Ardor (20 page)

To appreciate the power peculiar to the mind, one has to go back to a most mysterious state, that in which “there was no unmanifest (
asat
) and there was no manifest (
sat
).” The same words are found in a passage of the
Ś
atapatha Br
ā
hma
ṇ
a
with the addition of an
iva
, “so to speak,” which increases the uncertainty and mystery. And with a clarification from which everything else follows: “At that time there was only this mind (
manas
).” What then is mind? Of all that exists, it is the only element that already existed before there were the manifest and the unmanifest. A sort of shell in which everything else
is
, or
is not.
Mind is the only element
from which there is no way out.
Whatever happens or has happened, mind was already there. Mind is the air in which consciousness breathes. So consciousness was there before the existence of something that could have consciousness. The guardians come before what they must guard. The
ṛṣ
is
were there before the world.

The fact that
manas
was there before everything became separated between manifest and unmanifest gives the mind an ontological privilege over every other element. The world may even be infinite, but it will not succeed in canceling out the entity that has always watched over it. There again, the picture of a cosmos totally devoid of consciousness is something that many assume but no one has ever succeeded in portraying. And yet that would be the most radical positivist view: wasn’t the mind supposed to be an
epiphenomenon
? If consciousness has to be something that belongs only to the
higher functions
(as they used to be called), what happened before those functions were formed? A sort of unsullied naturalness must have existed. But natural in relation to what? And what if consciousness is something that
emerges
at some point, like birds and insects, as evolutionism—that sturdy branch sprouting from the tree of positivism—would have it? What then would earlier history have been? A long story of massacres between automatons, assuming we can be sure that automatons have no consciousness.

There again, the fact of mind being present even before the separation between manifest and unmanifest instills a peculiar weakness in it. And the same would be true for the other hypothesis, that the mind is indeed born from the unmanifest: “That unmanifest, which was alone, then became mind, saying: I want to be.” It is true that others would never have given it such preeminence, since
manas
is nevertheless the first being to be emitted from nonexistence, but at the same time its proximity to the beginning still makes the mind doubt its own existence. On the one hand,
manas
fears its own insubstantiality, its return into
asat
; on the other, the mind is tempted to see everything as an hallucination, since everything actually sprang forth from mind. This insuperable uncertainty, the anxiety peculiar to mind, was transmitted to Praj
ā
pati, the god closest to the mind, the only one of whom it is said that he
is
the mind: “Praj
ā
pati is, so to speak, mind”; “mind is Praj
ā
pati.”

The world can function without any reference to mind, in the same way that the gods will carry on with their tangled exploits without needing to refer to Praj
ā
pati. It once happened that Praj
ā
pati himself missed his turn while he was dividing up the portions of the sacrifice among the gods. He was the first to behave as if he himself didn’t count. The mind, in fact, can easily convince itself that it doesn’t exist. Born before existence, it is continually tempted to consider itself nonexistent. And in a way its existence is never complete, as it is always mixed up with
something that was there before anything else.
That is enough to place it in doubt.

*   *   *

Manas
ā
, “mentally,” “with the mind,” is a word that appears 116 times in the
Ṛ
gveda.
There is nothing similar in the founding text of any other ancient civilization. It is as though the Vedic people had developed a peculiar lucidity and an obsession toward that phenomenon they called
manas
, “mind,” which imposed itself on them as something evident, with a force unknown elsewhere.

*   *   *

The first couple, from which all other couples are descended, could only have been formed by Mind and Speech, V
ā
c (the Latin
vox
). Mind is Praj
ā
pati—and the first oblation goes in fact to him; Speech is the gods. So the second oblation goes to Indra, king of the gods. These two powers belong to two different levels of being, but to demonstrate their effectiveness they have to unite,
to be yoked together
, with appropriate devices. By themselves, Mind and Speech are powerless—or at least insufficient to transport the offering to the gods. The horse of the mind must allow itself to be harnessed with speech, with meter: otherwise it will be lost.

But how will the action of the two powers be perceived, moment by moment, in the ritual? “When this is performed in a murmur, mind transports the sacrifice to the gods and, when this is performed aloud, speech transports the sacrifice to the gods.” It will therefore be in the ceaseless alternation between murmuring (or silence) and clear, distinct speech that we may perceive the combined action of Mind and Speech, like a perpetual oscillation between two levels, both present if what we do is to be effective.

Yet it is not enough to establish what are the two powers that can alone bear the oblation to the gods. The ritualists loved detail and lists of equivalents. They were not content to establish a polarity, as Western metaphysicians would one day do. So where do we begin? With ladles and spoons.
Manas
, the male element (a slight strain on linguistic interpretation is needed in this speculation, since
manas
is neutral), is equivalent to the “ladle,”
sruva
(masculine noun), and with it carries out “the libation that is the root of the sacrifice”; whereas
v
ā
c
, the female element, is equivalent to the spoon with a spout,
sruc
(a feminine noun), and with it offers “the libation that is the head of the sacrifice.” Silence also belongs to mind, since “undefined is the mind and undefined is that which takes place in silence.” Mind is equivalent to the sitting position, speech to the standing position.

The most difficult point is the search for a balance between Mind and Speech. These two beings are not of equal power. Mind is “far more unlimited.” When, together, they become the yoke for the horse of the oblation, the imbalance is apparent. The yoke leans to the heavier part, that of the mind. So it will not be effective, and will skew the movement. So a supplementary plank must be inserted on the side of speech, to balance the weight. This supplementary plank is a sublime metaphysical device—and the oblation succeeds in reaching the gods only thanks to it. The reason for it helps us to understand why speech is never complete, but always flawed or made up of other factors, compromised by its flimsiness—or, in any case, its lack of weight.

