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Kenneth G. Zysk, "South Asian Animal Divination: A Critical Anthology" (Brill, 2025)
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Dr. Kenneth Zisk
Welcome to the New Books Network
- [02:09]
Dr. Raj Palparan
welcome back to New Books Network. I'm your host, Dr. Raj Palparan. More importantly, I have the pleasure of welcoming to the podcast today Dr. Kenneth Zisk, who is Emeritus professor of Indology and Indian Science at the Department of Cross Cultural and Regional Studies at the University of Copenhagen. We are about to embark on discussing a really, really fascinating work, a brand new Braille publication called South Asian Animal Critical Anthology. Kenneth, welcome to the podcast.
- [02:41]
Dr. Kenneth Zisk
Oh, thank you very much, Raj. I'm glad to be here.
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Dr. Raj Palparan
Yeah, glad to have you. Now, certainly a topic and interest such as this has an Upakyana backstory somewhere. So would you tell us a little bit about how this area of research sort of ripened for you?
- [02:57]
Dr. Kenneth Zisk
Yeah, sure. I would say. I first got. I first got exposed to this idea when I was doing my research and study of the medical tradition in the Buddhist texts. I came across the story of Jeevika Umarabhatya, who was a famous physician in the Buddhist stories all the way back in the Pali canon. And his story continues right up on through all forms of Buddhist literature in the East Asia countries, Tibet and so forth. And there's an episode in this story from the Mahayana or from the Buddhist, the Sanskrit Buddhist texts, that says that this Jeevaka, once he completed his course of medical studies in Taxila, he decided that he would go and learn something called the Sound of all living beings, or the call of all living beings. Asarva bhutta ruta was the Sanskrit word. And he was going to a place called Badnakara, which is in modern Asylap in Pakistan, and he was going to study with a famous person there, the Shastra of the call of all beings. So this call, this title, the Call of all Beings, stuck in my head. And so I wanted to find out, where does this phrase occur elsewhere in Sanskrit literature? Well, I came across several places. One is in the Ramayana where the king of the Ichaicas is given a special boon. And that boon is to know the call of all beings so he could listen to birds and know what they said. And this was a particular special thing. It was not something that everybody could acquire. And then in the Mahabharata, the goddess Tara is supposed to have been possessed of this special quality, this extra human kind of quality, for as a boon, as a special gift. But more importantly, it comes across. I came across the same word phrase in the yoga sutras where they become where the call of all beings, knowing the call of all beings is known as a vibhuti, or a special supernormal gift that one acquires when they have accomplished a certain level of meditation and so forth. And so this Vibhuti, again, is something that's not. Not normal. It's extra human. It's superhuman. So I began to look more closely, and I came across in a Jyotishastra, or astral science textbook, known as the Gargiya Jyotisha which is a very important early Shastra Jyotisha text, which is still in manuscript form. It hasn't really been studied and edited that much. One of the chapters in this text is known as the Sarva Bhutta Ruta. So that really tweaked my imagination. If it's known in Sanskrit literature to be a special quality that human beings, not all human beings, can have. And then there is a textbook by the name of Sarvabhutta Ruta. What is really going on here? So I dug deep into this textbook. I got the manuscripts and put, you know, did my editorial work and translation and looked at these, These. This textbook on the sound or the call of all beings. And they tend to. It turned out to be a series of omens. So a bird on the right side at this particular time means this. On the left side means this, and so forth. So there was a whole series of ways of understanding the sounds of different birds primarily, but also other land animals, jackals and so forth. And so it became apparent to me that one could learn what the sound of all beings is by knowing this textbook rather than necessarily having it as a boon, as a. As a special gift given to you for some deed that you did. So it's interesting that it's a learned. It's something you could learn, yet it is also considered to be a special boon. So that intrigued me. So I started penetrating into these texts. And what I realized was that this is only the second known textbook that deals with omens based on birds and animals. The other textbook, in fact, is from the ancient Near East. It's in the Akkadian language and is part of the Mesopotamian cuneiform collection of texts. So the two of them, the cuneiform text and the Sanskrit text, I put them side by side and I said, can we find any. Any similarities between the ancient Mesopotamian material and the Indic material? And sure enough, there was quite a bit of similarity between the two. And of course, this brought my mind going in all sorts of directions as to, is there influence from ancient near east into South Asia at a certain point? If so, how? When? What does it mean? A lot of that kind of information has not been explored before. So part of my book here is to look at that in a very general way, but also in a kind of exploratory way. Are there connections? Can we say that there was something going on between the ancient near east and that of the Indic material, which seems to date from around the same time as the Mahayana, Sanskrit, Buddhist Material from. From Gandhara and the northwest of India. So that would be around the beginning of the Common era. So that led me into that. And then I thought, well, okay, rather than look just at this one text, why don't I trace the development of animal omens all the way through, at least through the Jyotish material, up until the time of the Briht Samhita. So that's what I did into about the fifth, sixth century. So I collected the texts, edited them, and translate them and give them a commentary. So that's how the book is put together. But what's an interesting methodological approach? Of course, I was based my work completely