Sound -Significance in HInduism

Hinduism – in all the various traditions covered by this generic term – is a very pronounced performance culture, in which texts and holy literature in particular are “sounded out” and embodied (Beck, 1993; Coburn, 1984; Michaels, 2005; Wilke & Moebus, 2011). Texts are to be heard, even when they are written down. They are memorized, recited, chanted, danced, and staged since ancient times, and are not restricted to the Sanskrit idiom, although Sanskrit Hinduism provides the richest source. There was exceptional focus not only on orality, the spoken word, as major medium of communication and transmission, but also on the sounding word and its own range of meaning and value – in performance, in poetic production and aesthetic reception, in philosophical and theological reflection, and in the formation of symbols and world interpretation. This cultural matrix produced striking symbolic forms, such as language/speech/voice (vāc) viewed as a divine being or the great lord Śiva who created the world by the sounds of his hand drum (ḍamaru). Such “mythical” ideas were also plumbed by philosophical reflection. Even sciences, such as grammar and astronomy, made use of acoustic symbols. Mathematicians chose in addition the diction of the poets and of liturgical literature to convince and persuade the readers. 

The auditive dimension has played a very important role until the present day (Singer, 1972). This cultural pattern left manifold marks on habitus forms and social and religious practice. The loci of truth and authority are not written documents, but persons and utterings. Higher education and culture are not associated with writing, but with the library in the head and the fitting verse on the tip of the tongue. The performative-sensory approach to text effected a stronger sensory and emotive appropriation of the subject and created a cultural fabric of common conditions for aesthetic/aisthetic and religious experience. Acoustic piety is very widely spread. Complete “sound rites,” such as mantra practices and the constant repetition of the favorite god’s name and devotional music, belong to the most important religious practices. The phonocentric life-world also inspired a deep reflexive concern with language and sound that led to highly developed linguistics at an early age. It generated quite special symbolic forms – highly abstract and scientific ones like Pāṇini’s sonic metalanguage and metonymic-mythical ones like the deification of the alphabet and cosmologically hypostasized sound. Sensing the world through sounds in daily life naturally also left traces on perceiving the world as a whole and the divine sphere transcending the world. It shaped the ways of world making and was a good ground for holistic worldviews that range so prominently in many Hindu traditions. 

This article charts a short “sonic cultural history” of Hindu India. It does not exhaust the subject, but focuses on some particularly impressive and paradigmatic features. It aims to show why sound may be called a key medium of cultural representation and reproduction, and thus a key to Indian culture and to Sanskrit Hinduism in particular. The discussion exposes ongoing themes and common patterns in a highly diversified culture and at the same time records diversity and socioreligious change in a cultural continuum. 

The Veda as a Paradigm of Sacred Sound 

As is well known, the Veda remained a mere oral canon until the 19th century. Highest precision in correct pronunciation and sophisticated mnemotechniques guaranteed that the holy text was transmitted without change through the centuries (Staal, 1986; Falk, 1990). Books on phonetics, such as the Nāradīyaśikṣā, use very poetic metaphors to communicate the tonal subtleties of recitation and thereby implicitly communicate the Brahmans’ love for their holy text and an aesthetic-emotional flavor. The Veda svādhyāya or “self-study” remained the holy duty of orthodox Brahmans even after fire sacrifice ( yajña ) was replaced by the pūjā ritual of classical Hinduism, although self-study did not mean exegesis, but memorization and recitation. 

The Veda exhibits not only the aesthetics of sonic communication but also the fluidity of texts particularly well. Whereas the early rgvedic hymns were evocative calls to the gods and magic poetry at the time that they were composed, in late vedic times they became sacred language material in which one no longer tried to find a visionary meaning, but was rather seeking mysterious numeric combinations. A single text initially was understood as a “normal semantic text,” then as an esoteric secret formula, and finally, in essence, as sacred sound substance. The Rāmāyaṇa depiction of the “holy noise” (brahmaghoṣa) of the resonant three-tone Veda recitation, as it emanates from the simple straw huts of modest-living Brahmans, already completely suggests the vedic aura of solemn sacredness, which even today is linked to Veda recitation – all the way to Bollywood movies. 

Even in the past, the sacred aura of the “Veda noise” (brahmaghoṣa) surpassed the Brahmans’ sphere. The astrologer Varāhamihira (6th cent. CE) remarks on the right way to crown a king – that the noisy declamation of the Veda “stifles future unhappiness in the bud” (BṛhSa. 47.49). The Veda has kept its sacred power, although its reception has changed substantially over the course of time. The Web site of a Brahmanic temple priest in California informs us that Veda means the eternal “knowledge” of a hoary past (6,000 years [sic]) discovered by the vedic seers, and this knowledge (the vedic mantras) must be intoned correctly, as the sound of the Veda (veda dhvani) and listening to it brings great spiritual benefit, peace of mind, and interior and exterior purification. 

Only a minor part of the Veda is still used involved in pūjā ritual or profane festivities today. The modern Veda receptions have little to do with the original context. Historically, the vedic canon disintegrates into various text types from different cultural epochs, starting with the Ṛgvedasaṃhitā, a collection of hymns to the gods (dated back to 1750 or 1500 BCE). Still, it is interesting that through the different text types (versified hymns, composed melodies/musicalized compositions, mantras, sacrificial prose formulas, riddle verses, ritual instructions and interpretations, and early speculative philosophy), the power of speech and sound reappears in ever-new fashions. This starts with the original meaning of the brahman , which in the Ṛgveda was not the ultimate world principle of the Upaniṣads, nor the network of homologies of the Brāhmaṇa period (inquired by riddle verses), but magically powerful expressive speech. 

Brahman in the Early Ṛgveda 

In the early vedic hymns, the predominant idea is that only poetically expressive invocation has magic power and can reach the gods. Hymnic invocation and repeated praise of their heroic deeds are the real “food of the gods” that lends substance to the god – rather than gifts of meat, butter, and intoxicants – and establishes a link between the human and divine worlds. A separation between profane and sacred language does not yet exist. The term vāc, used for language, denotes first of all “voice” and appears often as “speech” that is not restricted to humans, but denotes all expressive utterances and manifold shades of sounds with signalling functions, including instruments and animal voices, such as the croaking of frogs heralding rain (ṚV. 7.103.1–2, 10). However, a separate word exists for sacred, powerful language – bráhman, “the great,” “the powerful.” 

Bráhman denotes a particular impressive way of formulating language, poetic diction, creative words of truth (Thieme, 1971), and likewise the evocative power inherent in such utterances. Bráhman always appears in utterances relating to something numinous, and it is invariably described as something powerful and irresistibly forceful. The extremely dense and highly organized sound structure of the vedic texts appears to be an important factor for language to attain magic power. Their strongly alliterative nature (for a paradigm example see ṚV. 1.1), which even today exerts an impressive aesthetic effect, was justly termed “magic poetry” or “poetic magic” and is so intensively and skilfully applied that one can actually speak of a “semanticization of sound sequences,” that is, a linguistic and acoustic reflection of the contents (Elizarenkowa, 1995, 153, 287). 

In the Ṛgveda, this evocative power of poetry, the bráhman, is not a god (in contrast to the later creator god Brahmā or the impersonal absolute godhead, brahman). However, it is subordinated to a “lord” (pati) or “divine speaker,” Bṛhaspati (or Brahmaṇaspati), “the poet of poets” (ṚV. 2.23.1). He “creates all the words of blessing” (ṚV. 2.23.2), and unto him they “cry out” and “flow” (ṚV. 10.68.1; 1.190.2). The song of Bṛhaspati is powerful, “bellowing” and “thundering like the heavens,” and an explosive force (ṚV. 1.190.1; 10.67.5). It is a spontanous outburst of truth that “blows away darkness” and brings light, blessing, and well-being (ṚV. 4.50.4; 10.68.6–8; 10.69.4–5, 9, 11). Bṛhaspati is, however, not only a divine being, but alo embodied by ecstatic priest-poets (kavi, vipra) and the purohita, the foremost Brahman priest and choir leader of the “hordes” of Brahman singers (gaṇapati) who cheered the princes and troops in battle with words of blessing (ṚV. 2.24.9). 

