Roberto Calasso - Ardor

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The Vedic seers regarded the passage of the mind from one thought to the next, and its ever deeper immersion into the same thought, as the model for every journey. To speak about oceans, mountains, and skies they had no need for daring explorations. They could remain motionless beside their belongings, during a pause in their migrations. The result would be the same. Traveling, they thought, was an essentially invisible activity. And, if anything, it takes its form in a series of liturgical actions. So in the kindling rituals they were above all concerned with kindling the mind, the only steed capable of carrying them to the gods. And they murmured: “Yes, that which carries to the gods is the mind.”

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The activity that the whole of creation depends on takes place in mind alone. But it is of a kind that immediately demonstrates the effectiveness of the mind over what lies outside it. And, for the mind, the effects of what lies outside it are within the body itself. An invisible combustion is thus produced, a gradual heat, up to the ardor achieved through the operation of the mind. It is tapas , well known to Siberian shamans, ignored or banished in Western thought. Ubiquitous and supreme, rarely are its powers defined, because they are too obvious. But the ritualist sometimes consents to explain them: “In truth, with tapas they conquer the world.” What affects the world, what assails it is tapas , the inner ardor of the mind. Without it, all gestures, all words are useless. Tapas is the flame that passes covertly or overtly through everything. Sacrifice is the occasion for which those two conditions of ardor — visible in fire, invisible in the officiant — meet and combine.

This is the greatest approximation allowed, if we want to describe the most elusive yet inevitable of facts: the feeling of being alive. Reduced to its proprioceptive as well as its thermodynamic essence, it is a sensation of something alight, something that burns on a slow and continual flame. All other characteristics are added and superimposed on this, which is their assumption and support. The word extinction, nirvāṇa , taught by the Buddha, had to appear as the negation par excellence of what was presented as life itself. Sacrifice, as an act of burning something, therefore had to appear as the most exact visible equivalent of the state which is the basis of life itself.

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The ṛṣis had the task of keeping and controlling world order. But they also had another function, which threatened to disrupt world order at any moment. Stories were based around the ṛṣis. In the interminable tangle of dealings between men and gods, at every turn there was a ṛṣi ’s curse, or his “boon,” vara. Great epic stories such as the Mahābhārata or the Rāmāyaṇa , which resemble immense luxuriant trees, would one day be presented as the work of a ṛṣi , Vyāsa or Vālmīki. But, much earlier, the framework of the stories they retold had been based on the acts of other ṛṣis , among whom there may have been the person who would one day become author of the poem that told these stories. This is what happened with Vyāsa and the Mahābhārata— as if Homer had been one of the Greek heroes who fought under the walls of Troy.

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There are no archaeological remains of Vedic kingdoms, but the Ṛgveda describes various conflicts and battles. They culminated in the “Battle of the Ten Kings,” where the Bharatas, under their chieftain Sudās and armed with axes, managed to defeat a coalition of ten warlords—Āryas and non-Āryas — who were surrounding them. So the Bharatas won, and it is the name by which India is still known today. Or this, at least, is what we may infer, since the hymns never recount a sequence of events, but allude to them, addressing gods and men who already knew what had happened. What were the salient features of the war? In describing the enemies of the Bharatas, the text declares only that they were “without sacrifices ( áyajyavaḥ ).” That was quite enough. It was taken for granted that every war is a war of religion. As for the Bharatas themselves, they were supported by both Indra and Varuṇa, not always friendly divinities. How had this miracle been possible? Thanks to the work of a seer, the ṛṣi Vasiṣṭha, who had arranged that alliance and had taken over as chaplain to the Bharatas, ousting another seer, Viśvāmitra, who had immediately crossed over to the enemy line. After that, they had been in perpetual conflict. They argued sitting on opposite banks of the Sarasvatī—and their voices traveled across the roaring flow of the waters. Even when Vasiṣṭha transformed Viśvāmitra into a heron — and Viśvāmitra in turn transformed Vasiṣṭha into a crane — they continued fighting in the air, pecking furiously with their beaks. They detested each other for deep religious reasons, “totally committed to attachment or aversion, always full of desire and hatred.”

Viśvāmitra had once threatened to destroy the three worlds, but Vasiṣṭha relied on his secret: he was the only ṛṣi to have seen Indra “face to face.” And when the hymns mention the battles, they do not pause to describe the kings, the warriors, and their exploits, but rather the gods and ṛṣis , as if the decisive conflicts could take place only between them. If Sudās turned out to be a great ruler in the end, it was not so much because he had defeated the Ten Kings, but because Vasiṣṭha had once taught him how to perform a particular type of soma sacrifice. Sudās was grateful. He gave Vasiṣṭha two hundred cows and two chariots, as well as women, jewels, and four horses.

Manas , “mind” (later mens in Latin), “thought.” But above all the pure fact of being conscious, awake. For the Vedic people, everything came from consciousness, in the sense of pure awareness devoid of any other attribute. They invoked it delicately, as “the divine one that comes forward from afar when we awake and falls back when we slumber.” Likewise “she through whom the seers, able creators, operate in the sacrifice and in the rites.” They said it was an “unprecedented wonder, dwelling in living beings.” They recognized in it “what envelops all that was, is and shall be.” They called it “stable in the heart and yet moveable, infinitely fast.” The unattainable speed of the mind: here it was named, evoked, adored perhaps for the first time. Finally the much-repeated wish: “May that which it [the mind] conceives be propitious for me.” The mind is an external power, equal to the gods and superior to the gods, which conceives in solitude and can, through its grace, reverberate in the mind of every living being. And the first, the highest wish, is that this might take place “propitiously.” Manas would then act like “a good charioteer,” it would become the one “who powerfully guides his men like steeds, by the reins.”

Absolutism of the mind, a prerequisite of Vedic thought, certainly doesn’t mean omnipotence of the mind, as if supremely magical powers were attributed to it. If that were the case, the result would have in the end been a crude construction, equivalent — in reverse — to one where such sovereign powers were attributed to an entity called “matter.”

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