Roberto Calasso - Ka

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.