The Language Goddess Vāc 

Whereas in the early Ṛgvedasaṃhitā, sacred language is only thematized as powerful poetic speech and evocative magic language (bráhman), in the later hymns the whole vāc – that is, every type of language and sound – is being treated as something numinous. The hymns to Bṛhaspati appear more and more replaced by the hymns to Vāc, and from the very start, Vāc is addressed as a goddess. She indicates not only “measured” and “sieved” sacrificial language and comprehensible speech (ṚV. 10.71.1–3) and a more abstract concept of language (ṚV. 1.164; 10.125.1–8), but also – and primarily – the expressive capacity of sound. The abundance and depth of language are illustrated with the image of the cow that gives milk unceasingly. The goddess Vāc (“Language,” “Speech,” “Voice”) is addressed as a milk cow, providing energy and strength (ṚV. 8.100.10–11; 8.101.16). Language is associated not only with structured, semantically meaningful and metrical speech, but also with unstructured, nonlexical or incomprehensible pure sound, manifest, for instance, in thunder heralding the rain and the lowing of the cow 

For the later Veda, the nonstructural element of sound is often the more fundamental aspect. It is praised as a kind of primeval, mysterious sound from which all other sounds flow (ṚV. 1.164.39–42). It is one syllable and thousand at once, “inexhaustible,” and the very “syllable of life” (AitĀ. 2.2–8). Vāc or Vāgdevī in the early texts was primarily expressivity and efficacy, while in the late tenth book of the Ṛgveda, she has established herself as the queen of the universe who has cosmogonic power and is present in everything and contains everything (ṚV. 10.125.1–8). 

This universalized idea of language corresponds to the universalistic claim of ritual in the late Veda. During the middle vedic period (approx. 1000-500 BCE), sacrificial ritual had become the dominant expression of vedic culture. All forces of the cosmos must be symbolically present in the sacrifice. It contains therefore not only semantically meaningful speech, but also music, nonsense sounds, and expressive calls. As sacrifice was regarded as a cosmos-maintaining force, knowing and applying the complicated relations between the fire sacrifice and the cosmos also became the tasks of a highly specialized elite priesthood, whose most important instrument was again language. The authors concentrate so much on language that it appears almost as if they had no interest in actual things whose substance is matter, but only in the words and names, whose substance consists of phonemes and meters. It remains vital, however, that language also encompasses a dimension that is immeasurable and not reducable to logos and calculation, and that surpasses the world of ordinary men. In the secret texts, the prevailing notion is that language arose from a dark, amorphous, mysterious primeval sound, which at the beginning follows on from the old ideas of Vāc as the language cow, and later on is interpreted ever more metaphysically. 

Mantras, Melodies, and Nonsemantic Sthobas 

An important development was the mantra conception as speech acts of self-subsistent power in the Yajurveda and the soteriological force of the melodies and nonsemantic stobhas in the Sāmaveda (see below), and their speculative interpretations in the Brāhmaṇas and secret Āranyakas that belong to each Veda. In contrast to the visionary poetic verses of the early hymns, which were selectively applied not only for ritual acts and received their power from their divine referents and the musicality of their linguistic expression and rhymes (and became themselves known as mantras) but also in contrast to the shift to hidden, secret meanings, as represented by the thousand-syllabled monosyllable, Vedic mantras in a more narrow sense refer to the sacrificial (mostly prose) formulas belonging to the ritual acts, which are found primarily in the Yajurveda. 

Mantras are sacred formulas to which an inherent power is ascribed (see MaBh. 1.1.1). They can be qualified as speech acts (Wheelock, 1991, in contrast to Staal, 1979; 1996). For example, in setting up the fire altar (agnicayana) with a thousand bricks, a certain series of 360 bricks is the year, because a mantra has been spoken over them stating this connection (bandhu). However, the notion that the performativity of mantras is independent of the speaker’s intention, which became so prominent in the mantric concept, extends speech act theory. Mantras are rather “language acts.” The utterance itself performs the act – in the religious sense mantras have often been translated as “magic formulas.” They are sacred formulas that were probably originally thought of as “statements of truth,” giving precise expression to something that should be brought about and thus comes to pass. It is not the priest who performs something through language, such as bringing about the blessing. The blessing is brought about by the formula itself. So there exists something like a mantra substance, or sound substance, which has irresistable power. Whereas intentionality is needed in the case of a Christian priest who performs baptism by the words “I baptize in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit,” and whereas this formula can be spoken in any language or dialect, the potestas in the Indian case resides in the word alone. 

The Yajurveda contains besides semantically lucid mantra formulas also short calls like “vaṣaṭ,” “vaṭ,” and “veṭ,” which have no lexical or etymological meaning. Nonetheless, correct pronunciation is absolutely essential, as in addition to the correlation of sounds and acts, symbolic relationships (bandhu) are created between sacrifice, ritual objects, and cosmic entities. For example, the word vaṣaṭ is presumably an onomatopoetic sound (like “vsht!”) that occurs while pouring a gift of butter into the fire. However, owing to the explosive nature of the sound, vaṣaṭ is also associated with “strength” and “power,” and as it contains ṣat (meaning the number “six”), it also denotes the six Indian seasons and the sixfold structure of the world, which lend ritual support. If vaṣaṭ were not pronounced properly, the mantric utterance would remain ineffective, “empty,” and “without support” (AitBr. 3.1.5). 

Similar symbolic and metonmic associations were connected with the nonsemantic stobhas of the Sāmaveda, the Veda of melodies (sāman), which are very much encoded with nonhuman voices and the heavenly world beyond. The Sāmaveda borrows its semantic language material largely from the Ṛgveda, but the original text appears in distorted form and with additional mysterious syllables that do not have any discernable semantic meaning. For instance, barhiṣi (on the grasses), the last word of a rgvedic verse, becomes chopped up into bā-hā ā ā and hī-ī ī ṣī, and the non lexical sound chain auhovā is inserted in between. Such nonsensical, purely phonetic-melodic insertions are called stobha (pause sound, from the root stubh-, “to rip up”) and also anṛcsāman, (“sāman without a hymn [ṛc]”), or alternatively, “incorporeal” (aśarīra), “bodyless sāman” (being devoid of the linguistic body of the hymn). They are always semantic “nonsense.” F. Staal (1996, 223–293) compared them with Papageno’s “heissa hopsassa” (in Mozart’s Magic Flute), nonsense words in baby talk, and birdsongs, empazising their “meaningless,” prelinguistic nature (reminisicent of earlier stages of evolution). However, their meaninglessness dissolves, when taking the musicalization into account. As pause sounds, stobhas have the primary function of providing phonetic material at those places where this is lacking in the text itself. At this point the musical sound begins to dictate the phonetics, similar to a modern jazz singer’s “shoobee-doobee-doo.” It is precisely such nonsense phrases that are accorded special sacredness. Exacly due to the fact that they do not denote something, they give the impression of nonhuman voices and realities of the other world, and this is underlined by the sāman singing styles. When semantic explanations are given by the Brāhmaṇas for the effects that sāmans exert, they are generally based on suggestive associations and metaphors and often refer to eschatological contexts. One striking feature is the association between the singing and animals of all types (e.g. JaiBr. 1.128–141; 1.294–295). 