on philology, the philological tradition. But what I did also is I incorporated modern ornithological information from South Asia, mainly the book of the textbook on ornithology by Salman Ali, which is a beautiful book to read if you ever get a chance, in which he explicates and talks about these different. The ones that were identified in this ancient text and other ones as well, of course. But what I found is quite interesting is that the scientific approach to ornithology, that is to say, a kind of classificatory system, identification and classification of different animals, that approach which took on the kind of taxonomy as well as behavioral characteristics, and above all the sound, the sound that the birds make. So as I looked into this ornithological material, I found that what the modern scientist was doing was precisely the same thing that these old birdwatchers and omens creators were doing. They were looking at the birds and the animals, watching their behavior, recording their sounds. And for the first time we have bird sounds, animal sounds, recorded in Sanskrit syllables so that they could be repeated, just as you find in these textbooks of ornithology, the sounds are recorded in English syllable. So it struck me as well, this is precisely what these ancient people were doing. They recorded this material from a very early period. And the modern ornithologists now take a look at it from a more modern scientific perspective. But what's interesting is that the modern ornithologist informs me about the ancient texts. They have information in there that hits a key, that strikes a chord with what is in the ancient texts, so that I can better understand what they're saying in the ancient texts. So that was a kind of a use of philology with natural science, using natural science to illuminate philological studies, which was an. In. Which is an interesting methodological approach which I tried to put to practice in the book. So that. That has taken me into this Kind of new realm. And one of the most important, I think, animals, birds that we come across is the corvid, the crow family. And there's a great deal of information. I think the. The omen bird par excellence for the Indians was the corvid was the. And there is one section where there's a ritual based on a Griha sutra ritual in which the bird watcher puts out food in the directions, the various directions. The cardinal in the ordinal directions. The dik palace in the different directions of the dykpalis. And then he waits and watches. Then what happens when the birds come, which direction they come from, what sounds they make as they get to the food, what kind of behavioral characteristics they were doing, so on and so forth. So I decided I was going to take a practical approach to this study so it would complete my understanding. So what I did is I got the. Bought a good pair of binoculars and a handbook on birds and bird watching and sat down and began to watch birds. In particular, I started and mimicked this ritual by putting food out for a family of crows in my backyard. And as I watched it, I noticed that there were different sounds that these birds made. Sometimes they were calling a ka ka sound. Kaka is of course, the common Sanskrit word for the crow, a ka ka sound. When they would bring. Gather their family to come to my. The food I'd put down there. And then there was a sound of a ka ka ka when they were aroused in some way.
- [15:38]
Dr. Raj Palparan
1.
- [15:39]
Dr. Kenneth Zisk
One night I was awoken by a big cacophony of kaka out my window. And I noticed that there was a huge deer in the yard eating the. Eating the leaves of the plants. And the crows got a little bit angry with it and wanted to get it out of the yard. So they were going about their business. And then there was another kind of a cooing call which the male practiced during a kind of food giving ritual right before mating. So I began to see these different ways in which these birds were behaving. And lo and behold, most of that was brought forth in this Sanskrit text. So my own practical knowledge gained by watching these animals as they did. I realized that they must have done exactly what I did, or I did what they did. So I learned how they learned. I learned from their method how to read these texts and how the text became informed through that. So this was quite an exciting study for me, actually, because it involved a kind of a new Using science to help me understand as well as my own personal experience and interaction with the Animals as a mode to understand what these ancient texts were talking about. So that was quite exciting for me. I must say that in a nutshell is the book. It kind of looks at the history of the literature, which is quite vast in India. It becomes known as a tradition of a part of the Samudra Shastra tradition, but also a tradition in and of itself of bird watching and knowing the calls and the sounds of birds, which I think, if I'm correct, probably derives originally from the Ajivika tradition of asceticism and then came through and became part of the Brahmanical tradition, a very important part of the Brahmanical tradition in terms of the Kshatriyas, because this form of bird watching and bird watchers, they became important during military campaigns so that these birds, especially the crow, became something like the modern day drone, where the birds up in the sky would be lookouts for the army on the ground. And a skilled bird watcher would know what was around the next corner or what was up over the next ridge by understanding what the birds were saying or what side of the road they were on and kind of all these methods for reading the signs and hearing the sounds of the birds. So it became a very important part of the military campaigns and warfare. As well as for merchants who were on trade missions, they also used bird watchers to know how to navigate through dangerous places along the way. So it became an important literature and grew and developed and is still found in certain parts of South Asia, especially in the folk traditions where people talk about which side of the road the deer on antelope are on and things like that. And so it goes right back to the beginning, probably originally from Mesopotamia, brought into South Asia and developed amongst the index speaking people.
