Kohn, Richard J.
Mantras, those ubiquitous and enigmatic utterances characteristic of the religions of India and of cultures that have fallen under her spell, are the subject of a valuable collection of essays published by SUNY Press as a part of its Series in Religious Studies (Robert Cummings Neville, Editor). The contributors are all expert in one or more periods of Sanskrit philosophical literature, and their essays are uniformly well grounded and soundly researched. Assembled by Harvey P. Alper--this was indeed the last work of that distinguished Indologist--these are essays in the original and best sense of that term: attempts to explain a phenomenon that does not easily yield to understanding. So obdurately hermetic are mantras that the authors cannot even agree whether they are language. Even if mantras do not mean anything, however, they are certainly intended to do something, and the instrumentality of mantras is a theme introduced by Alper and taken up in a variety of ways by many of the other contributors. Looking at mantras in the context of the Rgveda, Ellison Banks Findly sees them as "performative speech" (p. 16), as "pure power encapsulated" (p. 17). The mantra takes its power from its eloquence and from the "transcendent truth of the cosmic and human orders" (rta) (p. 19). As early as the Rgveda, Findly opines, revelation of such truth is not "dependent on a deus ex machina" but is to be found in the human heart. Be that as it may, part of a mantra's power comes from its divine associations. Agni, god of fire (and of the fires of inspiration), "stays the heavens with truthful mantras" (.Rgveda 1.67.5; cited p. 21), and along with truth (rta, satya), Agni is the power behind mantras in the earliest period (p. 23). Later in the development of the .Rgveda, power shifts from the gods to the priests who worship them. Now mantric efficacy is seen to rest on the fact that they are "pronounced by the seers." The instrumentality of the mantra is encoded in its very etymology, rendered here as "instrument" (-tra) of "thought" (man-) (p. 26). But thought only becomes instrumental, Findly argues, when it is put into words. Thus the term "incorporates the Rgvedic seers' sense that their words in ritual actually do something" (p. 27). In the words of the Veda, "If this mantra remains unspoken / It will bring no joy, even on the most distant day" (10.951cd; p. 26). The poet Archibald Macleish liked to observe that a "poem should not mean, but be." In a similar vein, for a number of years Frits Staal has argued that, in a certain deep sense, rituals have no meaning. Here, Professor Staal examines the use of mantra in all four vedas and finds that mantras do not consist of language. As usual, his argument is as eloquent as it is controversial. How can we but admire an article which renders the same bit of vedic Sanskrit in these two ways: (1) Hey hey hey! BANG bang bang bang bang bang BANG bang bang bang bang bang BANG bang bang bang bang! Hey hey hey! Born as brahman first in the ea-east, Vena has shone out of the glimmering horizon. He has revealed its highest and lowest positionemes, the womb of being and of non-be-be-ying. Hey hey hey! BANG bang bang bang bang bang BANG bang bang bang bang bang BANG bang bang bang bang bang! Hey hey, hey man! Brahman shines in the highest heaven of the gods brahman shines in the highest heaven of the gods brahman shines in the highest heaven of the gogodeses! (P. 50) (2) P[sup 3](QR[sup 5) [sup 3]P[sup 3] X P[sup 3](QR[sup 5])[sup 3]P[sup 2]P[*] Y The taxonomy of mantras that Staal proposes in the second example (p. 56) is itself a valuable contribution; it helps us compare mantras on a structural level. The patterning of meaningless vocalizations is something that Staal also sees in the songs of birds and the babbling of infants and madmen. There is much to be said for his claim that although mantras often may consist in part of language, they are indeed not language. After all, we might say, by analogy, the literary dimension of a book tends to recede when it is used to press flowers. Staal's position that mantras do not consist of language leads him to conclude that mantras actually "predate language in the development of man in a chronological sense" (p. 71). Whether or not this bold speculation is convincing, it is stimulating to see mantras considered in such a wide time span. Theorists both inside and outside the Indic tradition have often claimed that mantras take their power from their ability directly to access deeper levels of consciousness. By placing the ball in the court of evolution, Staal's argument gives the traditional view a new twist. From this vantage, the deeper levels of consciousness are part of what evolution has made us heir to, and the Buddhist philosopher Nagarjuna and the like-minded Vedantin Gaudapada, who once wrote "No one in bondage, no one seeking perfection," become the handmaidens of evolution The mystical state is a prelinguistic state of mind that can be reached when language is renounced, through silence, mantras, or rites. The absence of language accounts for most or all of