Parātrīṃśikā Vivaraṇa (Part 58): Hearing, Saṃkalana, and the Goddess of Speech

Shoe shine boys listen to the war stories of a USA Civil War Veteran. (1920s). Abhinava explains that hearing itself depends on the Goddess’s power of gathering sound into meaning.

Abhinava now turns from sukha as a contracted emergence of mahānanda to a subtler problem: how the supreme Śākta reality is actually present in something as ordinary and easily overlooked as hearing. He has already shown that the previously indicated maha-a is the worship-worthy form, that the expanded aham is the Śākta body, and that all finite joy is only a reduced disclosure of the Great. The natural next question is how that same Śakti operates in lived cognition, not only as bliss, but as the very power by which articulated meaning is gathered out of raw sound. This is the point of the present chunk. Abhinava identifies the maha-a with the body of Parābhaṭṭārikā, then shows that true hearing is not passive reception but a sovereign act of saṃkalana — the gathering and unifying of phonemic sequence into meaningful wholeness. Without that power, one hears only undifferentiated noise. With it, articulated speech and mantra become possible. So the movement here is from the worship-worthy maha-a to the Goddess as the inner power of hearing, synthesis, and meaningful manifestation.

The previously indicated maha-a is itself the worship-worthy form: the Śākta body and the form of Parābhaṭṭārikā

iti prāṅnayena yaduktaṃ maha-a iti rūpaṃ tadeva bhajanīyaṃ yasyāḥ parameśvarasya hi
svacamatkāravṛṃhitaṃ yat aham iti tadeva śāktaṃ vapuḥ tadeva ca
parābhaṭṭārikārūpam iti ucyate

“Thus, according to the earlier teaching, that form spoken of as maha-a is itself what is to be worshipped. For that ‘aham’ of Parameśvara, expanded by his own wonder, is itself the Śākta body; and that itself is said to be the form of Parābhaṭṭārikā.”

Abhinava now gathers the previous teaching again and makes its devotional and ontological force explicit. The form called maha-a is not just a compressed doctrinal sign to be analyzed. It is bhajanīya — worthy of worship, worthy of inward adoration, worthy of being taken up as the living center of practice. That already tells you that we are no longer dealing with a dead symbol. What had been spoken earlier in dense metaphysical language is now being declared to be the very thing one must turn toward.

The reason is given immediately: the aham of Parameśvara, when expanded by svacamatkāra, by his own self-wonder or self-delight, is itself the Śākta body. This is important. Abhinava is not speaking of “I” as ego, nor even merely as abstract self-awareness. He is speaking of the divine aham as it swells into manifest potency through its own inner marvel. That expanded aham is Śakti’s body — not something outside Śakti, but her very embodiment.

And then he seals it: that itself is the form of Parābhaṭṭārikā. So Parābhaṭṭārikā is not being introduced here as a separate goddess-image floating above the doctrine. She is identified with this very expanded divine aham. The earlier maha-a, the self-wondering “I” of Parameśvara, the Śākta body, and Parābhaṭṭārikā — Abhinava is binding all these into one living identity.

That is why the line is so strong. It takes what might otherwise remain esoteric phonemic metaphysics and says plainly: this is the object of worship. The point is not merely to decode maha-a, but to recognize it as the living, worship-worthy form of the Goddess herself.

So the force of the passage is this: the previously taught maha-a is the worship-worthy reality because the expanded divine aham is itself Śakti’s body, and that very body is Parābhaṭṭārikā.

Therefore Parameśvarī truly hears everything: hearing depends on the sovereign power of saṃkalana / anusaṃdhāna

ata eva saiva ca parameśvarī sarvaṃ śṛṇoti - śravaṇākhyayā sattayā tiṣṭhantī
śravaṇasaṃpuṭasphuṭakramikasvasvapandamayavarṇarāśiniṣṭhamaikātmyāpādana-
rūpasaṃkalanānusaṃdhānākhyaṃ svātantryaṃ

“Therefore that very Parameśvarī hears everything, abiding as the reality called hearing. For hearing depends on the sovereign power called saṃkalana or anusaṃdhāna: the bringing about of unity with respect to the mass of distinctly successive phonemes, each marked by its own vibration, as they are gathered within the auditory field.”

