I have been learning the Śrī Rudraṃ for months and months and months now. Learning is hard, effortful. It’s a necessary part of actually being able to do, and at times exhilarating, but it’s often tedious. In learning Vedic chant, the processes of learning and that of doing are separated. I find this helpful. I think we often mistake one for the other. In the yoga world - or maybe it’s just instant gratification, over commercialized, uber over liberalism land - we presume that going to teacher training is where you ‘learn’ yoga. This isn’t true. Learning and teaching are different processes. But oh no, not for us, we’re not satisfied with that answer: we presume we can buy learning, and then we presume that because we bought, we can turn right around and run our own teacher training. Presumption, presumption, presumption.
I am, right now, presuming to write about Vedic chant, which might also be silly.
The Veda means the wisdom. It refers in a sense to the four (originally three) compilations of mantras handed down orally for god knows how many centuries, truly pre-historic stuff, and finally compiled around four thousand years ago. Veda refers, in a related but slightly different sense, to the origin of Yogic, Buddhist, Jain, Śaiva and Vedantic practices.
But only in a sense. Only in a presumptuous sense.
Once upon a time, full of hubris and longing, I thought oh! There is a book! It’s called The Wisdom! and I got myself a copy of the Rg Veda. It was dense, a thousand pages of familiar words used in completely strange ways. I couldn’t read it. It was disorienting. As someone who lives in words, feels a facility with them, to be unable to make any sense out of text felt troubling. I felt aphasic. I felt as if the meanings of things had slipped; liquefied. They had gone behind a surface I couldn’t penetrate.
Thing is, The Vedas aren’t books. The Wisdom doesn’t work that way. Trying to read the Veda is a little like peeking into someone else’s prayer. I don’t think prayers make much logical sense. Someone else’s prayers are outright nonsense.
The Vedas aren’t intended to be read. You don’t learn them by such bold voyeurism and consumption. The only way to make any sense of them is to spend a lot of time with a teacher who explains the context, the usage, the purpose, the practice, the details, the tricks, the motions, the meaning, the connections, the process, and who most importantly tells you everything all over again when you say “wait, what?” Most importantly she says “sing it back to me” and listens openly, bravely, ridiculously patiently while you basically squawk at her and want to die of embarrassment.
The only way to approach the Veda is to become willing to sing them. You cannot theorize about it, although there are all sorts of academic, Ph.D level books about the oral tradition of India. Oh those arm chair philosophers. My teacher scoffs. “You cannot read your way to the Veda,” she says; “the chanting is the Veda.” You don’t learn to swim by reading a book about swimming. You have to actually get in the water.
I grew up swimming. My dad used to put my crib in the front of his fishing boat, make a sunshade with a blanket, and let me drift along. So I’m not scared of water. I understand what she’s saying. But water isn’t the point; singing every single day is. Or, more obliquely, The Wisdom. Wait; what?
When I got that big heavy thousand page tome, I poked at it for awhile and then I set it aside. It just lingered in various rooms of my house for years and years. I don’t know what happened to that book, now. I know I don’t have it any longer.
But I remember the first line. It’s run through my head for years and years. It was simple. It said: “I worship fire.”
That was enough. That was plenty. I spent years figuring how the contemplative life is a fire practice. It is alchemy. Fire transforms, consumes, purifies, burns. It transforms, yes. But it also burns. Fire worship makes us human; without it we were still rather hapless in the face of a bunch of things that wanted to eat us. With it, we became hunters ourselves, and cookers, and eventually scientists. With fire, we could keep the dark at bay.
But it can still get a little out of control.
This is a metaphor. But it’s also a basic description of yoga physiology.
Adyāyānāṃ, the practice of listening, is how you learn mantra. Your teacher sings and you listen, with leaning forward you listen, and then you are to repeat what she’s said twice. You go back and forth, back and forth, straining. A suspension, a tension, is made: you are held by it.
Pārāyaṇam, though, is what you do once you have learned a mantra. That is when what you have learned becomes part of the deep repository you have in you that you fall back on, touch, reference, recall. At that point, you call it up and you sing it out as ceremony, celebration, invocation, offering, sādhana, season marker, remembrancer, caller backer, ritual, rote.
