Raag

There is a word in Sanskrit for the thing that begins the moment the newborn first reaches outside of itself. The word is राग — raag.

It is translated, almost always, as passion. Or attachment. Or, when the translator is in a hurry, simply desire. None of these is wrong. None of them is sufficient. Raag, in the older Indian texts, is not a feeling. It is a condition. And the condition is precisely diagnosed.

The Ayurvedic physicians, working from a text called the Ashtanga Hridayam roughly twelve hundred years ago, listed three root causes of all human suffering. Raag was first. Dvesha — aversion — was second. Moha — delusion — was third. These three, the text says, are the trishna — the thirst — out of which every other disease, mental and physical, eventually grows.

It is worth noticing the choice of language. The Indian text is not saying that desire is a moral failing. It is not asking the reader to feel guilty about wanting things. It is making a clinical observation: that the human nervous system, left to its own habits, manufactures a particular kind of trouble for itself, and that the trouble has a name, and that the name describes a mechanism that can be studied, mapped, and — under the right conditions — interrupted.

This is the diagnostic frame the book will proceed from. Before we can ask what India was inventing, we have to notice what India was treating.

Let me show you what this looks like in a kitchen.

My grandmother kept a small wooden box on the upper shelf of the spice cupboard. In it were six small jars. Not five. Not seven. Six. The jars contained madhura (sweet), amla (sour), lavana (salty), katu (pungent), tikta (bitter), and kashaya (astringent). Every meal that left her kitchen — and there were three of them a day, for fifty years — contained at least a trace of each.

She had never read the Ashtanga Hridayam. She could not have named the text. But she was operating from it.