Ka

VIII

The sabhā is a hall: a place for meetings, royal audiences, games. Something happens there, something is made manifest: it is the place of initiation. In the beginning, it was a place where dice was played, where a cow was killed. In the beginning is always something that later gets hidden. The sabhā was already there, we discover, before the world — what we call “the world”—began. It was in the middle of the palace — subterranean, invisible, watery, celestial — of Varuṇa. And it was still there at the end, when India was invaded by the Islamic swarms. It stood in the middle of the palaces of the Mughal princes. It was in a sabhā that the Pāṇḍavas and the Kauravas, cousins and enemies, tossed dice to decide their destinies.

There are two indispensable elements in any sabhā: doors and columns. Everything else is optional. Lots of doors, lots of columns. Varuṇa’s palace has a thousand columns and a hundred doors. And this place that belonged first and foremost to the dead became the model for every other sabhā. It is to this that the rule which establishes that a sabhā must be erected toward the south, in the direction of the dead, discreetly alludes.

Varuṇa had invited the more eminent ṛṣis to his sabhā together with a number of foreigners and theologians. Welcoming them, he said: “The time of cruel disputes about enigmas, the time of the brahmodyas that ended with someone getting his head broken or cut off, is over. Maybe it’s to do with the aeon coming to an end, I don’t know, but it’s getting hard to find anyone who realizes that when you think you risk losing your head. All the same, we’re still responsible for the task of keeping thoughts moving and turning. More and more things are tending to unfold in the form of intertwining monologues. I’d be the last to oppose this new style. I just wanted my sabhā to host some travelers from the far West. Hybridization is de rigueur these days.”

When you went into the sabhā, the columns generated a sense of vertigo, as though you were in a geometric forest, or an alcove walled with mirrors. It must have been the same in the telestērion in Eleusis: the candidate for initiation came in and couldn’t understand the purpose of this parallelepiped of air measured out by columns standing at the same distance from each other in every direction. Then, in the huge hall, something would be moving. Shadows between the columns. They were the Cows, at once silent and docile. They wandered about as though in a field. A dull clatter of hooves on stone flags. But the Cows were also the Dawns. They filed by like heavily made-up dancers in a hurry to get onstage. And they were Words too. Whispered syllables. Lifting your eyes between the columns, you would suddenly see a golden swing. Everything else was doors and columns. Something was about to happen. But where was the center? Everywhere seemed central, each point protected by columns equally innumerable. Would the prodigy appear? They called it “the sun in the rock.” It was the vision that Varuṇa granted to Vasiṣṭha, born of the seed he had squirted in the air: the vision that brings clairvoyance, that made Vasiṣṭha a ṛṣi.

Varuṇa, the god hidden in the place of the ṛta, in the waters that are Truth and Order, never confided in men. Nor in the ṛṣis either. Everybody, every second of the day, felt the eyes of his spies upon them. And every second of the day they feared the bíte of Varuṇa’s nooses tightening around them. They all knew that at least one of those cords, whether long or short, thick or thin, was ever wound around them: the noose that keeps everyone tied to the yūpa, the pole from which the paśus, the domestic animals, the herds (pecus) destined for sacrifice, can never move too far away. Men are counted among the paśus.

But Varuṇa did strike up a friendship with one of the ṛṣis, a friendship that later went sour: with Vasiṣṭha. As a result, the other ṛṣis treated Vasiṣṭha with a respect that was mixed with envy and fear, tacitly recognizing him as superior to themselves, because he had knowledge that had been granted to him alone. People spoke of Varuṇa and Vasiṣṭha as having made a mysterious voyage together on the sea. They sailed across the ocean. A ship appeared and disappeared amid the cresting waves. With no sailors, no helmsman, no weight. Two motionless figures trod the deck and gazed at each other. The taciturn Varuṇa chose this watery waste to reveal secrets no one else ever heard.

Vasiṣṭha also claimed to have sat on the gold-and-silver swing that hangs from the sky. As if he were an Apsaras. Was he to be believed? After all Vasiṣṭha was in some way related to the first of the Apsaras, Urvaśī.

They were celebrating a soma ceremony. Solemn, already intoxicated, the gods stood in their ranks. Then Urvaśī crossed the sacrificial clearing. The gods looked up, some thrilled, some obtuse. They had never seen such beauty, nor such a bold, easy manner, that paid them no attention. The Apsaras didn’t exist as yet. But the gods sensed that with Urvaśī a new kind of being had made its appearance. A kind they would always be chasing after. Urvaśī crossed the clearing with a swift, light step, her feet barely showing under a long robe fastened tight beneath the breast. But immediately her presence filled the entire space. As she passed. Mitra and Varuṇa simultaneously squirted off their seed. It fell into a large bowl, standing among the liturgical accessories. It was from that bowl that Vasiṣṭha together with Agastya, was born. That’s why people called him the Kumbhayoni, “He-whose-womb-was-a-jar.” He grew up feeling he was the child of Varuṇa and Urvaśī. They said he was “born from the mind of Urvaśī”—and not just from the seed of Varuṇa and Mitra.

Perhaps this is why Vasiṣṭha always lived in the greatest intimacy with Urvaśī, even if he never so much as touched her body. As for Varuṇa, being his son is a dangerous business. Often Varuṇa will generate in order to kill. Vasiṣṭha knew that, but he was proud of it too. He would always remember the time he had been alone with Varuṇa in the midst of the ocean. Once, at night, he entered his father’s palace by one of its hundred doors. He ran along everidentical corridors, as though in a mirror. He knew that no living creature had ever set foot here. He wasn’t looking for anything. He just wanted to be able to say: “I’ve been in my father’s house.” But while he ran he felt the terror of the cattle rustler upon him; his throat was dry. And when the cord of a snare tugged at his ankle, he was brought down like a cattle rustler. He didn’t even see his father. He found himself outside, propped against a wall like a bloated, worn-out goatskin, an old man suffering from dropsy. His father’s waters again. Everybody hurried past on the road to the market, the way one does hurry past the disfigured and useless, while his damp and flabby lips still whispered the words of ciphered hymns.

Viśvāmitra, Jamadagni, Bharadvāja, Gotama, Atri, Vasiṣṭha, Kaśyapa: who were they? The first ṛṣis, the Saptarṣis, the Seven Wise Ones crouched on the seven stars of the Great Bear, the Progenitors, sons born-of-the-mind of Brahmā. Or again, in another aeon, those who composed the body of Prajāpati, which preceded Brahmā. The ṛṣis didn’t write the Vedas, they saw them. Which is why they were sometimes called the “Vedic seers.” To Viśvāmitra tradition ascribes many hymns of the third and fourth manḍala of the Ṛg Veda; to Vasiṣṭha, Ṛg Veda 7.2 and other hymns of the seventh maṇḍala; to Bharadvāja, hymns 6, 17, 18, 22, and 30 of the sixth maṇḍala. Jamadagni is said to have seen hymn 10.128 while arguing with Vasiṣṭha. The virāj meter is also ascribed to him.

The ṛṣis were sometimes called vipras, a word that suggests vibration, throbbing, trembling. Motionless, shut up in the cage of the mind, they vibrated. They fed tapas within themselves. This was their only conceivable activity. When they sacrificed, around their sacrificial pole, around the strangled victim, around their gestures, their oblations, around the flame, a burning canopy would form, separate from the world. And they would stay under that canopy a long time, days perhaps, perhaps weeks — then later it moved inside them when they were on their own. But can one speak of before or after? The sacrificial fire lights up because the heat of tapas is already there — and the heat of tapas grows because the sacrificial fire is already there. Here, as sometimes happens between gods, generation is reciprocal.

The word ṛṣi indicates an effort, a friction that unleashes heat. And what is the matter that one acts upon in immobility and that produces at once both light and heat? The mind. One operates on the mind with the mind. What else is there, after all? The world, nature, is a rare occurrence, a variation of the mind. So thought the Saptarṣis, born-of-the-mind of Brahmā. They had never dwelled in a womb, they didn’t know what it meant to be born from a woman’s belly. To live, for them, meant to ply the mind, the same smooth way they plied the skies back and forth between earthly valleys and the pinpoints of the Great Bear.

The Vedic hymns are not of human origin; they are apauruṣeya, “not from man,” not attributable to anyone who might have composed them. Or, alternatively — and this is the doctrine the Sāmkhya later espoused — there was a person behind them: the primordial Puruṣa. But even he didn’t compose them. The hymns emanated from him like exhaled breath.

Sitting immersed in tapas, the ṛṣis saw the hymns. Syllable by syllable, they appeared, then faded. At first, the hymns were disseminated everywhere, like plants. Much later, at the dawning of a new age that would no longer want hymns but stories, someone split them up into groups and collected them. Ṛg Veda Saṃhitā, “Collection of the Knowledge Made of Hymns”: such is the title under which they have come down to us. Each of the central books, from the second to the seventh, associated with a ṛṣi: Gṛtsamada, Viśvāmitra, Gotama, Atri, Bharadvāja, Vasiṣṭha. To them, or to other ṛṣis descended from them. That’s why they are called the “family books.” It was Vyāsa who arranged them in this way. He gave his life to this work of devotion and philology before embarking on the Mahābhārata, which he dictated to Gaṇeśa, who crouched in a corner, with his soft, young man’s arms and wrinkly elephant’s head with a broken tusk, like some toy left over from an earlier generation of children.