It’s a little bit like jazz: such elegant mastery of a skill that you can riff on it. Except that it’s not like jazz at all. There is no riffing. One must not riff. You’ll break it if you do.
Which is fascinating, because rather than feeling like a rule, this rigor ends up being a revelation. If the song stays the same, if you observe no riffs nor arpeggios, the creative force isn’t poured into the singing; the creativity bends back into you.
I know - as in I have already studied and learned - the Gaṇapati Atharvaśīrṣam Upaniṣat. Suddenly I became aware that it was fall. Suddenly the labor of the chant I am currently learning found release in deciding to sing the Ganesha song, right on his birthday. Perhaps bake him some sweets.
This is what happens as you learn. You learn that the chants have a season, a lectionary of sorts, a cycle that corresponds to years and seasons. In the spring you sing to water, flowers, color. In the dark months you sing to the light. Soon, coming now, are the nine nights of the goddesses. But Ganesha Chaturthi happens right now at the juncture into fall, opening the door to a new holy season.
This is my favorite, and I’ve come to think of it as the most important, effective, powerful practice: time. Being in time. Ṛta. The most fundamental practice is showing up on time. Giving things their time. Respecting people’s time. Learning to sleep at night, to eat roots in winter and fruit in summer. Figuring out how bad we were at time and getting a little better. Realizing that it’s so much easier, if not holy, it’s jazzy to move in this way. Then, when the dark comes, you’ve prepared. You have songs. When somebody dies, you’ve got prayers. When people are born, you’re right there. When the alarm goes off, it’s fine. When something unexpected happens, the weave of your time is so strong that you catch it. The tapestry holds.
It’s one of my biggest pet peeves, in terms of how yoga things are practiced. Why are people doing sun salutations at five pm? How do we expect anything to work if we take it out of context? What if we realized the most important question was not the yoga thing, but a question of your actual day?
Ah ha, I said. Oh fall! thou art autumnal! Breezy harridan, brash quickness, acres of sky. I dusted off my Ganesha things. I have a mala associated with the time I learned the Gaṇapati Atharvaśīrṣam. I have a painting. I also have a bookmark with a dancing elephant god encircled by a rim of light. It is delicate, made of a soft, thin, gold colored metal. The elephant and his halo are connected at the head, but separated under his feet. A page can slide through, leaving the halo on one page and the god on the next. I don’t know where I got it.
Of course, I still had to practice the Śīva chant. But now I had both my labor and my treat. Now I had some fruit. Now is the time for dancing.
Chant is basically the yogic process in miniature.
At first, you are curious. If you are wise and lucky, you ask a teacher to help you. That’s the important part: asking, there being a good enough teacher, the establishment of a relationship. If you are foolish and stubborn, like me, you tend to think you can do it on your own, make a mess, and then sheepishly ask for help while debris floats around your head like feathers and smoke. This is sloppy, but it still works. Probably because I’ve such a tendency to make a mess, my favorite line of the Gita is the one where Arjuna, having completely muddled himself up, says “I’ve muddled myself. I have no idea what to do.” Śiṣya te ‘ham, “I am your student;” Śadhi māṃ tvām prappannam, “please teach me.” I love how Krishna doesn’t answer. He just smiles.
So in Vedic chanting, your teacher gives you something. You don’t know what in the hell it is. You aren’t quite sure it’s what you asked for. You mumble. You can’t do this thing at all. You are in fact really, really, really bad at it. But you work though that a little, I mean your discomfort at being not good at things, and the repetition itself proves you wrong. Inarguably, after several tries, you have learned. Here is evidence, actual tactile proof. From thinking the thing was weird, you’re now a little fond of it. Your performance is imperfect, sure. Not very good, actually. But you have learned something. This is the beginning, I think, of faith.
When the teacher gives you the next line, the thing you had been struggling with is suddenly very very easy. Mysteriously so. You wonder how you could have possibly believed it was ever hard; it seems so obvious and simple. You now feel fluent, accomplished, emboldened on the one hand and daunted by the new thing on the other. You are learning how to learn. This will be endlessly useful in actual life.
