Words for the Heart: A Treasury of Emotions from Classical India
Maria Heim
Princeton University Press, $35.00 (cloth)
Kummerspeck: a German word for weight that one puts on due to stress eating. Age-otori: a Japanese word for the particular way one sometimes looks worse after a haircut. Shemomedjamo: a Georgian word meaning “to accidentally eat the whole thing.” Tingo: a Rapa Nui word meaning “to eventually steal all of your neighbor’s possessions by borrowing and never returning them.” Aspaldiko: Basque. The joy that comes from catching up with someone you haven’t seen for a long time. Mondegreen: English, coined in the twentieth century to describe the mistaken lyrics one habitually attributes to a misheard song (and which one sometimes prefers to the real lyrics).
Lists like this are easy to find. The internet is full of them because—regardless of their factual accuracy—people love learning that other languages name things that they didn’t know had names, or distinguish things they had never distinguished before, or connect things they never saw as connected. The lists bear witness to the fact that there is a small but profound joy in discovering new words for our experiences.
But what exactly is pleasurable about this? And what do we make of the converse feeling, equally common, that our linguistic maps, no matter how refined, always fall short of experience? Could these two pleasures—in naming our emotions and in realizing those names will always be inadequate—even be mutually reinforcing?
A recent book by Maria Heim, a professor of religion at Amherst College, provides some striking resources for examining these questions. Words for the Heart: A Treasury of Emotions from Classical India, is a collection of 177 different words for emotions from various South Asian languages, including Sanskrit, Pali, and a collection of dialects known together as Prakrit. And they come from a variety of different sources: Buddhist philosophy, meditation theory, literary theory, poetry, medical texts. Framed as a kind of glossary or word anthology—or, more precisely, following the classical South Asian metaphor Heim is drawing on, a “treasury” [kosha]—with micro-essays appended to each term, the book reveals a world of emotional arrangements that is by turns both familiar and deeply unfamiliar.
Words for anger and hatred, for example, abound. But there is a distinction between manyu, the “simmering wrath of resentment,” and krodha, an “explosion of fury.” “Where krodha is the fury of battle,” Heim explains, “manyu is the deep rage that causes and sustains wars to begin with.” Another example: there are multiple words for shame, but a distinction is drawn between hiri, the sense of shame that prevents one from doing wrong to begin with, and vrida, the shame that sets in after wrong has been done and which prompts actions of repentance. Lajja, on the other hand, is shame in the sense of bashful coquetry, thought to be appropriate to young women. Here Heim quotes the towering literary theorist and theologian Abhinavagupta, who tells us, “[Lajja] is a manifestation of emotion in the form of a desire to hide the workings of love which are bursting forth from within. . . . [it] is a beauty the essence of which is concealment.”
Words for the Heart offers us not only new distinctions but also new associations. There is a Pali word for self-loathing, omana, but this emotion is interestingly classified as a form of conceit or self-regard because it involves “a subtle form of preoccupation with the self.” Omana is an ironically proud fixation on how low and vile one is—the lowest and most vile of anyone to ever live! This can masquerade as humility, but it actually prevents the kind of humble and open-ended moral self-transformation stimulated by hiri. And occasionally, one finds a word for which there is no equivalent in English at all, including my favorite: anannatannassamitindriya, the faculty that allows you to say, “I will come to know what is unknown to me,” even if you don’t yet know what exactly it is you will come to know.
Heim helpfully situates her work within a global history of emotion, and she is sensitive to the idea that emotional terminologies and maps change over time, as well as to the idea that emotions are highly contextual, not easily abstracted from the networks—including cultures—in which they are embedded. But the terms she collects can be situated in other ways as well: they were also part of an elaborate South Asian world of philosophical debate and speculation on the nature of language—an exchange that stretched for thousands of years and produced some of the most sophisticated thinking about language ever seen, some of it explicitly concerned with the very questions raised by the project of creating and comparing linguistic maps.
Exploring this material—the work of philosophers, poets, and theoreticians who grappled with what it means to speak and to understand speech—can help us understand more deeply what exactly is at stake in the sort of project Heim is undertaking, and perhaps even gain us some purchase on the types of delight it furnishes. And in the spirit of Heim’s book, exploring these resources might even give us a more expansive and detailed conceptual map, this time not of emotions per se, but of the possibilities of language itself.
Take, for example, Bhartrihari, an Indian grammarian and philosopher from the fifth or sixth century (the exact dates are still debated), known for his complex and influential ideas on the relationship between language and experience. He is famous for propounding what went on to be called shabdadvaita, or “linguistic non-duality,” and for building his philosophy around a kind of divine, ideal linguistic absolute that devolves into everything in the universe, subjective and objective: what he calls shabdabrahman. Shabdabrahman is the essence or totality of language as such, and Bhartrihari’s work, which runs the gamut from proposing broad theories of semantic meaning to parsing the grammatical details of tense and word compounds, is entirely premised on this theology.