- [19:49]
Dr. Raj Palparan
Yeah, thank you. There are a great many fascinating threads to the work and to your presentation of it. Just now I'm just going to comment on some things that have come to mind and you can feel free to pick up whatever threads you may find interesting or worth riffing on. Yeah, this really interesting interplay between siddhi, the one who is sort of innately, or one who has acquired some kind of virtuosity of consciousness to know what the birds are saying instinctively and then a codification of that, a systematization of that. And one wonders about the interplay if it weren't historically, those who had some instinct for this, that were instructive in the production of the text, some sounds. But it really is interesting to think about, on the one hand, those who are just naturally talented. Compare, for example, Music, those who are naturally virtuosic in some sense or attain some talent, and those who might systematically teach and think about work progressions and how this works systematically. Another really fascinating idea is certainly there is bird watching, and certainly there's watching of all sorts, directions from which they come and go. And crucial here is the bird listening in the same this oral culture. The utterance, how crucial utterance is. And it reminds me of the Purana that I'm most familiar with is Markandeya, that I've studied formally. And the Markanda Purana is actually, at its outset, it's spoken by four birds. You have this idea that the birds are actually the mouthpiece of Piranha. And that's a crucial piece. Also your work dovetailing the ornithological and the philological, which I think is just brilliant because so often is our work so siloed and we gain so much insight from various other disciplines. It reminds me of an article, I believe, by Julia Leslie, who combs through various ornithological data to conclude that the conches of the Vomkirmaina are none other than seraphines. So there's a really fascinating piece there. So the bird thing really stuck out in my mind, the interplay of the siddhi versus the systematization really stuck out. In terms of a couple questions that might be worth. The audience might be interested in one, this is a really important philological study that you're doing, looking at texts and mapping sort of what we can see from the texts. One wonders if at any point, either hitherto or in future, there will be, or there could be consultation with tradition or those who might hold knowledge in this. That's one thought that I had in addition to the text. Another thought that I had is, are we to conclude necessarily that the influence would have been one way between Mesopotamia and India? Could it have been both ways or the other way? These are sort of questions that the audience may have in mind.
- [23:00]
Dr. Kenneth Zisk
I'm sure it did. I mean, there's an important more recent study that is just getting started, and that is that this Mesopotamian material was sort of retranslated into the cuneiform text in the Hellenistic period in the Middle East. So there are Hellenistic versions of these more ancient texts, which then brings into focus this connection, perhaps between the Greco Roman world and these texts, which then brings into, of course, the interplay between India and the Greco Roman world, which I do believe is not only one way, it goes two ways there. So that is a new study that's just underway because this new Hellenistic Mesopotamian material has just come out, just come to light. So hopefully there'll be some studies coming out of that. But what's interesting, I want to go back to this point about the city. What I found out is that this, among the Vibhutis in the Yoga Sutra, the sound, the call of all animals is one of six or seven, eight. I can't remember the exact number. But interestingly, in later yogic texts where they begin to call them the Maharsiddhi, this particular one is left out. And the question is, why is that one left out? Is it because it's no longer a siddhi? It can be learned through discourse of knowledge. So it's no longer considered to be a special quality that one acquires through asceticism. Is that it? Or is there some other reason?
- [25:13]
Dr. Raj Palparan
It.
- [25:14]
Dr. Kenneth Zisk
It leads me to think maybe there is something going on here between, as you say, the acquired knowledge, that is to say, the sort of ascetic, supernatural, however you want to call it, knowledge of understanding the sound of animals and that which can be learned through a textbook and through the understanding of the. How omens work and so on like that. This is an interesting dichotomy. Is one mutually exclusive from the other? Is one looking at it in one way or the other? I don't really know, but it's an interesting thing.