its allegedly blissful nature. But it also explains certain philosophical and theological ideas and doctrines.... Accordingly, mantras do not transform a person or lead to a new existence; on the contrary, they give access to a state or condition that at all times was already there. (P. 80) Wade T. Wheelock compares the use of mantra in vedic and tantric ritual. Like Staal, Wheelock finds it difficult to make mantra fit into the contemporary philosophy of language, for example, as a "speech act" as defined by J. L. Austin and John Searle. While Staal examines the patterns of polisyllabic mantras, Wheelock analyzes their grammar. In contradistinction to Staal, for whom the single-syllable mantra, or bija, is the epitome of the nonlinguistic quality of mantras, for Wheelock the "deep-structure" of a mantra like ram, which invokes fire, reveals the sentence "I am fire" (p. 103). Other cases, however, are "sonic in medium but inarticulate," such as when bija mantras are strung together to form the mula- or root-mantra of a deity, e.g. "hrim srim krim Paramesvari svaha" (p. 114). The point of tantric meditation is to identify with the deity. For Wheelock, vedic language, with its long association with invoking the deities, finds a natural place in tantra. By analyzing its structure and ritual context, Wheelock is able to gloss an opaque utterance like "hram to the heart, namah" as "To you, who are the heart of the deity I offer homage" (p. 104). Tantric rites usually have a single actor. Vedic ritual, on the other hand, has a multiplicity of roles. Vedic mantras, both in content and grammatical form follow this multiplicity. An adhvaryu or other priest may say in the first person indicative "with the arms of Indra, I pick you up" (p. 105), whereas a yajamana, or patron, whose brush with the divine is of a more transient nature, flips between the second and first persons, "You are Visnu's step.... I step across the earth" (p. 106). On the deepest levels, though, for Wheelock the difference in vedic and tantric mantras results from the radical difference in their world view. In the vedas, man and god ultimately are separate; they must be joined by articulated correspondences (bhanda) given voice in mantras. In tantra, however, man and god are one, and mantras attempt to "express sonically the collapse of the manifest universe into a single category" (p. 117). Kenneth G. Zysk examines the medical traditions of the Ayurveda. Mantras were a part of treatment from even the time of the Artharvaveda. One hymn (6.12), for example, refers to a treatment for snakebite-- By that [mantra] which was known by the brahmanas, by the sages and the gods [and] which was in the past, will be in the future and is now in the mouth, I cover the poison. (P. 128) By the time of the Ayurveda, at the beginning of the Christian era, it was deemed practical to supplement these mantras with a more tangible antidote, in case, for example, the mantra had been recited "with the proper accents and syllables missing." Mantras were also a crucial part of the collection and compounding of medicines, such as "the elixir which promotes sexual desire in old age (ayuskamarasayana) " (p. 133). In general, however, the movement in Ayurveda was away from mantras and toward other types of treatment. The Susruta Samhita, for example, avers that wounds should be cleaned and treated "as if it were a mantra," or, as your family doctor might say, religiously. John Taber meets a question head on that Staal and Wheelock treat in passing: "are mantras speech acts?" In the West, it has become the stuff of legend (or at least newspaper filler) that the Indians have laid claim to having invented everything from the aeroplane to the A-bomb. In terms of philosophy, at least, they may be right. The Indian philosopher approached his task with the same gusto as the Indian architect. No stone was left uncarved; horror vacuae ruled the day. It should be no surprise, then, that the question of whether mantras are speech acts should have been addressed somewhere along the line. Looking at the writings of the Mimamsa philosopher Sabarasvamin (A.D. 200--400), Taber finds the following question, "kim vivaksitavacana mantra utavivaksitavacanah"-- "Do mantras express an intended [meaning] or not?" (p. 145, 160 n. 2), or, in Searlian terms, "are mantras speech acts?" Sabara sets up an opponent, one Kautsa, who questions the meaningfulness of mantras on a number of grounds. They speak of things that do not exist (RV 4.58.3 mentions a being with four horns, three feet, two heads and seven hands); they attribute purposes to unconscious objects ("O plant, protect this one! " TS 1.2.1) ; they are self contradictory ("Aditi is heaven; Aditi is the atmosphere," RV 1.89.10). (P. 146) "Some of them, " Kautsa believed, "are simply incomprehensible" (p. 146) . Interestingly, Kautsa here supports the traditionalist view. His arguments are not meant to undermine the notion of the efficacy of mantras, but to affirm it: mantras work because they have magical power, not because of any meaning. It is the Mimamsa apologist Sabara who, in his