Atri said: “Our eyes, the eyes of the Saptarṣis, which now flicker from the stars of the Great Bear, were ever wakeful over all that happens. That something merely happens is pointless. But that something happens and a watching eye gathers it into itself is everything. Thus we came before the gods. Thus do we keep our watch after the gods. The gaze came before the scene. The world didn’t exist then. But it didn’t not exist either. It was the mind, if anybody knows what that might be. It was our mind. We seven, already old, yet unique and first among beings, watched each other. We were eyes watching other eyes. There was nothing else to let itself be watched. And we knew: we haven’t the strength, alone, we beings who are entirely mind, to bring into existence, to make existence exist, unless we compose something that goes beyond he who watches. It was time for vision to split away from the seer. We watched each other and said: ‘This way we will never exist. This is not existence. What’s required is for someone to be composed of us.’ Then, in the silence, we began to burn. The mind concentrated on a fire — and we were the substance that that fire consumed. That’s why we were called ṛṣis: because we consumed ourselves: riṣ-. Whom did we want to compose? A person, the Person: Puruṣa. Who was he? An eagle with wings outspread. Two of us squeezed ourselves in above the navel, two below the navel, one was a wing, one the other wing, one the claws. All the flavor of life we had within us we brought together above, in the bird’s head. That Person, that Puruṣa, became the Progenitor, the Father, Prajāpati, became this altar of fire, which we are bound at every moment to construct.”

Kaśyapa said: ‘In what are you experts?’ they asked us. In the sensation of being alive. We are wakeful — or, if you like, we vegetate. Vajra, the lightning flower, the ultimate weapon of the gods, is connected with vegeo, ‘to be wakeful, vigilant,’ from which we have wacker, wach, and wake, ‘awake.’ The lightning is the lightning flash of wakefulness. ‘Vegetation’ and ‘wakefulness’ share the same root. That which every instant implies, which every instant conceals, as the mind’s mill grinds out its images, that was our place, our sabhā where we meet and clash, where we recount our terrestial incursions, without ever having to leave our post between these columns.”

Seen from afar, the ṛṣis looked very like Plato’s Guardians. But it wasn’t a State they were guarding. A State would have been too small, too circumscribed for a gaze such as theirs, bending down from the stars. They watched over the world, or rather the worlds, each linked to the next like vertebrae in a spine. They were wakeful. Throughout their immensely long lives they knew adventure, intrigue, duels, passions, furies, idylls. But such stories were only minute and sporadic blossoms along the unbending branch of their longevity. When the stories came to an end, it looked as though the ṛṣis had disappeared. Whereas in fact they merely returned to their normal state. They were wakeful, and that was all. The worlds’ existence, submerged in and reemerging from the pralaya, from dissolution, could claim some continuity, claim to be the same existence, ever composing, decomposing, recomposing itself, only insofar as its every phase was gathered up in the pupil of the ṛṣis, the cavern where everything echoes and re-echoes.

When there was only the inexistent, asat, the ṛṣis were already there, since “doubtless the ṛṣis were the inexistent.” We don’t know whether they gave birth to the gods or were born of the gods — or both. The texts tell us that it was one and the other. In any event there was one priority, one privilege, the ṛṣis claimed over both men and gods. They and only they had been there, hidden in the nonexistent, before existence existed. And what was there in the nonexistent? Before the object there was an image. A breath before there was flesh to animate. Desire before there was a body. The ṛṣis were the sovereignty of the mind over every other reality. They were consciousness, that unique manifestation that needs nothing but itself. They were the gaze that burns. Already wizened before anything dawned. Thus it was that, despite their immense strength, they immediately appeared as venerable ancients, whetted and honed with exercise.

As the ṛṣis saw it, the secret of existence was implicit in just a few actions common to all: waking, breathing, sleeping, coitus. They saw the metaphysical in the physiological, whereas the first Westerners who wrote commentaries on their hymns imagined them as mainly concerned with clouds and storms.

Masters of the goaded, greased, hard-brushed, well-honed world, the ṛṣis were dazzled by one revelation: the elementary fact of being conscious. There was no need to drink soma or develop techniques or be inspired. The bare fact of being conscious was enough in itself. Everything else was a supplementary hallucination superimposed over the primary hallucination: that of living inside a mind. Beset by nature’s profusion, they shriveled it with a glance. For nothing, in nature, led to the mind. While nature itself might turn out to be but a brief experiment, a mise-enscène of the mind. Wasn’t that how it had been in the beginning, before the gods?

What does the world look like? It’s an upturned cup. What’s it made of? Bone. Looking up we see filaments of light filtering through cracks and scratches on the vault of that old bone: the stars. On the edge of the cup you can see seven figures, silently crouching, wrapped in their cloaks. They’re the Saptarṣis, who keep watch. The twins — Gotama and Bharadvāja, Viśvāmitra and Jamadagni, Vasiṣṭha and Kaśyapa — are arranged in parallel, gazing at each other. Below, where Atri shines, the cup has a narrow spout. What is it that hangs suspended in that upturned cup, that dark and empty hemisphere? The “glory of all forms,” they said. A brain saturated in soma: the mind.

The Saptarṣis stood guard at the seven gates of the fortress: the ears, the nostrils, the eyes, the mouth, which Atri watched over. Each controlled a breath, inside and outside the cup. The world, which imagined it existed alone, reproducing itself like a reflection in so many tiny, upturned cups of bone, became aware that it lived within an immense cup of bone, which yet was cramped, for only beyond it, as one might glimpse through a thousand tiny chinks, lay the realm of light that floods in.

To his foreign guests, Vasiṣṭha said: “You have entered a place where amazement is vain. Everything is normal here. There are fathers who are sons of their sons or sons who are fathers of their fathers and their sisters, who are their lovers and wives too. Here the latter-day priest is also among the first of the gods. Here the monster is an ascetic and the ascetics fight the monsters.”

Nārada was the only one of the ṛṣis who wandered around among the columns. Coming alongside a group, he would whisper something, then move on. Restless, his eyes hinted and winked. He listened long, then couldn’t help butting in: “If we wish to respect the laws of hospitality, we must remember that we ṛṣis are remote indeed from those strangers who have come here, far more than mere geography might suggest. We must remember that they are attached to habits quite different from our own. Of any and every event they want to know when it happened, by which they mean in what year, forgetting to ask in what aeon. They bow down before a word we hardly recognize, ‘history,’ a word that for us exists only in a plural form. At most we might speak of stories. Just as they speak of “water” and we prefer to speak of “waters.” Doubtless, misunderstanding makes life more flavorsome. But allow me to tell you something about those who have long celebrated and meditated upon our words…” He wasn’t able to. For Atri had interrupted, brusquely. Turning his eyes to the silent strangers in the sabhā, he said: “Let us remember our children, your ancestors: those who called themselves the Āryas, the Noble Ones, those whom you call the Indo-Aryans. They stormed down from highland wastes, bleak mountains, they burst forth with their horses and chariots; brandishing torches they set fire to the forests. They looked down from above on the boundless plain and filled it with scars. They killed or enslaved the dark-skinned, noseless, mean, and minute beings they found in their path. But where did their path lead? Toward the sun, toward the place of Indra, yet they never reached that place and the earth stretched on and on, ever flatter, ever more vast before them. They stopped on the banks of a huge river, amazed. Nature’s unceasing hum surrounded them on every side. Perhaps there would be no more people on the other side of the river. Just that hum beginning again, under trees that looked the same — or perhaps were the same, shifted there by magic, as though in a mirror. This happened over and over again, because everything happens over again.

“One day, or a thousand days, they halted their advance. Accustomed to tumult, they realized it was going on within them. But where? Where was that tumult? Things they had burned to ashes rose up again, but a sharp eye could shrivel them once more. The eye was more powerful than fire. And slowly a second eye split off from the first, and gazed at it. Motionless, humming with insects, all was exactly as before. Yet all had changed. Everything was covered in a shiny film. They sensed that within the box of their consciousness a sovereign was observing them. He watched them, but they couldn’t see him. Him, they decided, they would obey.”

Then Gotama said: “For many peoples, things began with a series of kings. For the Greeks it was a series of women. For the Āryas, a series of seers, of ṛṣis. The kings conquered, the women united themselves with a god. And the seers? Motionless, they vibrate within the brahman. From this origin, more elusive and improbable than others, since everyone knows what war is, or coitus, but few know what brahman is, and even less what it might mean to vibrate within it, proceeds the irreducible uniqueness of what was to happen, what did happen, what still happens, in that land that would one day be called India. Here, the further back one goes, the more something that elsewhere emerges only as a final, circumscribed, and explicit result is to be taken as understood, implicit, all-embracing. The Spirit of the World, which Hegel saw on horseback in the streets of Jena, and which even then was no more than a conqueror, was, for the Āryas, a horse’s head that, in the beginning, revealed the doctrine of honey, whose drops still trickle to this day.”

