The Divine as Music

In the first half of the thirteenth century, at the Yadava court of Devagiri in the Deccan, a court officer named Sharngadeva sat down to write what became the most influential treatise on Indian music ever composed. It is called the Sangita Ratnakara, the Ocean of Music. It runs to seven chapters on scales, melodic forms, rhythm, instruments and dance, and it is still cited by musicians of both the North Indian and South Indian traditions today.

He did not open it with a scale. He did not open it with an instrument. Before any of that, in the opening verses of his first chapter, he worshipped sound itself as God.

This treatise has already made the case that the tradition holds sound to be the ground of reality. It has followed the Word as the Absolute, the four levels of speech, and nada, bindu and Om. This chapter follows that same sound into its most exalted human form. Into music. Where the earlier chapters heard sound as the spoken and the repeated word, here it is the sung note and the plucked string, and the claim made for it is exactly as high.

Nada, the sound that is God

“That consciousness of all beings which has unfolded itself as the world,” Sharngadeva wrote, “that Nada-Brahman, blissful and non-dual, do we worship.” A few verses later he is precise about what he means. Song depends on sound. Instruments depend on sound. Dance follows both. And below all of them, the syllable comes from sound, the word from the syllable, speech from the word. “Therefore,” the verse concludes, “the whole world rests on nada.” On sound.

‖ The whole world rests on sound.

The word nada itself was given an etymology to seal the claim. It is built, the tradition said, from na, meaning breath, and da, meaning fire. Sound is born where the breath meets the inner fire. Whatever its worth as philology, the image is exact. Sound is the living meeting of air and heat in a body, and the cosmos is held to be the same thing at an unimaginable scale.

Sharngadeva was inheriting this, not inventing it. The boldest form of the claim is older than he is, and it names the great gods directly. “There is no song without nada, no note without nada, no dance without nada; therefore the world is made of nada. Brahma is of the form of sound, Vishnu is of the form of sound, the supreme Goddess is of the form of sound, Shiva is of the form of sound.” That verse is often credited to the Sangita Ratnakara, and here the record needs correcting, because it belongs in fact to an older text, the Brihaddesi of Matanga, composed somewhere between the sixth and ninth centuries. The correction is not a new one. It follows the critical editors of these treatises, among them Prem Lata Sharma, who edited the Brihaddesi and, with R. K. Shringy, the Sangita Ratnakara itself. The whole Trimurti, in this reading, is worshipped whenever sound is rightly made.

The drum at the end of the dance

There is one place in the tradition where sound is not a road to the divine at all. It is the source of everything, the divine included.

Every student of Sanskrit grammar begins with a list of fourteen short lines, strings of bare sounds. A i u. Ri li k. E o ng. They are called the Maheshvara Sutras, the aphorisms of the Great Lord, and they are the sound-inventory from which Panini, in perhaps the fourth century before the Common Era, built the Ashtadhyayi, the most rigorous grammar produced anywhere before the modern age. Every abbreviation Panini uses, every class of vowels or consonants his rules reason over, is drawn from these fourteen lines. They are the periodic table of the Sanskrit language.

The tradition says where they came from. At the close of Shiva’s cosmic dance, to raise up the sages who watched, the god sounded the damaru, the small hourglass drum in his hand, fourteen times. “Nine and five”, the commentary counts the beats. From those fourteen beats fell the fourteen lines. The grammarian Nandikeshvara wrote a whole commentary on them, the Kashika, reading each sound-group as a stage in the unfolding of reality and walking it down the same four levels of speech, from the silent para to the spoken vaikhari. In this telling the ordered sounds of human language, and so the ordered world that language can name, fall out of the drum of a dancing god.

That drum is the one Nataraja holds, in the upper right of his four hands, in the bronze image cast and recast across South India for a thousand years. The iconographers are clear about what it means. Ananda Coomaraswamy, writing in 1918, quoted an old Tamil verse to read the four hands at a stroke. “Creation arises from the drum”, it runs. “Protection proceeds from the hand of hope. From fire proceeds destruction. The foot held aloft gives release.” The drum is the first of the god’s five acts. It is creation, and creation is a sound.

It is worth being exact about the kind of claim this is. No single verse of the Veda says the drum makes the world. The reading lives in the grammarians’ commentaries, in the iconography, and in the Tamil Shaiva hymns, and that is where an honest account leaves it. But the intuition is the same one running through this whole treatise. Before the world can be seen, it has to be sounded.

Music as worship

If sound is the divine, then to make sound well is to worship, and the tradition drew exactly that conclusion for music.

The idea has a long textual life. The Natyashastra, the foundational treatise on drama and performance, declares music and dance to be the equal of Vedic recitation, and reports, on the authority of Indra and Shiva, that music is purer than bathing at sacred fords or muttering prayers. A famous couplet, traditionally ascribed to the sage Yajnavalkya and quoted through the music treatises, puts the claim at its boldest. One who truly knows the playing of the vina, who is expert in the microtones and the melodic forms and the cycles of rhythm, it says, “attains the path of liberation without effort”. It is fair to note that the couplet’s exact scriptural home is uncertain, and it circulates in more than one form. But it names something the tradition believed without reservation. The disciplined making of sound can be the spiritual life itself.

In the South Indian devotional world this became nadopasana, the worship of the divine through musical sound, in which to sing or to play is to perform puja and the note itself is treated as a form of the deity. It is the same conviction the treatise has already followed into the plainest form of all, the singing of the divine Name, where the philosophers’ argument in Sanskrit becomes a crowd singing in the street.

There is a face for all of this. Saraswati, the goddess of speech and learning, is shown seated with a book, a rosary and a vina in her hands. In the Rigveda she is first of all a river, and only secondarily the power that “brightens every pious thought”. The vina-bearing form, the goddess of music, is Puranic and later. But look at what the instrument is doing in the hands of the goddess of speech. She is the doctrine of this whole treatise made into a person, sitting on a lotus, drawing a note from a string.

Strike a bell in an empty shrine and listen to the sound thin out and vanish. The tradition heard, in exactly that, the shape of everything. Sound arising, sound growing subtle, sound resolving into a silence that was there before it and remains after.

The note fades.

The sound does not.