- [25:55]
Dr. Raj Palparan
Yeah, I really feel, I mean, now that you mentioned the omission in later texts, it seems perhaps reasonable that by the time the knowledge was systematized, an occult attainment would be obsolete. I mean, why waste your shakti on that? We've got this. Just learn from someone. We have this knowledge. Why, why go. And we don't need to. We don't need to create or reading texts. We have them. So why go and reveal more?
- [26:25]
Dr. Kenneth Zisk
Yeah, yeah, yeah. And of course, it raised the question about the other siddhis. Are these, can these be learned as well? Are we just lacking the knowledge to learn it, the method to learn it? I don't know. It's an interesting dichotomy within the development of the text and the idea. Yeah, so. And the other thing that you brought out, which I think is quite important and that is the emphasis on the oral, on the sound of the animals. This doesn't occur in other. In the Mesopotamian material. This is unique to India or South Asia. And it, it comes together with this idea of an oral culture where knowledge was transmitted orally. So the ability to listen, to hear, to know through hearing and to reproduce through. Through the verbal medium is crucial here and, and you find out that, you know, by the time of the, the Brihat Samita in the 6th century, this recording of the sounds of different animals reaches its high water point, high water mark. Because all of the animals are, are recorded by means of how they sound and what the sounds mean. I can read you a little bit from this text which dealing with the corvid. A corvid's natural call is ka ka. Its unnatural call is kuka ka ku. They say that the unnatural call portents danger and the natural call portents the opposite. So this is how you begin to learn this. When a certain corvid arrives by day on the branch of a withered tree falling out in a voice joined with ka ka, one knows for certain that there is danger. When a riled Covid voice makes the call, he cuckoo coo coo or tuti ka ka ka. Then food is in abundance. So here they're thinking about the sound. What are these, what is this bird communicating in its sound? What is it saying to me? And one is there's danger and the other is there's food around. So that's how they learn to know what these birds are saying. Quite interesting.
- [29:14]
Dr. Raj Palparan
It's fascinating insofar as irrespective of the veracity of the claiming folks can judge for themselves or experiment. The typology is sound in that what are animals concerned with for their survival, Protection from destruction and sustenance, finding food. And it would make sense that those would be vital for communication among them. So, so, so there's a level of the communication, there's a level of okay, perhaps that's, you know, whether as there something ideal in text or real, we can bracket that out the claim there. But the idea that, you know, an evolved enough consciousness would be able to discern the, the meaning behind the sound in the bird. And now we have that knowledge revealed and codified so we can actually just, you know, perhaps evolve consciousness. Using music analogy would, would, would, would create, would, would create a musical scale, create a chord, create something symphonic which now we can see the technique thereafter and emulate in some sense. So this is a, there's that dimension of the codification of the sound. But you know, you know, just look at the Sanskrit Alphabet really the sound system. It's a culture that is extraordinarily attuned to the production of sound. And so we see this here and so, you know, it's an interpretation of the sounds. It's really honing in on the nuances of Sound and also the rasa, you know, what's coming in. It just really reminds me of that. The Mahdishada verse of the God Gitamayana where, you know, the crunches call, the lamentation is a seed of kavya in Sanskrit lore. And it's really profound. And what comes to my mind
- [31:16]
Dr. Kenneth Zisk
you also find in going way back to the Veda, you find the sound of the lowing of cows that's emulated in the text. So this is an auspicious sound where the cows are coming together, of course, in the lowing of cows and so forth, calling its young to come and what to eat so that there, you know, milk is available to be had. And milk products, cow products are so important in the Indian tradition. So knowing the lowing of the cows is important to acquire milk or sustenance for human beings as well as for the cows. I mean, it's all the sound comes out the sound of animals and human beings interacting in this way throughout the tradition. It's quite interesting when you kind of look at it in a broader perspective. And of course these texts are zero in on it for specific purposes. But it's there throughout the literature, as you pointed out.