Unique among the ancients, they made themselves known exclusively through their language and their cult. Words and gods. They left nothing else. Nor wished to perhaps. They built no stone temples, no palaces. They left no chronicles of their achievements, made no lists of their possessions, created no images that survived the course of time. Perhaps they felt such things would be a mistake — or in any event unworthy of mention. But the invocation of a divine name, variations of an enigmatic formula, hints at matters celestial, these they never tired of repeating. Right from the word—veda—which would one day be used to describe them, they were devotees, perhaps fanatics of “knowledge.” There had been men who saw knowledge and passed on in “what may be heard” (śruti), hence through words, that consciousness whose origin was “not from man” (apauruṣeya). These men were the ṛṣis, the “seers.” Their dealings with the gods were complex. Sometimes they were superior to the gods (definitely so when it came to knowledge), sometimes they even generated the gods, sometimes it was the intensity of their tapas, the heat that blazed in their minds and could well have damaged even the mansions of heaven, that led them to flee the gods. The ultimate game in the cosmic match, the most subtle and occult of them all, was that played out between gods and ṛṣis, while the manifest game was fought between the Devas and the Asuras, between those gods and antigods who never ceased to confront each other. As for men, they might host “portions,” splinters, fragments of this or that contender, offering a further battleground where their deeds could unfold in new and more complex variations. But did men exist, on their own? Men who did not host within themselves parts of that other world which we are unable to see? Of course they did, but as accidents of nature that blossom and fade without further significance.

Cows were important, indeed vital, to the Āryas, just as they were to the Dinkas along the Nile and to many other tribes of nomadic herdsmen. But it was only among the Āryas that cows became, like the unknown quantity in algebra, an abstract agent that could be applied to everything, transform everything. When they said “the cows,” the Āryas hinted at a secret that was an operation of the mind. The cows were water, coinage, word, woman, dawn. They were the unit of exchange, the lingua franca of existence. The Āryas had the revelation that it is not only the element on which one operates that may be secret but likewise the operation itself. Anyone who does not know this is excluded. He does not know “the secret name of the cows.” Actually, the cows have twenty-one secret names. The uninitiated would hear the Āryas pronouncing them and imagine they were raving in some obsession. In fact they were experimenting with speech raised to a higher power, an abstraction hitherto unknown that now entirely reshuffled the pack of appearances. Before each word, they were seized by panic in the face of overwhelming allusiveness, a devastating expansion of meanings. But at the same time they were enchanted when the scattered elements of the world came together like a herd within the receptacle of consciousness, which vibrated as it named, evoked, invoked. Thus did the Vedie hymns make themselves manifest.

No artifacts have come down to us from the Vedic era. Nothing that those who intoned the hymns of the Ṛg Veda touched with their hands has survived. Not merely because wood rots faster in a tropical climate. Not merely because they chose not to build in stone. Not merely because they decided not to have temples. The hymns speak of palaces with a hundred gates. They speak of well-crafted jewels. Of bronze palisades. They list the paraphernalia of ritual. They speak of arms and chariots. It is as if everything had been pure mental reality that allows the object to appear, then reabsorbs it. What remained were the forests, scarred here and there where the fire had burned. And the hymns, the meters, the names. They preserved words and fire. What else did one need?

For hundreds and hundreds of years, before the Āryas came, there were cities on the hills above the Indus valley. They had cobbled roads, huge baths, canals, engraved seals, defensive walls, granaries. None of this is mentioned in the Vedas. Yet the hymns do speak of Indra demolishing a hundred púr in his warrior charge. Some have understood púr to mean “walls”—and think the passage alludes to the walls around Mohenjo-daro and Harappa being demolished by the invading Āryas. But the more plausible meaning of púr is “livestock corral.” Thus the Vedic lines might refer merely to cattle rustling or sheep stealing. No remains give conclusive support to the notion that the towns of the Indus valley were destroyed by the Āryas. Though there is nothing to say they were not. It may well be that there was a gap of around two hundred years between the destruction of these towns and the arrival of the Āryas. But aside from chronological inconsistencies, clearly a great blank separates the Āryas, who left nothing tangible at all, from the inhabitants of the Indus valley, whose seals traveled as far away as Mesopotamia.

The further they pushed on into the vast Sindhu plain, the more the Āryas turned their backs on the soma, the inebriating plant that grew only in the mountains. It was soma that had given them their strength and vision, and with the impetus generated by that strength and vision they were now conquering something that would deny them access to soma, except through memory. A different landscape lived on in their minds. A northern homeland of long, long nights, prodigious dawns. That was the territory where truth was manifest. Each new conquest was but a temporary camp set up further and further from the place of meaning, useful only insofar as it refreshed the memory. Already living in places where the length of the days hardly varied, they cherished and nourished that memory most stubbornly in word and gesture. To their eyes, every image of beauty, of seduction, of splendor, emanated from a dawn long faded beyond the mountains, to the north.

Ever more difficult to reach and to grasp on its high mountaintops, from the moment the Āryas settled down in the torrid plain, soma began to take on the nature of a simulacrum. Or was it perhaps the origin of all simulacra? Already, the simplest of the liturgies that referred to it was “fearfully complicated.” The substance at the center of everything was quickly becoming the void at the center of everything. And the web of liturgical prescriptions grew thicker and tighter, as if those devotional gestures were partly intended to conceal an absence, where the twofold power of a divine body and its cast still lingered.

The life of the Āryas revolved around but a few elements, a few objects. Always the same, ever repeated. Nor was there any attempt to add others. But the variations on those elements, those objects, were such as to make the head spin. Every morning they confronted the same simple liturgical articles, and every morning, once the mind was yoked up, a stream of thoughts would begin. Grasses, wooden cups, a wooden sword, sour milk, butter, wooden spoons, two carts, water, a gold ring, two wooden boards, five stones, an antelope hide, an antelope horn, a red ox hide. That was what they carried around with them: the wherewithal for the simplest of sacrifices. A temple was unacceptable, because that would have meant using something ready-made, once and for all, whereas what you had to do was start from scratch, every day, transforming whatever clearing you found, scattered bushes and all, into a place of sacrifice, choosing one by one the positions for the fires and the altar, measuring out the distances, evoking the whole from an amorphous, mute, inert scene, until the moment when the gods would come down and sit themselves on the thin grass mats that had been carefully unrolled for them.

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.”

Viśvāmitra said: “What we thought has been thought many times and in many places — and each of these thoughts, successive and coincident, is linked together in a single chain. But there is one thought that was our thought, insofar as it had never before been pursued so stubbornly, nor would be ever again, had never before achieved such sharpness, nor would ever after. One thought that was the arrow that buried itself within us — and that penetrated deeper and deeper into our brains and into every gesture we made. Until ultimately it became our only thought, ultimately would almost dull the minds it had too brightly illuminated. How to describe it? The recognition that the existence of the universe is a secondary and derivative fact with respect to the existence of the mind. Perhaps no more than its efflorescence. That’s how we speak of it today, but time ago we would never have used these words. Indeed, we wouldn’t even have understood them. Or we would have despised them. But that’s not the point… Let’s go back to where we were: for those brushed by the wing of that thought, the world was the same as before, nothing was the same as before. Nothing would ever go back to being as it had been before. Yet it is not a spontaneous, natural thought. A creeping oafishness is natural. And even we would sometimes have to struggle to rediscover that thought. Far easier to think of oneself as a ghost imprisoned in a box of skin and bone, surrounded by objects as stable as they are solid. But for anyone who opens his eyes on that other thought, all this falls apart and can never be restored.

“It was strange, how it happened. We forfeited history for that thought. As thought, the moment it took shape, a saber had swept down from the sky and cut off our hands. We were paralyzed in whatever action it was we had been involved in. Often they were violent actions, the actions of conquerors come down from the highlands and drought-stricken mountains into a plain too vast, too densely grown and torrid, that we were invading — and that would soon invade us. It was this thought that stopped us, nothing else. We went no further, or only sporadically, discovering new rivers and new forests, threatened by dark creatures lying in ambush in scrub and brushwood they knew so much better than we did. All of a sudden the impetus was gone. Something had distracted our attention, forever. Something that made everything else hollow. That didn’t mean we settled down to build palaces and temples, canals, gardens, cities with walls. Everything remained much as it was: a camp of nomad warriors who seemed suddenly to have forgotten their old habits, the fury of conquest.”

Then Jamadagni said: “What is the characteristic that sets us apart from every other being? And what is the knowledge that could only come from the Saptaṛṣis? For us the mind, the pure fact of being conscious, imposed itself with a conviction far greater than any other. Nature, in comparison, was an opinion. Or rather: nature was a flickering backdrop or momentary flowering or in any event something to treat with the same condescension that, in more recent times, would be reserved for hallucinations. The underlying implication was this: that everything, among the gods and before the gods, as likewise, in the end. among men, happened within the mind. Hence the first substance the world was made of must have been none other than that element from which the mind emerged. But what was that? A subtle heat, a hidden simmering, a burning beneath the surface, which sometimes flares up, with images, words, and emotions clutching at its seething crest, but above all: there blossomed the naked sensation of consciousness, like an incandescent point. All this we called tapas, ‘heat.’ Every story arises from tapas and is reabsorbed in it. The normal means of generation, at that time, was not sexual union. One used to say of countless beings that they were ‘born-of-the-mind.’ When the mind concentrated on a figure, tapas would feed it and its profile would emerge, perfectly formed: that was generation. Beings would arise from the tapas, grow in the tapas, multiform, impudent, airborne multitudes, rigid ascetics, celestial Nymphs. They came pouring forth on the scene as though in a market or at a fair. Then we grew tired. And another story began.

