Roberto Calasso - Ardor

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But the linguistic speculation of the ritualists is relentless. A further meaning emerges in the Chāndogya Upaniṣad. And it comes from the highest authority, the fires that the student Upakosala had tended for twelve years while he was a novice at the house of Satyakāma Jābāla. The master had taken leave from his disciples, all except Upakosala, who pined and refused to eat. The master’s wife asked him why and Upakosala replied: “In this person there are many desires. I am full of illness. I will not eat.” It was then that the fires decided to intervene. They were thankful to the pupil who had carefully tended them. They wanted to explain to him, in the fewest words, something essential. They said: “ Brahman is breath, brahman is happiness ( ka ), brahman is space ( kha ).” The pupil remained puzzled. He said: “I know that brahman is breath. But I do not know what are ka and kha. ” The fires answered: “What is ka is kha , what is kha is ka. ” The text adds: “They therefore explained to him breath and space.” From linguistic commentaries ( Bṛhaddevatā and Nirukta ) we learn that Ka was also kāma , “desire,” and sukha , “happiness.” But now kha , “space,” was also found in the same name. And what this was is explained at a crucial point in the Bṛhadāraṇyaka Upaniṣad : “ Brahman is kha , space; space is primordial, space is windswept.”

Etymologists and lexicographers help us approach certain telling details that the ritualists do not always make clear. Behind the dismembered body of Prajāpati, who “has run the whole race” and has ended up falling on his own eye, from which food flowed forth as if it were tears (“From him, thus fallen, food flowed forth: it was from his eye on which he lay that the food flowed”), behind his indistinct figure from whom his son Indra soon sought to take away greatness and splendor, one began to see a boundless extension of desire, over and above which was a happiness that came before all existence, in a space that came before everything and was able to contain everything, in a perpetual circulation of winds. And this was Ka.

Ka, kha : written differently, sounding almost the same, those two syllables, put together, had to heal all sadness. Why? In ka , Prajāpati loomed this time only in the shadows, whereas the meaning of “happiness,” sukha , was clearly apparent. Happiness spread out into space ( kha ) — and space allowed happiness to breathe. On another occasion, another master explained to Upakosala the simple opening of space called kha (which also means “orifice,” “wound,” “zero”).

But how does brahman appear in kha , in “open space”? In the form of an hourglass. Its upper part extends out into the totality of outer space. Its neck narrows to a point that is almost imperceptible, in a minuscule cavity in the heart of each person. Behind it there opens up an immensity equivalent to that of the outside world. This is the lower part of the hourglass. The grain of mustard, of which the Upaniṣads (and the Gospels) speak, passes through the neck and extends out into the invisible. One passage in the Chāndogya Upaniṣad states all this (a revelation that shatters all previous thinking) in the quietest, most direct way, as in a calm, persuasive conversation: “That which is called brahman is this space, ākāśa , which is outside man. This space which is outside man is the same as the one within man. And this space within man is the same as that inside the heart. It is what is full, unchangeable.” The aura that surrounds people is the impression that allows us to detect the presence of the lower part of the hourglass. For the German romantics, inner exploration was a relentless search for the neck of the hourglass, without the assistance of rituals and fires.

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Arka : a word belonging to a secret language, about which we know little. It was familiar to Armand Minard, the most austere priest of the Śatapatha Brāhmaṇa , who dedicated his life’s work to a word-by-word commentary on it, with the perverse satisfaction of making it even more inaccessible: “ arká -: ray (flash of lightning, flame, fire, sun), — plant whose flamed leaves carry the offering to Rudra in his lustral century ( śatarudriya ), — laud, hymn (= uktha ), which is perhaps the first meaning (Ren. JAs 1939 344 n. 1). This polysemy opens up endless speculations (thus X 6 2 5-10). And the word (almost: 525 a) always, as here (and 363), taken in two or more senses.” These words are a comment on the Śatapatha Brāhmaṇa , 10, 3, 4, 3 (“Do you know the arka ? So, may your Lordship deign to teach it to us”) and they make us feel the rapturous shiver of Minard’s philology. In contrast, Stella Kramrisch has another style: “ Arka is anything that radiates. It is ray, splendor, and lightning. It is the song.”

