The Divinity of Vaak

Whether we understand it or not, the experience of language is a mystery, particularly in its aspects of intellectual interpreta­tion. By divinity is meant here, the cosmological origins of human language, which is the least religious aspect of the human being; a perfect scientific awareness of the language mechanism, as viewed from the cosmic individual. The concept of “divine” as distinguished from the “human” need not disturb the secular perspective of the modern man, who is impelled to reject the reality of his own existence as a reflection of the inner conscious­ness, simply because consciousness is an experience.

The Secret of Language

The Divinity of Vaak i. e., the secret of language, pertains to that state of human consciousness, where the binary distinction of idea and sound, viz., the distinction between mind and matter disappears, and the individual is in perfect consonance with the rhythm of the universal consciousness.

Rigveda characterises this process as the tickling of the cosmic energy in the individual, by which the universe is com­prehended:

maho amah sarasvatii pracetayati
ketunaa dhiyo visvaa viraajati.
R. V. 1-3-12

Mantra (the hymn) originates from such a plane; the popular understanding of Mantras as being boons from the gods is a symbolic representation of this epistemological issue. The gods represent the layers of the cosmic mind (devam manah).

Methodologically similar, Kaavya (poetry) too springs from such a plane alone. Valmiki and Vyasa are points in evidence. When the Upanishad says:

Kavirmaniishii Paribhush Svayambhuh
(Isa Upanishad. 8)

It intends that the Kavi in his philosophical perspective refers to the creative matrix of the seer who is Svayambhu, i. e., born of his free will, viz., not volunteered by the individual  consciousness.

It is in this spirit of the poet, we find Valmiki, exclaiming about what came out through him (he being passive) to form itself into
            Manishaada........        (Ramayana)
His exclamation is typical of the origins of speech from its cosmic abode:

Kimidam Vyaahritam mayaa  (Ramayana)

The kimhere refers both to the content and the form as well. The expression of an idea through the configuration of sound and meaning is an expression of the will of the cosmic mind to speak. It expresses itself.

The Agency of Vaak

Similar is in question posed in Kena Upanishad on the Agentship of Vaak.

            Keneshitam Vaacamimaam Vadanti  (Kena Upanishad 1-1)

By whom impelled, or desired, do the people speak the speech?

Is what we call “speech” something different from what we speak? It is so certainly.

Everyone of us speaks a fragment of the total structure of the technique of linguistic communication associated by the other sub-semiotic mechanism called a “speech.” Telugu is a speech for example. The distinction between Telugu and Kannada, for instance, not only lies in their respective vocabularies and grammars, but also in the idiom, viz., the side of expression by virtue of which we locate that a particular person is a Telugu speaker. Even among Telugu speakers for example, no one of us can claim to have exhausted Telugu vocabulary in our usage; let alone the grammarian its grammar, the poet its stylistic pattern. Telugu as a speech is something beyond the scope of all these efforts to vocalise the concepts that the Telugu culture conceives. Hence all the lexicons, poetry, encyclopaedias, and the entire activity on languages and in language are after all different trials to approximating the totality of the linguistic repertoire that the human beings possess.

We find words for every object; there is nothing being unnamed or unnamable.¹ But, it is no individual’s or group’s agency, to give names to objects (including abstract ideas). Words are already there in the usage. Words exist; people only use them. Words are created anew, but all are within the cognisance of the groups-men who are immediately aware of the purports, the connotations and the feelings attached to words. Thus whatever is linguistically created afresh is proved to be a transplanta­tion, a contamination or a blend of the linguistic elements of foreign origins. Take for instance the variety of speech used in writing. There is a certain portion of the written variety which is never used in the colloquium, but are nevertheless a must for the writing to impress the readers. Hence the so-called “Vyava­haara” of the language aspect is something unlimited to the individual’s usage. ² It encompasses a larger area of which we as individuals have our shares of usage.

Due to what have been discussed above, one cannot assume the members of a social group to be the sole agents of speech.

Language change: a trivial hypothesis

If it is so, language change, and the people do adopt them in their changed forms. They too prefer one language in place of the other. They declare a particular language as being dead. No speaker is found to feel guilty of having used the changed form in his usage. How is it possible for the language to change irrespective of the people’s wish, and the artificial orthodoxy delimiting the natural evolution of language as a reflection to the changing socio-cultural life of a particular nation? What agent can be held responsible for the changes that the natural languages undergo?