“Nothing is so subtly undermining for tapas as sex, because nothing has a greater affinity with it. In eros a body acts upon another body, and is acted upon by another body, in the same way that in tapas the mind acts upon the mind and is acted upon by the mind. Sexual union, this whole made up of elements that are each both active and passive, is the activity that most closely resembles the activity of the mind. What they have in common is tejas, the flourishing energy, of desire and knowledge. Two fires, which may from time to time become one. We lived suspended between the two. They alternated within us. Neither could go on forever. As Sāyaṇa observed, sex and asceticism were the ‘two ways’ (ubhau varṇau, ‘the two colors,’ but varṇa also means ‘caste’) that the ṛṣi Agastya ‘cultivated.’”

When the ṛṣis turned their attention to the world, they would often display anger and lust. The immense tapas they had accumulated would boil over in all its turbulence. They could not have been less like those images people have of pious, pale, and passionless men. Rather you recognized them for their volcanic ferocity, a darting fury, blazing eyes. One common error was to imagine that they would also display the other passions to excess. Not at all: anger and lust, these and only these were their banners and their torturers. Why? The substance that burns in anger and lust is purest tapas, the substance the ṛṣis were made of. Giving way to anger and lust, they consumed themselves. Yet, were they not born-of-the-mind of Brahmā precisely so that they might be the first finally to penetrate a woman and generate those beings who would then inhabit the world? And what is the power that, like some cosmic police force, guarantees the order of the world against any and every violation, if not the anger of the ṛṣis, the ever-present threat of a curse that devastates and destroys like a gust of fire? Thus the ṛṣis lapses into those passions that destroyed their hoard of tapas amounted, perhaps, to nothing other than the continual renewal of the two supreme functions — creation and destruction — to fulfill which they had been called forth by Brahmā, the god they had previously called forth themselves.

It wasn’t only the gods who feared the anger of the ṛṣis. The rivers were afraid too. Once, Viśvāmitra and Vasiṣṭha had been quarreling from opposite banks of the Sarasvatī. The majestic flow of the waters was wounded by their shrill voices, lost in nature. Each was claiming that his own tapas was superior to the other’s. Vasiṣṭha’s smile was fierce: how could this impudent fellow, who wasn’t even a brahman, imagine he possessed a kind of tapas greater than his own? Didn’t he know — everybody knew — that Vasiṣṭha’s tapas was so strong it made it impossible for him to kill himself? Vasiṣṭha well remembered the day he had succeeded in scaling the summit of Mount Meru and, confident and eager as for an amorous encounter, at once leapt from the rock into the void. He longed for death as for the most exotic, the most unavailable of women, he would cling to her as he plunged through that immense expanse of air before his body, with supreme pleasure, crashed down upon the ground. But it was not to be. He fell on his back and found it caressed by the soft petals of lotus flowers, beneath which blossomed more lotus flowers, which rested on yet more lotus flowers. They formed a pillow that went deep into the earth. Ever more exasperated, he had tried to kill himself on a number of other occasions. He had thrown himself into the river Vipāśā, as a shapeless sack wrapped with ropes. But he emerged from the waters unharmed, unbound.

Thinking about this, Vasiṣṭha became extremely gloomy. What had driven him so determinedly to seek his own death if not his desperation at the death of his hundred children? And who had brought about that slaughter if not the horrendous Viśvāmitra, now glaring at him from that small white patch on the opposite bank of the river?

Suddenly Viśvāmitra broke off shouting insults and ordered the river to snatch Vasiṣṭha in her waves and hand him over. Terrified, Sarasvatī obeyed. She tossed up Vasiṣṭha on Viśvámitra’s bank, while the latter hurried off to his āśrama. He was looking for a knife to cut his rival’s throat. Then Sarasvatī once again snatched Vasiṣṭha up in her waves, for she was afraid the ṛṣi might curse her. The river was seen to leave her banks behind and swallow up trees and meadows like a freakish snake. Then suddenly she went back to her bed, flowing coolly by, while the two ṛṣis once more crouched down on opposite banks and obstinately went on insulting each other. Vasiṣtha shouted to Viśvāmitra that he would never be able get beyond his dumb warrior mentality. True, it had served to terrify the gods. But it wasn’t enough to terrify Vasiṣṭha. He was not so ingenuous as the gods.

Indra was handsome, strong, and not without a dose of cowardice. The pressure of the missions assigned to him was making him uneasy. A hundred horses to sacrifice— and any number of monsters to slay. All over his skin, a thousand vulvas surfaced in delicate tattoos, each opening just a fraction, like a sleepy eyelid. They were a sign of servitude, the indelible signature of a priestly sarcasm’s response to his adulterous crimes. Those vulvas — or butterflies? — would ever remind him of a disastrous adventure.

One day, Indra began to buzz around the ancient hermitage of the ṛṣi Gotama. The sage had gone down to the river for his morning ablutions. His gloriously beautiful wife Ahalyā was sitting in a flowery clearing, rapt in thought, playing with some twigs. Disguising himself as Gotama, Indra went up to her. Mimicking the ascetic’s voice, he said: “Woman of admirable calm and slender waist, I wish to unite myself with you, for the pure pleasure of it.” Ahalyā looked up and immediately saw through the clumsy disguise, in which, rather than the solid build of Gotama, a bull among his fellow seers, Indra’s slimmer, adolescent body was all too evident. Bored with her life in the forest, she consented to the false husband’s proposal, but in such a way that the god would appreciate that she had immediately recognized whom she was dealing with and meant to be possessed by him, not her husband. She headed for the hut. Looking up at the sun, she worked out how long they had before Gotama came back, then concentrated on her pleasure. It was an angry, exhilarating coitus. The climax was scarcely over when, with one eye steadily measuring the progress of the sun, Ahalyā coldly pushed Indra away from her and steered him toward the door with her foot. “Go, my lord,” she said. “Protect me — and yourself.” Hair still tousled, Indra rushed out of the twig hut. But coming toward him with calm and heavy step was Gotama. He was shaking the water of his sacred bath from his polished skin, a bunch of herbs in his hand, and his penetrating eye quickly took in the god’s nervous gesturing. “O evil being,” said Gotama, shaking with anger, “this gross disguise deserves a solemn punishment.” Indra was petrified. Accustomed though he was to fighting monsters, cutting off their numerous heads and hurling lightning at their scaly backs, he felt lost before this massive man with his deep voice, weaponless and fearless, transfixing him with piercing eyes. Gotama walked up to Indra. One hand went down between the god’s thighs, closed around his testicles, tore them off, and tossed them on the grass. “Henceforth you shall eat the wind and sleep on ashes,” said Gotama. Then he turned to Ahalyā, who was watching, motionless. “Many an epic cycle shall pass before someone comes one day to free you,” he told her. Then Gotama went off alone, in search of a peak no woman had ever trod.

Indra writhed in pain on the ground and told himself that never had any god been so humiliated. His confused mind boiled with rancor against the other gods: “As always, I undertook this adventure on their behalf. And, as always, I alone must suffer the consequences. The gods are snoops, always scanning the earth, anxious and apprehensive, tormented by their one fear that some ṛṣi’s tapas will grow stronger than their own. Then they always resort to the cheap trick of ruining the seer with the help of some Apsaras or courtesan. Or they get a god to seduce his wife. And who better than I, Indra, the woman thief? I was acting on behalf of the gods — and all the evil has befallen me alone. Meanwhile the anger I aroused in Gotama has destroyed his reserves of tapas. So the gods are safe again. But they won’t remember me.”

When the thirty-three gods heard these words, they decided they had better get together and see to the matter. Agni spoke first. His right hand rested on the neck of a large ram. “Look here,” he said. “This ram has got testicles. Indra, who is king of the gods, has lost his. I propose that we give Indra the ram’s testicles.” Solemnly, the other gods agreed. Gripping the ram’s neck with one hand, Agni tore off his testicles with the other. Then he went down to Indra, still on his back by Gotama’s abandoned hut, and attached those dark testicles to the god’s bright body.

“Ascetic” (“he who exercises himself” is the Greek sense of the word) offers us a sober definition of those wise men, the ṛṣis, who spent their lives kindling tapas, expanding a nucleus of heat. Were the ascetics to succeed in absorbing the world into themselves, nothing would ever happen. Nature would gradually spread its leaves and weeds over the many scattered rocks that nurse incandescence in their depths. Not only would there be no history, but there would be no stories either. Or at least no visible stories. The landscape would be swept bare and refashioned by the wind. But that is not the case. The ascetic — be it Śiva himself, greatest of all ascetics — cannot stop the world’s existing and flourishing. Deep down, he wants the world to exist and flourish. How do we know that? Beside the ascetic there is always a woman. It might be the beautiful Anasūyā, wife of Atri, devourer of meditation, who is busying herself with the housework when all of a sudden the three supreme beings — Brahmā, Viṣṇu, and Śiva — turn up like a bunch of rogues and grab hold of her. Or it might be the wives of the ṛṣis in the Forest of Cedars, who one day see a stranger approaching, his clothes ragged, his eyes feverish, his body smeared with ashes, and suddenly they are following him, swaying their hips as if to the sound of cymbals. Or it might be the magnificent courtesan whom the ascetic Rśyaśṛnga meets in the forest and mistakes for a young man, an aspirant to spiritual ascent with whom he can exercise his tapas. Or the celestial Nymphs, the Apsaras, to whom any malevolent god may entrust the task of leading another ascetic astray. Wherever we find the ascetic, there is also the most beautiful of women, at once tempted and tempting, moving in circles around him. This figure is the first concretion of tapas, a ghost who weaves herself a body, which is then used to protect her origin — the ascetic — or recklessly to attack and destroy it. The ascetic becomes the only lover she ever knows: or alternatively he will be ridiculed and humiliated by this woman, will spill his seed without touching her; or he may ignore the Nymph. But a female figure will ever revolve around him, in her circle of fire.

