Yama’s Chariot: Design Practice and the Transcendental Unseen

Prem Chandavarkar
CnT Architects, Bengaluru, India
prem.cnt@gmail.com

In one of the Principal Upanishads(1),  the Katha Upanishad(2), Yama, the God of Death, explains to a young boy, Nachiketa, the foundational truth that transcends life and death. At one point in his discourse, Yama uses the metaphor of a king’s chariot to illustrate the essence of embodied existence. The chariot represents the body in which the king, seated toward the rear in the main chamber of the chariot, is the atman – the inner divinity that constitutes the authentic self. The charioteer holding the reins is the discerning intellect, the reins are the mind, the horses pulling the chariot are the senses, and the path on which the chariot travels are the worldly objects and desires the senses perceive. If the intellect does not intervene, mind and body are captured by sensory temptation. But the intellect by itself is confined to dry abstraction, incapable of any sense of purpose. To connect with life’s essence, it must heed the call of the atman. The challenge lies in the king being positioned behind the charioteer. To drive, the charioteer must look forward – if he fixes his position to gaze backward at the king he must stop driving. He must know how to drive always permeated by an intense mindfulness of what he cannot see: the king’s purpose.

This metaphor captures the core dilemma of spiritual search: the quest to connect with a divinity one cannot tangibly perceive. It mirrors the challenge of a design practice seeking to produce transcendental architecture. The architect cannot directly see or describe transcendental spirit yet must capture it in design. While some architects may be gifted with the intuitive sensitivity to do this, such genius is rare. Does that mean only the gifted few can create a transcendental architecture while the rest are limited to a comparatively prosaic and secular practice? Can the ability to create transcendental design be reproducible in a way that any practice can pursue it? 

The paper will propose an approach through the following propositions:

1. All spiritual traditions reflect an understanding of reality as hierarchical where levels of the hierarchy are different dimensions of the same reality(3). The higher a level, the more tacit and transcendental it is(4).

2. The fact that higher levels are tacit, eluding explicit description, does not limit us for we all know far more than we can say(5). Most states of being that underpin life’s value – love, joy, beauty, wonder, laughter, play, and more – are attributes we are hard pressed to explicitly define, yet unquestionably and tangibly know as reality when we experience them.

3. Our consciousness offers us access to this value(6). While we are yet to successfully explain how physical bodies produce qualitative experience(7), this need not hinder us for our consciousness is affirmed by our experience of being alive. Consciousness qualifies as a miracle for it is wondrous, unquestionably real, and occurs without our being able to explain it. We must revel in this miracle, celebrating the wonder of our own presence(8).

4. We cannot intellectually define values that are intangible and sacred but can explore them experientially. This exploration rests on rigorous and mindful introspection that affirms the miracle of one’s being through resonances we discover in others and the world(9). 

5. Social affirmation tends toward a toxic tribal orthodoxy unless interwoven with personal and social transformation enabled by the miracle of consciousness. This requires a culture founded on a mythic imagination:
   1. The transcendental dimension can be reified only through the poet’s gaze, indirectly seeing the world through metaphor and myth.(10) 
   2. A myth is often misunderstood as something that is based on blind belief rather than factual truth but is really a kind of truth that can only be told in a story.(11)
   3. Myths permeate culture through a rhythm of retelling in which there is no privileged position of expertise or knowledge. Listening empowers telling and both teller and listener embody the acuity of ethics, culture, nature, and transcendence that form the subject matter of myth. The rhythm of retelling is as important as the accent of a specific telling.(12)
   4. We make an error in thinking we seek the meaning of life, for what we truly seek is the rapture of being alive. We feel this rapture when something greater than us echoes our innermost being, and myth has the capacity to provoke this connection.(13)
   5. The rhythm of retelling keeps alive reminders of what we tend to forget: the divinity that permeates us and the world.(14) 
   6. The authenticity of a myth does not spring from some original version, but from the extent to which we are transformed by each telling.(15) 

6. Architecture is an inherently collaborative enterprise, making the design practice a space well positioned to offer this mythic affirmation. We must apply our mind to the culture of practice we must create to affect this aim. This is a slow process, asking design practice to commit to a culture founded on affirmative friendships of mythic co-discovery that draw on the full freedom of embodied consciousness, transcending the superficiality of transactional exchanges devoted to executing projects. 

7. Transcendence is interwoven with beauty. There has been a great deal of effort in defining beauty philosophically or in terms of geometric theorems such as the golden mean. These definitions cannot touch the experiential core of beauty. A definition that recognizes this is Gernot Böhme’s assertion, “Beauty is that which mediates to us the joy of being here.” (16)

8. If we wish to create an architecture that offers such a ‘here,’ our practice must be a place imbued with the spirit of this ‘here.’ For a widespread ability to create a sacred architecture, our culture of practice must cast the foundations that recognize and affirm ourselves as sacred beings.

Footnotes

1.  The Upanishads are a set of ancient spiritual texts in Sanskrit from India, believed to be composed between 800 and 300 BCE. They represent the monistic branch of Hinduism known as Advaita Vedanta, which believes reality to be a holism in which Brahman (the highest divine reality) and Atman (self, soul) are different manifestations of the same eternal truth, and one must acquire discernment through spiritual practice to perceive this essence of existence. A hundred and eight Upanishads are known, of which the first dozen or so are considered the Mukhya (Principal) Upanishads.
2.  The Upanishads, trans. Eknath Eswaran (New Delhi: Penguin Books India, 1996), 75-106.
3.  Huston Smith, Forgotten Truth: The Common Vision of the World’s Religions (New York: Harper Collins, 1992).
4.  Michael Polanyi, “Transcendence and Self-Transcendence,” Soundings, 53:1 (Spring 1970): 88-94.
5.  Michael Polanyi, The Tacit Dimension (New Delhi: Penguin Books India, 2010).\
6.  Brian Greene, “This Tiny Slice of Eternity,” The On Being Podcast, Interview with Krista Tippet, 15 July 2021, https://onbeing.org/programs/brian-greene-this-tiny-slice-of-eternity/
7.  David Chalmers, “Facing Up to the Problem of Consciousness,” Journal of Consciousness Studies, 2:3 (1995): 200-219.
8.  John O’Donohue, Walking on the Pastures of Wonder (Dublin: Veritas, 2015).
9.  Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989).
10.  Italo Calvino, Six Memos for the Next Millenium (New York: Vintage International, 1993).
11.  Ranjit Kumar Pati, “Mythic Vision in the Selected Works of William Golding,” International Journal of English Language, Literature and Humanities, 4:2 (February 2016): 232-239.
12.  Jean-François Lyotard, The Post-Modern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, trans. Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1997).
13.  Joseph Campbell, The Power of Myth: with Bill Moyers (New York: Anchor Books, 1991).
14.  David Shulman, “Fire and Flood: The Testing of Sītā in Kampaṉ’s Irāmāvatāram” in Many Rāmāyaṇas: The Diversity of a Narrative Tradition in South Asia, ed. Paula Richman (New Delhi: Oxford University Press India, 2012), 89-113.
15.  A.K. Ramanujan, “Three Hundred Rāmāyaṇas: Five Examples and Three Thoughts on Translation,” in Many Rāmāyaṇas: The Diversity of a Narrative Tradition in South Asia, ed. Paula Richman (New Delhi: Oxford University Press India, 2012), 22-49.
16.  Gernot Bohme, “On Beauty,” The Nordic Journal of Aesthetics, 39 (2010): 22-33.