Rishi Panini — His Architecture of Consciousness
What I want to look at is Pāṇini (पाणिनि), for speech and grammar are the source of the Indian tradition itself. Whether one is Shaivite or Vaishnav, Shakta or Tantric, or Buddhist, it is Panini who informs that tradition, and the great thinkers we name as India’s philosophers, Śaṅkara, Mādhava, even Vivekananda, were fundamentally linguists. So I have set out five masters of speech to take up in turn: Panini, who is the text; Patañjali (पतञ्जलि), his first great commentator; Bhartṛhari, who brings meaning and philosophy; Abhinavagupta, who universalizes it; and last the moderns, who in our own century have come back to Panini. Tonight is Panini.
Panini lived perhaps twenty-five hundred years ago; the academics place him around five hundred BC, though in the tradition I have heard him set as far back as fifteen hundred. He lived in what is now the Peshawar region, near the great learning-city of Takshila, in the Indus valley, an immense meeting place of east and west where the subcontinent first touched the Persians and the Greeks. There is even a word in his Aṣṭādhyāyī (अष्टाध्यायी), Yavana, taken to mean the Greek, from which, by the rules of the syllables, we can derive Ionia. His brother was Piṅgala, a mathematician, and in Piṅgala’s text of the same period stands the first written mention of the numeral zero, and the first of the numbers we now call Fibonacci’s. The genius of this family covered speech, mathematics, and geometry, which they considered one discipline.
When I first began Sanskrit I assumed it would be a language like German or Spanish or Russian, and very quickly I found I was not studying a language at all but a system, almost a system of logic. This is precisely what the modern West has concluded about the Aṣṭādhyāyī: that it is among the most sophisticated systems of logic ever devised, which is why Fritz Staal called Panini the Indian Euclid. The Aṣṭādhyāyī holds four things. First the phonetics, the fourteen short Māheśvara Sūtras (माहेश्वर सूत्र) that hold within them the fifty syllables of the language, the same fourteen that sound from Shiva’s drum. Then the rules, some three thousand nine hundred and fifty-nine of them, by which those syllables are combined and changed and joined to represent the whole world. Then the roots, the nominal and the more important verbal, from which words are generated. Out of fourteen lines, recited in ninety seconds, Panini generates a language without end.
The power of it lies in two devices. The first is the pratyāhāra, which, in modern translations, is taken for the withdrawal of the senses, but in the grammar is something else: a way of naming a whole set of syllables by its first sound and its last. The grand pratyāhāra is ahaṃ (अहम्), which seems to mean only I, the first person singular; yet a (अ) joins to ha (ह), the first of all syllables to the last, closed by the nasal m (ं), so that ahaṃ holds the beginning, the end, and everything between, which is to say the whole universe. The second device is that Panini sets one rule inside another, as one might place two mirrors face to face and watch the image repeat toward infinity. This is recursivity, and it is what lets a finite set of rules generate without end. The mathematicians found their way to it slowly, through Saussure and Frege, until in the nineteen-forties Emil Post took Panini’s null indicator-syllables and built from them his recursive theory, and in 1959 Backus and Naur made of it the form on which the computer languages still rest, a form some now propose to call the Panini–Backus Machine. Panini prescribes nothing. He describes the actual mechanism by which language becomes the world out of consciousness, and that description is at the same time an application, almost a program in itself.
Name makes form, nāma-rūpa (नामरूप), for without the name there is no form, and the name is speech. This system runs beneath everything that follows Panini, and you cannot escape it; when you come to Abhinavagupta and the Kashmiri Shaivites, the magic they teach and the sādhana they practice are referential to Panini, to his syllables and rules and roots. I find a curious thing in all of it. Panini is, to my mind, the single most influential person in the intellectual and spiritual culture of India, the one who disciplined the Vedic ritual and gave the descriptive rules of speech that everyone in the tradition has observed ever since. And yet, search for Rishi Panini and you will hardly find him. How many had even heard his name before I began to speak of him?