Sāman melodies are dominated by long, drawn-out, and vibrating tones – generally sung to a descending scale and containing remarkable microtonal shifts opposed to the natural scale. Completely atonal singing styles have developed, whose audible impressions seem hardly to have anything to do with music anymore (e.g. in the Vāmadevya beginning of the Sāmavedārcika, 682). Sāmans can only be sung by today’s singers with difficulty and a lot of training. The intensive, mournful cadences exhibit more similarity with the tonal structure of animal noises (such as the howling of a tomcat looking for a mate) or with natural noises such as the wailing of wind. Even the linguistic, “embodied” sāman creations have themselves a strongly “nonhuman” aspect, and this is also the impression left by the tonal material of the songs. The scales used are not found anywhere else in Indian music, not even in the archaic recitations of the calling priest. In the sāman the tones seem to float away without any direction, as no fundamental note exists toward which they could move. Although the tones themselves change, the melody seems to remain stationary. These atonal features are intentional. They resemble an incorporal sāman singing and leave a strong impression of something “nonhuman.” 

The holiest sāmans contain only stobha syllables or “incorporal songs.” Stobhas should never be completely absent to maintain the efficacy of the song. According to indigenous hermeneutics, the incorporal songs lead into eschatological dimensions. Gaining immortality by means of the nonsemantic sāmans forms the main theme of the Jaiminīyopaniṣadbrāhmaṇa (which bears the style of an Āraṇyaka). According to this text, some of the incorporeal sāmans are so potent that people who are “sung high” by them enter the heavenly world of the gods and become immortal, as the stars in the heavens (JaiUBr. 3.6.1–2). This sort of thinking in eschatological categories is typical for the Āraṇyakas and the late vedic period. The characteristic aspect in the incorporeal sāmans is the notion of an immortal sound substance. We meet here with an axiom that became common in later times: what is bodyless is also deathless. The sāman replaces the mortal body with a new “body” of “deathless” sāman substance. The “disembodied ones” now inhabit the heavens, but can still also tread the earth – remaining, however, aliens to worldly life by living in cremation grounds (JaiUBr. 3.6.1–3), just like the later adherents of Tantra. There is remarkable ambivalence of the nonsemantic (JaiUBr. 1.4.1–6). On the one hand, it is a heavenly and religious element and extremely relevant soteriologically, but on the other, it also has a special sympathetic relationship with the dangerous, ghostly, and demonic, while the gods are “embodied” in their hymns and more related to “this world.” 

The typical samavedic discourse on the categories “this world” and the “other world,” the semantic and nonsemantic, plays a role not only in the discussion of the melodies, but also in the discussion of the cosmic syllable oṃ , which was to become possibly the most important symbol of Hinduism. As closing formula of all recitation, the oṃ was virtually omnipresent in vedic ritual, and it was a step not too far to understand it as a condensed form of the whole Veda, in similar way to bhūr bhuvaḥ svaḥ, Prajāpati’s three words of creation (“earth, air, and heavens”). In the Aitareyabrāhmaṇa 5.32–34, “a,” “u,” and “m,” the three phonetic components of oṃ, are explicitly identified with these three creation mantras (used by the silent Brahman priest to repair errors in the recitation). In addition, an esoteric identity with the “inexhaustible syllable” of life is suggested. According to the Jaiminīyopaniṣadbrāhmaṇa, oṃ plays a central role in the “victory over the world.” Oṃ is presented as condensed essence (rasa) of bhūr bhuvaḥ svaḥ and of language/speech (vāc), and it is related to breath (JaiUBr. 1.1.5; 1.1.2). 

All oṃ speculations in the Jaiminīyopaniṣadbrāhmaṇa relate to the explanation of the Gāyatra, an almost exclusively nonsemantic sāman song, and its main part, the udgītha, beginning with the nonsense phrase “ovā ovā ovā huṃbhā ovā” (JaiUBr. 2.1.3–7). These syllables are given elaborate interpretation showing that although the “incorporeal” sāmans do not actually have any semantic meaning in the normal sense, they can be loaded all the more with symbolic meaning. The ovā formula occupies the central focus and is “read” as a binary code: “o” stands for oṃ and “vā” for vāc (language). The final -c is chopped off, because the (“soundless” and “breathless”) consonant is associated with death. “Ripping out the mortal syllable,” which is polluted with evil, transforms the Gāyatra into “pure, deathless syllables” (JaiUBr. 4.8.3) and channels the melody into a continuous, uninterrupted, and aimless stream that symbolizes and evokes the “deathless” aspect – a full lifetime and thereafter the yonder world (JaiUBr. 2.1.3–7). The linkage of o(ṃ) and vā(c) in ovā assures the world beyond without having to leave earthly life. In contrast, the cosmic syllable oṃ is identified with pure transcendence (JaiUBr. 1.1.3–6). Just like the “disembodied” on the cremation grounds, one would be lost to all that is earthly, if one were to sing only the oṃ (even today the notion that oṃ recitation and contemplation are only appropriate for ascetics, as they lead to lack of interest in worldly life, persists). But in this way the singer can reach the “deathless” regions in spirit, without actually having died, and this leads to possession of eternal life without rebirth and redeath (JaiUBr. 1.1.5–6). 

Oṃ in the Upaniṣads 

Revealingly, the earliest mentions of oṃ as primordial syllable occur in the Āraṇyaka texts and the Chāndogyopaniṣad of the Sāmaveda schools, which have been most concerned with sound. This probably earliest Upaniṣad continues and tops the speculations on oṃ as syllable of life, as “essence” of language and everything existing (the elements earth, wind, fire, etc.), and still situates them in the ritual context: oṃ is identified with loud of sāman singing, the udgītha (ChU. 1.1.1–2). However, there is a definite shift, which will be typical for all Upaniṣads – the “noetic part” of the Veda (jñānakāṇḍa) in contrast to the older “ritual part” (karmakāṇḍa). The goal is no longer to perfect ritual (as still in the Jaiminīyopaniṣadbrāhmaṇa), but to explain the world as a whole beyond sacrifice and to attain immortality and an intuitive and complete vision of the cosmos. In this context the brahman has attained its historically very effective role as absolute being, and it is linked to the ātman (the inner self and conscious soul beyond the world of senses). An individualization of religion has taken place, the discovery of one’s own transcendence. In the Chāndogyopaniṣad 16, the famous dictum tat tvam asi (that [brahman] you are) occurs repeatedly, which became the major hermeneutic formula in the Vedānta schools (whose interpretation ranged from strict no-duality, to differentiated nonduality, and even to duality). The ritual sound oṃ is deritualized, similar to the brahman, and sucked into the maelstrom of the ātman-brahman speculations. Chanting, knowing, and contemplating oṃ means entering into the “inexhaustible,” deathless, fearless, and immortal realm of being (ChU. 1.4.4-5). Since the time of the early Upaniṣads, oṃ has symbolized and signalled the concept of absolute transcendence and absolute immanence (“Truly, there is nothing but the sound oṃ,” ChU. 2.23.3). Equipped with this symbolic value, it created for itself new ritual and semantic contexts and merged also with yoga practice and theistic systems. 

Whereas the initial chapter of the Chāndogyopaniṣad, in which the oṃ occurs, still uses sacrificial terminology to indicate that oṃ is everything and transforms sāman singing into a contemplative act leading to self-realization, the sacred syllable became increasingly detached from the ritual contexts and more linked to inducing trancelike states and to metaphysics. The “language cow” received a heavy blow in this epoch, as the ātman and brahman were declared to be a realm into which language does not reach. The gnostic search could only lie in nonverbal knowledge, and the access was meditative and contemplative. For a while language and sound lost their cosmic, soteriological function. The only exception was oṃ, as it was seen to be more than language. Taittirīyopaniṣad 1.8.1 in addition to the familiar sentence “oṃ is this whole world,” states, “oṃ is brahman.” The Muṇḍakopaniṣad lances a direct ritual critique, addressing the new religious group of the renunciates. They totally reject the sacrifice and its symbols except for oṃ, which becomes here a preferred tool of meditation: “oṃ is the bow, the self is the arrow, and brahman is the goal” (MuU. 2.2.4). 

