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It is illumining to reflect upon the one-pointedness and dedication that Sri Chinmoy brought to his creative marathon endeavour. Fortunately, the first five hundred poems contain a time chart which allows us to plot their growth. ' In that initial on rush of inspiration, we see the poet's energies rapidly and powerfully at work: by the time his plane touched down in Tokyo, on October 22nd, he had completed seventy poems. The next ten days witnessed a spate of activity, both inner and outer. For four days the poet travelled in Japan, giving lectures on different spiritual themes and meeting with various officials. On October 27th he took a series of connecting flights to India, arriving in Pondicherry, South India, on the 29th. The poems then numbered 375. By October 31st, the poet was on the move again, this time catching the numerous linking flights that would take him back to New York. On November 1st, the poet arrived home having been abroad eleven days. The total of poems stood at a staggering five hundred.
After this date, it appears that the project was temporarily set aside. New poems were composed but not with the tremendous speed of the October poems. Late in 1980, however, with the anniversary of the commencement of the project, the poet resumed work on it once more. Writing with renewed intensity and purposiveness, the next eight volumes, each containing one hundred poems, were produced at the rate of approximately one per week, taking us into the first few weeks of January, 1981--the limit of this study
Eventually one hundred volumes will be needed to hold the entire ten thousand poems. It is a conception so overpowering in its dimensions and yet, even at this stage with thirteen complete volumes, so exact in its proportions, that the reader intuitively becomes aware of an underlying source for the words, a fundamental organising element that is continuously mindful of the completed whole.
What has been written to this point is considerable. What is still to be written is unimaginable. Not since the Vedas of ancient times has a vision of such magnitude prevailed.
Composed in the millennium before Christ, the Vedas are India's ancient scriptures. Of these books Sri Chinmoy has written:
The Vedas house the earliest poetry and prose literature of the searching, striving and aspiring human soul. [1]
The four books of the Vedas have been attributed to a number of different seer-poets, chief among them being the seven holy 11 rishis," or sages, who are themselves the subject of several verses:
