A Word for the Gaze

 

His divine fish-soul hung there, poised in its alien element, gazing, gazing through huge eyes that perceived everything, understood everything, but having no part in what it saw.  

—Aldous Huxley, Eyeless in Gaza.

I’ve long been on the lookout for any sign of Padampa’s South India heritage, and one thing I was always hoping to find was a trace of a Dravidic language in records of his speech. It wouldn’t matter if it were Tamil, Telugu or Malayalam. In fact I’m still looking, since I’ve found not one clear example.* There are a few, very few, occasions when Padampa while speaking, as he did, in Tibetan, drops an Indic word into the sentence. Each incident of ‘code switching’ as our modern linguists would like to call it, needs to be thought about separately, since there may be more than one reason to try and get by with a word most likely unintelligible to your audience. Why risk getting a blank face in return? One very possible reason is the frustration of trying to put a complexly embedded cultural term into another language, just because the target language has no word for exactly what it is you want to say. For English speakers, examples like Gestalt and simpatico are first to come to mind, although the fact is English vocabulary has absorbed and naturalized so many of these kinds of foreign words that we would hardly ever recognize them as being foreign as such, such as ketchup or pyjamas or the drink called punch. We know just what is meant when we hear these words, origins be damned.

(*Although not a vocabulary example, one thing I have noticed is the unusual number of sea turtle metaphors Padampa used. When we compare the most common metaphors used in Indian epic literature with those of Padampa this is one of the most striking differences. I believe it must be due to Padampa's close proximity to their coastal nesting areas during his childhood, before age 15 when he was sent to study in a monastery in the Gangetic plain of north India. We also know that his father was a sea captain, so a home close to the sea is in any case very likely.)

As a long-time adult learner of modern Hebrew, I’ve found some excellent examples of code switching there: Two words that English-language speakers in Israel cannot avoid using are davka and stam, and they are placed in English sentences in much the same way they are found in Hebrew.

Davka (Hebrew)

Emphasis on first vowel (first syllable stress is davka unusual).

A word with several meanings:

1. Done on purpose/done in spite.

Example: “Jon pushed that kid davka.” (This means he pushed him on purpose, not by mistake)

2. On the contrary/actually.

Example:“I thought you didn’t like basketball.”“What do you mean? I davka ADORE basketball.”

May

Stam (Hebrew)

“With no purpose, value or significance.” "Just because!"

Example: “What is that?”  “Oh, that’s stam an old bucket.”

or

“Why did you step on the ant?”      “Stam!”

But it is not the case that entire sentences using these words are untranslatable. It’s just that single word that immediately makes translation appear to be impossible. And if you have these alien words in mind when you are mentally translating from Hebrew, you simply cannot give them up for some English word that doesn’t quite fit. They are too useful. So you keep them. Even at the risk of not being understood at all, there is no way you can settle for some fuzzy approximation that stam doesn’t have the same punch to it.

Some other examples go in an opposite direction supplying us with more germane analogies, English words that routinely pop up in everyday Hebrew sentences, words like fair and chance. This is a problem of matching, since Hebrew davka does have abundant terms for concepts of justice, rightness and opportunity. Words are not the problem.

I imagine a similar phenomenon taking place when Padampa ‘saved’ the word karaṇa for the yogic gaze. Part of his problem is that the term has a very rich range of usages and meanings in Sanskrit, and he couldn’t come up with a Tibetan word that would share the same semantic range.

Karaṇa in truth is one of those simple Sanskrit words... Well, simple in the sense that it easily and obviously derives from a very common and basic root √kṛ, the ordinary verb meaning to do. It shares the same root with that by-now English word karma. But such simplicity can conceal considerable complexity when we consider usage.

करण  —  expressive move, operation (?).

The Sage Bharata's Dance Manual is one of the earliest works of identified authorship in India, although there is wide disagreement just how early it was, or how late were its final redactions. It was written in a time when there was no distinction made between dance and drama, just as there was no difference between song and poetry. In this work the word karaṇa has a technical meaning for a selected list of standard stances or postures to be performed on stage.  Although technically beyond numbering, discussion is limited to 108 of them.* Each posture is defined as a combination of two things: [1] particular positions taken by the feet, and [2] the same for the hands. The text goes on in great detail to speak about positionings of other parts of the body as well, and not just postures but types of transitions from one posture to another. Well, acting in itself could be nothing but posing, I suppose, but all the same we usually associate it with movement.

(*They are illustrated in 13th-century South Indian friezes on the outer walls of Cidambara Temple. It was raised up by the Cola King Kotottunga III, who reigned from 1178 to 1216 CE.  Photos of some of the karaṇas are displayed here.)