A second historically effective development took up earlier syllable speculations and coined oṃ as the very superstructure of reality. The Praśnopaniṣad 5.4–5 is still very close to the Brāhmaṇas when it sees in the three sounds contained in oṃ (a, u, and m) a condensation of the three (original) Vedas (Ṛgveda, Yajurveda, and Sāmaveda), the three worlds (earth, air, and heavens), and the “victories” over these worlds. More advancing in new terrain is the Māṇḍūkyopaniṣad, which is dedicated exclusively to the oṃ. The starting point is already well-known ideas: “Oṃ. This syllable is all this” (MāṇḍU. 1), and oṃ is brahman, the self of all existence (MāṇḍU. 2). However, by linking brahman also to the “four feet (meters) of oṃ” (a, u, m, and the echo of the final nasal sound of oṃ, or the silence in between the oṃ repetitions), the Māṇḍūkyopaniṣad proceeds with a powerful new, independent interpretation – both micro- and macrocosmic: “a” signifies the waking state (the external world), “u” the dream state (inner perception, corresponding to the entire mental of the universe), “m” the dreamless deep sleep (the germinal consciousness in the state of pure bliss, corresponding to the causal state of the world in the godhead). The fourth meter, however, lies beyond language and thought and can only be described by means of negation of the previous states. It relates to pure self-perception, in which the phenomenological world falls silent (corresponding with the highest, attributeless, and formless brahman; MāṇḍU. 7, 11). Oṃ acquired here an additional symbolic “phonetic” element. The experiential space at which the final sound “m” (ṃ) recedes into silence can be acknowledged as “fourth” ineffable state. The Māṇḍūkyopaniṣad identifies it as being beyond and at the same time nonseparate from the other phases (MāṇḍU. 7). 

The interpretation of oṃ in the Māṇḍūkyopaniṣad brought about an especially powerful history of reception, infusing the Veda with the transcendentalist philosophy of the Vedānta by means of which the Veda ceased to be a ritual text and became a primordial revelation to which all can refer, and oṃ became its representation. 

The already postvedic Praṇavopaniṣad states that the impersonal brahman created the the creator god Brahmā and, in turn, the whole cosmos in a series of homologies by mentally perceiving the oṃ. The final nasalized sound has particular significance: it creates the Veda (tones) and discussions, the vedic sciences (Vedāṅgas), the commentaries, and the arts, dance, and music (PraṇU. 1). 

A late section of the Maitryopaniṣad introduces the term śabdabrahman (word-brahman) as a new, proper name for oṃ (MaitriU. 6.22). It also adds new theistic homologies (representing the cosmic trinity Brahmā, Viṣṇu, and Śiva) and yogic-tantric concepts of “struck” and “unstruck” sound. It mirrors the fantastic world of interior yogie sounds (such as flute, thunder, waterfall, and bee buzzing), which herald supernatural powers. These late parts of the Maitryopaniṣad reach already far into medieval Hinduism and give even the ineffable “fourth” (turīya) state a tangible sensory expression: it can be experienced in sound vibrations and wonderful auditions. 

Holy Hearing and Acoustic Piety in Postvedic Literature 

While there was a tendency to memorize the sacred texts even to the exclusion of scriptualization in the case of the Veda, there was no restriction on writing down secondary texts and the postvedic sacred lore. Strictly speaking, even the Veda cannot be qualified as an oral culture, since it is a highly codified orality. It is an acoustic canon based on rigorous mnemotechniques, that is, a system of acoustic signs that is traditionally combined with hand gestures (mudrās), that is, a set of corporal signs. We find a complex coexistence of written and oral forms of expression, with an exceptionally strong inclination to oral-aural communication. It seems that the more sacred a text, the more the need to memorize it and to transmit it orally. 

The Veda was to leave manifold profound marks on Indian cultural life, far beyond the vedic-brahmanic milieu. It is of interest that the scrupulous care given to the Veda as a canon of sound did not include an equal care for meaning (Wilke, 2011) – an exception was only the Upaniṣads. The strict orality allowed maximum openness in interpretation, that is, extreme re-semantization, and “aggiornamento” to cultural change. This is reflected not only in ever-new Upaniṣads, which integrated new theistic, tantric, and yogic ideas, but also in the adoption of the Veda title by most varied postvedic literatures and their “reinvention” of sacred sound. 

The idea that even the acoustic environment of a Veda recitation has auspicious effects and banishes all harmful influences wherever it is heard was adopted and further developed by the theistic texts. The framing story of the Viṣṇusahasranāma (Thousand Names of Viṣṇu; incorporated into the Mahābhārata ), for instance, has the standard formula typical of theistic and devotional texts, stating that the recitation of the names of Viṣṇu purifies and liberates one from all burdens of sin. The devotional texts take on the auspicious power of the deity and top thereby the soteriological power of the Veda. Merely hearing a Purāṇa recital brings the gift of deliverance and even counteracts the karman laws (see e.g. ŚiPM. 3–5). 

The auditive dimension and the multifunctional aspects of sonic communication played a very important role in daily religious life from postvedic times until the present day. In public as well as private practice, acoustic piety is very widespread. The performing styles, for instance of a litany of thousand divine names, range from highly rule-regulated recital with utter care for correct pronounciation to pure devotional recitation where feeling is all that counts, and from simple semi-musical rhythmic “reading” (pāțha) to more musicalized, melodious performance. To the most cherished and widespread religious practices across societal milieus belong complete “sound rites” in two variations – the repetition of tantric and devotional mantras, and song and music as preferred “language” of bhakti . Nonvedic mantras attained pan-Indian popularity with the rise of (a moderate) Tantra between the 5th and the 13th centuries (Sanderson, 2009). Their lasting success was only challenged – or rather complemented – by devotional music as a new paradigm of acoustic piety in the succeeding age of bhakti, which forms the religious mainstream still today. The cult of Rām that is so widespread in northern India, for instance, is almost exclusively confined to sound rituals, recitatives, and texts performed for the senses – from the uninterrupted repetition of the god’s name, “ rām rām ,” to Rām songs (bhajans) in simple rhythms, to public recitation and dramatic performances of the vernacular epic Rāmcaritmānas of Tulsīdās. Above all, in the devotional traditions of bhakti (loving participation) with its emphasis on emotional religiosity, music plays a central role. These traditions have often drawn on the vernaculars and nonstandard Sanskrit. However, practices and habitus coincide in many ways, and it is Sanskrit Hinduism that set the cultural standards. 

When in Tulsīdās’ devotional theology of the saving power of the divine name, the name of Rām surpasses the (epic) form of Rām and personal and unpersonal features of the godhead merge, this owes inspiration to the mantra conception of the Tantra. Holy hearing also found philosophical support, for instance, in ancient Sāṃkhya cosmology, which correlated sound, voice, ear, and space and allowed seeing them as the most subtle principles of the physical world. This brought the yogic-tantric discourse into particular closeness to – even identity with – the divine sphere and a correlation of inner space/sound with cosmic space/sound, the experiential side of which was mantra contemplation. 

Tantric and Devotional Mantras – Mantra Power and Musicalized Devotion 

One of the most typical features of Indian (not just Hindu) religious practice is the existence of veritable sound rites and of categories of text, which are not texts at all in the (modern) Western understanding. This is found most pronouncedly in the “seed” (bīja) mantras of Tantrism, which consist of nothing other than (strings of) monosyllabic sounds, such as hrauṃ and aiṃ hrīṃ śrīṃ, or the nasalized alphabet (aṃ, āṃ, etc.). These nonlexical sounds were a new type of mantra introduced by the Tantra, which became exceedingly successful. Tantric mantras differed not only in form from the vedic mantras (mostly semantically transparent short texts of different contents), but also in terms of content (mostly monosyllabic sounds that embody a deity). What is most characteristic of tantric mantras is the idea that they incorporate – like a “seed” – in their mere sound pattern the respective god or goddess (or another numinous force) in a very real sense, for instance hrauṃ Paramaśiva (“Supreme Śiva”), or aiṃ hrīṃ śrīṃ the Great Goddess (Mahādevī) in her mild form (Lalitā-Tripurasundarī; see Śrīvidyā). Tantric deities are invariably mantra deities. Uttering a tantric mantra, therefore, will make the divinity and all its powers immediately present. This idea was also absorbed by devotional mantras, that is, formulas containing god’s name (such as namaḥ śivāya, “prostrations to Śiva,” or rām rām). And it was even re-projected on the vedic mantras that were associated with the postvedic great deities. Mantra practices include verbal and mental (and often also breathing) techniques, appealing to both the outer and inner senses. Mantras may be recited, sung, and chanted alone or in groups, they may be muttered or silently repeated, or they may be contemplated upon. The recitation of mantras (nonsemantic or semantic sacred formulas) and the constant repetition of one of god’s names (silent, murmering, loud, and even in written form) are still among the most widespread religious practices today. The various tantric (and bhākta) initiation lines generally feel superior to the Veda, to whom they attribute less (or no) soteriological force.

