X · Resemblances & Correspondences

My first guru, Shri Hari Puri ji Maharaj, told me some things in my early days in India that shocked me and took me years to corroborate. He spoke of a rishi of ancient India, Rishi Garg, one of the great astronomers, who, centuries before the Western calendar, calculated the distance from the Earth to the Moon at a hundred and eight Moon-diameters, and from the Earth to the Sun at a hundred and eight Sun-diameters. Modern science corrected him only in the last century by less than one per cent. Now, a hundred and eight is the number of auspiciousness we set before a holy man’s name, and the books will give you the tidy reasons, the twelve houses and the nine planets, and so on. But its real sense is distance: a great person is a fire you cannot approach too closely without being burned, so you place the number of distance, a hundred and eight, before the name. The number came from distance itself. And how did Garg know these distances, with no telescope and none of the instruments of the modern astronomer? Not by the methodology of modern science and its metrics, but by Correspondences, the way things connect with one another other than mechanically. That question seized my curiosity past all restraint, and shaped the rest of my life.

For India reached a great sophistication in mathematics and astronomy and medicine more than two thousand years ago by means other than the modern physical sciences: Garg the astronomer; Pāṇini (पाणिनि), whose Aṣṭādhyāyī (अष्टाध्यायी) is a mathematical system we could not fully read until the nineteen-thirties; Charaka, and Suśruta who is called the father of surgery, performing complicated surgery thousands of years ago; the zero used continuously in India long before any Arabic numeral. All of it rests on other premises: correspondences that we can describe as resemblances. Things are like other things for various reasons. Both things are red. Both things have spikes. Two things are next to each other. Two people look exactly like each other. Resemblance guides exegesis, the interpretation of texts, which in our case is very important and very interesting. If we try to interpret the texts of a culture that produced Rishi Garg and Rishi Panini with our etymologies and our dictionaries, it is like feeding a commentary into a computer in place of its code: alter the code even a little and the program will not run, but set down the right code and it will raise any image, any book, you like. This is why we began with our assumptions, for I want you to find another way of interpreting than the one we carry in by habit.

There are kinds of resemblance, and the first is convenience, proximity, the resemblance of things that lie next to one another and exchange their passions and properties across that nearness. In my book I told of being stung by nettles and finding, growing right beside them, the very plant whose leaf draws out the burn; the two look nothing alike, one all barbed spears and the other soft and broad, yet the one undoes the other, and their being side by side declares an unseen relation we discover only in the using. So the body lies proximate to the ātma, and communicates its desires to the soul it is pressed against. The second resemblance is emulation, which needs no nearness at all: things answer one another across a distance, as the two eyes emulate the Sun and the Moon, as a prominent nose is said to answer to Jupiter, as your face answers its own reflection in a mirror, though no tape can measure how far into the glass that face stands.

When emulation is laid over convenience, we have analogy. Lay the reflected story of the stars over the chain of things on earth and the night sky becomes an analog of the affairs and passions of men, a story to be read. These are not the cute literary devices the textbooks make of them; they are means of perception, and at the root of perception is speech. I tell a story to show how much perception must be learned. When television first came to India, in some villages the elders could not see the image at all; they saw only the light striking the glass, for nothing in them could place a little man and a little woman inside a box on the wall. Peter, after his stroke, woke to find he could no longer read the letters before him, only pixels, having unlearned that this shape is an A. We see what we have been taught to organize, and that organizing is speech.

And all of this returns to the syllables. The Varnamala, the garland of all the akṣaras, is itself a chain of convenience: ka stands next to kha, and across that nearness their qualities pass, link upon link, until the whole of speech is one connected chain. Lay the emulation of the stars and the earth upon that chain and you have storytelling, the stars standing witness over the events of men; and from this come the two arts we will need, the art of representation and the art of interpretation. I see each of you as a reflection of myself, and the universe as a reflection of us, a room of mirrors throwing the image off to infinity in every direction. This is how we are one: not one mind making it all, but reflections without end. What I ask is that we not stop at setting Speech on an altar as an idea, but look into how She works, and through Her into the knowledge of ourselves.