They lived without the comfort of crafted images. Not because they didn’t trust them. On the contrary. A mental spring of images bubbled up unceasingly. But there was no need to copy them in stone. Rather they must be channeled by ritual. Bridled with hymns. Made to travel with the hymns, which are chariots. Every gesture unleashed more of them, like shadows. And if you tried to find where they came from, you arrived at something that “burns without wood in the waters.”
They thought so much about sovereignty that they no longer dared to exercise it. Their history was one of progressive abdication. Having consumed its every variation, from the most avid to the most austere, in the heat of their minds, they chose to refrain from dominion, and let the first invaders seize it from them. They would put up with anything, so long as they could think. And, if possible, think what the ancients, what the ṛṣis had thought before them.
They were more interested in grammar than in glory. Their inquiries reached their supreme expression in Pānini’s treatise, a generative grammar, as two thousand, four hundred years later those who were convinced they had invented generative grammar were bound to recognize. Pānini’s construction was so perfect it eclipsed the numerous others that had come before it. In four thousand aphorisms, or sūtras, it analyzed the phonology and morphology of Sanskrit, that language “through which the light passes.”
Between the conquering Āryas and the Buddha: a thousand years and not a single object. Not a stone, not a seal, not a city wall. Wood: burned, rotted, decayed. Yet the texts speak of paintings and jewels. Immensely complex metrics — and the void. One thousand and twenty-eight hymns collected in the Ṛg Veda. Not a trace of a dwelling. Rites described in the most meticulous detail. Not a single ritual object that has survived. Those who glorified the leftover left nothing over themselves, except what was filtered through the word. A highly articulated language, fine-wrought as a palace. But no palace remains. Had the texts been lost, the India of the Āryas, the India of the Vedas, might never have been. Then, finally, in the reliefs of Bhārhut and Sāñcī, one touches stone. And already it is crowded. Genies, dancers, tradesmen, that nameless crowd so useful for filling the void. But a void is ever present: protected by a parasol, where the Buddha was.
Then Atri spoke again: “Just as some claim that every true philosopher thinks but one thought, the same can be said of a civilization: from the beginning the Āryas thought, and India has ever continued to think, the thought that dazzled us ṛṣis: the simple fact of being conscious. There is not a shape, not an event, not an individual in its history that cannot, in a certain number of steps, be taken back to that thought, just as Yājñavalkya demonstrated that the three thousand, three hundred and six gods could all be taken back to a single word: brahman. And what is brahman? That, tyád.
“Thus far, everything is extremely clear. But it becomes less so when some of you, drawing on your lexical resources, seek to define that void to which everything leads back. There are those who speak of ‘absolute,’ as if the absolute were something self-evident. That may be so, but the term is hardly congenial. At the opposite extreme, there are those who speak of an ‘enigmatic formula,’ as if the whole cosmos could be reduced to a linguistic trick. Back and forth between these two extremes, other definitions abound. All lofty in tone. For scholars are convinced that something solemn, something aulic must connect with that word, in the absence of any other specific fact. Something elevated anyway. Whereas we find the brahman at every level of life, high or low. This much we know: that if one seeks to define almost everything — or rather: everything except a single point — that point must remain undefined. As in geometry, one cannot do without an axiom. And an axiom is not defined. An axiom is declared. Now, there is a form of declaration that does not come through words. There is something self-evident that is comparable with what happens in our minds when we read a word. What does happen? Something that can hardly be identified with that black mark on a piece of paper, nor yet with any of its meanings as given in a dictionary — which after all would be just more black marks. Yet something does happen. And it’s something that changes every time we read that word. How can we, then, find a definition for something that is ever-changing and what’s more has no boundaries? Where does it end, for example, within our minds, that word ‘black’ we just read? At what point can we claim that we are no longer subject to the reverberation of that word ‘black’? That reading, which took but an instant, may have infiltrated all the other words, all the other silent waves that dwell within us. Perhaps we will never be able to disentangle it again. It’s as if it had been lost in foreign territory. But what is this land one speaks of as unknown, yet locked away within us? Indeed, it might just as well be outside us, given that we shall never set foot there. We can describe it in any number of ways — and all. once again, will confer a certain coloring, as if we were eager to grant the place a meaning even before knowing whether it has a meaning or not. For the territory where meanings arise and lie hidden might well turn out to be meaningless. A notion that frightens and embarrasses us all, but that we ought to cherish, because — down there where definitions cannot hold — everything is, above all else, uncertain. Indeed, it’s salutary that it should be perceived as such. But let’s try to see what happens when we are obliged to recognize (and not to define) the existence of that. When does this happen? When we wake up. Awakening: it is the only physiological phenomenon that has to do with that. I will add but one further remark: try to think of a second awakening: of an awakening that happens within our being awake, that is not simply added to that wakefulness but multiplies it, by a quantity n, whose value we shall never be able to establish. I don’t know if that’s how it was for you. But such, for us. was thought. Such is thought.”
As if continuing where Atri had left off, Vasiṣṭha said: “The neutral divine, brahman, comes before the gods. ‘In the beginning brahman alone existed.’ The gods, ‘as they gradually woke up to it, became it.’ This is the decisive step: awakening. Something invisible that happens within thought. Something that adds a new quality to thought: consciousness. To become aware that one is thinking: this is to enter into brahman. The gods entered there, the ṛṣis likewise, and finally men too. ‘He who knows thus,’ ya evaṃ veda, the ever-repeated formula that divides men into those who know and those who don’t, refers to this knowledge. The gods would like to banish ‘he who knows thus’ from that state, but ‘they cannot prevent it.’ And why is it that the gods don’t invite man to enter into brahman, why do they try rather, and with treacherous insistence, to lead him astray? Because without that knowledge man is no more than a ‘herding beast’ to the gods. And herds of men are useful to the gods, in just the way that herds of beasts are useful to men. They constitute wealth. ‘That an animal be stolen is regrettable; but how much more regrettable if a large number of animals be stolen. Hence it is irritating for the gods that men should know this.’ Where ‘this’ means brahman. Thus began and thus goes on the taciturn hostility between gods and men.”