Yājñavalkya said: “Thinking is dangerous. And it was never more so than the day Janaka of Videha invited me for a sacrifice, and likewise invited the brahmans of the Kuru-Pañcālas. On arrival, I found myself walking through a huge fair. Behind a stockade, a thousand cows were lowing, coins tinkling around their colored horns. Those cows were the prize Janaka was offering to whoever proved best able to answer questions about brahman. The Kuru brahmans all looked at me with suspicion, and some with resentment. I was seeing many of them for the first time, but we all knew something about each other. I was renowned for my brusque manners and didn’t want to disappoint. The meeting began: it was made up of two white stripes, the brahmans and the cows, between which milled a colorful crowd of women (some of them, I noticed, supremely beautiful), merchants, warrirors, and craftsmen, in short people who keep quiet and bear witness. Then I turned to Sämaṣravas, the young disciple who followed in my footsteps: ‘Sāmaśravas, my boy, go ahead and get the cows.’ I had spoken softly, but it seemed everybody had heard. There was a buzz of noise, with everybody speaking in everybody else’s ear.

“Aśvala, the hotṛ of Janaka, who was master of ceremonies on that occasion, stood up and asked me: ‘So, Yājñavalkya, you really are the best, are you?’ His voice was calm, his mind seething with rage. ‘I’m ready for anything,’ I said, ‘but I want those cows.’ The contest began at once. Gazing along the line of brahmans, I had the impression that every eye had narrowed to a slit: each mind was looking for the sharpest question. They wanted my head to burst. The first question was Aśvala’s by right: ‘Yājñavalkya,’ he said, ‘everything that exists is tainted by death. How can he who sacrifices not be tainted by death?’ There was a strong wind that day, bright sunshine, tents and banners hummed like sails. The wind bared my head. Everybody was looking at it. They wanted to see if the bones would shatter. The questions went on and on. With the concentric circling of the hawk they were homing in on brahman But my head was not bursting.

“Then Gārgī stood up. She was the most beautiful of all women theologians, and the most to be feared. Few were the brahmans who dared compete with her. Yet, rather than at the woman herself, I found myself looking at her robe. I hadn’t known that a fabric could be so splendid, hugging her body as if it were itself a body and eluding any definition of its color. She must have woven it herself, was my first thought, since I knew that Gārgī did some weaving as a pastime. She was famous for her fabrics, though one never saw them. Then I thought, ‘Perhaps the excellence of Gārgī’s thinking was a pastime when compared with her art as a weaver.’ As this thought came to an end in my mind, so did Gārgī’s first question. Playing the coquette, the woman who will speak of nothing but women’s matters, she was asking me a question about fabrics. ‘Yājñnvalkya,’ she said, ‘if the waters are the weft on which all things are woven, on what weft are woven the waters?’ An easy question, or so it seemed. But watching her facing me, I sensed that Gārgī was determined to beat me. The deceptive modesty of this opening was just a way of leading me into a trap. Ten times she asked me on what weft had been woven the world that was the weft of the preceding world. And I answered without hesitation, as though repeating a liturgy. After the tenth question, she looked up at me with blazing eyes: ‘And the worlds of brahman, what weft were they woven on?’ Then I felt fury well up within me against that insolent woman, temptress of the mind. ‘She believes that what her hand weaves is everything, that everything is there in her loom, beneath her fingers. Quite probably no man has ever dared contradict her. And she’s too proud and mad about her body ever to have invited a man to her bed,’ I thought. Then I found a new vibrancy in my voice, it was harsh and tense as I heard it pronounce these words: ‘Do not ask too much, Gārgī. Take care, lest your head should burst. You ask about a divinity beyond which there is nothing more to ask. Do not ask too much, Gārgī.’ And Gārgī fell silent.

“But it wasn’t over. Gārgī was holding back her last attack. She let the other brahmans ask their questions one by one. Then she came forward again, but her manner was different this time. She was no longer the impressive painted statue. Now the warrior came to the fore. First she looked at the brahmans and said: If he answers these two questions, none of you will beat him.’ Then she turned to me, legs braced like a man: ‘Yājñavalkya, I stand here in front of you like a warrior from the country of Kāśī or Videha. I have strung my bow. I hold two arrows tight in my hands, ready to transfix you. They are two questions. Try to answer.’ I’d been preparing myself for an attack from a different quarter. But once again Gārgī displayed supreme elegance. Again she spoke about weaving. She asked me what time was woven on. I knew that she knew that I had already answered this question. But I decided to answer softly, calmly, intimately, as if speaking only to her. I told her that time was woven on the indestructible. I said that it was woven on he who neither eats nor is eaten. On he who knows the one who knows. I said this looking straight at Gārgī, knowing perfectly well that I wasn’t telling her anything new. It wasn’t this she wanted to hear. So I added something else as a gift, a gesture of homage to lay at her feet. I said: ‘in this world, Gārgī, he who makes offerings, celebrates sacrifices, practices tapas, but does not know the indestructible, his virtues will come to an end, be it only a thousand years hence; in truth, Gārgī, he who leaves this world without having known the indestructible is a wretch, but he who does not leave this world unless he has first known the indestructible, he, Gārgī, is a brahman.’ I saw Gārgī’s eyes flash when I said the word ‘wretch.’ That was the word that right from the start she had wanted to hear spoken at this gathering, in front of those tight-lipped brahmans, wretched every one quite probably. She had wanted to hear a word that would speak contempt for virtuous deeds. At the same time I sensed an unspoken complicity between myself and Gārgī that nothing could undermine, a complicity that, were we never to speak to each other again, would be with us forever. Then Gārgī turned around and said: ‘Brahmans all, rejoice, for you can never escape this man except by rendering him your homage. None of you will ever beat him in theology.’”

Yājñavalkya was renowned for his bluntness. He never stooped to the polite commonplace. The words that came from his mouth were as unpredictable as his natural authority was immense. Everybody remembered the time when a group of brahmans had plunged into the most dazing speculations vis-à-vis meat eating — and it was clear that many of them were only speaking in the hope that Yājñavalkya would notice how clever they were and perhaps drop a compliment. So giddily high-flown was the dispute, you would have thought that none of the brahmans had ever eaten meat in his life. Yājñavalkya listened, eyes staring at the ground, face inscrutable. Everybody went on behaving as if he wasn’t there, but everybody knew that the outcome of the discussion depended on what, if anything, he would say. They were exhausted — and still Yājñavalkya hadn’t spoken. Then he looked up from half-closed eyes. All he said was: “When I eat meat, I like it tender and juicy.” Nobody dared add so much as a word. Later, when they cast their minds back on that day, it was with a feeling of terror.

On other occasions, however, Yājñavalkya would use the most obscure and unfamiliar words as if they were perfectly common. And some would immediately be convinced of the poverty of their learning, since it didn’t include the meaning of these words. Nothing dumbfounded his listeners so much as the formula they heard him come out with one day, speaking in a whisper, as if trying to hide what he was saying. The subtle Śākalya had been asking him how many gods there were. Patiently — and this in itself was surprising — Yājñavalkya had brought the number down from three thousand, three hundred and six to one. But Śākalya still pressed him. So Yājñavalkya said: “There is a divinity that lies beyond all questioning.” Then in a fierce hiss he added that one day pillagers would steal Śākalya’s bones by mistake and scatter them in contempt. Which came to pass. But it wasn’t this that so impressed itself on the minds of those present so much as the words “There is a divinity that lies beyond all questioning.” They had never heard anything like this before. What were the gods, if not the object of their questioning? Now it seemed that something gave way, went deeper. But how much deeper? Though nobody could claim to understand them, the words passed from mouth to mouth, like a proverb.

Yājñavalkya was also famous for certain irreverent remarks about women. About certain women in particular, but also about women in general. Yet none of Yājñavalkya’s disputes was so intense, almost unbearably so, as the one he had with a woman, the proud Gārgi. Never had he answered another brahman with such ferocity. Those listening felt they were being annihilated. Every scrap of air had been appropriated by those two overwhelmingly sovereign beings. They battled together — and perhaps something else was going on between them too, something no one could follow, at once evident and ciphered. Somebody recalled, on that occasion, another of Yājñavalkya’s engmatic remarks, about man being composed of himself and a void. “Hence that void is filled by woman,” he had said. Now it seemed — and it was almost a hallucination — that Gārgī’s shape was superimposed over that void, and that she was making herself at home there, taking on the outline defined by its boundaries, as the dispute went on, sharp and cutting.

Yājñavalkya had two wives, Maitreyī and Kātyāyanī. No one had ever seen them quarrel. And this alone would have been enough to unsettle people, since it ran contrary to everybody’s experience. They rarely appeared in public together. And when they did so, they treated each other with affectionate circumspection. Kātyāyanī had a soft, inexhaustible beauty. Even in lands far-flung, people would say that no beauty could rival Kātyāyanī’s. Few could claim to have heard the sound of her laughter, but they said it was a wonder, like the sudden flowering of the udumbara. Maitreyī on the other hand was often present at the brahmans’ disputes. Indeed, the brahmans were afraid of her, knowing that she was capable of spotting where their doctrine was weak. And they envied her, because they also knew that Yājñavalkya spoke to her about brahman. Nothing worked so fiercely on their imaginations as the thought of those conversations, of which they would never know so much as a syllable.