Although vedic and tantric mantras and devotional ones can be distinguished, there is one basic feature shared by them, namely the typical mantric idea of an agency and inherent power of the utterance independent of the speaker’s intention. Above all, mantras in all the various traditions are believed to exert an effect. Mantras are therefore used, not interpreted (Padoux, 1991; Wheelock, 1982; 1991). The language of ritual does not transport information, but creates participation and seeks to transform the state of the speaker and his or her reality. The idea of innate agency, coupled with the immediacy of access to the favorite deity at any time and place, the possibility of direct empowerment without any priestly mediation, and the openness of tantric and devotional mantras (mantra initiation) to all groups of society made these nonvedic “language acts” immensely successful. With the rise of (moderate) Tantrism to a religious mainstream between the 5th and the 13th centuries, mantra power became a common cultural knowledge even in the remotest villages. 

Mantras – whether vedic, tantric, or devotional – are invariably powerful sacred formulas of high symbolic value. They are coded with cultural and group-specific imaginations, connotations fixed by tradition, particular functions, specific experiential fields, and an array of expectations resulting from the global connotatum of mantra power. The postvedic imaginations surrounding mantra practice have much to do with personal empowerment and self-transformation – be it to cope with daily life, reach liberation, or attain supernatural powers. Correct pronounciation remains an important subject. Similar to their vedic predecessors, the phonetic structure and number of syllables are more important in the tantric (and even devotional) mantras than the literal meaning (if there is any), and the performative context is all that counts to make them effective. The nasalized sound (anusvāra) at the end of most tantric bījamantras leaves a strong impression in the body, reverberating in the head like the echo of a gong. In the yogic-tantric traditions, mantras were often experimented on by concentrating on the sound vibrations and their resonance in the body. Sound was a very powerful holistic symbol and a perfect connector of exterior and interior space. In addition to the sound impression, the lexically meaningless sound combinations hide secret messages for the initiated. As in the case of the stobhas and oṃ, the tantric elitist discourse of mantraśāstra (mantra science) attempted (and codified attempts) to semanticize the sound sequences and find in each phoneme deep esoteric meaning. Both such creative hermeneutics and an almost scientific observation of sound resonances are elaborately found in Bhāskararāya’s Varivasyārahasya and autocommentary (17th cent.). The author not only deals with the nonsemantic sounds of the śrīvidyā(mantra) in a highly polysemantic way (unifying it with various Śaiva-Tantra theologies, astrological numbers, popular deities, and the ritual part and gnostic part of the Veda), but also discusses the mantra sounds as contemplative instrument and direct sensory gateway to timelessness and cosmic knowledge. 

The interface of sound and sense in mantra syllables has also been dealt with in the Nāmasiddhānta of the Kāvērī delta (Jackson, 1994), but here the calling on the deity’s name and devotional singing are in the forefront, which are interpreted in vedantic manner. This is already an elitist reflection of the age of bhakti, which became the new religious mainstream after the tantric period and continued to be most influential until the present day. The emotional – partly very ecstatic – bhakti traditions, which have had a long history in Tamil Nadu since the 6th century CE  and swept over to North India and the whole subcontinent in the late Middle Ages, enhanced the success of mantric utterance by feeling and emotion. At the same time, they introduced as the new paradigm of acoustic piety devotional singing (bhajan and kīrtan ), and often the mantras themselves are set to music. Mantra here always means formulas containing the favorite deity’s name, to which words of surrender and praise are often added. The ideal of perfection is not a body of sound, but a body of emotion and a mind immersed in the divine. 

Characteristically, the Vaiṣnava classics Bhāgavatapurāṇa (c. 8th cent. CE) and Jayadeva’s Gītagovinda (12th cent.) are counted among the greatest Sanskrit works of bhakti poetry, as they are “full of rasa,” aesthetic sentiment and feeling, or “flavor,” due to the melodious beauty of their linguistic expression. The Bhāgavatapurāṇa (7.5.23; 11.11.23) emphasizes hearing, chanting/glorifying (kīrtana), singing (gītā, saṅgītā), and incessantly remembering (smaraṇa) god’s name as major acts of pure devotion and immediate means of release and direct participation in the divine (bhakti, bhajana). It includes communal repeating and congregational singing (saṃkīrtana) among the best and easiest methods of evoking divine presence and destroying all sins in the present age of kaliyuga (BhāgP. 11.5.32; 12.13.23; see cosmic cycles). Alongside weeping, fainting, and laughing, also loud singing is counted among the psychosomatic spontaneous expressions of bhakti (BhāgP. 11.14.24). Song, dance, and instrumental music are as important as and part of the temple service (BhāgP. 11.11.36). Devotional songs belong to the classical offerings to please the deity. The Gītagovinda combines text and song (stanzas and refrains) in a highly artistic manner. It inspired many later kīrtan(a) compositions (musical and textual glorifications of the deity), dhrupad songs (poems in mostly the Bhrajbhasha dialect of Hindi set to highly regulated pure rāga forms), and even South Indian kṛtis (Tam. kiruti, Carnatic classical-devotional compositions) – for both liturgical and private use. 

Across all the bhakti traditions, music became exceedingly popular, as it is seen as the best way to express and invoke emotion and devotion, and to literally tune into the divine. The normal bhakti text is a song, often in vernaculars. Also devotional praise hymns in Sanskrit (Stotras) are set to music and partly already composed along with melodies. The classical image of music embraces the idea that melodies (rāga) “trigger feelings” and “color” the mind (rakti, rañjana) by the rasas (aesthetic moods and flavors) contained in them. 

Some distinct patterns of musical access to the deity may be illustrated by two famous South Indian goddess hymns, the Mahiṣāsuramardinīstotra and the Saundaryalaharī. They are exponents of popular and elite tantric-devotional goddess images, and also of two major styles of Indian vocal music: fixed pattern and free improvisation. The Mahiṣāsuramardinīstotra was composed along with its melody. Its most remarkable features are a persuasive drumlike rhythm, onomatopoeic sound chains, and aggressive dissonant harmonies, creating by virtue of the sound material the energetic “atmosphere” of the buffalo-slaying goddess Durgā (including possession trance at goddess festivals in village South India). The rhythm, alliterative language music, and refrain are conducive to collective singing and likely to induce ecstatic trancelike immersion and social effervescence. In contrast, the Saundaryalaharī is more intended for private contemplation and belongs to elitist “high Hindu Tantra.” It contains esoteric doctrines of the Great Goddess in her mild form and lauds her as paramount of beauty in elegant ornate language. There is no prefabricated melody. The hymn is intended for classical music. As every verse takes up its own theme, each may be sung in a different rāga to realize the specific mood. Each singer develops a very personal interpretation while singing the text. This presupposes knowledge of Sanskrit and professional musical training. Classical rāga music is a highly individualized art that includes a great deal of improvisation. The singer must immerse himself/herself completely into the text and work out the melody from his own emotional “color.” Only the audible emotional involvement, rakti (coloration, feeling), and the skill in free improvisation in developing the melody (alāp) and enriching it by microtonal ornamentation, are seen as real art and music in the proper sense (in contrast to fixed forms of recitation [pāṭha] and prefabricated melodies, including sāman chants). Singing the Saundaryalaharī in classical rāga style itself becomes an act of contemplation, as it is (ideally) singing that is completely internalized – pure expression of feeling. The two hymns are thus complex communication systems in terms of content, acoustics, social milieu, and musical and religious style, and their performance generates different forms of absorption. 

