Audial and literary cultures: the Bhagavad Gītā as a case study

Abstract

I am arguing in this paper that in order to study cultures we must first be able to identify the models by which a culture forms itself. I distinguish between audial and literary cultures and audial cultures I further distinguish from oral cultures. Oral cultures used songs to transmit information (like the navigation rules of the Somoans), while an audial culture provides us with a structure ruled by the correspondence between the innate auditory sense of harmony and tone on the one hand and the arithmetic properties and ratios of the vibrating strings on the other. The literary culture takes the eye as the primary sense and organizes sensation by the criteria of a semiotic model that takes sight as primary. These texts are based upon the properties of sentences as embodied in grammar, two-valued logic, mathematics, classical physics, constructivism. Through the identification of culture with Text and by using the Bhagavad Gītā as a case study, I am able to isolate the three following texts from this original audial Text: (a) a semiotic text, alien to the Gītā, and identifiable as the text the reader carries with him/her to the reading of the Gītā; (b) an audial/musical text, or the text-model by which the Gītā, so to speak, wrote itself; (c) the text of the imagination, or a text based on non-cognitive skills for the sake of decision-making; this text we identify as the text of meditation. While the literary or semiotic text is grounded on principles of knowledge and therefore on abstraction, the audial/musical text and the meditation text are both grounded on the imagination and therefore on experience. Thus we establish two origins of language: cognition and imagination. Each develops different skills and the rules of reference are complementary in the sense that what is true or can truly be said in one is not true and cannot truly be said in the other. This paper concentrates in developing the audial/musical model. It shows, in two appendices, the dramatic consequences it carries for translations, transliterations and the transformations of the imagination.