Abhinava now turns from the worship-worthy maha-a, the Śākta body, and the form of Parābhaṭṭārikā to something unexpectedly concrete: hearing. But the move is exact. If the Goddess is the expanded divine aham, and if she is the living power through which manifestation becomes articulate, then hearing too cannot be a passive mechanical event. It must belong to her sovereignty.

That is why he says: Parameśvarī hears everything. This does not mean that the Goddess, as one being among others, possesses a very strong faculty of hearing. It means that what hearing truly is, in its living essence, belongs to her. She abides as śravaṇākhyā sattā, the very reality called hearing.

Then he explains what hearing actually requires. Not mere impact of sound. Not crude sensory contact. Hearing depends on saṃkalana / anusaṃdhāna — a gathering, linking, carrying-forward, unifying act. The phonemes arrive successively, each with its own vibration, each distinct, each momentary. Left at that level, there would be only acoustic succession. What makes them heard as a meaningful unity is the sovereign power that gathers them into oneness within the auditory field.

That is the real force of the line. Abhinava is saying that hearing is already a work of freedom — svātantrya. The ear by itself does not produce meaning. Nor do the phonemes, as separate events, guarantee intelligibility. There must be an inner power that holds together the sequence, relates the parts, sustains continuity, and allows unity to arise across succession. That power is not external to consciousness. It is Parameśvarī herself.

This follows the previous point very tightly. There, the earlier maha-a was shown to be the worship-worthy form because the divine aham, expanded by self-camatkāra, is the Śākta body and the very form of Parābhaṭṭārikā. Now Abhinava shows one concrete consequence of that: the Goddess is not only the transcendent form of the doctrine, but the operative unity within cognition itself. Even hearing is one of her acts.

So the force of the passage is this: to hear is to gather. The unity of articulated sound does not arise automatically from the succession of phonemes. It arises through the sovereign power of saṃkalana, and that power is Parameśvarī herself.

Without this gathering power, even one who hears sound says: “I do not hear”

tena hi vinā
kalakalalīnaśabdaviśeṣaṃ śṛṇvannapi - na śṛṇomi

iti vyavaharati pramātā |

“For without that, even while hearing a particular sound dissolved into mere noise, the knower says: ‘I do not hear.’”

Abhinava’s point does not conflict with the science of hearing. At the physical level, sound waves strike the ear, are converted into neural signals, and those signals are processed by the brain. But that still does not yet explain the lived fact of hearing meaning. One can receive the sound physiologically and still fail to hear what is being said. That is exactly the distinction Abhinava is making.

His claim is that hearing, in the full sense, requires saṃkalana — the gathering together of what arrives in succession. Without that unifying act, there is only kalakala, undifferentiated noise. So when the knower says, “I do not hear,” he is not denying that sound reached him. He means that the sequence never became a meaningful unity for him. The auditory event happened, but the articulated word did not truly arise.

So Abhinava is not rejecting the sensory or neural process. He is speaking about the further fact that reception alone is not enough. There must be an inner synthesis by which separate sound-elements are held together as intelligible speech. His stronger move is then to say that this power of meaningful integration is not dead mechanism, but an expression of Parā Parameśvarī’s svātantrya. In modern terms, we might say: the ear and brain can register the signal, but unless the signal is integrated into meaningful form, one still says, quite truthfully, “I hear the noise, but I do not hear.”

Mere “noise-hearing” is only hearing of kalakala, not of articulated phonemes

kalakalamātraviṣayameva tu saṃkalanamiti tatraiva śrutamiti vyavahāraḥ |
vastutastu sa kalakaladhvaniḥ śrotrākāśe anupraviśan na varṇān
anupraveśayan tathā bhavet tadvarṇātiriktasya kalakalasyaiva bhāvāt

“But when the gathering extends only to mere noise, one says only that that has been heard. In truth, that noise-sound, entering the auditory space without carrying the phonemes into it, would remain just so, because in that case there would be only the noise itself apart from the phonemes.”

Abhinava now sharpens the distinction he has just made. It is one thing to hear that there is sound; it is another to hear what is being said. If saṃkalana reaches only the level of kalakala — mere undifferentiated noise, the blur of sound before articulation is gathered — then hearing remains at that level. One can say, truthfully, “yes, I heard something,” but what was heard was only the noise-mass, not the phonemic body of speech.

