Galana Ganga

I’ll talk away with those blue eyes
I’ll get drunk on the sound of your bangles
I’ll kiss that dark hair of yours
Dream up dreams and talk to me
Like the ripples of a flowing river
there’s no end to your beauty…..
Like the far rim of a horizon
there’s no end to your beauty…

Worldly pleasure is only killing time
for someone walking into nirvana
The unstable nature of the pancha skandha (the five aggregates that make up a person)
turning it over, turning it over
I had become an ascetic, before
I saw you, your soft lotus cheeks
where dew has fallen and glitters on thick darkness
on a mountain no eye can see
I had known beauty, and then I saw your face
and it broke, the stillness I had settled into
the deep calm I had held all this time, thrown into disorder
My right view has come to a halt today
At the root of your eyes lies my cause and effect
Struck dumb, blinded, stranded halfway, what is this?
Slipping quietly down from the fragrant chamber, laying my precepts aside
lost in the nature of a form
On the road of saṃsāra (the cycle of rebirth) I was walking, out to reach the far shore
you came today and turned into craving…..

Those blue eyes……

A man who had turned his back on the world falls for a woman, and this song is him owning up to it. He starts soft and playful, promising to talk away with her blue eyes, to get drunk on the little sound her bangles make, to kiss her dark hair, asking her to keep dreaming and keep talking to him. Then he tells you what all of that has cost him.

Before her, he was living like a renunciant. The second verse is full of the vocabulary of practice: worldly pleasure was just killing time, he sat turning over the impermanence of the pancha skandha, the five aggregates that a person is made of, with nirvana somewhere ahead of him. Then comes the line the whole song hangs on, that he was an ascetic right up until he saw her. What she breaks is not a mood but a discipline. The deep meditative calm he had built collapses, and samma ditthi, right view, the first step of the Noble Eightfold Path, simply stops.

The images stay inside that world and that is what gives them their sting. Her cheeks are soft lotus with dew glittering on them against thick darkness, on a mountain no eye can see, beauty found exactly where he was not looking for it. He climbs quietly down from the gandhakuti, the fragrant chamber where a teacher lives, and puts his precepts down beside him, which is about as plain a confession of falling as Sinhala allows. And when he says his cause and effect now sits at the root of her eyes, he is handing her his whole karma.

The title carries the turn. In the chorus the flowing river is a compliment, her beauty running on without end like ripples on the water, like a horizon line you can walk toward forever. By the last verse the water means something else. He was on the road of saṃsāra trying to get across to the far shore, and she arrived and became taṇhā, the craving that keeps you circling back. He never says he regrets it, and that is what makes the ending land.