On the Possibility of Transcendent Language, Part I - India

In his prodigiously researched Empires of the Word: A Language History of the World, Nicholas Ostler writes in his chapter about Sanskrit:

"Sanskrit appears to us, as do most of its Indo-European sister languages, as the speech of conquering warriors, well capable of using horses and wheeled vehicles to establish domination over their neighbours, and turn them into serfs and subjects. The way of life is familiar from heroic poetry of Indo-European peoples in every direction: men who fight from chariots, speak forthrightly, and care for their own personal honour more than life itself. When, in the Sanskrit epic Mahabharata, Krishna advises Arjuna on his duty that day, he could be speaking to the Greek Achilles attacking Troy (a thousand years earlier), or the Irishman Cuchulainn standing against the hosts of Connacht (in a thousand years to come)."

After quoting Krishna's famed exhortation to Arjuna, in which the god encourages the king not to flinch from his duty as a warrior, Ostler continues:

"Being a Hindu god, Krishna does go on to ground this exposition of the heroic code within a theology of reincarnation and a theory of knowledge that reduces the world of action to a shadow-play of appearances; but the basic ethic of nobility expressed through courage and military prowess is clear."

Although I was struck by the historic-militaristic trend Ostler identifies within the Indo-European language group (particularly since I had just watched Die Hard 4, in which Bruce Willis single-handedly takes on an army of computer wizards, martial artists and men with guns), I did take note of how quickly Ostler skips through the caveat about Krishna's "theory of knowledge".

I began to experiment with Indian epistemology, as filtered through several thousand years of Chinese, Japanese and American culture, about five years ago, although it wasn't until just this last year or so I realized that that was what I was doing. In one sense, Buddhist meditation is experiential epistemological research, and its roots, while plural, are certainly as much Indian as anything.

As Dan Lusthaus writes in his exposition of Yogacara Buddhism, Buddhist Phenomology, "While it is not uncommon for Western philosophical systems to begin with ontological commitments or assumptions (this is especially true in Theological philosophy, but generally true in other forms as well, including Analytic Philosophy, which has bestowed a virtual ontological status on language and statements [and, I might add, of science, which has enshrined the 'facts' uncovered by 'the scientific method' as unassailably primary]) and secondarily to generate epistemological criteria and methods whereby those commitments and assumptions can be verified, in India the situation is reversed. Indian philosophers, including the theologians, begin with epistemology, and only once they have satisfactorily established the criteria for valid means of knowledge can they move on to make ontological, metaphysical or ethical claims. The various Indian schools and sects, Buddhist as well as non-Buddhist, spent as least as much time arguing over what constituted valid means of knowledge as they did arguing about other matters."

Returning to Ostler, while he may be correct in pointing out the existence of a tradition of militaristic heroism extending through Indo-European history, he glosses too quickly over the importance of epistemology as a dividing factor in that tradition. As my South Asian History professor at CU told my Indian history class many times, it took Indian armies close to a thousand years after the first Muslim invasions in the 8th century CE to begin using tactics. Not just ballistics, but tactics of any kind. To try to conceal oneself or deceive an opponent was seen not just as cowardice but as apostasy, insofar as Hinduism has such a thing. For while battle, as a kind of theater, made sense to Hindu devotees, trickery in battle amounted to denying the connection, symbiosis, or even the unity of oneself and one's enemy, and that made no sense at all. Now I certainly won't vouch that each and every Indian soldier saw his imminent slaughter at the hands of Arab armies, Turkish slave-generals or Afghan empire-builders as a 'shadow-play of appearances', but it is clear that the Indian epistemology which gave birth to that notion was very much underpinning their lives.

And what, then, was the crux of that epistemology? Roberto Calasso writes the following in Ka: Stories of the Mind and Gods of India, his dazzling retelling and elucidation of the Vedas:

"Masters of the goaded, greased, hard-brushed, well-honed word, the rsis 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-en-scene of the mind."

What Calasso is getting at is the Indic fascination, unparalleled in human history, with the phenomenon of consciousness. Where Des Cartes made due with thought as the locus of the self, the Indians demanded more rigor: If the self is the thinker, who is the self that watches the thinker? Before they exercised consciousness outward, they wanted to step inward to know its origin, and that step proved to be not an initial but a determinative one, for the workings of internality were found to be manifold, complex and possibly infinite. But how could the mind know the mind? And how could one person's knowledge of his own mind be transmitted to another? Certainly not without language.