The passage Minard comments on is a provocative example of a series of riddles, where the human body appears behind the description of arka as a flower, Calotropis gigantea (“Do you know the flowers of the arka ? With this he meant the eyes”—and so forth for the other organs), and behind the arka can be seen the profile of Agni, up to the last comparison: “He who regards Agni as arka and as man, in his body this Agni, the arka , will be built up through the knowledge that ‘I here am Agni, the arka. ” But also to be found in arka were Ka as well as ka , “happiness.” Immediately after the opening of the Bṛhadāraṇyaka Upaniṣad —an overwhelming procession of divinities led by the young girl called Dawn, Uṣas, who reveals herself to be “the head of the sacrificial horse”—we move on to arka : “In the beginning there was nothing here below. Everything was wrapped in Death [Mṛtyu], in hunger, for hunger is Death. He [Mṛtyu] had this thought: ‘Let me have a Self.’ So he began to pray. And, while he was praying, waters were generated. He said: ‘While I was praying [ arc- ] happiness came to me [ ka ; this according to Senart, but ka also means ‘water,’ and so Olivelle translates the passage: ‘While I was occupied in a liturgical recital, water poured forth from me’].’ This is where the name arka comes from. Happiness goes to the one who knows thus why arka is called arka [Olivelle is in difficulty here, so that he has to translate as follows: ‘Water pours forth from the one who knows thus’].”

But the story carries on: “The froth of the waters solidified and was land. On the land he [Mṛtyu] toiled. When he was exhausted and hot, the essence of his brilliance became fire.” After the waters and the land, other parts of the world were formed: the sun, the wind. It was the breath of life that broke down into pieces. Death then wished: “Let me give birth to a second Self. Death, which is hunger, coupled mentally ( manasā ) in coitus ( mithunam ) with Speech, Vāc. That which was the seed became the Year.” Speech, Vāc, as a daughter with whom to have immediate intercourse, then the appearance of Time (Year): we have already come across this in the Śatapatha Brāhmaṇa , the long text of which the Bṛhadāraṇyaka Upaniṣad forms the final part. There, however, it was all about Prajāpati; here it is Mṛtyu, Death, who continues to behave like Prajāpati. He practices tapas , becomes exhausted, dismembered. “The breaths: splendor, energy” flee from his body. His body swells, as also happens in the stories about Prajāpati. It is a carcass, but his mind is still in it. Mṛtyu then decided to make another body for himself. He formulated the same words in his mind as he had spoken at the beginning: “Let me have a Self.” He then became a horse, aśva , since he had “swollen,” aśvat. And once Mṛtyu has swollen up in the horse, he can sacrifice it, since “what was swollen had become fit for sacrifice ( medhya ).” This is the origin of the “horse sacrifice,” aśvamedha. Here we sense the action of the same coded, lightning process that operated for the word arka. The text, in fact, immediately points it out: “They are two, arka and aśvamedha , but there is one single divinity, which is Mṛtyu.” Throughout, up to the institution of the aśvamedha , which is the greatest of all sacrifices, Mṛtyu and Prajāpati have each followed in the footsteps of the other, like two doubles. But only now, in the Upaniṣad of the Forest, is the piercing obsession of the Vedic ritualists given form, which in the Brāhmaṇas appears only fleetingly: “recurring death,” punarmṛtyu , the greatest of all ills that can be suffered. And the power that makes it possible to escape it is Mṛtyu, Death, itself: “He [who knows this] avoids recurring death, death cannot reach him, Mṛtyu becomes his Self, he who knows thus becomes one of these divinities.”