This is a very exact phenomenological point. We all know the difference. A crowd murmurs, a distant voice speaks, a radio crackles, someone calls from another room. Sound is present. But sometimes the words do not arrive as words. There is auditory presence without articulated uptake. That is precisely the zone Abhinava is marking with kalakala.

And his point is stronger than a simple contrast between “loud” and “clear.” He is saying that if the sound entering the śrotrākāśa, the auditory field, does not bring the varṇas through as such, then there is no reason to posit articulated hearing there. What remains is just the noise itself, not because the phonemes were destroyed, but because they were not gathered into manifest clarity for the hearer.

So this follows the previous point exactly. There, without the Goddess’s gathering power, one who receives sound may still say, “I do not hear.” Here Abhinava explains the intermediate case: one may indeed hear something, but only as kalakala, not yet as phonemic articulation. That is why mere acoustic presence is not enough. Hearing, in the full sense, requires that the distinct phonemes come through in gathered form.

So the force of the passage is this: noise is not yet speech. Mere sound-presence is not yet articulated hearing. Without the inner act of saṃkalana, the auditory field holds only kalakala.

The sphoṭa theory is mentioned and set aside

[tasmādekaḥ kramavirahitaḥ kalpitāsatyabhāgo vākyasphoṭo janayati matiṃ tādṛśi svābhidheye |
varṇāste te prakṛtilaghavaḥ kalpanaikapratiṣṭhāstasminnarthe vidadhati dhiyaṃ netyalaṃ tatkathābhiḥ ||

iti sphoṭavādo vaiyākaraṇairupagataḥ |]

“[Therefore, the single sentence-sphoṭa — devoid of sequence, with its imagined unreal parts — produces cognition of such a meaning denoted by it; while those phonemes, being naturally slight and resting only on conceptual construction, do not produce cognition of that meaning. This is the sphoṭa doctrine accepted by the grammarians. But enough of such discussions.]”

Abhinava briefly acknowledges the sphoṭa theory and then deliberately refuses to linger in it. That is significant. The grammarians’ view is clear enough: what really conveys meaning is not the successive phonemes themselves, but an indivisible, sequence-free vākyasphoṭa, while the phonemes are only slight, derivative, and conceptually imposed supports. Abhinava knows this position, states it fairly, and then cuts it off with a dry dismissal: “enough of such discussions.”

That dismissal matters. He is not denying that sphoṭa can be argued for within grammatical theory. He is saying that it is not the point here. His concern is not to build a separate philosophy of language around an abstract indivisible sentence-entity. His concern is to explain how actual hearing becomes meaningful through saṃkalana, the gathering power of consciousness. So he refuses to let the discussion drift into a technical grammatical detour.

This follows the previous point exactly. He had distinguished mere kalakala, undifferentiated noise, from articulated hearing of phonemes. The sphoṭa theory offers one way of explaining how meaning arises beyond raw phonemic succession. But Abhinava does not need that machinery here. He wants to keep the emphasis on the living act by which distinct phonemes are gathered into unity.

So the force of the passage is this: the sphoṭa view is recognized, but bracketed off as nonessential for the present purpose. Abhinava’s real interest lies elsewhere — in the Goddess as the sovereign power of synthesis, not in grammarians’ abstractions about sentence-meaning.

The real point: the phonemes themselves, when clearly gathered, are what matter

tadvarṇaviśeṣavivakṣāyāṃ ca kalakalasya ca kāraṇābhāvādeva anutpattiḥ syāt -
tadvivakṣotpannasphuṭavarṇamayaśabdakāryatvepi sajātīyaśabdotpattyanupapatteḥ |
sarvathā ta eva varṇāḥ tena sphuṭarūpeṇa
saṃkalanāmagacchantaḥ kalakalaśabdavācyāḥ tatsaṃkalanāvadhānodyuktasya
bhavedeva kiyanmātrasphuṭopalambha

“And if what is intended is the specification of those very phonemes, then mere noise would not arise at all, since its cause would be absent. Even if one were to say that, from that intention, a sound-effect made of clearly manifest phonemes is produced, the arising of another sound of the same kind would still be untenable. In every case, it is those very phonemes themselves which, coming into gathering in clear form, are what had previously been referred to as ‘noise’; and for one intent upon attentive gathering of them, there indeed arises some degree of clear apprehension.”

