Ardor (23 page)

One might think that
vijñ
ā
na
is the last link in Sanatkum
ā
ra’s chain. But it is not. With a sudden change of tack it continues: “Strength (
bala
) is more than discernment. One man alone, with his strength, can make a hundred sages tremble.” The words here catch us by surprise and turn the game upside down. Just when we thought we were following an
itinerarium mentis
, we find the reappearance of simple strength. Strength as a simple physical quality. But it is enough. And straightaway, here opens up another series of powers that go further. There is no more mention of mind. Now it is “food,”
anna
; waters; “incandescent energy,”
tejas
; space. Having reached space, we might begin to lose track. What would there be beyond space? Another surprise: memory. With another unexpected move, he goes back into the mind. And beyond? Hope. And, stronger than hope,
pr
āṇ
a
, the “breath,” which here means life itself. Having reached life, finally there is a pause. And the teacher says to his pupil: “He who sees this, he who knows this, that person is an
ativ
ā
din.
” An
ativ
ā
din
is someone far beyond (
ati
), who cannot be reached with words.

Have we arrived at the end of the chain? No. Another more intricately linked chain begins. As if to strip the pupil of the illusion of having found an answer. The teacher continues: “The only one who wins with the word is he who wins with truth.” What follows is a further recursive procedure. Truth this time is surpassed by the discernment of thought (
manas
, which finally reappears). Thought surpassed by faith in the effectiveness of the rites,
ś
raddh
ā
.
Faith by perfect practice. This is surpassed by sacrifice. Sacrifice by joy. Here once again, a surprise: “Only when you feel joy do you sacrifice. You must not sacrifice when you are prey to suffering. Sacrifice only when you feel joy. But you have to know joy.” By the time we have become accustomed to the succession of powers and there is still no end in sight, we suddenly find ourselves taken back to the starting point: the moment when the student N
ā
rada appeared before the teacher and said: “I, sir, am suffering.” Now the opposite power finally appears: “joy,”
sukha.
A word very close in sound to
ś
oka
, “suffering.” The path has to be found from one to the other. The teacher continues, unflinchingly: “Joy is fullness. There is no joy in what is limited.” But where is that fullness, the pupil wants to know. “It is below, it is above, it is to the west, it is to the east, it is to the south, it is to the north, it is all of this.” Here once again we feel close to a final word. And it is exactly here that the sharpest psychological arrow strikes. The teacher continues. “But the same can be said of egoity [
aha
ṃ
k
ā
ra
, the word that from now on will be used to describe what Western psychology calls “ego”]: the I is below, it is above, it is to the west, it is to the east, it is to the south, it is to the north, the I is all of this.” Once again, an irony: the imaginary supremacy of the I is the strongest obstacle to perception, simply because it is what most resembles the true final word:
ā
tman
, Self, which other masters had pointed out to N
ā
rada, as if it were the way out of suffering. And the teacher, first of all, describes
ā
tman
in the same terms used for the I, placing it in all directions of space. But, as had already happened once with
v
ā
c
, “speech,” in relation to nouns, something more can also be said about
ā
tman.
And it will be the decisive phrase: “He who sees like this, who thinks like this, who knows like this, who loves
ā
tman
, who plays with
ā
tman
, who copulates with
ā
tman
, whose happiness is in
ā
tman
, that man is supreme, he can have all he desires in all worlds.” Now the moment has come in which the chain could be followed in reverse. From life, power by power, down to the nouns, since “all of this follows from
ā
tman.
”

Two verses follow. The first seems to be a response to the Buddha in advance, since it names the three evils that appeared to him immediately before leaving his father’s house (substituting all-encompassing “pain,”
du
ḥ
kha
—another key Buddhist word—for old age): “He who sees, does not see death, nor illness, nor pain. He who sees, sees all, he attains everything everywhere.” The second verse is a numerical riddle, like those often found in the
Ṛ
gveda.
Finally it says that, with this chain of arguments, the master Sanatkum
ā
ra taught N
ā
rada to “cross the darkness.” And the word
mok
ṣ
a
, “release,” rings out. There is no mention of any response from N
ā
rada: he was at last practicing silence.