Bhartrihari is a notoriously difficult philosopher, and scholars are still puzzling over what exactly his work means. But perhaps radically oversimplified, here are a few things he suggests. First: wholes are always more real than the parts that comprise them. The whole comes first, and parts exist always and only as conceptual divisions within a pre-existing, coherent whole. Second: these divisions are always linguistic. It is language that carves up experience. But importantly, when language carves up experience, it is not, as some Buddhists thought, simply the superimposition of an artificial, conceptual filter onto a non-conceptual reality. Instead, Bhartrihari tells us, ordinary language is a crystallization of something already implicit in reality. Reality itself is fundamentally linguistic, and what we think of as language—ordinary language, with its words and conceptual divisions—is just a devolution or fragmentation of this more primordial linguistic totality. This is precisely why, for Bhartrihari, the ultimate reality is shabdabrahman, a linguistic absolute. So this is a strong form of idealism: things in our experience, and all things in existence, are fundamentally linguistic. We have no access to anything outside of language and therefore no reason to assume that there is, or ever was, anything separate from it.
While these dynamics apply to the universe as a whole, they also apply to individual, ordinary experiences within it. When I see a field with a few trees in it, a car driving near me on the highway, or a room full of people, I am primarily having a kind of gestalt experience: one that is fundamentally linguistic but not, at first, divided into discrete parts, concepts, thoughts, or words.
But for the purpose of interacting with that experience—to do anything to or with or through it, or to communicate it to someone else, this undivided totality is useless. It is only by dividing it up into parts (each of which can be named by a word) that I can start to determine things in my mind: that tree is getting old and should be cut down before it falls on the house; that car is driving dangerously and should be avoided; these people are getting bored of what I’m saying and I should hurry my story up. But these thoughts are still themselves rather inchoate, appearing in the mind as complete, unitary ideas. To communicate them to another person, I must break them up even further—into discrete spoken words that are uttered one by one. It is only then that I can tell someone “Cut down this tree but not that tree” or “Watch out for that car up ahead.”
But crucially, the person to whom I am speaking can only understand what I am trying to say if they do the converse: if they see past my individual words and have a sudden intuition of the more unified, coherent idea that I had in mind and was trying to communicate—an idea which was itself carved out of my holistic, gestalt experience of the entire situation.
In some cases, we are confronted with an experience that is easily divided into discrete units that match closely the structure of the language we have inherited. It’s fairly obvious to us that one person is different from another, or that a chair is different from a car. Nothing controversial here. But in many cases, we are confronted not with easily divided experiences but with blurry spectrums and gradual transitions: milk transforming through many stages into clarified butter, a tone gradually rising from low to high, a herd of cows that all seem very similar. In these cases, we employ what Bhartrihari calls samvijnanapadas—“labeling words.” These are words which give us a kind of handle on reality, words which pick out certain parts from the blurry spectrums and give us an awareness of them by naming them, allowing us to experience and even manipulate that spectrum more clearly. Milk separates into cream, which is churned into butter, which is then clarified in ghee. Musical notes are distinguished from among the infinite possible gradations of tone and set in relationships of scale that can be played as music. And herdsmen name their cows in order to distinguish and care for them better. In these cases, without labeling words, we wouldn’t notice or distinguish any given detail in the experience. It would fall between the cracks, recede into the gestalt background.
This doesn’t quite mean that we never have experiences without words. Bhartrihari uses the example of someone running quickly along a path and not noticing that the path is lined with grass. Later, he can reflect back on his experience and say, “Oh yeah, there was grass there.” But until he does this with language, the grass is only in his holistic experience, not part of his conscious experience—for Bhartrihari, it is “as good as unexperienced.”
Bhartrihari is not always so strict about this. He acknowledges that language can sometimes give rise to experience or inform knowledge even when it is not fully articulated in words, as with trained intuition. Bhartrihari uses the example of a master jeweler, whose extensive experience with gems allows him to immediately and intuitively tell whether a jewel is genuine or fake and what its value is. He can do this even though he cannot explain to you, or even to himself, exactly how he knows what he knows; that is to say, his knowledge arises despite not having any samvijnanapadas for the subtle cues that inform his conclusion. Nonetheless, Bhartrihari insists, certain things do feed into the jeweler’s knowledge and these must, on some level, be linguistic, even if the jeweler can’t pick them out and communicate with words and is aware of them only intuitively.