- [32:30]
Dr. Raj Palparan
Yeah, absolutely. I mean, as I mentioned, the Martini Puranas is literally voiced by four birds. And it's outs of Markhandeus too busy doing religious practices. When Jaimini, who's also a figure in Jyotish, when Jaimini comes to him to ask, you know, I had these questions of the Mahabharata. He's also Jaimin is a student of Yasta. When he's like, I can't figure it out, Mark. And I like, great, I'm kind of busy. You know, these four birds have that knowledge. And so we have this, this really rich, rich tradition of hearing what birds have to say and making sense of birds and birds being stand in not just as Dwidjas in general, but particularly exalted brahmanical Dwijas who have expert knowledge. You have this motif in, in Sanskrit literature that's, that's brilliant. So, so, so, so sound is utterance. I think you, you, you well celebrate with your work. One question that I think folks might have is whether or not there, there has been or can be consultation with sound as oral tradition or oral memory. Like are there individuals who, who use these texts or on the ground or may, may implement these practices?
- [33:44]
Dr. Kenneth Zisk
I've never come across any in modern India. But that doesn't say that they don't exist. It just could be that I never come across Them, India is full of all sorts of hidden treasures in different parts. But certainly they were very important in the middle. In the medieval period, as I said, primarily for these texts anyway, for campaigns for yatras, to the campaigns that the king and warriors would go on. Not so much, I guess, in the more modern period. But I could imagine that there are bird watchers. I mean, just. I mean, who isn't fascinated by. By watching birds? I mean, you sit down and you watch and you. First of all, you come in contact with nature in a way that you wouldn't normally do. And then you just sort of. You use an analogical kind of method for understanding them. You see their behavior and you use analogy to say, well, what does that behavior mean? What are they doing? What are they saying? They're making a sound, this is the sound. And then they're doing something. So you sit and you watch and you begin to understand more closely your interaction between the bird and the human being, which draws you into the natural world of these beings. I'm fortunate enough. I live right next to a fjord here in Copenhagen, outside of Copenhagen, and it's one of the richest bird areas. So every morning I sit and I watch the birds. And they're water birds. There are other kinds of birds. There are hawks, there are different kinds of swans and ducks and geese and so forth. All have their own sounds and all going about their business. But you're simply drawn into it in a way that is, I would say, probably irrational. It's on emotional level.
- [36:19]
Dr. Raj Palparan
I would say transrational. But I get what you mean.
- [36:23]
Dr. Kenneth Zisk
Yeah. Okay. So I mean, it's a phenomenon that I think is part of the human being, himself or herself, that you interact with animals in these ways and you learn from them and you become part. Closer to their existence. At least that's my experience. And people that I've talked to about bird watching and so forth, some of them are absolutely fanatics. You know, they go out every day and they're looking for birds. Of course, many of them are to find rare species and so forth. But nevertheless, there is this need, this interaction that takes place between the human and the animal level, especially with birds, but not exclusively. But I think birds have that special quality of being up in the air, being away, being free in a way that we on earthlings here, they're bound to the earth. We're not all that is really kind of part of what I would call a romanticized version of literature and tradition, especially in India.
- [37:41]
Dr. Raj Palparan
Yeah, that's quite beautiful. Thank you for sharing Your experiences. It's, it's so refreshing to see that your own direct observation and lived experience informs or supplements your scholarship. Particularly, are we textualists?
- [37:57]
Dr. Kenneth Zisk
Right?
- [37:58]
Dr. Raj Palparan
So it's crucial.
- [37:59]
Dr. Kenneth Zisk
And this, this is one point I would like to emphasize. When I grew up with, you know, doing Sanskrit, you know, you always had to be right on the text. You had to be right, you know, you had to be philological. You couldn't, you couldn't vary much from the text and from what the, what the commentary says and so on and so forth. But as I found out, that there is, there is an understanding that you have to have of this text. And that understanding comes from whatever ways you can get it, either through personal experience, through some kind of interaction. Of course, reading the text, knowing the language, knowing how to work with it, that's crucial. But that's not all there is to it. There's much more that you have to know and interact with that text so that it becomes you. You know it because you are part of it. And I emphasize that, that use that creative side of you when you read these texts because it'll become more meaningful and you can explicate it much better if you yourself have some kind of personal interaction with it. So don't be afraid to be creative in your thinking about certain texts in the Sanskrit and philological tradition.
- [39:27]
Dr. Raj Palparan
Very well said and couldn't agree more. Thank you very much for appearing on the podcast tonight.
- [39:33]
Dr. Kenneth Zisk
Yeah, good.
- [39:34]
Dr. Raj Palparan
For those listening, we've been speaking with Dr. Kenneth Zisk on a brand new publication, South Asian Animal A Critical Anthology. The links are in the podcast notes. Keep all listening, keep reading, and keep contemplating the meaning of birds. Bye for now.