Yājñavalkya had no children. He traveled from place to place with his two wives and a considerable retinue, like a tribe. There were those who waited years for him to visit. Generally they would prepare a list of questions. One day Yājñvalkya said the same words, at two different moments, to his two wives: “I shall shortly be leaving this stage of life. Make haste, I want to settle your affairs first.” Maitreyī and Kātyāyanī immediately understood what these words meant: they were never to see him again, he was going into the forest. Kātyāyanī said nothing and stroked his hand. Maitreyī asked a question she had asked him many times before, as if this were a day like any other: — Master, if I possessed the earth and all its riches, would that make me immortal?” Yājñavalkya smiled, in memory of their talks together. He gave an answer Maitreyī already knew: “You would simply lead the life of the rich.” As though following a liturgy, Maitreyī replied: “What can something matter to me, if it does not give me immortality? Yājñavalkya looked at her, holding her hands on his shoulders. “You are dear to me and say things that are dear to me. Now sit down and I shall teach you. But you must give me all your attention.” After a moment, he said: “The bride does not desire her husband because he is dear to her, but for love of self.” This was a new formula. How was it to be understood? Everything turned on one word: “self,” ātman. Was “for love of self” to be taken as meaning “for love of one’s own person”—something with a name — or as “for love of Self,” of the ātman, for love of something that stands above the ego and absorbs it into itself? Was it another of those fearfully harsh and true observations Yājñavalkya would use to crush the claims of the sentiments — and above all the noble sentiments? Or was it the last word on things as they are? Maitreyi was of two minds, she hesitated. Yājnāavalkya watched her with a sweetness no one was to witness. He went on talking about the ātman, he told her secrets he had never told before. But already he knew that Maitreyī could no longer hear him, for a veil of tears was falling on her heart. Pulling herself together, Maitreyī caught only the last two things Yājñavalkya said by way of farewell: “How to know the one who knows?… That is the secret of immortality.” Maitreyi caught the cadence of the words but not their import. More than immortality, what mattered to her was that voice, which she would never hear again.

Kaśyapa said: “You are continually finding the word ‘sacrifice’ in the texts and you ask yourselves: why this word, this obscure act, and why so soon? Why does it come before all others? Why doesn’t it appear, if appear it must, after the completion of the more basic actions? To know the answer, you must first remember. See the beginning. ‘With the eye that is mind, in thought I see those who were the first to offer this sacrifice.’ So say the texts. Who were the first to offer the sacrifice? What was there to see?

“The sky was empty. On the earth but two groups of beings, gods and ṛṣis—those gods and those ṛṣis who were called Ádityas and Aṇ Watching the sky, they wandered around the earth, and desired. They desired the sky. Each group knew the other harbored the same desire. They watched each other from a distance. Each wanted to make their move before the other. Canny and deceitful, the gods managed to sacrifice first. No sooner had they conquered the sky than they asked themselves: ‘How may this celestial region be made unattainable by men?” Immediately a thought came to them: ‘Wipe out the trail.’ They sucked the essence from the sacrifice until it was quite dry. Then they decided to hide the essence, the way bees hide honey. Down below, on earth, they could still see the sacrificial clearing: ashes, sticks, heaps of stones, grass, logs. It looked like an abandoned bonfire. But you could sense that something had happened there. So the gods took the sacrificial pole, the yūpa to which the victim was tied, and used it like a broom to smooth over the earth, cover up and confuse. That’s why the pole is called yūpa, because the gods used it to wipe something out, ayopayan. Soon enough the Aṅgiras turned up. They suspected a trick, because the gods had slid off. They looked around, in that speechless clearing. They sang and kindled their inner fires. They said: ‘There must be some telltale sign, something must be peeping out in this clearing.’ All they could hear was a rustle of ferns. The Añgiras prowled around, cautiously, silently, taking care where they put their feet. A turtle popped up out of the grass. The Añgiras exchanged glances. ‘It must be this, then, the sacrifice…,’ they said. ‘Let’s stop it.’ As it turned out, the turtle was indeed the sacrificial cake. They surrounded it. They invoked the names of many gods, to stop it. The turtle paid no attention and went right on walking. They pronounced the name of Agni. At that the turtle stopped. It drew in its legs. They picked it up, heaped together some wood, lit the fire. They wrapped the turtle in Agni. It was their offering to the gods. Thus the Añgiras too conquered the sky. From that day on they have plied back and forth between earth and sky.

“I was that turtle.”

Atri said: “Since we watched everything from above, from the light of the Bear, we were the model of those who observe, those who watch over: the brahmans. Only one thing distinguished us from them, our not performing a certain gesture: we were not obliged to eat the prāśitra, the ‘first portion,’ that piece of wounded flesh, torn by Rudra’s arrow and no larger than a grain of barley, which a brahman on the contrary has to eat. If the brahman doesn’t open his mouth to take the prāśitra, the sacrifice will not be able to heal. The brahman eats the guilt, he assimilates it into his circulation. Thus he ‘restores what was torn asunder.’ The tearing is within the ceremony — and the ceremony itself serves to heal it. Everything is within the sacrifice. With the sacrifice one heals the sacrifice. I say this so that you might not imagine it easy to escape from sacrifice. In every sacrifice there is the uncertainty of a journey toward an unknown destination. ‘When exactly did the journey begin?’ two priests asked themselves. ‘Did it go to the home of the gods?’ ‘Did it really go?’ ‘It went!’ ‘I ask the gods that they may listen!’ ‘That they may acknowledge it!’ The sacrificer must make himself heard, must make himself seen. What was the vehicle of sacrifice? A chariot, made up of meters. The gāyatrī and jagatī meters are the sides of the chariot. If the word doesn’t scan, the chariot won’t travel. And vāc, ‘word,’ is Vāc, the divine maiden who steers the mind toward the sky, who supports it on its journey, nourishes it, helps it.”

Jamadagni said: “We are here to speak because struck down — quite for how long we do not know, though the first signs came early — by the disease of the ritual. The building was still majestic, the joints meticulously executed, there were no cracks. Or rather, only the prescribed cracks, the three bricks with the holes, heralds of the immense that remained outside our construction. But would it be enough? Mightn’t a murderous wind blow up one day, to destroy it all? Mightn’t the tension slacken one day, the frail ship of the ceremonial word go down in a storm? And above all: hadn’t our presumptuous idea of building been of its very nature vain, since building inevitably implies a series of gestures, and thus falls within the category of action? Action: a mysterious, terrible word. Yājñavalkya and Ārtabhāga withdrew to discuss the matter. Not all were to hear. Not all would be able to bear that truth. Can action, action of whatever kind, free us? Or is action perhaps the main thing, indeed the only thing, from which we must free ourselves?”

Atri said: “Even before breathing, men desired. But what is desire? Before our eyes, there is nothing; behind our eyes something lights up: an image, a few words that return obsessively, or just one word. The world is a desert: where can we find the expedient that would turn that presence behind the eyes into something before the eyes? There was action, the gesture that changes things. But do action and gesture belong to he who accomplishes them? If they do, to accomplish an action once implies accomplishing it always. If not, every action that seeks to evoke the object of desire is aleatory. The object might appear, but only the way an animal might cross one’s path in the forest. And this was exactly our experience. At which point we began to suspect that actions do not belong to he who acts. But in that case, what does belong to such a person? Where does the action begin? It was important to know that to understand where what belongs to he who acts ends. There was the danger that everything might come apart, that even the desiring mind might start to doubt whether it really belonged to itself: for isn’t a desire similar to an action? Isn’t it, like an action, something that appears, complete with its own shape, its momentum and direction? But, if the two resembled each other, perhaps we might pass from one to the other — and from the latter, once again through resemblance, to the object desired. And what was the nature of the object desired? A place, a being, a state, a substance: something unique, not to be mistaken for anything else. Something irreversible. Something that, once it appears, must ever belong to what is. But where to find an action that has these characteristics? Whoever drinks water will always repeat the same gesture of drinking water. The action has nothing unique or irreversible about it. It can be repeated as often as one comes across running water. Unless there happens to be a radical difference between one example of running water and another. But no one ever claimed as much. Rather we asked ourselves what action might be of its nature both unique and irreversible. And linked to something’s appearing. Perhaps it was this latter consideration, the most important aspect of all, which pointed the way. To cause something to appear was beyond us. But to cause something to disappear? Things can resemble each other by contrast too. So we posed ourselves a question that sounded like a riddle: what is that action that is unique and irreversible — and can evoke the unique and irreversible? One day someone came up with the answer: Causing something to disappear. But we were bound to recognize that, at least as far as men are concerned, causing to disappear is another way of saying ‘killing.’ Perhaps this partly explains why a delicate halo of mourning surrounds every desire achieved. In the vain, formless, undefined realm of gesture we had succeeded in finding one, and only one, this one, whose characteristics corresponded to those of the object of desire. So we placed our quiet trust, śraddhā, in this: that that object might prove to be the last link in the chain of that particular action. The link where to that which disappears there corresponds, in another part of the chain, something that appears: the fruit. That was sacrifice. But at the beginning, between ourselves, we called it ‘the wheel of desires.’ That wheel is also the punishment to which desire is ever tied.”