Philological interest in the West in the 19th century found fantastic answers to these questions. Fantastic because even the traditional Indian Pundits were swept away by the tide of philological ignorance that has been in continuation till today in the academic bureaucracy of India. Fantastic because they were supposed to be scientific from an imperfect standpoint of the 19th century’s rise of empiricism. Fantastic because they are proved to be wrong today.

The answer August Schleicher ³ for instance gave to this question of the agency of language change, was that languages die, take birth and grow as do the other animals and plants, in perfect ­accordance with the Darwinian Theory of Evolution (Darwinian     Theory and Linguistics, 1863).

The reason seems to be very clear. It is merely in their­ rigour to treat language as a product of nature, to regard linguistics as a science, that the above characterisation simply objectivises the Phycho-physical aspects of language mechanism, as a product which has little connection with the mind of the speaker (the mind here includes in itself the social history, egged in the universal consciousness which thoroughly manifests in the form of Vaak). ⁴

Such a trivial understanding of language as an organism separated from the human consciousness can be recharacterised in the light of the Vedic exegesis, to be discussed later, as follows:

Man has two faces of his existence – the verbal and the non­verbal. Language is an organism in its strict sense when it refers to the verbal face of the human being.

Purushasya vaag rasah          (ChandayogyaUpanishad 1-2)

Steps towards mind

The renovation of the Cartesian revolution in Western rational­ism in the 19th century, as an opposite stand to empiricism, has launched for the first time the concept of the Idea, which is taken to be “innate”, of which speech is a direct Projection. Thus the artifact of deep structure in language is termed a psychic-­configuration. ⁵ But the recent advances in the treatment of language by the Cartesian followers have failed to account for the apparent contradiction that is found between in arbitrary relation­ship of sound to meaning, and their union at the semiotic level. According to them it is difficult to understand how language functions as an instrument of thought. ⁶

Semioticians of the recent past have declared once and for all that language is a semiotic mechanism, wherein there are layers of communication through which the ideas manifest themselves into speech varieties, and that language is a dress of thought. ⁷

The Biblical legend of the “tower of babel” has all through the years in the academic discussions of the present century been assumed to be an unscientific account of the origin of the diversified languages. Taking clues in the process of translation across languages, George Steiner in his herculian attempt ⁸ to interpret the allegory of the tower of babel declares that beyond all these languages, a semiotic mechanism seems to be operating the True Language. He also firmly believes that it is the language which speaks.

The importance of mind in matters related to language use has been independently studied in various other systems of learning. The existence of a social mind which plays an important role in the building of a metaphor in a natural language, has been discovered in the recent researches on social psychology. Anthro­pologists and Folklorists had to bank upon the concept of arche­type to interpret the origin of myths. Jung’s contribution to the concept of universal unconscious has been undisputedly recognised as a criterion to explain the artistic experience. The recent developments in Neurology too testify the nervous responses as being related to the differential functions between “intelligence” and “intuition.” ⁹ Thus it is no wrong if one argues that the experience of a poem, i.e., of the language, is an area related to the intuitive perception; not an intellectual inference. It is in this area of experience that all the systems of learning have been moving towards mind, the depth of which has been a matter of wonder, and an object of speculation.

It is to a dialectical materialist that the problem of intuition has been a blocking stone to explain the materialistic dialectics of the continuing stream of consciousness among men of different centuries and places. They too have had to recognize the mystic nature of language experience; the emergence of the multifarious creativity of the artist as opposed to the isomorphic ideology of the times in force. ¹⁰ They substitute the terms “cosmic idea” by the “historicity of an idea,” which nevertheless amounts to say that it is no individual’s property to master the “art” in language. It is a social property.

The concept of “Society” in its philosophical perspective refers to the creative impulse of the cosmic mind to become many. (Cf. “Brihadaaranyaka Upanishad”). Then the terminological distinction between society and cosmic idea does not stand in the way of understanding language as a manifestation, i. e., the reflec­tion of the cosmic mind to speak.

The Vision Answers

Vaacam Vadanteem
Sarve praanaa anuvadanti
(Kaushitaki Braahmana Upanishad 2-2)

It is the recorded experience of the seers of all times and places that the Mantras reveal themselves to the Yogins. This revelation is not unplanned. It is the cosmic mind which when strikes the mind of the individual that the truth is perceived. Such are the most modern inventions of the sciences, where the scientist is a tool in the hands of the cosmic mind to propose an idea. Interpreters of biblical passages have aptly recognised that the spiritual entender beneath the historical meaning of a psalm or a proverb is something divinely perceived. ¹¹

The poet’s experience of his own composition is a similar wonder. The poetic circuit is apparently finished by the rendering of a poem. But the genesis of the poem from the point of an undifferentiated experience, where the fact and the feeling are one, points out to the independent movement of the will of the cosmic mind to reveal itself through the poet’s voice. Thus the poet’s language is not of his own; but is just a reproduction – a photo-copying – of the dictation by the creative matrix in him.