Finally, to wind this down, I have to admit that I haven’t really solved the problem. Nested inside the mystery are more mysteries. It may be entirely understandable to use a term of dramatic arts for the yogic gazes, but I still don’t see any positive evidence that would link the two together in Indian sources. The ironic thing is that something we inevitably think of as an unblinking gaze, a steady stare of total concentration, would go by the name of an expressive dramatic pose or movement of the arms and legs. I think I’d like to return to this subject when I know more about it, when I get a better sense of where things are going.

 

Stuff on code switching, gazing, staring and so on 

A.E., The Candle of Vision. See the PDF archived here. Both this fairly famous literary figure and his admirer Aldous Huxley, recommended staring intently at a candle, something yoga practitioners, at least nowadays, would call trāṭaka | tratakam. Try looking for it.  

Aldous Huxley, By the Fire.

Aldous Huxley, Scenes of the Mind. 

 

The normal Tibetan word for these gazes would be lta-stangs, or gzigs-stangs, a term much used in Dzogchen. And sure enough, there is one place in the Zhijé Collection where ka-ra-na is directly defined by the word lta-stangs. It’s in volume 2, p. 12, line 5: ka ra na ni rgya skad de / don la blta bstangs bya ba yin te. That means, “Ka-ra-na is Indian language, it signifies what is known [here in Tibet] as blta-bstangs.”

 

Padampa uses the term in particular contexts implying that by keeping the gaze steady, distractions coming your way from the world of objects cease, the disturbing thoughts go into stop motion, and sinking and scattering don’t stand a chance.*

(*Oh, and there are quite a lot of names for special eye postures, most of them named after animals, after all. Certain animals both domestic and wild are proven masters of the art of the stare. If you will permit me, I would love to talk about these another time.) 

Bharata, The Nāṭyaśāstra (A Treatise on Indian Dramaturgy and Histrionics) Ascribed to Bharata‑Muni, vol. I (Ch. I‑XXVII), tr. by Manomohan Ghosh (Calcutta 1967). Republished in the Chowkhamba Sanskrit Studies series no. 118 (Varanasi 2003), in 4 volumes.

See chapter 4, verse 29 ff., where 108 karaṇas are enumerated.  These 108 ‘dance phrases’ may be found demonstrated on the internet if you search for them, but since these URLs tend to be highly unstable I hesitate to put any up for you.

H. Brunner, G. Oberhammer & A. Padoux, Tāntrikābhidhānakośa, Verlag der Österreichischen Akademie der Wissenschaften (Vienna 2004). 

In vol. 2, pp. 50-52 is quite an interesting discussion of various Hindu tantric usages of the word karaṇa. The only part of it that directly references gazes is as part of a larger set of yogic prakaraṇas that largely correspond to something well known to Tibetan Buddhists as the Seven-Point Posture of Vairocana (རྣམ་སྣང་ཆོས་བདུན་), seven bodily positionings that ought to be assumed in preparation for meditation. And only one of those seven has to do with what to do with your eyes.

Kalsang Yeshe ༼སྐལ་བཟང་ཡེ་ཤེས་༽, “A Preliminary Note on Chinese Codeswitching in Modern Lhasa Tibetan,” contained in: R. Barnett and R. Schwartz, eds., Tibetan Modernities, Brill (Leiden 2008), pp. 213-248.

Nicholas Tournadre, “The Dynamics of Tibetan-Chinese Bilingualism: The Current Situation and Future Prospects,” China Perspectives, vol. 45 (2003), pp. 1-9.

Look here: http://chinaperspectives.revues.org/231.

Although I wouldn’t call it code switching necessarily, it does happen that in early Tibetan-language narratives about sojourns in India one finds words and phrases in something like colloquial Hindustani.  For examples, see Ulrike Roesler, Rgya gar skad du — ‘in Sanskrit’?  Indian Languages as Reflected in Tibetan Travel Accounts, contained in: Oliver von Criegern, et al., eds., Saddharmāmṛtam. Festschrift für Jens-Uwe Hartmann zum 65. Geburtstag, Arbeitskreis für Tibetische und Buddhistische Studien Universität Wien (Vienna 2018), pp. 351-368.

A note on the frontispiece: What you see here is a detail from an old thangka painting of the Zhijé Lineage illustrated in an earlier Tibet-logic blog. Look very closely and intently at Padampa's eyes. Tell me if they don’t resemble the eyes of the peacock. And aren’t peacock feathers the very thing Indian hypnotists waved in place of the swinging pocket watches of western hypnotists? 

This brief video needs no translation.