VI · Sacred Geography of the Mouth

This episode turns from our Assumptions to the body of speech itself, the sacred geography of the mouth. I begin with a parable I have told many times. Shiva, the Lord of Consciousness, unmoving and unmanifest, in a timeless moment desires to know Himself; He lifts a mirror to His face, but looking at Himself in that mirror, He beholds Shakti, the Mother Goddess, instead. And He exclaims, “AAh!” (आ) Subject and object, Shiva and Shakti, vowel and consonant: this is the paradigm that runs through the whole of speech. The vowel, svara, is sounded and self-existent like Shiva; the consonant, vyañjana, is the manifesting, struck in a precise place, and powerless until a vowel gives it life.

So I ask you to set aside letters and alphabets and to treat the vocal apparatus as a map, remembering that the map is not the thing. There are five stations of articulation, beginning in the throat and rising to the lips, each named by the syllable that begins its varga: ka (क) in the throat, then cha (च), then ta (ट) with the tongue against the roof of the mouth, then ta (त) with the tongue against the teeth, and pa (प) at the lips. Think of the vocal apparatus as a dome, and these five as the places within it. I will not teach you to make these sounds; I will teach you to look for them in your own mouth.

“A” (अ) is the most important of the vowels, the syllable of Shiva, of consciousness, which we call anuttara, that, which there is nothing greater. With “a” comes the visarga, which is much more than a device, for it is the thing that makes speech manifest and makes the world manifest. The visarga is a reflection, as Shiva, looking in the mirror to see Himself, saw the reflection of Shakti; and it is also an echo. The visarga of “a,” the echo of “a,” is the anāhata, the untouched, the unstruck syllable “ha” (ह). Put “a” together with its visarga and you have “a-ha,” the alpha and the omega, the pure consciousness and the final manifestation of consciousness. But “a-ha” is still incomplete, for a tension remains between “a” and its echo “ha,” and that tension is marked by the bindu, the nasal “mmm” (ं). So “a” and “ha” with the bindu become ahaṃ (अहम्), which means I, the first person singular pronoun, and also means the entire universe: Shiva and Shakti connected by the bindu of the tension between them, and this is the universe.

These points of contact, in their specific spaces, become analogs of other things: of the stars in the sky, of the geography of the earth, of the elements, and, for those who have worked with Kashmiri Shaivism, of the tattvas, for all the tattvas are analogs of points of articulation. Shiva’s desire to know Himself is kāma, a desire; and as that desire arises in Shiva, the still lake of consciousness is disturbed, as if a stone were dropped into it. The rise from the ka varga to the cha varga, the movement from “a” to “i” (इ), is the very basic movement that starts the universe.

I will leave you with one more thing, the way a varga is broken down. The first syllable is the simple striking, the sparśa, as in “ka.” The second adds the operation of breath, the aspiration, “kha” (ख), so that a hand held before the mouth feels the blast of air. The third expands the voice, “ga” (ग), so that a hand on the throat feels its vibration; the difference between “ka” and “kha” is as great as the difference between A and B. I think of all this as the sacred geography of the mouth, a geography we can make pilgrimage to, visiting these temples in our mouth, ringing the temple bells and beating the temple drums.