(An excerpt)
By Dr. Shravan Kumar
My approach is purely philological here, or primarily philological. That is, I am basing what I present on close, contextualized reading of documents. I am not a psychologist and I’m not a particularly good yogi; what i’m concerned with here is a philological approach to the very idea of vrtti (psychic propensity), and a detailed examination of the evidence that we have available for understanding what Prabhat Ranjan Sarkar meant by vrttis.
I’m also secondarily drawing upon Sanskrit philosophical and other literature to understand how these terms are more widely used. Of course, the language for biopsychology is a technical vocabulary, and the author’s intention and the meanings of those vocabulary items is what’s most important…
In his language, a cakra is, quote, “a collection of glands and sub-glands”. He also introduces new terms. He identifies the traditional term granthi as the Sanskrit word for gland, and he coins a new term upagranthi for sub-gland. And so each of the cakras is, in fact, a principal gland and series of sub-glands, and the series of sub-glands is basically the sequence of vrttis. The symbolic complex of cakras or lotuses is, from this perspective, in fact a kind of map of biological terrain.
The second cakra is the Svadhisthana Cakra, the seat of six vrttis and i’ll just first print them here as we have them in our books: avajiṋa or indifference, múrcchá, psychic stupor or lack of common sense, prashraya (to be discussed), avishvása, lack of confidence, sarvanásha, the thought of sure annihilation, and krurata, or cruelty.
Avajiṋá is is controlled by the acoustic root BA and I’d suggest, in brief, that we understand this as apathy, indifference or neglect, maybe disregard, disdain, contempt, so it has a broad semantic field and that’s sort of how I’ve mapped it here to translate Baba’s very brief comments: “BA is the acoustic root of avajiṋá vrtti. When one ignores something which is actually unacceptable, that is called upekśá, but when one neglects something which may actually have value, that is called avajiṋá. Avajiṋá is somewhat similar in meaning to avahelá, neglect. Upekśá is not used in a bad way, but avahelá certainly has a negative connotation.” So let me just elaborate upon that. Avahelá in Bengali means neglect or disregard, also disrespect and so forth. So that’s one of the ways that Baba is a glossing avajiṋá. In our publications, we have as our main translation “indifference.” And that’s not bad, but we would have to remember that it’s indifference of a kind that is inherently negative. So indifference towards things that are good, basically. I prefer “apathy” as a basic translation, because I think apathy conveys that kind of fundamentally negative side of avajiṋá in Sanskrit philosophy. So this word avajiṋá is formed basically from the prefix ava plus the root verb jiṋa to know. So it means to look down upon, to hold in low regard. It’s both a noun and a verb.
In Sanskrit literature we have a popular saying, atiparicayád avajiṋá. Overfamiliarity leads to avajiṋá, that is indifference or apathy or a lack of respect, which is very similar to the English maxim “familiarity breeds contempt.” Another note from Sanskrit tradition: the Buddhist philosopher, Asanga, defines a fool, a múrd́há, as somebody who hears about dharma, who hears the dharma, but treats it with avajiṋá, apathy or indifference. I think that’s a beautiful definition. And that certainly makes me a fool. So, in short, avajiṋá is neglect of that which is potentially beneficial, indifference to good advice, to good ideas, to healthy habits and practices, indifference to active engagement in good work. I think also perhaps it signifies an indifference to the difficulties of others and a general lack of sympathy or the will to respond constructively to others’ distress.
Another point that I think might be interesting in thinking about translation is that when these vrttis are hyperactive or very powerful, they might have slightly different meanings in English. So for example, when avajiṋá is very intense, this might manifest as contempt, disrespect, etc.
“Múrcchá does not mean to lose consciousness or become senseless. It means to lose one’s common sense, to lose one’s wits, under the control of any ripu.” (Ripus are the six enemies, of lust and so forth.) “To avoid succumbing to the múrcchá vritti, one should direct the mind along the path of benevolence through the practice of pratyáhára yoga,” the withdrawal of the mind from sensory objects.
