The four levels of speech, and the swan on the mind

The doctrine of the four levels of speech is the central piece of philosophy of language in these traditions, and it is not a mystical embellishment on top of grammar but an account of how anything gets said at all. Vaikharī is speech as heard: articulated sound, moving air, available to anyone in the room. Madhyamā, the middle one, is speech in the mind — it has words in it and they come in order, but nothing is audible; it is the running commentary a reader hears while reading silently. Paśyantī, whose name is the feminine present participle of the verb to see, is the stage at which the word is no longer sequential. What is to be said is present entire, as a single thing apprehended at once, and the tradition uses a verb of seeing rather than hearing precisely because sequence has dropped out. Parā is the level at which not even that differentiation obtains.

The scheme has a long and traceable history. Its Vedic warrant is a single verse of the Ṛgveda declaring that speech is measured out in four quarters, of which three are hidden and unmoving and only the fourth is what human beings speak — a verse that later authors of every school cite as scriptural authority. The philosophical elaboration comes from Bhartṛhari, the grammarian-philosopher of roughly the fifth century, whose Vākyapadīya works with three levels, paśyantī, madhyamā and vaikharī, and speaks of the supreme station beyond them. The fourth level under the name parā belongs to the tantric traditions, particularly the non-dual Śaiva schools of Kashmir, where Parā is also the name of a goddess. Whether parā is properly a fourth stage or the silent ground of the other three is a question on which authorities differ, and a reader will find the arrangement counted both ways. What the hymn does is settle the matter practically by putting all four in the accusative of praise, so to speak, and making them all her.

The interleaved names are placed with care. Pratyakciti follows parā. Pratyañc is the opposite of parāc: turned back rather than turned forward, inward rather than outward. It is the standard Vedāntic term in the compound pratyagātman, the inner self, and it comes with a famous image from the Kaṭha Upaniṣad — the self-existent bored the openings of the senses outward, so that a person naturally looks out and not in, and only some rare steady man turns his eyes around. Placing this name at the point where speech has not yet begun to move suggests that the descent about to be described is also, read the other way, the route back.

Paradevatā, the supreme divinity, is one of the standard designations of Lalitā Tripurasundarī in Śrīvidyā, where Parādevatā functions almost as a proper name for the goddess of the school. There is a grammatical curiosity in it worth noticing: devatā is a feminine noun in Sanskrit regardless of the sex of the deity it refers to, so that when the language speaks of divinity in the abstract it does so in the feminine. The hymn does not exploit the point explicitly, but it is the kind of coincidence a tradition of this sort does not consider accidental.

The last name is a small poem in itself. Mānasa means the mind, and it is also the name of the high lake in the Himālaya to which the swans are said to migrate. The compound therefore says two things at once: she is the swan on the devotee's mind, and the devotee's mind is Lake Mānasa. The haṃsa carries a great deal of freight in Sanskrit — it is the bird credited with the ability to drink the milk out of a mixture of milk and water and leave the water behind, so that it stands for discrimination; it is the mount of Brahmā and of Sarasvatī; and paramahaṃsa is the title of the highest class of renunciate. It is also a mantra. The syllables haṃ and sa are heard in the outgoing and incoming breath, and the tradition calls this the unrecited recitation, going on continuously in every living body without anyone's effort. That is the joke the verse ends on, if it can be called a joke: having taken speech down through four levels to the point where it becomes audible sound, it closes with the one sound that no one has to say.

The first line is four names all beginning with p, and the metre is tidy: parā and pratyakcitīrūpā fill the first eight syllables, paśyantī and paradevatā the second eight, madhyamā and vaikharīrūpā the third, and bhaktamānasahaṃsikā the last eight by itself. The caesura after paradevatā is the only breath in the verse.

Pratyakcitīrūpā contains the hardest junction in the verse. The underlying word is pratyañc, which loses its nasal in composition and appears as pratyak, and that final k then stands immediately before the palatal c of citi. The cluster kc — guttural stop into palatal affricate — has no English parallel and cannot be smoothed over; release the k and start the c cleanly. Some printed nāmāvalis, including the one used here, keep the two elements apart as pratyak citīrūpāyai for exactly this reason. Note also that citi appears in the compound with a lengthened final vowel, citī, which is the same word the previous verse used in its first name.

Paśyantī begins with the palatal sibilant ś, which is not the s of 'sit' and not quite the sh of 'ship': the tongue is against the hard palate, further back than English. It is followed immediately by y, another palatal, so the cluster is made in one place with no shifting.

Vaikharīrūpā opens on the diphthong ai, which in Sanskrit is a full long vowel and takes twice the time of a short a. The kh in it is an aspirated k — a k with a puff of breath after it — and not a fricative; Madhyamā just before it has the dhy cluster: voiced aspirated dental, then the palatal glide, with nothing between.

In bhaktamānasahaṃsikā, note the anusvāra of haṃ. Because the following sound is the sibilant s, the anusvāra here is a pure nasalisation of the vowel rather than a full m or n; the mouth does not close. Reciters who convert it to a firm m turn the swan into something else. The opening bh is one aspirated labial, and the kt of bhakta is two distinct stops.

The datives for archanā are all regular ā-stems: parāyai namaḥ, pratyakcitīrūpāyai namaḥ, paśyantyai namaḥ, paradevatāyai namaḥ, madhyamāyai namaḥ, vaikharīrūpāyai namaḥ, bhaktamānasahaṃsikāyai namaḥ. Paśyantī, an ī-stem, turns its vowel into the glide y before the ending.

There is a further reason to take this verse slowly, which is that it describes the activity being performed while it is performed. Whoever is chanting is producing vaikharī, the outermost and grossest of the four, and the verse names that level last and lowest while insisting it is the same goddess as the first. The manuals of recitation know three grades of japa — spoken aloud, murmured under the breath, and purely mental — and rank them in ascending order of value, which is the same descent read upward. Trying a single name of this verse in all three — out loud, then whispered, then in the mind alone — is the most direct way to understand what the four levels are pointing at.