Lal Das, though the ordinary people of the Punjab, unable to separate the man from the tenderness he radiated, had already taken to calling him Bawa Lal Dayal, Father Lal the Merciful. He agreed to come.

What followed, over some two weeks in the gardens of Zafar Khan and in the Saraye Anvar Mahal of the Badshahi garden, was not a courtier's audience but a genuine meeting of two minds hungry for the same thing. Twice a day, morning and evening, the prince who would have been emperor sat before a Hindu hermit who owned nothing, while two scribes, Jadhav Das Ray and Chandra Bhan himself, took down every question and every answer. Dara asked about the soul and the paramatma, about whether the atma that sits in a human breast is truly separate from the Supreme it came from. Bawa Lal answered the way a man answers who has stopped needing to win an argument: no, he said, there is finally no difference, only as there is no difference between the water cupped in a vessel and the same water flowing on as the river Ganga. He was asked why Hindus bow before images of stone and wood. Worship offered to a murti, he said, is like a child's toy: it steadies a wandering heart long enough for the heart to grow up and no longer need the toy. He was asked what liberation, moksha, actually feels like. It is like true sleep, he said, the kind that comes only when every wanting has finally gone quiet and there is no longer a rope of desire tying the sleeper back to the world he is leaving. Dara Shikoh, who would go on to write of the search for a truth beneath all names and forms, later confessed in his own hand that he had met no one among the Hindus who had climbed as high in irfan, in that hard-won gnosis of God, as this one barefoot faqir. The commentary tradition preserves the same memory more simply: the Muslim rulers, it says, plainly meaning Dara, had come to place enormous trust at this mahatma's feet.

By the time that meeting happened Bawa Lal was already, by every account his own tradition keeps, an old man, and by the reckoning some of his followers still repeat today, an impossibly old one: born, they say, in the village of Kasur near Lahore in Vikram Samvat 1412, and destined not to lay down his body until Samvat 1712, three full centuries later. No sober history can verify three hundred years of one life, and nothing requires a reader to take the number as ordinary arithmetic. What the number is straining to say, the way hagiography always strains at plain fact to reach a truer one, is that this was a life so entirely surrendered to Hari that even time seemed to lose its usual grip on it. His parents, remembered as Bohlamal and Krishna Devi, are said to have been told by an astrologer at his birth that the child would grow to free others from the wheel of birth and death long before he had any use for the prophecy himself. As a boy he kept cattle in the fields around Kasur and, the story goes, sat so long and so still in contemplation under the open sun that a great serpent came and spread its hood over him for shade, the same old sign the tradition uses whenever it wants to say: something more than an ordinary child is resting here.

That contemplative restlessness would not let him stay a cowherd. At eight years old, an age when most children cannot be sent alone to the next village, Lal Das left his father's house and walked toward Lahore in search of a guru he had never seen and could not have named except by a kind of inner certainty, Chetan Swami. He crossed and recrossed the Punjab, through Gujranwala and Sialkot, up into the passes toward Rajouri and Kashmir, on to the cold shore of Mansarovar beneath Kailash, and further still to Badrinath and Kedarnath in the high Himalaya, a pilgrimage that would exhaust a grown man's whole life, let alone a child's single journey. He came back down out of the mountains still searching, and found what he had been searching for, at last, on the banks of the Ravi near Shahdara, just across the water from Lahore, where Chetan Swami gave him darshan and accepted him. Whatever passed between guru and boy at that riverside meeting, the old Hindi commentary remembers it by name, calling it Harishapur, and says that it was there, through nothing but his guru's grace, that Lal Das seized true bhakti and would not let it go again.