There is a tendency of total disappearance of language in music in many of today’s bhakti traditions. The most popular form of musicalized devotion in India and the diaspora is communal bhajan singing (often nām bhajan or nām kīrtan, which contain nothing but the divine name). Bhajans are generally led by a cantor, who can be any layperson (not necessarily musically trained), and accompanied by percussion instruments, tambourines, cymbals, and harmonium. Groups of people of all social strata spontaneously or regularly meet in homes, temples, and neighborhoods. The predetermined distinct tunes and rhythms are mostly simple, semiclassical or folk-song–like informal styles. Bhajans often also contain very simple word material. Preeminent is a headline or refrain with the name of the deity, which can be repeated without knowing all the words’ content. Emotional religiosity needs no words. It needs, however, sensory expression to become a “social fact.” The music’s role in bhakti was not least social integration, group participation, and communal experience, besides giving form to personal devotion or simply giving religion an enjoyable and entertaining appeal. Since medieval times nām bhajans have been vital to democratizing sacred sound and bringing it into the reach of ordinary people. 

Fluid Signs and Sonic Symbols – Language and the Alphabet in Scientific Contexts

Language and music are not strictly separated in India, as they coincide in sound. This is well illustrated by the goddess Sarasvatī, who in the Veda was a sacred river and became in postvedic belief the gentle goddess of language, music, and wisdom, carrying a book and a rosary, and playing the vīṇā (the classical string instrument). This iconography of today’s most popular language goddess demonstrates the fluid borders of language and music in the cultural memory and communicates in a sensory symbol the fact that language and sound were always seen in unison. However, Sarasvatī’s original river nature is also a good symbol for the fluidity of signs and the ever-new ways to conceptualize, semanticize, and use the pair of sound and language in very different contexts and with an amazing variety of symbolic functions. 

The phonocentric life-world inspired not only various forms of acoustic piety, but also a rigorous academic concern with language from a very early age. Grammar, etymology, metrics, and phonetics already belong to the auxiliary vedic sciences. Since late antiquity, grammar and linguistics, just like theatre and poetry, had become largely secular, and precisely in such areas that are not explicitly religious does it become clear how decisively important sound as a means of communication and symbolization is in its effects on India’s hierarchy of values. The major postvedic term for language is no longer the mythical vāc (voice), but the linguistic śabda, which is generally translated as “word.” Revealingly, however, this translation only insufficiently captures the range of śabda, as this central Sanskrit term covers the English terms “sound” and “word” equally. A word is always both a body of sound and a bearer of meaning, that is, a sound that is linked with meaning. Because in practice the audible word is so important, language in India has seldom been removed from its acoustic physical nature and its sonic aura. The cultural knowledge that language also includes the pre-terminological, the prelogical, and the sensory, and that even nonsemantic sounds have communicative ability enjoyed great historical persistence. 

Sound pervades even the most complex symbolic representations in the traditional sciences. It functions as an organizing principle in such abstract conceptualizations as found in grammar, mathematics, and astronomy. At the core of Pāṇini’s grammar (5th–4th cents. BCE) – the trendsetter of science in India – lie 14 basic sound codes (pratyāhāra) that rearrange the Sanskrit alphabet and are valid for all grammatical operations. They are learned by recitation in a manner similar to that of the Veda. The alphabet being structured according to the seats of articulation in a strictly phonetic and highly rational order likewise inspired the numeric code systems used by astronomers and mathematicians (from the 4th to 19th cent. BCE in Kerala). They used the complicated Āryabhața coding and the easier kațapayādi system to give numerical values to the letters (syllables) of the alphabet. Instead of diagrams and numerical tables, we find memorizing systems and poetic verses full of alliterations. The predominance of sound is also seen in metaphysics. The sophisticated cosmologies of the Śaiva Āgamas and Tantras are again based on the alphabet, which turns here into mysterious sonic and graphic codes serving to explain the creation of the world and language (for variations see the Pauṣkarāgama and the Śivasūtra, 9th cent. CE). 

The phonocentric life-world thus generated quite specific cultural practices and symbols. It structured perception and left traces on the interpretation of the world and that which transcends daily life as well as on the ways of “doing science.” Grammar was the paradigmatic analytical science for Indian intellectuals and had a defining influence on methodology and scientific representation. In Pāṇini it becomes evident how much sonic awareness trained abstract thought. His grammar was dedicated to the formal analysis of the natural structures of language and developed concepts that today one would call symbolic logic and linguistics. It is noteworthy that Pāṇini’s highly technical algebra-like Sūtra language is far more acoustically than visually memorable. Not only the 14 pratyāhāras, but also the 4,000 grammatical aphorisms, were memorized and transmitted orally, like all important texts in India (one must also assume written circulation to explain the vast regional reach of the Pāṇini Sūtra language, which produced a standard Sanskrit). 

The difference of scientific style from those produced in Europe shows up even more surprisingly in astronomy and mathematics (Wilke & Moebus, 2011, 231–236; 491–492). Mathematicians and astronomers were at the same time poets, and they used not only sonic codes, but also metrical form and the most complicated meters to present their gigantic numbers and groundbreaking discoveries, such as the circular shape of the earth and the law of gravitation. 

Such highly aesthetic devises even in mathematics not only ensured easier memorization, but also allowed a more emotive incorporation of the abstract subjects and also had a legitimizing role. The aesthetic aura and poetic cryptic diction have the function of convincing. This may be explained with the predominance of liturgical speech in the cultural system and the Veda as a paradigm of authoritative speech (Wilke & Moebus, 2011, 243–250). Liturgical speech is perceived almost forcibly as the most perfect literary form because the Veda, a liturgical text, and not economic lists or didactic texts, represents the “original text” of Sanskrit culture. This liturgical model of powerful speech also dominates the teacher–pupil transmission, and the “community” model in the temple: the priest recites the mantras and litanies while those attending the service only listen. Archetypal literary speech is less about the efficient transmission of information than about the consistency of the situation, appropriateness of the form, and performative efficiency. 

The Postvedic Language Goddess and the Alphabet as Primordial Sound 

Mythical and abstract thought must be seen as poles of an oscillating system, in which myth was never devaluated. Śabda, covering the English terms “sound” and “word” equally, allowed a conclusion that had its precursor in the vedic texts: it is not only sentences and words that are seen as communicative, but also syllables and even individual phonemes. Although they do not impart meaning in the sense of content, they are still bodies of sound with their own audible expressivity. For many religious Indian thinkers, language was not only a means of communication, but in a way also the subject of the communication process. The language itself is envisaged as a person and even individual phonemes as independent personalities or speech subjects with their very own statements. This has been implemented in rituals and also thought through in terms of linguistic philosophy. One striking result of the notion is the mātṛkāpūjā in Tantrism, a ritual recitation of the Sanskrit alphabet in esoteric temple service and private worship. A nasalized sound (ṃ) is added to each of the letters, to make them mantra-like, numinous forces. The Śāradātilakatantra, a popular ritual manual compiled by Lakṣmaṇadeśika (probably 13th cent., traditionally ascribed to the 10th cent. CE), describes the deity associated with this rite as follows: "And now we speak of [the goddess] with the body made of the alphabet, who makes intelligence in the universe possible. If this [alphabet] did not exist in perceivable form, the whole world would be without life... [When one prays to her, one thinks to oneself:] I turn to the white-shining three-eyed goddess of language... on whose face, shoulders, breast, belly and feet are distributed the 50 letters [of the alphabet]" (ŚTT. 6.1.4; trans. Wilke & Moebus, 2011, 279).