P. R. Sarkar
So here Baba brings up a topic which comes up again and again in the biopsychology, which is the role of the ripus and the páshas, the inner enemies, the six enemies of káma, krodha, lobha, moha, mada and matsarya. Lust, anger, avarice, vanity, blind attachment and envy. Those come up again and again. Some of them are also vrttis, some are not. So a really interesting topic here with múrcchá. Baba alludes to the fact that this often in colloquial language means the loss of consciousness. So that’s different, that’s not the meaning of múrcchá as a psychic propensity or vrtti. Múrcchá is closely related also to another vrtti, moha, a vrtti of the Mańipúra Cakra, which means infatuation or blind attachment.
The commentator Singhabhúpála, a commentator on this Saḿgiita Ratnákara, explains múrcchá as excessive infatuation. So how do these two things relate? How does múrcchá relate to moha? That was kind of the key problem that I encountered with this vrtti. So what I think is that in Baba’s discussion, a key distinction between moha and múrcchá is múrcchá’s connection to the six enemies. So múrcchá represents the temporary loss of judgment, the temporary loss of common sense, of our reason and inhibition, under the power of anger, lust, envy and so forth. Moha, on the other hand, seems to be less transitory. It is the loss of rationality, the loss of good judgment on the basis of deeply rooted sentiments. And so one of the examples of moha is geo-sentiment – attachment, blind attachment to one’s locale, to one’s identity, a place-based identity or socially-based identity connected to land, hence “geo-sentiment.” So múrcchá is like a loss of good judgment under a powerful emotion while moha is the loss of rationality due to a deeply rooted sentiment.
Our publications translate múrcchá as psychic stupor or lack of common sense. Psychic stupor seems pretty good to me. Lack of common sense, not so much. I think it’s a little misleading. Maybe instead “loss of common sense” or “loss of judgment.” More idiomatically in English, “losing one’s wits.” Some other possibilities that may be considered are loss of control, heedlessness. What I really like is oblivion. That’s a little archaic in English, but I think in 19th-century and maybe other language, oblivion was a term used that overlaps a bit with what we’re talking about here. Insensibility, again, a little bit learned of a word in English that may not communicate very well today. But I think that’s the basic idea, the temporary loss of good judgment or common sense under the spell of a powerful emotion.
The third vrtti of Svadhisthana is a little bit controversial, or maybe I’m about to make it controversial. So in most discussions where Baba lists the vrtti, he calls it prashraya. In the English version of the discourse “The Acoustic Roots of the Indo-Aryan Alphabet”, we list it as two, actually two vrttis, prashraya and prańásha. Its acoustic root is MA. We translate this as indulgence. So let me first read what Baba says. I’ve re-translated this, and I’ll explain why I think there’s some confusion. “The sound MA is the acoustic root of prańásha. Besides this, the sound MA is also the acoustic root of prashraya vrtti. The meaning of prashraya is treating with indulgence, to give latitude in English, or in North India [i.e. in Hindi], baŕhvá dená.” So Baba actually gives an English translation of prashraya, to give latitude. Now, elsewhere, Baba explains prańásha as a final destruction. Prańásha occurs when an entity, quote, “gives up its present existence to return to its original state, to its original existence, or to the entity that is its source.”
… The conclusion I’ve come to is that in fact prańásha is not a vrtti. Baba simply says that the above ma is the acoustic root of prańásha. He doesn’t say that prańásha is a vrtti. On the other hand he does refer to prashraya as a vrtti. And so I think we should treat with skepticism the idea that MA is the acoustic root of two propensities, two vrttis, prashraya and prańásha. I’d like to point out that it’s only the English version of this discourse that suggests that pranasha is a vrtti. We print the following. We print “MA is the acoustic root of prańásha [the propensity of annihilation]. It is also the acoustic root of prashraya vrtti.” The idea that prańásha is a propensity is an editorial insertion with no basis that I can discern.
Dr. Shravan Kumar served as the principal speaker at the recent Deep Dive into the Vrittis conference. His presentation explored the philological study of the vrttis as described by P.R. Sarkar.