*   *   *

Sanatkum
ā
ra’s teachings to N
ā
rada on
ā
tman
, in the
Ch
ā
ndogya Upani
ṣ
ad
, is a recursive progression toward an indefinite point,
ā
tman
, which, once discovered, is found to encapsulate all preceding powers. The progression moves constantly forward, but there are crucial transitions: above all the transition from discursiveness to nondiscursiveness, at the point where “speech,”
v
ā
c
, becomes subordinate to “mind,”
manas.
Then the beginning of a hierarchical separation of the mind (
manas
,
citta
,
dhy
ā
na
,
vijñ
ā
na
), which seems to trace a preliminary outline of what will for centuries be the teachings of Buddhism. Finally the rejection of a linear progression, which instead turns out to be circular.
Ā
tman
is not reached from the peak of the mind (
vijñ
ā
na
), but from there we drop down into the undifferentiated outside world, into simple “strength,”
bala
, then returning into the mind with another sudden leap: the passage from “space,”
ā
k
āś
a
, to “memory,”
smara.
But the most delicate and risky transition comes toward the end, the penultimate step, when Sanatkum
ā
ra ventures to infer “fullness,”
bh
ū
man
, from “joy,”
sukha
: “Joy is fullness.”
Bh
ū
man
is above all a cosmic power. It is limitless. And from this limitlessness, which is both mental and cosmic, Sanatkum
ā
ra could hazard the final step and thrust the arrow of his thought into
ā
tman.
But here the final obstacle emerges: the I,
aham.
Because all the characteristics of limitless expansion which belong to “fullness” also belong to the I. Which is central to every world, a self-appointed sovereign, an unlimitable domain. And, above all, it is the most insidious imitation of Self. The I superimposes itself so perfectly on Self that it can conceal it. This, in fact, is what happened during the course of Western philosophy: it never worried about giving a name to the Self, but always chose the I as the point of observation, even if it was only called that much later on, with Kant. Before him, it was the unquestionable subject, the first person of Descartes’s
Cogito.
But for Sanatkum
ā
ra, the I is the most daunting obstacle, that which can forever deny access to the Self. If the search had not continued, it might have been supposed that it had reached its completion with the I. But how is the final step taken? Here, once again, we see Sanatkum
ā
ra’s subtlety. It is not a question of driving away, rejecting the I. That would be pointless—and contrary to the physiology of the psyche. It is a matter of following its movements and then adding others to it, which the I could not pretend to. Only if a new entity appears, which is the Self,
ā
tman
, can we speak of “he who loves the Self,” “whose happiness is in the Self.” This new being will no longer be the I, with its illusory supremacy, because its supremacy has been transferred to the Self, with which each individual plays and interacts. The point of arrival is a dual subject who is irreducible, unbalanced (the Self is infinite, the individual is any being whatsoever in this world), intermittent (the perception of the dual subject is not something there right from the start, but something to achieve, the hardest yet most efficacious achievement). This is why the master’s teaching is sought, this is why Sanatkum
ā
ra offered to tell N
ā
rada “what goes beyond this.”

*   *   *

At the age of twenty-four, after twelve years of study,
Ś
vetaketu went back to his father, the teacher Udd
ā
laka
Ā
ru
ṇ
i. He had studied all the Vedas, was “conceited, proud of his knowledge, arrogant.” Much like N
ā
rada. Now he had to go
beyond
, guided by his father. The path is different each time. The introduction chosen by Udd
ā
laka
Ā
ru
ṇ
i was extremely fast. It was just to let his son know that all he had learned was probably not of greatest importance. Then suddenly Udd
ā
laka
Ā
ru
ṇ
i began to tell how the world was made, almost as if his son had never heard anything about it: “In the beginning, my child, there was nothing but being, one without a second. Some say: In the beginning, there was nothing but nonbeing, one without a second.” Similar words would be heard in Ionian Greece or at Elea. He continues by saying that this being “thought.” The being who thinks here is the one whom the Br
ā
hma
ṇ
as called Praj
ā
pati. For Udd
ā
laka
Ā
ru
ṇ
i it was enough to call him
sat
, the existent one. And those which were generated from him, from it, did not have the names of gods, but of elements: it was
tejas
, incandescent energy, and not Agni, who was a son; it was
ā
pas
, the waters, and not V
ā
c, who was a daughter; lastly
anna
, food. Compared with the Br
ā
hma
ṇ
as, everything became one step more abstract, though the doctrine remained identical.

Udd
ā
laka
Ā
ru
ṇ
i, like Sanatkum
ā
ra, would also resort to recursive progressions. But with impatience. And at the end he would refer sarcastically to the “grand lords and grand theologians” who gain pleasure from these teachings. His thinking pointed elsewhere, to three words—to introducing the Self,
ā
tman
, and saying immediately: “
Tat tvam asi
,” “This you are.” In its hastiness, Udd
ā
laka
Ā
ru
ṇ
i’s reasoning is not particularly efficacious. On the other hand, the effect of the three final words is wonderful.
Cogito ergo sum
seems a meager, dry fruit in comparison.

The cosmogony that Udd
ā
laka
Ā
ru
ṇ
i concisely described to his son revealed, in its pre-Parmenidean physiognomy, a new, modern conception, quite opposite to the doctrine that
Ś
vetaketu had learned while studying the
Ṛ
gveda.
For it is said there: “In the primordial era of the gods, being was born from nonbeing.” This doctrine is found again in the
Taittir
ī
ya Upani
ṣ
ad
: “In the beginning this [the world] was nonbeing and from it was born being.” And in another passage of the
Ch
ā
ndogya Upani
ṣ
ad
we read: “In the beginning all was nonbeing, this was being. Then it developed, it became an egg.”