Vasiṣṭha said: “This was our axiom: that what was not manifest took precedence over what was manifest, that the manifest was subject to the unmanifest. And since the manifest, insofar as it depended on the unmanifest, was merely a consequence of it, and a consequence, what’s more, that had not been clearly and unambiguously desired, as the events of Brahmā’s early life bear witness, the manifest could be considered as a residue, a leftover, a remnant, the place where whatever was superfluous, and could not be reabsorbed in the realm from which it originated, had gathered.

“Rather than for the thing itself, the substance, which is ever beyond our grasp and in any event overwhelming, we fought for the leftovers, the residues. And fought among residues. That is our territory, the only territory where the presence (memory?) of another territory might flash across our minds. Never forget that even the most noble gods, the Twelve, the Ādityas, took their form when Tvaṣṭṛ, the Craftsman, cut the Sun down to size, because its light was flooding the world. Shut up in his workshop, Tvaṣṭṛ clipped it, pruned it, pushed it back and forth on his grindstone. As though from a blacksmith’s bench, shavings of bright sunshine fell to the ground. The Ādityas were born of those shavings. And if they were scraps, how much more so is the earth and those who inhabit it…”

Atri said: “What’s the first thing we notice, when we bend our gaze down upon the plains of earth? Fires. We recognize them as people. They are the toughest of living beings. Our vast memory recognizes, in a certain mud hut in the forest, down near Kāñcī, the same fire we once saw dart from the hands of an ancestor as he strained to climb the ridges of the Hindukush or gazed through mist at the immense folds of lands still to explore, toward the east. We alone know that that fire has been ever the same, fed and renewed for hundreds of years by kinsmen who know nothing of each other, terrestial model of the fragile, unfailing life that no man ever manages sufficiently to imitate.”

Viśvāmitra said: “You see that Agni means fire — and you are satisfied. You think that such a precious and dangerous element deserves a great many honors. But you are wrong. Agni’s secret name, the name the gods use when they speak of him — and it is also a common word in our language — is agre, ‘forward.’ Before he is fire, Agni is everything that goes beyond us, the dazzling light that darts ahead of us wherever we are. When we go forward, we are merely following Agni. Man’s conquests are the scars Agni leaves behind in his progress across the earth.”

Jamadagni said: “Where does fire come from? From the mouth. From the vagina. From a smooth, moist cavity. From the burning lake. There is a fire beneath the waters. It is the Submarine Mare. Her name is Vaḍavā. Hot blasts issue from her mouth. One day, when the oceans can no longer hide her, when all the waters have been devoured, then the Mare’s head will surface once more. It will be the end of a world.”

Bharadvāja said: “The mind is ever treacherous, even when it is but one component of the innumerable tiny beings who populate the earth. Even in that fragmented, occulted, clouded state it preserves its nature, the same that caused it to rise as desire from within the asat, the boundless which is not, and yet desires. But how can that which is not lie at the origin of that which is? It almost seems as if there were two states of being, each of which seeks to deny the other. Yet the poets, the kavis, having long searched their hearts, discovered that there was a connection, a bandhu, suspended between the two states, a rope that ended by hiding itself (knotting itself) in the asat. In the void? In the fullness? This they didn’t say — and doubted whether anyone could. ‘The one who looks down on it, in the highest heaven, only he knows — or perhaps he does not know.’ But why should the mind have this privilege? Why should the mind be before and after every other thing? Because it can never be found in the world. You can open up any body, any element, with the finest of metal points, you can turn everything inside out and expose all that has been hidden, until matter becomes a whirr of dragonflies. To no end: you will never find so much as a trace, not even the tiniest, of the mind. The banner of its sovereignty is precisely this: its not being there. No one can ever claim to have grasped it. It is like a dazzle on water: you can follow it, but however far you go toward it, it will always move the same distance away.”

The impatient Nārada was the only one who felt the need to offer explanations. He took advantage of a period of silence to take up the discussion again, turning toward their foreign guests: “It has come to my attention that in your land a person who writes a work read by generation after generation is said to be ‘immortal.’ And the work too is said to be ‘immortal.’ This seems to me an improper use of the word ‘immortal.’ It would be enough to say that this man is evoked, through his work, in the minds of many. That he is a frequent guest of the memory. But no more. Immortality is not so simple as the passing on of memory. But it does have a relationship with the word. In the beginning, the gods were afraid of death, not unlike yourselves. They felt exposed, like animals grazing who know they are being followed by the predator’s eye. To keep death at a distance they decided to hide. But where? In the Vedas. They wrapped themselves in the meters as though in robes. The metres are called chandas because the gods wrapped themselves in them, acchādayan. But death saw them there too. ‘The way you see a fish in water,’ say the texts. The meters certainly have something to do with escaping death, but they are not enough. They are transparent water, a fleeting protection, as our clothes for us. So, to hide. the gods went beyond that. Leaving meters behind, they moved on to the syllable. And here one would have to consider whether the syllable can escape death. But we will talk about that some other evening. In any event we shall be far indeed from fame, a word unduly close in your minds to the word ‘immortality.’”

Vasiṣṭha said: “To attribute infinite duration to the gods, or infinite knowledge, or infinite strength, is groveling and superstitious. The gods are simply those who have come closest to brahman. It’s true that, vain and fatuous as they were, they claimed to be responsible for their victory, claimed to originate their own actions. Men do the same, to imitate them. But it is pure boastfulness. The only knowledge is the getting closer — and the recognition of what you are getting closer to. Agni, Vāyu, and Indra tried as much. There was a mocking Yakṣa who belittled their power. And they couldn’t work out who he was. Then, while trekking up through the woods, Indra had a stroke of luck: he met Umā, that is Pārvatī, the Mountain Girl. It was she who explained to him, in that brusque way women have: ‘You are still glorying in a victory that isn’t yours. That Yakṣa was brahman. He was responsible for your victory.’ So Indra was able to recognize brahman in a Yakṣa who never showed his face again. He had gone a step further than the others. Something similar happened among us ṛṣis. One day I met Indra face-to-face. And this is still a difference between myself and the other ṛṣis. But then Indra was lost to my sight too.”

Bharadvāja said: “What you foreigners recently called the coincidence of opposites, what you developed as a thesis, was, for us, a state. A formless, tremulous, borderless extension, moving of its own accord — and within it a glow and a warmth, which at first glance look like a will-o’-the-wisp. But then they expand, they radiate outward in the waters from a red-hot bar. The first of all states, the one to which, after each event, one returns as to a final barrier, behind which we shall always meet the same barrier and so on and on for all time, is the birth of fire from the waters. Of Agni from Soma. The liquid fire.

“For this reason, and only for this reason, tapas—the heat — came before the word, the number, reasoning, deduction. This is why the first image thought chose for itself was that of a submerged, pervasive brazier, a glow in the water. It was the only way to lead us back to that state that preceded all others, when the waters issued forth from the mind and the mind from the waters. Who could say which came first?”

Jamadagni said: “There are many worlds — and never fewer than two: this and that. This is the world of men, that is the world of the gods. Look at the animals and you will see what I mean: tame animals are the world of men; wild animals, the world of the gods.”

Yājñavalkya said: “To gain access to that world, to move toward it, one must yoke together mind and word. No other chariot will carry us there. But one must watch carefully to see that the yoke is balanced. For the word is smaller than the mind. So, beneath the main bar of the yoke, on the side of the word, it is well to slip another wooden plank, so that the bar stays flat. Such are the precautions upon which the course of our lives depends.”

Atri said: “Many have asked and will ask themselves: why does something happen, if it must then be submerged? What is the point of an intact dharma among corpses? What is the difference between one era and another, if all are swallowed up? I was asked this question many times. I asked it myself every time I was left with only the billowing waters beneath me. In the midst of that indigo or sometimes of that interminable grayness, there was but one black speck, a wandering bed. On it lay a sleepy viṣṇu, glued like a lover to the coils of Śeṣa and protected by the canopy of his heads: a delicate toy no child could ever play with. Śeṣa was a lump, a leftover, the residue of what had been. Not all had been hallucination, so long as that lump still drifted around. It was here that deeds undone, fruits uneaten, gathered and clotted. Waiting to measure out the days of the new era.

“‘But then does nothing new exist?’ they asked me. ‘One should be thankful that anything exists at all, why ask for it to be new as well?’ I answered with a brahman’s impatience. Yet I knew that, however tiny, the new does exist. While all expands and all is reabsorbed, ever in the background a faint hiss tells us the arrow is heading toward its target. The feather ruffled by the arrow is the new.”

Viśvāmitra said: “I remember. It was nearly time to press the soma—the midday pressing. It was winter, almost at the solstice, like today. We were celebrating the mahāvrata, the ‘great vow.’ I had just finished intoning the thousand verses of the hymn called the mahaduktha. All at once I realized that Indra was sitting next to me. I thought it was an illusion. I went on with the verses, looking straight ahead of me. Then, furtively, I risked another glance. Indra was still there. So I said: ‘I am honored to see you here in my home, but my wish would be to join you in your own beloved home, in the sky.’ Meanwhile the ceremony continued. The verses echoed around like a swarm of hornets. Indra said: ‘Follow me.’ When we were in the sky, I said to him: ‘I would like to get to know you.’ Indra answered: ‘I shall grant you this favor.’ Then he fell silent. For a long time we sat opposite each other. Then Indra said: ‘I am prāna, breath. You are breath. All beings are breath. Breath is what burns below. Thus do I penetrate all spaces. The mahaduktha you were reciting is also breath. It is light too. It is food.’ Indra then explained that there are seven breaths — and each goes in a different direction. As he was describing them, I recognized them: they were none other than ourselves: the Saptarṣis. Now I understood why, during the mahaduktha, the hundred harp strings were brushed in seven different ways, using an udumbara twig. Now I understood why the hotṛ had pushed the seat of the swing, with immense care, in seven different directions. That day Indra revealed to me why we must celebrate the rite we were already celebrating. On my return, I told everyone of my vision. So today we know why we celebrate the mahāvrata. This is the right sequence of events. The vision comes afterward. First one must arrange the gestures. But without knowing exactly what they mean. The vision throws light on how and why things must happen as they already do. Since everything already happens. But how did it happen?