As you go along, your mouth too full and gawky, the teacher gives you all sorts of information. She gives you more information than you realized was possible; you didn’t realize there were so many details, so many possible questions; you aren’t quite sure how this links to your childhood, your chronic patterns of distrust, a book written thousands of years ago, or ethics and metaphysics, but when your teacher says it it makes a kind of sense. A wondering, baffled kind of sense. This happens times twelve. By the trick of the chant, you are getting a heck of a lot of mentorship in yogic principles.
Then one day, you realize you sound like your teacher. Another day, you realize the voice of the teacher is in you. Every time you sound, or merely remember, the thing, you are re-enforcing all the previous learnings and details of the thing. Every time you sing, you are re-wiring and re-enforcing all your previous experiences with the teacher, not just that one thing. You weave support into your muscle memory. When you come across a new thing, your deep, tender from practice wiring will hum in recognition: this isn’t so strange! My teacher mentioned this a year ago! After a little while, you think you understand what you’re doing. I get it! you think. Six months later you realize that understanding was infantile. Five years later you look back at your early understanding with an almost embarrassment, which is how I mostly understand gratitude. You begin to laugh at yourself.
Another day, probably years on, you realize you’ve now become the teacher: this makes you slow down and get quiet. This makes you take things to a whole new level of serious. That person, that circumstance, is down in you. They are a part of you: walking as you walk, present as you stumble. They are on subliminal speed dial.
Another day still you realize you’ve become yourself. You lift your head. You look around. Wait; what?
One of the chants I know is deeply associated with a particular teacher, a ten year expanse of time, a heck of a lot of memories. I feel his hand on my head whenever I sing it. I do not mean I remember the feel of his hand on my head. I mean I physically feel it. It’s something between a playful ruffling and a benediction.
Learning a chant isn’t really about learning a chant, just like nothing in yoga is what you think it is. It’s all just an opportunity for these other things to happen.
At first, Ganesh is ‘remover of obstacles’. This is so nice. It’s like having a personal cheerleader. Rah Rah! Boom Boom! Marching marching, thundering footsteps and off we go! It’s terribly useful to have something to say, someone to call on, when things get hard. Or, related but distinct, when beginning something new. There is a whole science of beginnings and letting go, how to open and close doors, how to realize there’s a problem. Basic life stuff, I know. But we’re not terribly good at life. An obstacle remover is quite supportive for clumsy, stubborn, willful, timid, frightened, awfully presumptuous human brains.
At other times, different aspects of Ganesh have moved me. The weird love child of spirit and matter; how lovely. The one who, realizing he didn’t have a pen, snapped off his own tusk and used that to write the great human story down; that hits home. Poet of poets, who has a throne in my heart; that is just downright soul food. And just imagine, of all the animal vehicles, the elephant rides a mouse! The hilarity is pleasing. It gets poignant when you remember the mouse symbolizes the mind. Such a scurrilous creature. It gets sublime when you realize there is something bigger than the mind. Wait; what?
These days, I like the idea that Ganesha is not just the remover of obstacles, he also puts things in your way. I love the fact that these are not separate characters. If I’m right in myself, if the path is the right path, if I’m doing it for the right reasons, the path is clear. But if I’m not right, a little wan and tired, if I’m needy or manipulative, if the choice is not the right choice but I’m trying to make it so goddamn it, here then is Ganesha, slamming doors right close to my nose.
Okay; okay I say and sit down for a minute. I realize I need to start rightly. Or stop trying to do that obviously wrong but really wanted thing. I open my heart. Or I simply realize that I’m scared, or angry, or trying to replace something I can’t replace with something, someone, a near or at least strong enough sensation. Okay, okay I say; I get it.
I love, but can’t quite explain to you, how you learn that god is just a useful way to learn: it’s actually you. It’s all you. You are the one making your own problems. You are the one who’s got to remove the obstacles.
