Introductory Notes

Now, yoga is presumed to be of Indian birth, but this is not altogether certain. It is, however, a very ancient practice. Personally, I very much like the idea that yoga was born precisely at the time that the human being was born.

May we speak of evolution then? Is human evolution anything more than a poetic metaphor? Well, poetry or science, it can reasonably be said, "when early man stopped walking on his knuckles, yoga came into existence."[9] What, after all, is the human being as a species? An earlier, perhaps related species was Homo erectus, "the man who stood up." But present man calls himself Homo sapiens, "the man who is smart." He stood erect in search of greener pastures, to bring far horizons into sharper focus, to contemplate the future. This creature had plans![10] Now of course there were apes in the tops of tall trees that were also privy to distant horizons. But the Homo family had its feet on the ground and developed a vertical spinal cord – an upright backbone with four gentle curves running upward from the sacrum to the cerebral cavity, thus establishing its ground-breaking cerebro-spinal axis. However, as man stood up his cerebrum expanded and he gained a sense of his own mortality. Let us have a look at the English word "cerebrum."

We know that cerebrum was taken from Latin in the 17th century, but why at first glance does it look so Sanskritic? Why is one so tempted to "roll with the hunch" and segment the word into two root units cere° and °brum? Cere- would seem to indicate "the head" as echoed in the Sanskrit-derived Hindi term "sirī" with its interesting reference to "the head of a sacrifice." But what about -brum? Are we seeing correspondence with the Vedic word brahman, the ultimate first principle of Indian thought?[11] After all, even up to recent times, scholars have associated brahman with the Latin word flamen, a title for priests. In the philosophic sense, of course, Brahman refers to that which lies beyond the sphere of human awareness, as its source is hidden and essentially unknowable. Brahman represents that ubiquitous something through which we all exist and act. But it also corresponds to what later Hinduism referred to as shakti, the primordial "potency" or "force" of nature.[12] It has also been defined as "holy power."[13] On the strength of all of this, then, cerebrum seems to indicate "the human organ of higher consciousness," the aspect of the body that mirrors Brahman... Or is this merely an expression of our necrophilic obstinacy to pillage the body of ancient language? Alas, we were only half-right.[14]

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Notes

[1] The kingdom of Siam changed its name to Thailand in 1941 during the Phibun regime. Thus, "[a]s a result of the nationalist policy of the Phibun government, the term Thai came to encompass all ethnic groups in Thailand, and not just the Tai-Siamese, who were concentrated in the Central Plains." Kamala Tiyavanich, Forest Recollections: Wandering Ascetics in 20th Century Thailand, Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 1997: 301, n. 1. The word "Thai," itself, is a loosely used word, both in Thai and in foreign languages. See William A. Smalley, Linguistic Diversity and National Unity: Language Ecology in Thailand, Chicago, University of Chicago, 1994.

[2] Oriental? Eastern? Asian? How to avoid sounding pompously colonial? But remember these words are essentially the same. Asia itself is derived from the Assyrian word assu, which simply means "east." It appears somewhere in the Homeric narratives (first put in written form in the 8th-7th century BCE) to describe the blood-drenched scene at Troy of a mother standing on the wall of the city clutching her slaughtered child to her breast, her throat stretched upward squealing to the heavens 'as the ducks in the rain on the plain of Assu.'

[3] I.B. Horner, Women Under Primitive Buddhism, London, 1930: 315.

[4] In the strict sense an offering to a guru is called dakshinā.

[5] J. van Baal, "Offering, Sacrifice and Gift," in Numen, 23. Leiden, 1976: 161-78, n.

[6] Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus, Paris, 1942, English trans. 1955.

[7] "[He] becomes conscious of all those physiological acts he had previously performed automatically and unconsciously," Mircea Eliade, Yoga: Immortality and Freedom, trans. from the original French (Paris, 1954) by Wilard R. Trask. Bollingen Series LVI, New York, Pantheon Books, 1964: 168. See Mahā-Sattipatthhāna Suttanta, Dīgha-nikāya (II, 327f).

[8] Anguttara-nikāya, II, 48.

[9] I borrow this idea from Lawrence Durrell's unpublished section of A Smile In The Mind's Eye (1980), filed: reserve 1, 368/1, Centre d’Etudes et de Recherches Lawrence Durrell. Sommieres, France, which I consulted in December 1992. The centre's materials have since been moved to the University of Montpellier.

[10] Bipedalism gave competitive edge, being more energy efficient than a quadrupedal gait. The eighty-foot-long track of footprints discovered by Mary Leakey at Laetoli provides the most convincing evidence that Australopithecus-afarensis walked upright in Africa as early as 3.6 million years ago. Homo ergaster was the first human ancestor to move out of Africa, around 1.8 million years ago. This early species in genus Homo was born to travel, as it seems to have left the African continent almost as soon as it appeared. Its fossils are known in Europe, China and Java.

[11] As noted by Indologist Heinrich Zimmer (Philosophies of India, edited by Joseph Campbell, Bollingen Series XXVI, Princeton University Press, 1951: 79), Brahman is based on the Vedic root brih (or brah), the particle of 'power,' 'growth' and 'expansion.' When inflected, brih becomes both brih-ant 'great' and brimh 'to make or render great.' As applies to sound, brih signifies 'roar' and when inserted with the nasal m as in brimhita it means "elephant roar," i.e., the sentient sound that 'swells' above the others. When the genitive ending -man is considered, Brah-man gives the sense of 'heightened activation,' but it is something far more than the intellect (Zimmer: 77). The genitive Sanskrit ending -man is naturally recognized in words such as ātman and karman (karma). Ātman is based on the particle an "to breath" (or as some believe, at, "to go"). It is therefore the particle of breathing (or going), which is also "life." Karman is from kri, "to make," which is the particle of 'working,' 'activity' and 'ritual.'

[12] Zimmer: 76-9.

[13] Arthur Berriedale Keith, The Rigveda Brāhmans, Harvard Oriental Series, vol. 25. Cambridge Mass, 1920, as cited in Zimmer: 69-75.

[14] For the fact is that 'cerebrum' cannot be segmented into two units, cere° and °brum. The word, however, does mean "brain." Cere- for its own part also corresponds to the Vedic/Sanskrit shiras and to the older Rig-Vedic shīrshan, both meaning "head." Cere- and shiras are based on the Proto-Indo-European root k'riH-, as are a host of other Indo-European words, e.g. Greek keras ("head") and Latin cornu ("horn"). This shows that k'riH- originally indicated 'the uppermost part of the body, head, horn, summit,' etc. See Pokorny, Indogermanisches Etymologisches Wörterbuch, 2 vols. Bern/Stuttgart, Francke, 1959: 574. Moreover, the fact that Latin cerebrum means "brain" confirms that Latin used a -ro- suffix in its derivation from the Greek keras-rom, denoting 'something that belongs to the head.' However it is curious that the Latin word for 'head,' which should have been something along the lines of cere-, was supplanted by the altogether different word "caput." There is also evidence of an early correlation with Latin caput (cf. German kaput) and Sanskrit kapāla meaning, "skull," but this has not been definitely proven.