The word indeed is eternal. Man faces himself when he seeks the word. The word as pure sound is but a communication that comes from silence. The word is but vibrant silence compounded into a momentary act. The act has to be like prayer if it should yield what you want it to yield. Even to say a flower, let alone Rama, you must be able to say it in such a way that the force of the vocable, has the potency to create the flower. Unless the word becomes mantra no writer is a writer, and no reader a reader.

For the right reader-to-be, the writer has therefore to become an upasaka of the word. Thus we give sound back to silence and the seemingly divided remains undivided.

Let us, therefore, not heed expressions like ‘the reading public’, ‘communication’, etc. We in India need but to recognize our inheritance. Let us never forget Bhartrihari, the great grammarian (AD 450–510).

15

Words of Acceptance1

I am a man of silence. And words emerge from that silence with light, of light, and light is sacred. One wonders that there is the word at all—sabda—and one asks oneself, where did it come from? How does it arise? I have asked this question for many, many years. I’ve asked it of linguists, I’ve asked it of poets, I’ve asked it of scholars. The word seems to come first as an impulsion from nowhere, and then as a prehension, and it becomes less and less esoteric—till it begins to be concrete. And the concrete becoming ever more earthy, and the earthy communicated, as the common word, alas, seems to possess least of that original light.

The writer or the poet is he who seeks back the common word to its origin of silence, that the manifested word become light. There was a great poet of the West, the Austrian poet, Rainer Maria Rilke. He said objects come to you to be named. One of the ideas that has involved me deeply these many years is: where does the word dissolve and become meaning? Meaning itself, of course, is beyond the sound of the word, which comes to one only as an image in the brain, but that which sees the image in the brain (says our great sage of the eighth century, Sri Sankara) nobody has ever seen. Thus the word coming of light is seen eventually by light. That is, every word image is seen by light, and that is its meaning. Therefore the effort of the writer, if he’s sincere, is to forget himself in the process and go back to the light from which words come. Go back where? That is, those who read or those who hear must reach back to their own light. And that light, I think is the hearth of prayer.