6
The Genius of Dnyaneshwar
light is difficult to define precisely because it is too far back in the history of the universe to be defined by human language, which is only a few thousand years old. It is perhaps because of man’s infirmity in the face of light that he has tried to identify the whole of this universe and its predecessor with a sound. And that sound according to the Indian philosophical and religious tradition has three letters, A, U and M pronounced as ‘AUM’. It is the sound or the hum that preceded and accompanied the dense singularity which burst forth to form the universe. Notice that the word AUM is constructed with the help of the first and the last vowels A and U and is followed with M, a consonant which is not to be pronounced fully but used only to embellish it with nasal resonance. The word or the sound ‘AUM’ is not flat but reverberatory, representing the reverberations of the birth of the universe. Dnyaneshwar follows the tradition and custom in India of beginning anything worthwhile with the sound AUM before he embarks on his Dnyaneshwari, a commentary on the Geeta. 1. 2. 3. 4.
cacophony – harsh discordant mixture of sounds lexicon – dictionary or vocabulary echelon – level or rank aphorism – brief statement of a principle