What kind of man that grip made him is exactly what Nabhadas, writing his verses on the great devotees perhaps two centuries before scholars would ever hear of him, chose to preserve. He compared him to a lotus leaf lying flat on a pond: the water is all around it, touching it on every side, and yet not one drop clings. So Bawa Lal lived in the world, Nabhadas says, without the world's usual residue of greed and appetite ever sticking to him. He compared him, too, to a bridegroom at the center of a wedding party, the one figure the whole procession exists to honor: so did Lal Das shine, not off in a cave alone, but in the middle of a crowd of Hari's other devotees, exactly where they could see him and warm themselves at him. He was, in the commentary's plain phrase, a mine of Hari's own virtues, endlessly worked and never emptied, and he kept an open door for anyone who came to hear hari-gun, the qualities and stories of God, whether that visitor was a lifelong Vaishnav or, as history would prove, a Muslim prince.

Sometime around Vikram Samvat 1552, by the tradition's own count, Bawa Lal and three disciples he trusted above the rest, Dhiandas, Gurumukh Lal, and Kashi Ram, came to a quiet stretch of country in what is now the Gurdaspur district of Punjab and found it so suited to contemplation that he named the place itself after his disciple's gift for stillness: Dhianpur, the town of meditation. A dera grew up there, then a temple, then a whole devotional household that has not gone dark since. Twenty-two gaddis, seats of teaching, are remembered as having spread outward from that one hearth under disciples he himself had raised and sent out, so that the Bawa Lal sampradaya was never a solitary hermit's cult but a living lineage, handing itself forward acharya after acharya into the present day, when the current successor still receives pilgrims at Dhianpur as the fifteenth in that unbroken chain.

He did not stay fixed to any one address even after Dhianpur was founded. Long years are remembered spent further east at Saharanpur, given over there to a tapasya so consuming that the local memory of it survives to this day in the name of an actual small river. The people of Saharanpur still call it the Paondhoi Ganga, and the story that has been handed down with the water itself, told by townspeople who owe the tradition nothing, is that Bawa Lal Das longed so fiercely for the Ganga's presence at his place of practice that the goddess herself relented and sent a fresh stream down to him where the Himalayan foothills give way to the plain. Whether or not one takes the goddess literally, the stream is not a legend: it runs through Saharanpur still, carrying the saint's name on it eight kilometers from its spring at Sanklapuri, a very ordinary kind of proof that this was a man real enough to leave his mark on a map and not only on a manuscript.

The Bhaktamal's own commentary, when it comes to describing how such a life ended, reaches for the one death in Hindu scripture built to be the model of a good death: that of Raja Parikshit, cursed to die within seven days, who sat and listened to the entire Bhagavata Purana recited to him and let go of his body the instant the final word was spoken, untroubled, satisfied, done. In a village the text names Bandhera, though a variant reading gives it as Baivare, the commentary says Lal Das died exactly that way, listening to a Bhagavata katha, and departing the body the moment the story closed, as if his own life and the text being read to him had been waiting to finish together. The sampradaya at Dhianpur remembers the ending differently, and just as devotedly: that in Vikram Samvat 1712, having completed everything his incarnation had come to do, he simply returned to his eternal abode from the dera he himself had raised, leaving behind not an absence but a lineage that would go on manifesting him through every acharya who sat in his seat afterward. Both tellings agree on the one thing that actually matters to a devotee: that there was no struggle in it, no unfinished business, nothing left undone.

What makes Bawa Lal Dayal worth sitting with, all these centuries later, is not the arithmetic of his years or even the drama of a Mughal prince at his feet, remarkable as that meeting was. It is the plain fact that a Ram bhakta raised on the banks of the Ravi, who never left off calling Hari's name and never stopped receiving satsang, could open his heart wide enough that a Muslim seeker walked out of it saying he had found more irfan there than anywhere else in the land. Lal Das never diluted his own path to make that possible. He kept his bhakti, his guru, his Ram, entire; he simply loved the specific truth he had been given so completely that it turned out to be recognizable, without translation, to someone praying in a different language altogether. That is the teaching the lotus leaf and the bridegroom and the pearl of the Paondhoi stream are all quietly pointing toward: total absorption in Hari does not narrow a life. In Bawa Lal it opened one wide enough to hold a defeated prince, a village Bhagavata reading, a runaway boy of eight, and three hundred remembered years, all inside the same unbroken current of devotion.