"No artifacts have come down to us from the Vedic era," writes Calasso. "Nothing that those who intoned the hymns of the Rg Veda has survived. Not merely because wood rots faster in a tropical climate. Not merely because they chose not to build in stone. Not merely because they decided not to have temples. The hymns speak of palaces with a hundred gates. They speak of well-crafted jewels. Of bronze palisades. They list the paraphernalia of ritual. They speak of arms and chariots. It is as if everything had been pure mental reality that allows the object to appear, then reabsorbs it...Between the conquering Aryas and the Buddha: a thousand years and not a single object. Not a stone, not a seal, not a city wall. Wood: burned, rotted, decayed. Yet the texts speak of paintings and jewels. Immensely complex metrics - and the void. One thousand and twenty-eight hymns collected by the Rg Veda. Not a trace of a dwelling. Rites described in meticulous detail. Not a single ritual object that has survived. Those who glorified the leftover left nothing over themselves, except what was filtered through the word. A highly articulated language, fine-wrought as a palace."

In their search for the meaning and origin of consciousness, then, the Indians put language at the forefront. Sacrificial chants, ritual intonations, a generative grammar (Panini's) that has never been equalled, and an entire caste of people dedicated to the propagation of sacred scripts. But the risk in all this was that language would prove a maze, a trap. As I wrote in an earlier blog entry, it is commonly accepted by linguists today that language is a fundamentally self-referential phenomenon. Like a pair of exceptionally effective gloves that we use to handle 'the world', language allows us to communicate in our manipulations of energy, but what we feel when we use it is not the energetic 'objects' themselves, but the gloves. This is a big problem for religions that would depend on language.

One solution is to assert that one's language is, unlike all other languages, objective. It is not a stretch to say that Orthodox Judaism is inconceivable without this premise. The Hebrew of the Torah is said to be the language of God and thus the language of reality, and this assertion is backed up in various ways - analysis of the shapes of letters and words, comparative etymology within the language, and, most potently, the system of gematria, wherein each Hebrew letter has a numerical value, and numerical comparison of words can lead to astonishing conceptual linkages. (Gematria is deeply intertwined with Kabbalah, Jewish mysticism, and it is these days a common factor in the conversion of secular Jews into believers, as it is indeed difficult to believe that its sophistication is within the power of the human intellect.)

The Indians too made the case that their language, at least in the case of the Vedas, was "not from man", but India was a yogic culture, a culture that placed high value on experiential knowledge, and with the Buddha, that value became a clear emphasis. In the hands of Buddhism, language would not have to claim divinity to warrant use in accessing true reality. It would become, rather, a tool grasped firmly in the hand of meditative silence. And to what end?

Writes Lusthaus: "Literature is the attempt to fill the gap between sensation and discourse with meaning, an activity that is both a reduction of sensation to language and an evocation of sensation by language. It could be argued that beginning with the Prajnaparamita literature, the Buddhist theory of verbal and textual authority hinges on the ability of fictitious literature to evoke soterically expedient sensations."

Language could thus be transcendent not through connection to higher powers or effects in unseen spiritual realms, but in its ability to radically inflect the felt experience of human beings, to disrupt the cognitive loop in which it normally plays so crucial a part.

When the Muslim armies came with force into India, the Hindus did not use tactics, but the Buddhists did not fight at all. By the 11th or 12th centuries, what had formerly been almost entirely Buddhist populations - in modern Afghanistan, Pakistan and Bangladesh - had either fled, been killed or converted to Islam. But inquiries into transcendent language and its possible uses were continuing farther to the north. The Buddhist literature of India had been assiduously translated and copied by Chinese monks for more than six centuries by that point. But following the translations from Sanskrit and Pali to Chinese, we cannot say that the language was being written anymore. It was, in a sense, being drawn.

The Lowest Glacier in Asia (Entry the Last)

In my last week before leaving China, I took a trip to see the Hailuogou Glacier Park, which lies in the mountains of western Sichuan, fairly close to Tibet. A sign from the park police read as follows:
"When consumer's legitimate rights and interests receive the violation; when you discover the fake and shoddy merchandise, please dial..."

That was the best bit of Chinglish I had encountered since reading the suitability guide on the back of Tom's weight-gain protein powder: 'Suit Mass: Teenager, the elderly, weakling and fitness and body-building people.'