Language is a goddess called Śāradā. Śāradā is the esoteric form of Sarasvatī and has cosmogonic relevance like her vedic precursor Vāc. The chapter of the “rites of the language deity” describes her prayers and the recitations of her living body, the 50 “sounding” syllables of the Sanskrit alphabet. They are used in various ritual contexts and most importantly projected on the practitioner’s own body parts. Symbolically, the tantric actor thereby divinizes and cosmicizes his or her mortal frame and enters the cosmic space of pure, world-generating sound. 

The Sanskrit alphabet is not a random assemblage of language sounds, but a structured composition in strict phonetic order. The grammarians’ interest was to account for all sounds of language in a systematic way. The Tantrists were interested in the alphabet, because it formed the basic material of the mantras. They gave it deep esoteric meaning by calling it mātṛkā, “mother” (PauṣĀg., Tantramantrotpatti 19–20; ŚTT. 2.57; ŚiS. 1.4). The alphabet is viewed as a blueprint of creation before its realization and is variously equated to primordial sound (nāda), Śiva’s creative power (śakti), the cosmic energy (kuṇḍalinī), and the highest form of speech (parāvāc). For creation the god unites himself with his own power. In the agamic vision, “pure knowledge” (śuddhavidyā) of “word creation” (śabdasṛṣți) engendered by the mātṛkā precedes the physical world. What connects the two spheres and sets creation in motion is orginal sound (nāda). Vibrating sound (nāda) is seen as the first evolute in the context of the cosmogonic mantra speculations. It is more basic than either mind or matter and exists prior to them. Primeval cosmic sound pervades the universe and is a divine substance. Ultimately, the universe exists in more subtle form in sound (nāda) and light (bindu). 

According to the Pauṣkarāgama (Tantramantrottpatti, 1–2), the primordial cosmic brahman turned into the first sound of the alphabet, which engendered the Tantras and mantras. All the words arose from pure primordial, preverbal sound (nāda), which emerged as a first impulse from the union of Śiva und Śakti and harbors in itself the whole spectrum of sounds (the alphabet) condensed in a brightly shining droplet (bindu). The Śāradātilakatantra views the mātṛkā as the basic material out of which not only the mantras and the ordinary language (śabdasṛṣți), but also the phenomenal world (arthasṛṣți, the “creation of meanings,” i.e. of things), are made. A very elaborate mystical interpretation of each letter of the alphabet is given in Kṣemarāja’s commentary on the Śivasūtra, the Śivasūtravimarśiṇī, and Abhinavagupta’s Parātriṃśikāvivaraṇa. The alphabet condenses in the aham – “I,” the sacred mantra of nondual Kashmir Śaivism, regarded as the hub in which god, world, and human person fall into one. The first three vowels embody the inner life of the godhead: the supreme, ineffable nature of the I, which is pure prereflexive self-presence and world-consciousness (a),whose embodied reflection is pure bliss (ā), endowed with the powers of will (i, ī) and knowledge (u, ū), which becomes manifest in objective appearance – the world, viewed as external expansion of the godhead. 

To Abhinavagupta (10-11th cents. CE) there is no difference between sound and pure consciousness. Every instance of consciousness is also an utterance, not occurring in conventional words, but in “the womb of cosmic sound” (paranādagarbha; TSā. 3). The entire mātṛkā becomes a vocabulary of god. The repetition of the alphabet sounds turns into a noetic means of truly experiencing the unity of the universe – the unfoldment of god (the supreme I) in the form of “a” to “kṣa” (all the 50 letters; ParāTrV. 5–8). God’s self-expression at the level of pure autonomy and presence is absolute divine existence (a-nuttara). The first letter contains in itself all aspects of sound and expression, respresenting god’s complete vision of the whole and the world phenomena as god’s body (TĀ. 3.67). From the pure bliss (ā-nanda) of god’s self-reflection (the goddess), the alphabet/external world pours out in stepping beyond the self-forgetfulness and complacency of the absolute (a) and blissful (ā) (ParāTrV. 5–8; TĀ. 3.68). When god “sees” (u-nmeṣa) the world, he recognizes all possible objects of “will” (i-cchā) hidden within himself. The diphthongs (e, o, ai, and au) represent the first step outside god’s timelessness into linear time, as they only exist as temporal phenomena. The consonants are individuations (vyakti) of the vowels, as they cannot sound by themselves without vowels. They are symbols for the objects of the external world. The five groups of consonents signify the five elements, the five senses, the five organs of action, and so on. 

Much attention receive the anusvāra “ṃ” and the visarga “ḥ,” which terminate the mantric seed syllables and the consonants (“aṃ” and “aḥ.”). Aṃ-aḥ embody god’s “devouring” and “spitting out” of the universe and constitute the central (“natural”) mantraaham (“I”). Repeating it becomes a contemplative instrument to realize the identity of god, world, and human being, leading earthly consciousness back to the “wholeness” of god and the realization “I am the cosmos” (“In my I is the whole cosmos”; ParāTrV. 5–8). 

Linguistic Metaphysics 

Apart from the many and varied performative and symbolic functionalizations of language and sound that we find in Hinduism, perhaps no other culture has turned so much of its mental attention to language and sound. Indian grammarians and linguists of late antiquity and the early middle ages developed amazingly modern-sounding linguistic questions and reflections, such as “What links the sounds ‘c-o-w’ with the actual animal?” or “Does the word ‘cow’ denote an individual animal or the class of all cows?” (ŚabBh. 1.1.6.19). Bhartṛhari came to the conclusion that words attain their meaning only within the sentence whole. Although the vedic goddess Vāc and “language cow” had been demythified in such academic discourses, this was not the end of Vāc’s leading role as holistic cosmic symbol. Language as a divine being was popularized not just in numerous iconic images, such as the exoteric and esoteric Sarasvatī, the goddess Gāyatrī, and the mild Lalitā-Tripurasundarī. Vāc also reappeared in the language philosophy of Bhartṛhari (5th cent. CE), whose theory was further developed by Abhinavagupta (10-11th cents. CE). These highly sophisticated philosophies bound the old idea of Vāc as the creator of the universe and actual basis of existence into a rational discourse by positing rationality within a mythical framework and explaining mythical embedding in an analytical fashion. Almost as a by-product, Bhartṛhari anticipated the “linguistic turn” of Western philosophy by hundreds of years, when he noted in his famous work Vākyapadīya the fundamental dependence of perception on language: “In this world there is no perception of things that is without language [and our] whole perception appears permeated by language” (VākPad. 1.123 [1.131], trans. Wilke & Moebus, 2011, 287, 624). 

This thesis of the indissoluble connection between language and thought was in Bhartṛhari only a subordinate aspect of a holistic program of metaphysics, inspired by the old cosmo-genetic notions of vāc in the Veda. Bhartṛhari postulates that the phenomenal world is nothing but a “metamorphosis” (vivarta) of an eternal, transphenomenal linguistic principle (śabdatattva). This principle is equivalent to an integral world consciousness (brahman) that on the phenomenal level becomes the meaning aspect of language. Meaning takes place only because there is a global network of meaning to which all words must refer in order to become meaningful. This idea of a linguistic basis for the world’s existence (śabdabrahman) – which some interpreters again interpreted as sound – set a real revolution of thought in motion in India. It has strongly influenced many other philosophers and the ritual practice and philosophy of later Tantrism. 

An important conception of Bhartṛhari, which was most relevant in tantric discourse, is the idea that language/speech/voice (vāc) has three dimensions (VākPad. 1.159; crit. ed. Rau 1.134), of which the first is “corporeal” speech (vaikharī), the linguistic expression that is uttered and heard (along with all individual characteristics of speech like modulation and tempo). The next is the “middle” or “mediating” one (madhyamā), that is, the interior speech, the dimension of thought in which the apprehension of the sound sequence as a meaningful word takes place and where words are not articulated as aerial vibrations, but rather as mental processes. A still subtler dimension, which exists beyond the sequences of sound, the mental labeling and the linearity of discursive thought, is the sudden comprehension of meaning. Bhartṛhari calls this immediate insight the “seeing” or “visionary” dimension of speech (paśyantī). What was so vital in Bhartṛhari was the insight that language works in both the verbal and nonverbal spheres and that understanding meaning always happens in a holistic way of sudden insight. Speech and consciousness exist in a continuum. 