Language is like fire. Like fire, language is wired into our humanness. Lots of animals communicate. Only a few, us and maybe dolphins, have language. Our thinking is shaped, more or les, by the things we have words for. When you learn a language, you learn new details about reality. Fika: the Scandinavian habit of stopping to talk with a friend, have a coffee and a sweet in the afternoon. Pochemuchka: Russian for one who asks too many questions. Once you start to thrash about in language, you know some things are quintessentially “impossible to translate”. This is a profound statement about knowing. It’s an intriguing commentary on subjective and cultured human beings. It’s a riot of privacy and learning.
Learning a language seems to have all sorts of brain health and health health benefits. It keeps our brains awake. It makes us better learners generally, and is correlative to short term recall. It hones seemingly disparate capacities: rationality, responsibility, adaptability. It might have something to down with linear parts of the brain synching with harmonic parts of the brain. I have suspicions about what it does to the deep, the ocean floor, parts of memory.
There is some suggestion that the language parts of our hardwiring are related to the dancing, movement parts of our hardwire. Only creatures that have language can dance. There are oblique, but clear, relationships to the vestibular system. Also, spatial recognition. Probably, if you’re playing with modulating tones and volume, strumming the vagus nerve.
Think of how children learn: obsessively repeating, tapping a stick to a surface, hopping on one foot. They sing song and fidget their way to proficiency. Think of your childhood songs: you will never, ever be able to forget the ABCs.
Think of how many depression studies recommend that you sing. That you listen to music. That you dance.
Many years ago, I was dating an artist. Typical: date one because you’re too scared to be one. Anyway. We’d had a fight, and I’d broken it off. “What do I need to do?” he asked. I said I wasn’t sure, but I needed a large sign of respect. Tongue in cheek, which was not the right signal, he went and got a 6’ x 4’ canvas and painted ‘THIS IS A LARGE SIGN OF RESPECT’ across it. It worked, I smiled, for a week or so. Then we broke up for good.
But what does one do with a huge painting when one no longer wants it? Should I leave it next to the trashcan like an old mattress? Should I break it down into smaller pieces? I didn’t care to give it such violence of attention. It sat around, blocking a hallway. Covering, inconveniently, a bookshelf.
One afternoon I was home with a cold. I was bored but not able to do anything strenuous. I was studying something or other about Ganesha at the time. I was a little loose in the brain, because of fever. I decided to paint him, even though I can’t draw for shit. I had a gallon of blue, used on the kitchen wall, paint. I had non-toxic children’s paint in my box of tricks for family yoga. I spent all afternoon first abstractly, then with tiny details, making a big elephant head. I went back and forth between napping and adding something. I secretly incorporated a little of my lemon tea, and then my snot. I made my Ganesha real.
So now I’ve got this elephant god painting who I will not throw away like a soiled mattress. It’s been around for so long. My husband and I live in a tiny, pre-war house. The walls are all very small; you can’t go far before you run into a doorway, a corner, a stairwell. The painting doesn’t fit anywhere, so he kind of lives everywhere. For a while he lived in my office. Now he’s in the bedroom. Those are the only two places he can be.
To celebrate Ganesha Chaturthi, the proverbial day when Ganesh was born, I started to sing his song. The local Hindu temple hosted a family event where you could make your own clay murti. For several days, you bring him out, let him occupy space, give him gifts. After several days, you give the idol back to the water. He’ll melt; the god will melt. There was a ceremony for this at the temple too, but I was at an art gallery.
After adyāyānāṃ, the slow process of listening and repeating, studying, focusing, you eventually hit a point where you can pārāyaṇam. I don’t want to translate pārāyaṇam. It is more than ‘recitation in full’. It means and does not mean committing to carry it through for a set number of days. It means the period from dawn to dark; morning, evening, according to the rules. It means and does not mean you’ve learned.
On day three or four of singing, I began to feel that Ganesh was everywhere: in the car, walking the dog, in the bathtub. The song diffused throughout the mundane tasks of the day. Experiencing the chant over a stretch of days is a little like decanting it; it begins to breathe, to take on new color and flavor. It blooms. It starts to perfume everything with its own essence.
It’s an awkward, clumsy, intoxicating thing. A subtle movement from consumption to being, yourself, consumed.