The most poignant sentence I saw came after I returned to America, as the opening line of an email from my friend Xiao Han: 'Dear Matt, Last night I dreamed tow bears and them wanted to hit me.'

Anyway, cheered by the park tourist affairs police bureau's effort at reassurance, I headed up to see the Hailuogou Bingchuan (the latter word meaning 'ice river') – the lowest glacier in Asia.

It's a beautiful place. I arrived in the afternoon, and the diffuse, gray clouds had already set upon the mountain, giving a fairy-tale quality to the looming trees and slicking the rock faces, which are shaggy with vivid green moss. As you can see in the above photo, the glacier itself (or at least its tongue, which is the part you're allowed to walk on) consists of hillocks of ice intermixed with dirt and snow and the various rocks and boulders that it has pushed with it down the mountain.

I was guided to and on the glacier by a friendly, middle aged local man with a thick Sichuanese accent. Having failed to foresee that my worn-out sneakers might not be ideal for hiking on a glacier, I accepted the man's hand now and then going up and down the icier patches. At one point he pulled out a cigarette and forged ahead, simultaneously smoking with one hand and pulling me along behind him with the other. Coming down the glacier, several times he turned full around and held both of my hands while backing down the slope, and I thought that we must have looked like a parent and overgrown child in some sort of bizarre but tender skating lesson.

The man told me that he has two children, one in college and one in high school, and that it is very difficult for him to pay their tuitions. I asked him what his daughter is studying at college, and he said he doesn't know. "Wo mei you wen hua," he told me by way of explanation. "I don’t have education."

When we got back down to the trailhead, I gave the man an additional seven or so dollars on top of the eight he had asked for, and he thanked me profusely, on the verge of tears. He said that if any of my friends ever visit the park, he would guide them around for free. I wish I could say that all of my stories about economic inequality in China were so amicable, but most were not. When I was in the bus station in Chengdu waiting to catch the bus to Hailuogou, I realized I didn't have a pen on me and went to try and buy one. It was early in the morning, and I spotted a woman just opening up her little store at the side of the station. I saw a box of pens and, taking one out, asked how much they were.

"Three kuai," she told me - about 40 cents.

I knew the price was inflated but didn't care about such a relatively small amount of money. It occurred to me, however, that the pen was very likely be of low-quality and might stop working after a short while, so I asked if I could have two pens for five kuai. The woman, in her late 30s or early 40s, nodded and took my five kuai, but at that point she either changed her mind or realized she had misunderstood me, because she said, "Six kaui! Add one kaui!"

Now, in a shopping market in Chengdu, one can probably buy ten or fifteen pens for five kaui. Feeling irritated, I put one of the pens back, took two of my kuai back out of her hand and began to walk out of the store.

"Okay," she said. "Okay."

As I gave her back the two extra kuai and took another pen, I noticed the shame in the woman's eyes. She had looked fierce and frightened as she challenged me for the extra pittance, and now she just looked bitter and unhappy.

I have no idea if that woman or my park guide are technically impoverished. I don't know much about their lives or how they feel. But what I do know - what I came to sense as I stayed in China - is that an ocean of desperate uncertainty lies beneath the social surface of that country. While I was in China, three people were trampled to death in a grocery store in Chongqing in the rush to buy large jugs of cooking oil that the store was selling for half-off to mark its anniversary. Part of the explanation for such tragedies is that there are simply so many people in China, but it goes beyond that. It lies in the presence of China’s past. Unprocessed suffering and its progeny, the anarchies of desire, are at play in China; they are at play within and amidst a billion and a half people. I know this because these tendencies, which are present to greater or lesser degrees in everyone, became more and more exacerbated in me the longer that I stayed in Chengdu. My breath grew shallower and my energy less focused. I found myself becoming easily irritated, and when I blamed people, the cautionary voice that I have worked to develop in my head, the voice which says that there is a reality of non-self as well as a reality of self, was becoming more of a toyish concept to me than the spiritual guide that I want it to be.

In the end, although I can say that I had an interesting time in China, I left there with a depth of sadness in my heart. It is a sadness sprung from the realization that the world’s largest population has been disinherited of its culture, orphaned from its identity, and left to make its way in the fields of modernity and postmodernity, where the soul-sickening weeds of nationalism and consumerism flourish. It is a sadness bred of the knowledge that there was nothing I could do but take heart in the good times I shared with people there, and go.