The divinity of the Yogin’s Vaak and that of the poet does not stop in them; but flows into the earthly activities of the human consciousness where the proverbs, idioms, metaphors, expressions of a particular linguistic community are seen to exist among all the people irrespective of their sociological differences. The invention of zero, the identification of an equation, the idea of a triangle and the perception of unity in dissimilars, are all the projections of the cosmic mind into the Bhaumaperception of the individual. The Platonic conception of the lack of fidelity in the human conversation related to the area of the differentiat­ed idea into cognisable facts of human comprehension.¹² There lies the divinity of Vaak.

A rationalistic explanation to language change can now be formulated to have its impulse in the social mind. Language changes in accordance with the society. Thus it is a social fact. It is also a matter of personal experience¹³ in the sense that the individual is conditioned by his linguistic experience. Thus the triangle of the individual, the cosmic mind, and the experience has mutable rotations in which the language assumes various functions to symbolise the idea, to decode it, and experience it. The axis of rotation being immutable, i. e., the Absolute Idea, it manifests at every point of its realisation, viz., the Vaak.

It is to this divine unity that Kalidasa refers when he says:
            Vaagarthaauiva sampruktau              (Raghuvamsam)

or when the Taittiriya Aaranyaka prostrates as follows:

            Nama vaache nama vaachospataye

And hence it is realistic to conclude that mind and speech have an integrated existence.¹⁴ Speech is an expression of the mind, the experience, an impression of the speech.
The “Aitareya Upanishad” succinctly characterises the notion as follows:
            Vaag me manasi pratishthitaa
            mana me vaachi Pratishthitam          (Invocation)

The evolution and the involution aspects of mind and speech are univocally upheld in the following:        

tasyaa manasaa esaa kulyaa yad vaak          (Jaabaala Upanishad)
            Vaag manasi darsanaat sabdaatcho              (Brahmasutra)

Thus the agency of the speech ultimately goes to the Divine which the Advaitins call the Brahman (as manifested by the Avidya aspect of it), the Saivates the parsa, the modern parapsychologists the cosmic mind. Whatever be the technical term, language is undoubtedly divine.

“As the ancient Indian might say, the utterances of the costermonger, the language of the greatest poet, and the formulae of the atomic physicist are all in some sense manifestations of the same divine vaak.”– John Brough. ¹⁵

References

¹           Nasosti pratyayo lokah yah sabdaanugamaadite
            Anuviddhamivajnanam sarvam sabdena bhaasate.
–Vakya Padeeyam 1-123
² R. G. Bhandarkar, “Development of Language and of Sanskrit”. First Wilson Lecture, incl. in J. F. Staal. 1972. (ed.) Pp. 87-93.
³ R. H. Robins, “A Short History of Linguistics.” Pp. 178-81. (1967)
⁴ According to the Abhaasavaada of Kashmir Saivism, the concept is described as “mayuraanda nyayaa.” See for particulars Jayadev Singh “Pratyabhijnaa Hridayam” (1977 ed)
⁵ N. Chomsky “Cartesian Linguistics” (1960)
⁶ “Language and Mind” (1968) P. 101.
⁷ Roland Barthes “Style and its Image”, in Chatman Seymon (ed) “Literary Style” (1971) also Barthes (1967).
⁸ “After Babel” (1975). See in particular P. 105.
⁹ For details of these researches, see K. C. Pandey (1963) Brahma­nanda H. S. “Vaag Darsana” (1981; in prep) also Koteswara Rao. T. (1981)
¹⁰ Avner Zis, “Foundations of the Marxist Aesthetics” (1976)
¹¹ Raniero A. Gnoli, “Aesthetic Experience According to Abhinava Gupta” (1968), Introduction. p. xxxiv.
¹² Morris Henry Partee, “Plato’s Theory of Language”, Foundations of Language. Vol. 18-1, pp. 113-32 (1972)
¹³ T. A. Richards “Philosophy of Rhetoric” (1936), P. 54.
¹⁴ Ferdiand de Sanssure, “Course delinguistique Generale” (1915) Tr. Wade Baskin 1960 (ed.)
¹⁵ John Brough, “ Some Indian Theories of Meaning” TPS (1953) in J. F. Staal. 1972 (ed.) Pp. 414-23.