Another, more relatable example might be to think of a CGI human face in a video game. As soon as we lay eyes on it, we know that the face is not real, and we know this because of our extensive experience with human faces. But we might have a hard time putting our finger on exactly how we know this. We would have to resort to vague assertions like “It just doesn’t move right.” But we can’t specify, and because we can’t specify, we probably couldn’t teach someone else how to recognize it as CGI. On the other hand, if someone did manage to explain to us in words how we were able to discern the CGI face from the real thing, we would be able to recognize their explanation as correct, and to recognize it as an articulation of the experience we were already having.
Emotions, to return to the subject at hand, are a fantastic example of the kind of blurry, confusing spectrum that requires samvijnanapadas. The words we have for emotions take certain facets of our emotional experience and label them, pick them out, so that the spectrum becomes more clear, conscious, and communicable.
But for Bhartrihari it goes even further than this. Because remember that Bhartrihari is a linguistic idealist. We never experience anything apart from language—we make our experience out of language, using language. So this means that learning new words for experiences is not just learning a new way to communicate. It is, in some sense, gaining new experiences. When we expand our emotional vocabulary, we expand our range of emotional experience, even if the experiences we are acquiring are not radically new, and did not come ex nihilo, but are built out of the stuff of our minds. The joy of learning new words, I think, comes in this peculiar combination of surprise and recognition: we are gaining something that was already in some sense ours, but which we hadn’t ever noticed.
These sorts of ideas cast a long shadow in the world of South Asian arts and letters. They are, for example, what the eighth-century playwright Bhavabhuti is alluding to when he discusses “chakshuraga,” which Heim translates as “eye-love”—something like “love at first sight” except that it can apply to friendship or even to long-lost relatives who don’t consciously recognize each other. In the entry for chakshuraga, Heim quotes one of Bhavabhuti’s characters making the odd statement that “however unfounded and inexplicable it may appear to be,” eye-love must be real, because there is a word for it. Heim then insightfully connects this to another statement by Bhavabhuti: “In everyday life, a good man’s words correspond with facts / but in the case of a primal seer the facts conform with his words.” A seer or sage, in other words, doesn’t simply speak the truth. He makes things true by speaking them. And poets, which for Bhavabhuti are analogous to primal seers, do the same. Bhavabhuti is drawing on a Bhartriharian view of language here, telling us that poets literally create new experiences with their words by giving us new ways to carve up the raw, inchoate language of our lives.
The possibility of endlessly new divisions in one’s conceptual map is joyful, but it is not an unalloyed joy. In fact, there is also a distinct anxiety or sadness at the heart of it that comes when we realize that the whole could always have been divided up some other way, and that there is always something left out of our divisions. Not just left out, in fact, but cast out in order to make room for what we wind up naming and seeing. Our divisions, that is, conceal as much as they reveal. We can name red, yellow, and orange, but then the colors between these become harder to notice as independent colors—seeming more like indistinguishable shades of the colors to which we have given names. And what about all the emotions that don’t exactly fit any given word? What about all the microtones between notes? Aren’t these so much more difficult to talk about precisely because we have linguistic maps that have revealed other things to us?
But if our language is to be learnable and communicable in human terms it cannot be infinite. It needs to make choices. This is why the linguistic divisions are simultaneously useful and sad. They create a particular world only by destroying others. Even more, they create particular worlds by destroying the primordial linguistic totality in which all worlds, all experiences, are possible, and in which none have yet compromised their integrity by falling to the level of mere existence. Bhartrihari, as a religious thinker, ultimately longs for a return to this totality, which will lack nothing but also can be nothing like our ordinary, intelligible experiences. But even without following Bhartrihari into this absolutism, it’s common to feel that conceptual maps are only maps, and that our real emotions can never quite fit into a conceptual and linguistic framework, however refined, because no framework really allows for the right degree of gradation and overlap. It is even common to feel relief when this is confirmed, and the uniqueness of one’s experiences is upheld.
South Asian thinkers were aware of—and even played with—this view. Heim summarizes from the work of the eleventh-century polymath King Bhoja, in which he describes the different kinds of emotions that poets can convey. In an almost absurdist parody of the taxonomic mania that characterized his intellectual world, Bhoja first lists 64 different types of attraction, anuraga, and then says each type can be divided into 8 subtypes, which themselves can further be subdivided into 8, each of which can then be further divided into 3: leaving the total at 12,228. Lists like this might seem fanatically rigid, and perhaps they were taken as such by generations of diligent Sanskrit schoolchildren who simply took it for granted that this number was a straightforward description of the exact number of the sub-varieties of attraction. But I rather suspect that this is a humorous and playful moment in which the rigid, formulaic tendency of Sanskrit scholasticism deliberately implodes in on itself, and the longing for specificity begins to dissolve into the reality of almost infinite variety and combination like some kind of mathematical limit to precision.