attempt to demystify the vedas, takes the innovative position that mantras have meaning. Thus, Taber concludes, "To be sure, Mimamsa does not explicitly work out a theory of speech acts, but the basic elements of such a theory serve as a framework for many of its discussions" (p. 159). The quest for the meaning of mantras (or the lack thereof) takes a different tack in Harold Coward's analysis of the Vakyapadiya by the fifth century grammarian Bhartrhari. For Bhartrhari, the idea of language is inextricably bound up with meaning. "All knowledge," he claims, "is, as it were, intertwined with the word" (p. 167). Coward is the only contributor to pick up Staal's gauntlet. If Staal finds mantras devoid of meaning, Coward asserts, the deficiency lies more with Staal's definition of meaning than with mantras themselves. "Meaning, for Staal, is obviously conceived quite differently from meaning for Bhartrhari. It would seem to be the modern positivist definition of meaning as one-to-one correspondence that Staal is applying here" (p. 169). For Bhartrhari, meaning is not piecemeal. In Coward's succinct explanation, "just as a painting is perceived as a whole, over and above its different parts, so our cognition of a mantra is of a meaning whole, over and above the sequence of uttered sounds" (p. 170). Ultimately, Bhartrhari appeals to the experience of those whose ignorance has been cleansed by the repetition of mantra. As Coward states, "as long as such direct perception is reflected in the experience of people, Bhartrhari's explanation of the meaningfulness of mantras will remain viable" (p. 172). Ludo Rocher looks at mantras in the context of the Sivapurana. Despite its claim to be a panacea for mantric malaise--the Sivapurana claims that until it appears on earth "mantras will be in discord" (p. 178)-it naturally concentrates on mantras dedicated to Siva himself. Chief of these in the Sivapurana's view is om, and the purana finds several ways to homologize each penstroke of that quintessential mantra with the forces of the universe. The purana elevates mantra beyond all other religious activity. At the height of its enthusiasm, Rocher explains, "Even a single utterance of the five-syllable mantra is ten million times better than any form of tapas, ritual, or vrata" (p. 180). It is no wonder that the effects of one million Sivamantras are so stunning: they can turn a warrior into a brahman and a woman into a man--"If a brahman woman learns the pancaksaramantra from a guru and recites it 500,000 times, she obtains longevity; by reciting it another 500,000 times she becomes a man and, eventually achieves liberation" (p. 184) . But such power has its price. Bead-bedecked travelers returning from India may be dismayed to hear "that wearing rudraksas without reciting mantras is not only useless but leads to residence in a terrible hell for the duration of fourteen Indras" (p. 181). Perhaps there should be a sign to that effect in Delhi airport. Despite such fascinating tidbits, readers who are not Sanskritists will find Rocher's text rough going, a disadvantage in a collection aimed at a wider community of scholars. We are told, for example, without further comment, that "japa is said to be a part of sattvikapatas (5.20.11,15); it is the domain of the gods and yatinam urdhvaretasam" (p. 181). The second half of the article, a typology of the mantras which the purana asserts to be vedic, will be of interest only to scholars of the vedas and puranas themselves. Gerhard Oberhammer continues in Rocher's vein with a discussion of Saivite mantras. Like Rocher's essay, his "The Use of Mantra in Yoga Meditation" is aimed largely at a specialist audience. Patanjali's definition of mantra in the Yoga-sutras is "the one denoting him (isvarah) is the pranava" (YS 1.27; cited p. 204), which we might gloss for simplicity's sake as "orb denotes god." In Oberhammer's view, Patanjali is being deliberately simplistic here: after all, if a "trivial linguistic denotation" were the point, why not use "Siva," which is a name for god, rather than "om," which is not. For Oberhammer, the answer lies outside of Patanjali's "nontheistic spirituality" in the theology of the Pasupatas. According to Pasupata belief, the power of a mantra does not lie in the mantra itself, but in the sovereignty of Siva. In the words of the Pasupata theologian Kaundinya, it is "accepted by Mahesvara and made his own" (p. 219). Thus, Oberhammer suggests at the end of this closely argued essay, "in using these mantras in meditation, Siva communicates himself for the salvation of men" (p. 220). The field shifts from Saivism to Vaisnavism in Sanjukta Gupta's discussion of "The Pancaratra Attitude to Mantra." In the Saiva view, the power of mantra comes from god's "power and majesty," or, to use Oberhammer's term, his sovereignty. The Pancaratra, an early Vaisnava sect, emphasizes god's mercy, defining "the power of mantra (mantrasakti) " as "the expression or embodiment of god's saving grace (anugrahamurti)" (p. 224). Though detailed, Gupta's discussion never loses sight of broader philosophical and theological