Bhartṛhari’s three dimensions of language appear in tantric discourse further differentiated and radicalized into four dimensions: the fourth one being parā, the “supreme” dimension, a cosmic language that is identical to a perception of the cosmic whole. This view was the very backbone of the nondual Śaivism developed by Abhinavagupta, the Kashmiri philosopher, theorist of aesthetics, poet, and left-handed tantrist, whose starting point was mantra practice and the unbrokenness of sound extending from the audible to nonaudible stages. To Abhinavagupta the all-encompassing perception of the whole (saṃvid) represents the gaze of god upon the world and “cosmic language” (parā vāc), which is embodied in the alphabet and crystallized most perfectly in the word aham (“I”). To him aham is the central mantra of the universe, for “I” contains all levels of language within itself, from the synthetic vision of the whole to the judgment “That is that.” The levels of language arise solely out of the increasing differentiation between “I” and “that,” and between message and sign. So they are nothing other than a continuous self-formulation and self-expression of aham. 

Abhinavagupta argues that language includes not only linear discursive and logical modes, but also simultaneous presentational modes, that is, sensory and emotive dimensions, and that discursive perception only works because of a holistic perception surrounding it (ParāTrV. 1). Within this holistic perception (saṃvid), both the modes are interwoven. Apparently saṃvid does not so much mean a focused perception, conscious registering, or “complete awareness” as a requirement for the logical and objective (samam + vid) – here Abinavagupta refers to Bhartṛhari’s linguistic prereflexive intuition (pratibhā), but more an intuitive impression or a “feeling” and “physical sensation” in the realm of the emotive and aesthetic (samyak + vid), which for Abhinavagupta is more basic. He compares the integral overall impression of the cosmic whole not only with the view from a mountain top, but also with enjoying music. Pure sound is ultimately the model for Abhinavagupta’s contention that a perception of the whole must always exist between two discursive perceptions. 

Bhartṛhari’s śabdabrahman (the dynamism of the one transforming into the many and yet remaining only one) and Abhinavagupta’s model of music and pure sound for a cognitive vision and emotive feeling of the whole did not remain restricted to speculative philosophy. They were not only implemented in ritual, but also newly reconstructed in the musicologists’ metaphysical discourse on the essential nature of music, which they declared as nādabrahman. This idea was later “translated” in the one-stringed drone instrument tāmpūra. In the construction of this instrument, acoustic theory was set into practice that a vibrating string carries the whole tonal spectrum. Indeed, hearing a tāmpūra always leaves the impression of one sound and many sounds at once. In keeping with Abhinavagupta’s integrative theory of language and his reification of the pure audible and expressive aspect of language, music most evidently demonstrates that a fundamental basis of communication, “knowledge,” and experience is beyond the semantic contents. It also takes place at the more general sympathetic and emotional level of expressing and perceiving pure sound. 

The Nādabrahman as a Cultural and Transcultural Symbol 

A culminating point of India’s sonic worldview is the nādabrahman, literally “sound-brahman” or “sonic absolute.” This very complex cultural symbol assumed the aura of a hoary past, reaching back to the Veda. However, the nādabrahman is a relatively late concept that was “invented” by Śārṅgadeva (13th cent. CE) in his music classic Saṅgītaratnākara. The musicologist claimed music to be brahman in audible form, and listening to music as a pleasant yoga for everybody (SaRa. 1.2.164–167). He fused in his nādabrahman many earlier ideas, in particular the Śaiva tantric primordial sound that pervades the universe (nāda - and manifests in mantra deities) with the vedantic nondual absolute (brahman) and Bhartṛhari’s śabdabrahman. (SaṅgRaĀk. 1.3.1–2). Already Śārṅgadeva’s initial benedictory (maṅgala) verse allows one to understand god Śiva and song as the embodiment of the nāda (SaṅgRaĀk. 1.1.1). This immediate correlation of religion and music, and of inaudible (“unstruck” yogic) and audible (musical) sound, hints at the soteriological relevance of music. Music is said to cause both enjoyment in life and ultimate liberation, and to appeal to feeling unlike strenuous yogic concentration (SaṅgRaĀk. 1.2.164–167). 

In the world of musicians, language becomes a subform of expressive sound and brahman audible in music. In keeping with Śārṅgadeva, the great Carnatic musician-composer Tyāgarāja (1767–1847) states, “The joy of music is itself the bliss of Brahman that Vedānta speaks of” (cited by Jackson, 1994, 224). 

In the indigenous context, the nādabrahman is the last great transformation of the brahman concept and its “reinvention.” Via music the abstract brahman became (again) a sensory substance and accessable to feelings and aesthetic immersion. The holistic notion of a universally pervading “primordial” sound and its physical realization in classical Indian music fused almost all the significant language and sound discourses while they acquired a new corporality and semioticization. The term nādabrahman became so popular that it migrated out of the classical musicians’ circles and was adopted and remodeled by various groups. It found a permanent home in the popular Tantra and devotional literature and song. It became a key for devotional fusion all the way to modern hit songs in Bollywood style, praising the all-pervading nādabrahman and evoking it emotionality through a sweet singing style. It was also taken up by Veda exegists (Mīmāṃsakas) and the Sants. It became also connected with the Sikh, Radhasoami, and even Sufi traditions, and it also gained transreligious influence in the West. Today “Nada yoga,” “Nada music,” “Nada healing,” and “Nada gnosis” are found among various esoteric groups in the West and also in India who locate the nādabrahman in resonances and inner sounds and associate it with extraordinary experiences, fabulous sonic journeys to the center of the universe, and also therapeutic power, the Pythagorean music of the spheres, and popularized modern physics. 

The introduction of the nādabrahman into alternative Western movements was encouraged by the jazz historian J.-E. Berendt, among others. His book Nada Brahma - Die Welt is Klang (1983) fused in a typical New Age manner all the world’s religious traditions and natural science. He not only lanced the nādabrahman as an age-old wisdom of humanity (all knew that “the world is sound”), newly discovered by quantum physics, but also presented a cultural criticism and a history of musical styles starting with the 1960s. He declared the Indian concept and Indian music to be a key to a “New Conciousness,” which could cure the Western “eye person,” the logocentric, dissecting Western subject, by introducing a more intuitive and affective relation to the world. He became acquainted with the nādabrahman concept by personal encounters with Indian musicians, like Ravi Shankar, who came to the West. J.-E. Berendt argues that they taught Westeners the new spiritual attitude of the “listening man,” in which music and religion merge seamlessly. Classical Indian modal music had, according to him, a profound impact on the worldview and music making of a whole generation of young musicians in the 1960s and 1970s. 

J.-E. Berendt’s thesis of a spiritualization of Western music through the impact of India is certainly too enthusiastic, but it cannot be denied that the short Indian boom in the 1960s inspired new forms of music and spiritualty that crossed religious and cultural boundaries, and turned into New Age spirituality starting in the late 1970s. Modal playing of music provided the musicians with the possibility of dealing with religious feelings in a very personal form and adopting explicitly spiritual attitudes, without having to enter into institutional and dogmatic ties. This fitted in well with the change in subjective piety patterns becoming apparent at that time (and now well documented in the research literature). It was the scene of musical counterculture, world music, and popular musicians like the Beatles, which interiorized musical elements of India and “Indian spirituality,” that created social effervescence. Indian music opened new ways of sensing the world and the self and created a space for music to take the role of an invisible religion. From Woodstock to the New Age music, the spiritualization and cosmopolization of music turned into a new “creed” of perceiving music as a universal language of humanity. Similar statements can be heard today from Indian gurus. This is one of the ways how Abhinavagupta’s “cosmic language” and Śārṅgadeva’s nādabrahman are converted into a (post)modern discourse.