“The mahāvrata was an ancient ceremony — like all the ceremonies founded by the vrātyas. People no longer speak of the vrātyas, but they are the shadow that accompanies our every gesture. And if one does not know the shadow, one knows nothing. So I will speak of them. With black turbans and black sandals complete ‘with ears’ (as they used to say), wrapped in robes with red and black fringes, antelope skins on their shoulders, a metal-pointed stick and small loose-strung bow in their hands, grouped around a rickety cart, open-topped, that lurched askew, off the beaten track, drawn by a horse and a mule, driven by a man with long, loose hair and a silver collar, stiff as a corpse: thus did the vrātyas wend their way. They were always followed by a whore and a man from the Magadha. Although, according to the precepts, they were a ‘non-whore called whore’ and a ‘man-not-from-the-Magadha called man-from-the-Magadha,’ apumścalu pumścalūvākyā and amāgodho māgadhavākyah. I know this may sound strange. But consider: anyone taking part in a rite is not what he is. He is something else… And the life of the vrātyas was nothing but a rite, throughout their ceaseless wanderings. The vrātyas traveled, made music, bullied, stole, danced, spied, plundered, cursed. But they were also the butt of curses, outcastes, emissaries of the unnameable, all that you would like to leave behind but that always comes back like the past. They were a ‘pack,’ vrāta, a band, a fraternity bound by a ‘vow,’ vrata, which imposed a certain ‘way of life,’ vratá. They were the eternal ambush. When the people who lived in the grāma—the communities, likewise nomadic, though they moved more slowly, with their herds — chose to evoke an image of terror, they didn’t think of the beasts of the forest, nor of the enemies they met on their wanderings and would have to fight, enemies who had no horses and did not speak the ‘perfect language,’ Sanskrit. They thought of the vrūtyas. Occasionally some of the young people in the community, particularly the younger sons, would disappear, and it was rumored that they had joined the vrātyas. Everybody knew there was another community in the forest, a parallel, tighter community, whose contrasting gestures, behavior, language, and dress formed a counterpoint to the life of the grāma, sometimes invading it, with brash ferocity, striking as suddenly and unexpectedly as Rudra’s arrow. Thus they thought of them as of Rudra’s noble bands. They were the esoteric itself, precipitous, rapacious, self-contained. They congratulated themselves on being indistinguishable from each other, like two-legged wolves. They referred to themselves as ‘dogs.’ They would have no truck with the exoteric, which alone allows a community to exist. The brahmans, on the other hand, who were the guardians of the esoteric, also wished to be guardians of the community, of normal life, life without upheavals or excesses of knowledge. Knowledge they would take care of themselves, in silence. All everybody else had to do was to live. But the vrātyas were not like that. Often they were announced by a great din. Harps, drums, rattles, flutes. To their minds, even the earth was first and foremost a sound. They dug a deep hole. They laid out the skin of a sacrificed animal. They beat on it with its tail. It was the earth drum. Like a strip of sound they slithered around the encampments of community life — and this in itself sufficed to alert those who lived there, in transient settlements, with their carts and herds, that an other life was always open, always flitting outside and beyond: that the community was not everything. Thus, for a long time the vrātyas were the sensible presence of the esoteric. But what is the esoteric? The esoteric is the forest. To grasp the ultimate significance of what happens in the society of men, one must go outside that society. There are traces of servitude and blindness in everything formulated within that society. He who goes out of it breathes for the first time. For the first time he is alone. He feels terror — and provokes terror. The forest is the roaring of wild packs, two-legged wolves — and it is the silence of the renouncers. The young predators and the solitary thinker, still as a log, communicate through their knowledge, remote now, beyond the grasp almost of the knowledge of the householder who observes the rites of the hearth and home. What is the esoteric? The thought closest to the vision things have of themselves.

“This is why I found myself on that occasion among the celebrants of a vrātya rite. This is why I inclined toward them, unlike the brahmans, who secretly detested them and were only waiting for the chance to eliminate them from the canonical course of events altogether. And they almost succeeded. I was always an anomaly among the ṛṣis, because I am a warrior, a kṣatriya. I had a kingdom to rule too, in my life, not just an āśrama. I am also the only one who ever managed to upset my companions, the ṛṣis of the Great Bear, the time when, out of sheer spite, since they refused to welcome my favorite Triśanku into the sky, I caused seven other ṛṣis—identical to them — to appear in the southern sky. They saw those other ṛṣis take shape in the starry depths and recognized themselves, as though in a terrifying mirror. And they imagined that, at the other end of the universe, seven pairs of eyes must be looking at them with the same terror. Who was who? But the ṛṣis got to the bottom of that uncertainty, like all the others… What has never ended, on the other hand, is the quarrel between myself and Vasiṣṭha. Even when I was a heron and he a marsh bird, we pecked each other with our sharp beaks. They said of us that we were ‘always entangled in love and hate, always impatient in anger.’ I don’t deny it. Nor will I renounce it. All this by way of making clear that, if ever a a ṛṣi were destined to celebrate a rite with the vrātyas, with those who were outcasts because they knew too much, it was I.

“But now let’s speak of the rite itself. It was a sattra, something different from all other rites. Sattra means ‘sitting’: one sits, perhaps for a very long time, sometimes as long as sixty-one nights. Other rites were celebrated in an open space, often on a riverbank, the sattra in a thicket. To other ceremonies one walks, to a sattra one creeps. You see the sacrificers moving in a line, bent double, circumspect, each holding a corner of the robe of the person in front. Thus one arrives at the place of sacrifice: creeping. Why? The sacrifice is like an antelope, it mustn’t be frightened. Otherwise it runs off.

“In other rites there is a patron, and there are officiants. In a sattra all are patrons, all are officiants. Hence there are no ritual fees, no dakṣiṇā. What does one sacrifice, then, in a sattra? Oneself. At the center of the mahāvrata there is a swing. It is the sun. Then they mark out something like a track, for a chariot race. And they set up a target, in this case a cowhide. Then the water dance begins. Nine girls, six in front, three behind, move from left to right, tapping one foot lightly on the ground, each with a full jug of water on her head. ‘Here is the sweet,’ they said, over and over. At the end of the dance, they poured out the water on the ground. I didn’t know why until I met Indra, but that dance enchanted me. I had never seen anything more graceful in my life. Then the hotṛ approached the swing, but without climbing onto it. He touched the seat with his elbows, with his hands, then with his chin. He looked like a snake, testing the ground. Then, as though the angle were the result of long calculation, he would slowly push the seat toward the east, then upward, downward, sideways. It was the ceremony of the breaths. When the hotṛ finally climbed on the swing, the hymns burst out. All desires were made word. The drums sounded, the flutes and harps played. The officiants sang till they were out of breath. There were many other phases, including the chariot race and the coitus, behind a quivering curtain, of the ‘non-whore called whore’ with the ‘man-not-from-the-Magadha called man-from-the-Magadha.’

“All this is very far off. The brahmans concerned themselves not only with thinking but also with covering their tracks. The vrātyas were cast out among those best left unmentioned. They lived on as ghosts. Which in a sense they had always been. The herds of the dead. And yet the breaths, we Saptarṣis that is, whom every renouncer knows as his last companions when he withdraws into the forest and speaks with them alone, the breaths without which thought could not mingle with existence, since the one mingles with the other only by virtue of breathing — yet the breaths, I say, were first revealed to the vrātyas, who arranged the right gestures, through the revelation Indra gave to me, that day I am now remembering.”

Vasiṣṭha said: “What is knowledge composed of? If it wishes to know the world in its very fiber, knowledge must achieve the highest level of affinity with that state from which the world arose. That state is knowledge. Every other descends from it. One is what one knows: ‘One becomes what one thinks: this is the eternal enigma,’ say the texts. He who knows, transforms himself. Whatever does not make one become like the thought that has been thought is not full knowledge. Which is another reason why thinking is dangerous. If whoever thinks horror becomes horror too, his thinking will have to be vast indeed if the horror that gathers there is not to suffocate all around it, as has happened, and still happens to many a wretched mind not lacking in perception.”

Yājñavalkya said: “I know that for many of you the real torment is that you must abandon your dear bodies. You imagine, not unreasonably, that the happiness of a disembodied spirit has something dreary about it. But that is not the case. After death, you will find yourself wandering through a haze, shouting without being heard, but all at once it will be you who hear. You will become aware that someone is following you, like an animal in the forest, only now in the darkness of the heavens. The person following you is your oblation, the being composed of the offering you made in your life. In a whisper, he will say to you: ‘Come here, come here, it is I, your Self.’ And in the end you will follow him.”