VIII · Garland of Sacred Syllables

I begin by showing you my mouse pad, which is also the Monier-Williams Sanskrit-English Dictionary, the reference used across the English-speaking world. I read aloud one paragraph from the Preface to its New Edition, written at Oxford in 1899. There the compiler explains that the chair he occupies, the Bowdoin Chair of Sanskrit, was endowed by Colonel Bowdoin in 1811 with one express object: to promote the translation of the scriptures into Sanskrit so as to enable his countrymen to proceed in the conversion of the natives of India to the Christian religion. This is the book we have learned to treat as the authority for words. When a translator looks up a word used by Patañjali (पतञ्जलि), the dictionary offers several options, and he chooses from among them by the meaning that seems to best suit his translation. The translator is making his own conscious choice, to suit his own purposes, from the options given by Monier-Williams. Within an oral tradition, those choices and options do not exist, and this is much of what our conversation on sacred speech is about.

From there I return to Pāṇini (पाणिनि) and the Aṣṭādhyāyī (अष्टाध्यायी), its four thousand sutras out of which the whole of the Sanskrit language is generated. Panini’s is a formal system that precedes the formal systems of logic in Europe by some twenty-five hundred years, and when his composition reached Europe at the turn of the nineteenth century it became, almost single-handedly, the ground of the modern study of speech, of linguistics and the cognitive sciences. In the twentieth century the mathematicians took it up. Emil Post, much influenced by Panini, drew from one attribute of his sutras their recursivity, the endless generation of speech from a finite set of rules, and built from it the theory of auxiliary symbols on which the modern computer languages all rest; and Turing stood close by. Fritz Staal, among the greatest of the Western Sanskritists, called Panini India’s Euclid, for a line runs from the geometry of the sacrificial fire altar through the formal system of the language itself. Panini, Patanjali, and Pythagoras each saw the one connection: speech, mathematics, and music. And it is curious to me that the mathematicians who used Panini insisted that his composition is an oral one; this touches Chomsky, who holds that language is inborn in the child rather than learned, and behind him Bhartṛhari, for whom speech too is present in the newborn, not by DNA but by previous births.

People ask how this is not religion. In these post-Enlightenment times religion is taken to mean a deity, a doctrine, and a printed text, and the religions of the book answer to that easily. India does not. There are deities in the hundreds of millions, doctrines without number, and texts beyond counting, so that to make an Indian religion fit the Western category someone must first decide which deity, which doctrine, which texts will stand for the rest. When rural people in India speak of dharma, the word we translate as religion, they mean what the West calls science: the knowledge of the world and the cosmos. Sanatan Dharma, what is now called Hinduism, is held not as a set of beliefs but as that knowledge. And the work of Panini, of Patanjali in the Yoga Sutras and the Mahābhāṣya, of Bhartṛhari, of Abhinavagupta in his Tantras, stands far closer to the work of the linguist and the mathematician than to anything the cleric does.

So I ask you again to set aside letters and notation and to attend to articulation, to take the trip through the spaces of your own mouth. The authority for these syllables, and for mantra itself, is not in Monier-Williams nor in any chart; it is in your vocal apparatus, and you reach it by operation rather than by mimicry. We go once more through the cycle of the twenty-five consonants, varga by varga, from the simple striking of ka (क) at the base of the throat, adding aspiration, then the expansion of the voice, then aspiration and expansion together, and closing each varga with its nasal, rerouted through the nose from that same place. Ka deep in the throat carries the density of earth; the cha (च) varga, where the saliva rises, carries water; the tongue lifted to the roof of the mouth points to fire; the teeth break up the earth; the lips make the final release, which is space. These are not concepts laid over the sounds but the obvious operations of the places themselves. Each varga has its vowel as well, ka the A (अ) and cha the I (इ), and the movement from A to I is the most significant in all of speech: the passage from the unmanifest to the possibility of manifestation, the kāma bīja, the desire of the One to become many.

I close on what happens when sounds meet. There is a hermetic rule from the alchemical centuries of Europe, that when things touch, they change; it is exactly the mark of the Indian languages, which are inflected rather than agglutinative. Put “to” before “I” and the I becomes me. Sanskrit formalizes this as sandhi: as words touch each other, the end of one word coalesces with the beginning of the following word, changing the syllable. Because Sanskrit holds no fixed word order, the work of each word carried in its ending, the speaker may rearrange words to gather or shed syllables, and out of this comes an immense poetic freedom. Panini described all of it, and yet he and his commentators held that the rules are not the authority for real speech. Real speech is common usage. His grammar describes how people actually speak, descriptive rather than prescriptive, and that distinction runs through everything I have tried to show you here.