Kumariyaka Pa Salamba Saluna Lyrics by Amaradeva

A maiden’s anklet chimed,
and the closed eyes that were shut slid open.
There in my hermitage of celibate study, a young ascetic prince,
the trance I had sunk into came apart.

A maiden’s anklet chimed…

Her swaying hips and breast set the buds trembling,
and the sheer veil of cloth that had hidden her
parted, stirring the playful longings of the mind.
My two eyes, gone mad, were torn out of their trance.
A Tusita heaven took shape before me,
a blessed hour that even the gods would envy.

A maiden’s anklet chimed…

Deep in the still forest of my ascetic life,
the elephant-rush of feeling snapped its chains and broke loose,
crushing and splintering, it set everything shaking,
the tender shoots, the climbing vines, the buds and petals of flowers.
It makes me weep, this Tusita that has shattered,
a blessed hour the wind has lulled away.

A maiden’s anklet chimed…

This is one of the great classical Sinhala art songs, an Amaradeva piece built on an old story that runs through Buddhist and Indian literature: a young ascetic, deep in meditation in a forest hermitage, has his hard-won calm shattered by the sudden arrival of a beautiful woman. The whole song is told in the voice of that prince. He has given up the world to sit in tapas, the long discipline of stilling the mind, and then, in a single moment, all of it comes undone.

It begins with the smallest of sounds. A maiden’s anklet chimes nearby, and that one ring of metal is enough to make his closed eyes open. The poet is using something tiny and ordinary, the jingle of an anklet, to mark the exact instant the spell breaks. From there the imagery turns lush and sensual on purpose. Her body, the veil of thin cloth that slips aside, the “playful longings” it wakes, all of it pulls his eyes out of their trance and leaves them, in his own words, gone mad. He calls the vision a Tusita heaven (in Buddhist cosmology a realm of pure delight, the heaven where a Buddha-to-be waits to be born), and a blessed hour the gods themselves would envy. For a moment desire dresses itself up as paradise.

The third verse is where the song shows its real craft. The feeling that breaks loose in him is described as gajasen, the charge of a rutting elephant snapping its chains, a classic Sinhala image for a force too powerful to hold back. That wild rush tramples through the quiet forest of his ascetic life, and notice what it crushes: the tender shoots, the climbing vines, the buds and the flower petals. Those young, soft, growing things stand for the fragile inner calm he had nurtured for so long. One surge of longing flattens it all.

Then the mood turns, and this is what lifts the song above a simple tale of temptation. The same Tusita heaven he marveled at is now broken, and it makes him weep. The blessed hour has not been seized or enjoyed; it has been “lulled away by the wind,” gone as lightly as it came. What the listener is left holding is the old human ache between the spirit and the senses, the longing that can topple years of discipline in a heartbeat, and the quiet sorrow of a man who glimpsed something like heaven and watched it dissolve.