*   *   *

Relations between Mind and Speech were always difficult and fraught. They sometimes clashed like two warriors—or two lovers. Each wished to do better than the other. “Mind said: ‘I am surely better than you, for you say nothing that I don’t understand; and since you imitate what I have done and follow in my wake, I am surely better than you.’

“Speech said: ‘I am surely better than you, for I communicate what you know, I make it understood.’

“They appealed to Praj
ā
pati for him to decide. He decided in favor of Mind and said [to Speech]: ‘Mind is indeed better than you, for you imitate what Mind has done and you follow in his wake’; and in truth he who imitates what his better has done and follows in his wake is inferior.

“Then Speech, having been contradicted, was upset and miscarried. She, Speech, then said to Praj
ā
pati: ‘May I never be your oblation-bearer, I who have been rejected by you.’ So whatever thing is celebrated in the sacrifice for Praj
ā
pati, is celebrated quietly; for Speech was no longer the oblation-bearer for Praj
ā
pati.”

The dispute between Mind and Speech over supremacy is reminiscent of what would happen in Greece between the spoken and written word. And perhaps in this sliding of levels lies an insuperable difference between Greece and India: in Greece, Speech, Logos, takes the place held in India by Mind, Manas. Otherwise, the points of dispute are the same. What in India is accused of being secondary, imitative, and derivative (Speech) in Greece becomes the force that directs the same accusations against the written word. In Greece, all that happens takes place within speech. In India, it originates in something that
precedes
speech: Mind. In the same way that the Devas gradually forgot Praj
ā
pati, though only after a long period when they sought his help, particularly when they had to fight their elder brothers, the Asuras, so too the Olympians regarded themselves from the very beginning as the ultimate reality, relegating the exploits of Cronos and his “twisted mind” to the dark and cruel history of their beginnings, even though he had given his measures and order to the cosmos.

*   *   *

The wars between the Devas and the Asuras were fought in many different ways and ended in many different ways, though the outcome was always the same—with the Devas victorious. But before that happened, there was a constant series of setbacks and reversals. The decisive moment came when the gods took refuge in Mind and the Asuras in Speech.

Mind meant sacrifice. The nature of Mind was such as to make it correspond with sacrifice and the sky. This is told in the story explaining why the sacrificer should tie the horn of a black antelope to his garment: “He then ties a black antelope horn to the edge of his garment. Now the Devas and the Asuras, each created by Praj
ā
pati, received their father’s inheritance: the Devas took Mind and the Asuras Speech. So the Devas took the sacrifice and the Asuras speech. The Devas took the yonder sky and the Asuras this earth.”

And so it happened that the war between the Devas and the Asuras was transformed into the story of the relations between a male being, Yajña, Sacri
fi
ce, and a female being, V
ā
c, Speech, herald of the Asuras. Here the enemy lines and the clash of arms fade away. The stage was cleared—ready for playing out the first comedy of love. The Devas peered out from the wings. They were no longer warriors but prompters, whispering from the sides. As soon as they saw V
ā
c’s radiance, they thought all they had to do to defeat the Asuras was to abduct her. So imperious must have been the power emanating from Speech. It is true not only, as Herodotus wrote, that the abduction of a woman lies at the origin of every war, but also that the final conquest of a certain woman marks the end of war. So the Devas began to whisper to Yajña, telling him how to seduce V
ā
c. What resulted would establish the traditional rules of courtship between men and women, like a code of manners that would remain basically unchanged for centuries:

“The Devas said to Yajña, Sacri
fi
ce: ‘This V
ā
c, Speech, is a woman: make a sign to her and she will surely invite you to come to her.’ Or perhaps he himself thought: ‘This V
ā
c is a woman: I’ll make a sign to her and she will surely invite me to come to her.’ So he made a sign to her. But she at first rejected him, from a distance: for a woman, when a man makes a sign to her, at first rejects him, from a distance. He said: ‘She has rejected me, from a distance.’

“They said: ‘Just make a sign to her, sir, and she will surely invite you to come to her.’ He made a sign to her; but she answered him, so to speak, only by shaking her head: for a woman, when a man makes a sign to her, answers, so to speak, only by shaking her head. He said: ‘She has answered me only by shaking her head.’

“They said: ‘Just make a sign to her, sir, and she will invite you to come to her.’ He made a sign to her, she invited him to come to her. For a woman in the end invites the man to come to her. He said: ‘She has in fact invited me.’

“The Devas reflected: ‘This V
ā
c, being a woman, we had better be careful she doesn’t seduce him. Say to her: “Come here to where I am” and then tell us whether she has come to you.’ Then she went to where he was. For a woman goes to a man who lives in a fine house. He told of how she had come to him, saying: ‘She has in fact come.’”

The story couldn’t be more perfect than it is and is heavily spiced with Vedic irony—an irony that has largely gone unnoticed over the centuries, in India as well as the West—for example, where it says: “For a woman goes to a man who lives in a fine house.” With their taste for both basic and systematic detail, the Vedic ritualists managed to recount the comedy of seduction in all its classic phases, as if it were a rite—the kind of comedy that, from the Greek poets up to the story of Don Giovanni, has been represented only in sharp, hot morsels, without worrying about reconstructing the sequence in all its stages, as happens here. This amorous approach is a crucial step in a cosmic game—and at the same time is the model for what will take place over and over again in narrow lanes, public squares, drawing rooms, bars, and cafés throughout the world.