issues. Rooting his discussion in a clearly laid-out summary of Pancaratrin doctrine, Gupta demonstrates how theological and cosmogonic concepts are worked out in the Pancaratrin use of mantras. Unlike the Mimamsaka philosophers, for whom sound itself was supreme reality, the devotional Pancaratrins gave sound second place in their scheme of creation, after their personal god. To use Gupta's metaphor, "this ideal speech is imprinted on god's thought like a craftsman's blueprint of the ensuing creation" (p. 229). Among all sounds mantra takes pride of place; it is sound's "salvific aspect" (p. 231). The mantra is not only the deity in sonic form, but it is the deity's primary form and the form in which the sadhaka meditates on the deity. Being a step in the creation of our illusory world, sound has a primary place in unraveling the illusion. Adding to our lore on the syllable om, Gupta shows how, in the Pancaratrin analysis, it "contains all the cosmic stages of creation," (p. 237): each component, "a" "u" "m" and the pure nasal "m" corresponding to a form of the deity. The penultimate contribution in this collection is by Alper himself, an exercise in hermeneutics that pairs a Kashmiri Saivite approach to mantra with Wittgenstein's later works. So specific is Alper's focus that he restricts himself to two works, Ksemaraja's interpretation of mantra in the Sivasutravimarsini on the one hand, and Patrick Sherry's interpretation of Wittgenstein in Religion, Truth and Language-Games on the other. Hence his title, "The Cosmos as Siva's Language-Game: 'Mantra' According to Ksemaraja's Sivasutravimarsini." It is not that Alper views Ksemaraja as a proto-Wittgensteinian. For Alper, "The concepts language-games, forms of life, and the Umgebung of speaking are heuristic. They do not oblige us to go on a treasure hunt for forms of life hidden in medieval Sanskrit texts. They do call for a particular style of reflection" (pp. 254-255). Language-games, the concept that the act of speaking is a game or at least like one, take on a new dimension in the Saivite context. There, Alper argues, nothing less than "the cosmos is Siva's game encompassing language game" (p. 267). Moreover, the limited, errant form of consciousness which binds us to the world is also a function of language. Thus, Alper concludes, For Ksemaraja, then, the great mantra is a vital, effective tool of redemption, the skeleton key to the cosmos. It liberates because it recapitulates in its inner structure the inner structure of bondage that is believed to be at once linguistic and cognitive. (P. 280) Such a brief snippet does scant justice to Alper's tightly woven thirty-five pages, in which Wittgenstein and Sherry and Sivasutra and Ksemaraja form the warp and weft of a richly textured intellectual fabric. Fittingly, Andre Padoux, who, as the author of a series of essays onng back to 1963, might be called the father of modern mantrology, has the last word. In his essay "Mantras--What are They? " Padoux plays discussant, tying up themes of his fellow essayists and amassing a comprehensive list of suggestions for future research. All too often in collections such as this, each essay seems conceived in a vacuum. One of the great virtues of this volume is that Alper allowed the authors to interact, not only Padoux in his excellent summation, but the other authors as well. This provides for a lively debate and a thought-provoking contribution to the study of the subject. With Gupta's, his own, and Padoux's essays placed at the end, Alper is clearly aiming for a strong finish--a good strategy in a long collection. However, part of these essays' strength is their clear exposition of the context in which their separate questions are raised. Thus, for example, Alper's short summary of Saivite doctrine might be of more use if his essay were before rather than after Rocher and Oberhammer's efforts. If this is a caveat, it is a minor one in a collection as strong as this. Each essay is a well-considered effort, rich in detail and firmly grounded in the Sanskrit tradition. A good storyteller leaves his audience begging for more, and Alper has done a marvelous job at whetting his reader's appetite. Several authors mention what the guardians of Indian orthodoxy often call "lower" uses of mantra, giving fascinating glimpses of the dangers of promiscuous bead-wearing and whispering of snakebite and aphrodisiacs, but although both Staal and Alper warn us of the danger of uncritically accepting indigenous exegeses, all the essays clearly emphasize the soteriological aspect of mantra over its more mundane uses. To use Indian parlance, where is the "bhukti" to counterbalance all the talk of "mukti"? Here and there we find an anecdote drawn from present-day mantra belief and practice, but where is an article devoted to the ethnography of mantra in modern India? Nor will one find reference to Buddhist mantra or to the thriving mantrayana of Nepal and Tibet. Clearly, Alper has left ample room for a second and even a third collection of essays bearing the title "Mantra." It is to our sorrow that he will not be there to edit them.