Roberto Calasso - Ka

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.