Abhinava now states his real position after setting sphoṭa aside. The point is not that a hidden abstract entity beyond phonemes does the work while the phonemes themselves are negligible. Nor is the point that raw kalakala simply turns into meaning by itself. What matters is that the very phonemes themselves become available in clear gathered form.

This is why the passage is so exact. If distinct phonemes are really intended and manifest, then mere undifferentiated noise cannot be the whole story. At the same time, Abhinava does not want to multiply entities and posit some second, same-kind sound beyond the actual phonemic sequence. That would explain nothing. The meaningful event must occur in relation to these very varṇas, not in an abstract duplicate hovering behind them.

So the decisive factor is again saṃkalana. The phonemes are there, but they must come into gathering — not as raw succession only, and not as a separate metaphysical sound-entity, but as a sequence held together in clear form. Once that happens, there is sphuṭopalambha, clear apprehension, at least to some degree. Abhinava is realistic here: he does not claim that every act of hearing immediately yields perfect total comprehension. He says there is a real measure of clarity when attention is rightly engaged in gathering.

This follows the previous points perfectly. First, without the Goddess’s gathering power, one hears only kalakala and says, “I do not hear.” Then Abhinava distinguished mere noise-hearing from articulated hearing. He briefly mentioned sphoṭa and refused to get lost there. Now he says what actually matters: not an abstract sentence-entity beyond sound, but the real phonemes themselves, insofar as they are clearly unified by saṃkalana.

So the force of the passage is this: meaning arises not from raw noise, nor from a second hidden sound-entity, but from the actual phonemes becoming clearly gathered. That gathering is the operative key.

Therefore saṃkalana alone is operative here — and Parā Parameśvarī herself performs it

iti saṃkalanameva atra upayogi | saṃkalanaṃ ca bhagavatī saiva parā parameśvarī karoti |
yaduktam

tadākramya balaṃ mantrāḥ

“Therefore, here it is saṃkalana alone that is operative. And that gathering is performed by the Blessed Goddess herself — Parā Parameśvarī. As it has been said: ‘Having been seized by that power, the mantras…’”

Abhinava now gives the doctrinal seal of the whole discussion. He has distinguished mere kalakala, undifferentiated noise, from articulated hearing; he has briefly acknowledged and set aside the grammarians’ sphoṭa theory; and he has insisted that what matters is the actual phonemes themselves, insofar as they are brought into clear unity. Now he states the operative principle plainly: saṃkalana alone is what does the work here.

That matters because it removes every remaining ambiguity. Meaning does not arise from sound merely striking the ear. It does not arise from raw succession as such. It does not require positing some separate hidden sentence-entity behind the phonemes. What is needed is the act of gathering — the linking, holding-together, and making-one of what arrives successively.

And then Abhinava makes the stronger move: this gathering is not an impersonal mechanism. It is Bhagavatī herself, Parā Parameśvarī, who performs it. This is the decisive point of the chunk. Hearing, when fulfilled as meaningful articulation, is one of the Goddess’s acts. The emergence of intelligibility is not outside Śakti. It is one of her direct operations.

That is why the citation tadākramya balaṃ mantrāḥ is brought back in. Earlier, mantra was said to become truly operative only when seized by that power. The same logic applies here. Just as mantra does not function by dead form alone, speech is not truly heard by acoustic succession alone. In both cases, the decisive factor is the entry of Śakti as the power of living synthesis.

This follows everything that came before in the chunk. The maha-a was declared worship-worthy because it is the Śākta body and the form of Parābhaṭṭārikā. From there Abhinava showed that Parameśvarī truly hears everything because hearing depends on saṃkalana. Then he showed that without this power one hears only noise, not articulated speech. Now the conclusion becomes unavoidable: saṃkalana is the operative key, and that key is the Goddess herself.

So the force of the passage is this: what makes sound become meaningful speech is not passive reception, but the sovereign act of gathering; and that act is Parā Parameśvarī. That is why hearing, speech, and mantra all remain inside the life of Śakti.