And so I have returned to the monastery, to the place where I feel most supported in the effort to understand and generate peace in our life. What peace I feel here is not, however, a peace outside of suffering, not a blissed-out detachment or a dreamer’s retreat; it is, rather, the peace of generating a nearer heart-broken life.

I am keeping China as close as I can. It is me.

My Time in the Elevator

(I don't have any good photos from the elevator, so I thought I'd put this one in instead. The photo is of my boss's aunt, a tiny, energetic lady of 71 and former star of Beijing stage and screen. I met her when she visited during the National Holiday week, and she treated us to a few numbers, including "Edelweiss," "Unchained Melody" by the Righteous Brothers, and some songs from Soviet Russia. Her husband, a retired pharmaceuticals chemist, is in the background.)

My apartment is on the 23rd floor of a humongous apartment complex. Everyone has to ride two elevators to get up or down. We ride down to the sixth floor, then get off and walk across a veranda that is in fact the roof of a large shopping mall, and then ride a second elevator down to the first floor. All in all it makes for a lot of elevator time and elevator-centered relationships.

The inside of an elevator tends to be an awkward space for most people, and in the case of the Chinese, having a large (by Chinese standards,) white male who may or may not understand Chinese standing there also in the elevator tends to exacerbate the tension. In most cases it's not so bad. People just glance nervously and exercise whatever little tics they have. Little kids duck behind their parents legs; young women look embarassed; middle age women look frightened. It's the younger guys who have it the worst - cool guys in their teens or early twenties who are used to being the coolest person in sight, or at least pretty clear on who is the coolest person in sight, and who now suddenly have to contend with a total unknown. I remember one guy, about my age or a little younger, in a leather jacket, tan slacks and a button-down shirt opened at the top of his chest. I was already in the elevator when he got on. He pushed the 'close door' button and started shifting from side to side and fidgeting with his cigarette (a paper sign prohibiting smoking in the elevators is pasted up on the wall, but many people do not heed it, and many of those who do simply stomp out their butts on the floor of the elevator.) We had to ride up quite a few floors together, and with perhaps five seconds to go until his stop, this man actually began clawing at the serrated, plastic brand identification placard (Guangzhou Hitachi) on the elevator wall. He scratched and scratched at it, which produced a sort of low whine, and he turned his head over his shoulder, in my direction, but not actually looking at me. I felt a little nervous myself.

The other day I got on the elevator as a woman on the outside carried on an argument of some kind with a man already standing inside. They were speaking in thick Sichuanese, so I couldn't make any of it out, but there was a bunch of stuff, small furniture and the like, outside of the elevator, so I took it they were quarreling over some work he had done or was supposed to do for her. His clothes were gray and worn, and his thumbnail was grown out in the style of those who want to show that they are not manual laborers (this is most commonly done, as I understand it, by the children of farmers or other manual laborers.) After I got on, I held the door open, as I figured they would want to put the stuff in, but the man gestured me away.

"Mei shi, mei shi," he said to me as the woman continued pestering him. "Don't worry, it's nothing."

The women was still talking as the doors glided to a close, and then the man and I rode down together two floors, he saying "Mei shi" a few more times as we descended. The elevator stopped on the third floor, where there was someone holding a mattress and some other large furniture. The man's tone picked up vehemence. "Mei shi! Mei shi!" he assured me, waving his hand prohibitively at the furniture as he nodded at me and pushed the 'close door' button. I got off at the first floor, and the man looked satisfied because I hadn't had to wait for very long. It was dreamlike, as if I had encountered some guardian who, upon meeting me, preferred me to his other wards and saw me safely on my way.

I love riding the elevator with babies or dogs. Babies and dogs do not kn0w that I am a foreigner. I can pat either of them as I please, which is both fun and an effective way to establish rapport with whoever is their guardian.

One time I rode the elevator with an unattended dog. The dog was hanging around outside the elevators when I showed up. No owner appeared, and, looking around, I saw none. When the elevator came I got on, and the dog, a small, mostly white, muscular mutt, got on with me. The doors closed and he began to growl and bare teeth. We rode on up together, the dog continuing its low-throated rumble and occasionally taking a few steps this way or that. Then the doors opened on the 23rd floor, and the dog preceeded me out. He went off to sniff things, and I to my apartment. It was an unprecedented and oddly satisfying experience for me.