Проблема выразимости невыразимого: слово-звук, сознание и реальность в индийской мысли

Abstract

For traditional Indian philosophy, which tends to establish its identity on the basis of the rationally incognizable Absolute (Ātman, Brahman), the verbal expressibility of the latter is one of the central issues. In fact, what is at stake here, is an attitude to language, trust or distrust in its capacity to be a tool for transmitting the experience of reality, which for the Indian tradition is of the highest soteriological and metaphysical value. Namely, it is the experience characteristic of the culminating transpersonal states of meditation and yogic practices, as well as at the moment of unio mystica (between a believer and the personal God). The best way to point to such states is to demonstrate their radical otherness in comparison with everyday speech behaviour (vyavahāra) and discursive ways of reporting it. That is why, the apophatic approach is used, meanwhile, that does not exclude the applicability of its cataphatic opposite. In the first part of the paper, the author emphasizes a tendency to privilege the apophatic approach (‘not that, not that’) to the definition of Brahman on the example of some mahāvākya (‘great sayings’) from the Upaniṣhads. In the second part, the author elucidates a phenomenon of phonocentrism, characteristic of traditional Indian culture, taking as example an incarnation of the goddess Vāk (Speech) in Vedic literature and in Tantrism. The third part is devoted to Bhartṛihari’s (ca.V century A.D.) concepts of ‘linguistic monism’ (śabda-advaita), and of the three-part speech, and their culmination in Kashmiri Shaivism. The author shows that in Bharitṛhari and Kashmiri’ s expressibility and inexpressibility of vocalized speech does not presuppose the recognition of a separate reality of object referred to by it (correspondence principle), but varied within the boundaries of the word (śabda) itself as identical to the dynamic nature of Brahman constituted by potencies (śakti).