Passage 6

All the things of the world are made of two parts: form and name. Take away these forms and names, and there is no world at all. It is name that has taken form into its possession; it is form that rests on name. If one considers which of the two is permanent and which impermanent, name is permanent and form impermanent. People may have done a great many good deeds in the world and achieved some great works. They may have provided hospitals, or places of learning, or temples of God, many amenities of great public benefit. They are no longer in the world today in person, yet the works and deeds they did and achieved still stand in the world even today, do they not! Form stays a while and goes, but name endures somewhat longer.

When names are countless, forms too are countless. But let us consider here the letters, which in our daily experience everyone, from the scholar to the unlettered, understands easily. If we look at Telugu, there are fifty-two letters; if we look at English, twenty-six. Even if all the great, great literatures of the world were piled up in heaps, mountain upon mountain, there would be nothing more in them than these fifty-two letters of Telugu. If you look at English, there are only the twenty-six letters; there are no new ones in it, and none will come. In the same way, in the human body too there are six principal nerve centres. They have the shape of lotuses. Those six lotus-shapes together have fifty-two lines in all. On each line, too, one letter is formed. Like the ‘reeds’ in a harmonium that is being played, each line, when it moves, sends forth its own particular sound. Here the thoughtful may have a doubt: if the letters on these lines are to move, there must surely be some moving power as their support! That is true. That moving power is ‘Praṇava’. It is anāhata sound. It arises without effort. Sound produced through effort is called āhata sound.