Sanskrit: The Life Pulse of Yoga (Part 1)
by Katyayani Poole, Ph.D.
When I was a student in Calcutta, I used to spend hours in a dusty library at a rosewood table piled high with volumes of Sanskrit texts. Instead of
studying like I was supposed to, I’d feed a breadcrumb to a spider who’d woven a web in between two legs of the table. (If you’re an arachnophobe, I wouldn’t recommend Calcutta as your next vacation destination!) Then I’d observe colonies of worms winding tunnels through the bindings and fragile pages of the Yoga books I checked out. And occasionally, I’d steal glances with lovers meeting in secret between the stacks.
Then one day, during Calcutta’s Kali Puja festival, a parade passed outside the library window. A marching band led a procession of ecstatic drummers and dancers carrying clay statues of the goddess, Kali, richly decorated with red hibiscus flowers and blinking electric lights. The women wore their hair loose and shook their bodies wildly, while the crowd shouted with joy – “Jai Ma! Jai Ma! Jai Ma! (Praise to the Mother!)
Like a strong tide, the celebration pulled me out onto the street. As I was swept along with the crowd flowing towards the Hoogley River (the last part of the Ganges before it spills into the Bay of Bengal), it finally struck me. Here I’d been just reading about spiritual experiences in old books that smelled like a musty towel, when all around me a celebration of living Spirit was going on.
Likewise Yoga’s scriptures are not just dead words on a page.
They are alive because they are composed in Sanskrit. It is said that the Mother goddess Kali herself is the source of all sound. She wears a garland of 50 skulls, which are the 50 primordial sounds of Sanskrit, around her neck. As creatress of this manifest universe, she speaks forth the world at the beginning of creation and she’s the pure silence at the end.
Because Sanskrit’s syllables are the primal sounds at the basis of all things, they have the power to enliven and expand your consciousness in very simple and practical ways.
Let’s look at the example of Patanjali’s Yoga Sutras. Every Yogi should be familiar with this scripture as it is the classical textbook on the subject of Yoga.
Most Yogis who read translations of the Yoga Sutras experience it as a volume of descriptive information like a cookbook or a list of commandments. And most commentaries on the Sutras are not much more helpful. They most often just explain the literal translation of the verses, but not the body/mind/spirit synthesis their pure vibrations affect.
Few understand that each sutra is a technique to bring your mind and body together in this very moment. (A power they have because they are made up of electrifying Sanskrit syllables, or the sonic formulae for vibrating consciousness.)
Sutra means “a little thread” (like the sutures you got when you were a kid in need of stiches after you fell off your bike). They bring together two things in a very delicate and refined manner. You wouldn’t use a heavy rope, after all, to sew your skin together!
Sages like Patanjali who composed sutras crafted the words and syllables together in the most concise form possible. They also knew how to
link together the potent sound bytes of Sanskrit in such a way as to best elicit an energetic response in your nervous system.
For this reason, there is no point in just reading and studying the Yoga Sutras. Rather, they are meant to be heard or experienced
internally in order to refine your subtle body until it achieves a state of pure perception and receptivity. Then true Yoga as an ecstatic state of total union can be realized.
(In the next issue of Spanda, we’ll observe more closely how the Sanskrit technology of sutra achieves complete Yoga in Part 2 of this article.)
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