The thinker who has the most interesting and clarifying take on these issues is another ninth-century literary theorist, Mukulabhatta. Mukulabhatta draws on a few different philosophical traditions to discuss poetry, particularly the tradition of Vedic ritual theory known as Mimamsa, but he makes it clear that Bhartrihari’s philosophy is at the center of his own work, and that all other philosophical systems are only provisional and subordinate—useful only to the extent they are reconcilable with Bhartrihari’s more overarching vision. Borrowing a term directly from Bhartrihari, Mukulabhatta argues that when poetic language is used properly, it makes us aware of realities for which there are no samvijnanapadas. Take the famous but anonymous verse he uses as an example:
White herons circle against a sky glistening with lovely, dark clouds.
Raindrops are on the wind and the peacocks cry out with joy.
Let all this be. I am Rama, whose heart is hard. I can bear it all. But how will Sita survive this? Alas, my queen, be brave.
In this verse King Rama, whose wife Sita has been abducted, is watching the beginning of the monsoon season, which is supposed to be a joyful and refreshing time. The grinding intensity of the hot season ends, and the landscape suddenly turns vivid shades of green and springs into bloom. Animals begin to mate. People, who can no longer do as much work outdoors, can lazily huddle together and watch the cooling, peaceful rains drift across the sky, feeding the crops and ushering in another season of life and natural flourishing. For Rama, however, separated from the woman he loves and unable to locate her, the familiar rains mean something very different: all the roads will become impassable, all the rivers unfordable, and the search for Sita will have to be temporarily called off for at least a few months while he and Sita—wherever she is— can do nothing but wait, forlorn, impatient, and frightened that they may never see each other again.
There is a lot going on in this verse, but one common locus of attention—and what Mukulabhatta focuses on—is the word “Rama.” Every South Asian reader would have known, in the context of the poem, that it is Rama who speaks this verse—as, of course, would Rama himself. So his naming of himself must be intended to convey something beyond simply information about who is speaking. This blocks the literal meaning of the name—it no longer makes sense as a simple reference to the man Rama—and leads us to a secondary meaning: a complex, inexpressible collection of qualities and emotions that are unique to Rama at this particular moment. No labels can pick out exactly where in the messy spectrum of emotion he falls. You could say it’s some potent combination of sadness, loss, pride, courage, and divinity, but all these terms would still be too general.
And yet we become aware of what he is feeling—partly, no doubt, because of our extensive experience, even expertise, with human emotions, rather like that of a master jeweler. In this way, the name “Rama” comes to communicate, through context and shades of meaning, a reality that falls through the cracks of any linguistic or conceptual map—a reality for which there is no samvijnanapada—but which the poet has nevertheless managed to convey. For Mukulabhatta, this is precisely the magic, the miracle, of poetry: that it can deliver to us, through language, experiences that slip through our linguistic nets. And by pointing to a fish that slips through this net and yet is somehow still ours to behold, it subtly reminds us that our net can never catch all the fish. And there is, I think, a distinct relief and even joy in this, which partly accounts for the joy we take in poetry.
So which is it that we want? The fish in the net or the fish still in the sea? Of course, we want both, simultaneously. Many of our greatest works of art and philosophy trade on the productive tension between these mutually defeating, impossible, and thus irresistible desires. I am reminded of Jorge Luis Borges’s mapmakers, who get so good at their craft that their maps have to be made bigger and bigger to hold all the detail they contain until eventually, they reach the same size and shape as the kingdom itself—at which point they are abandoned as useless. Surely the mapmakers saw where this was all headed. And yet they pressed on, unable to keep their yearning for simplification, specificity, and representation from dissolving back into reality. Are we any different when we eagerly and joyfully expand our list of emotional words toward some hypothetical limit in which the infinite gradation of emotion would be reflected in an infinite gradation of words?
And what of the joy we take in spotting a fish still on the loose—is this a joy in the failure of nets, or is it a joy that the work of netmaking isn’t done yet, that we can now set to work weaving with even more skill? Or both?
Here I am reminded of the preface to Anne Carson’s Eros the Bittersweet:
Beauty spins and the mind moves. To catch beauty would be to understand how that impertinent stability in vertigo is possible. But no, delight need not reach so far. To be running breathlessly, but not yet arrived, is itself delightful, a suspended moment of living hope.
Independent and nonprofit, Boston Review relies on reader funding. To support work like this, please donate here.
