by Juanita Dugdale
Source: AIGA: Journal of Graphic Design, Vol. 13, 1995
Why would a designer in mid-career spend a week studying an ancient language from a foreign culture when common sense suggests the time would be better spent mastering the latest Quark-Express update? One answer is that contemporary notions about continuing education have, fortunately, expanded beyond late-night classes taken solely for professional advancement into the more exciting realms of intellectual adventure and personal exploration. And with increasing pressure to specialize, it seems obvious that designers must make a more conscious effort to embrace unfamiliar concepts and maintain a broad perspective.
On a whim, I signed up for a week's intensive training offered by the American Sanskrit Institute (ASI) in the fall of 1993; my rationale was that a glimpse into Sanskrit would reintroduce me to the world of ancient language last experienced in high school Latin and etymology classes. I felt an almost visceral need to look at written letters in a different way now, not just as forms with handsome strokes and well-balanced counterspaces, but as symbols that evolved from speech, song, and sound.
I chose Sanskrit, which literally means "perfected," because it is considered to be the most ancient language, ranking with Latin and Greek in providing significant linguistic roots for English words. Much of the world's most beautiful epic poetry is recorded in Sanskrit, and so it provides access to famous texts such as the Bhagavad Gita and also a look at India's past. However, Sanskrit is usually assumed to be impenetrable because of its complex structure and pronunciation. Most students have to enroll in esoteric university courses with high dropout rates. So ASI's promise that anyone could learn Sanskrit seemed especially seductive.
On our first day, instead of looking at charts or books, my twenty classmates and I found ourselves chanting the alphabet under the guidance of a remarkable teacher, Vyaas Houston, a Sanskrit scholar with an M.A. from Columbia who practices outside the university context. And during that week he kept his promise that everyone would master Sanskrit basics — alphabet, pronunciation, and basic word structure — in order to start reading simple verses. However, it quickly became clear that the course's value was less in learning Sanskrit than in overcoming personal learning blocks.
Houston's method to elicit everyone's agreement to a basic set of "contractual" terms. These emphasize total participation and dismiss intellectual processes such as note-taking. Everyone must vow to "stay on the point" — remain completely focused on the matter at hand. Unwavering attention from the individual and the group is his mandate.
His other buzz-phrase is: "Who wants to learn today?" In the context of this class, it was posed with genuine sincerity and really meant, "Who will raise their hand and participate — with or without the right answer?" Houston's motive is to rekindle the innate joy of learning suppressed during years of negative learning experiences.
His Sanskrit teaching methodology evolved over two decades through trial and error. Initially discouraged by how few could master the language, he soon made breakthroughs that radically simplified the task. Houston came to realize that most of us are products of a flawed education system overemphasizing performance at the expense of understanding. Houston observed that the Westernsuccess/failure model, "while seeming to produce an abundance of successful, self-conficent individuls on the one hand, and an equal abundance of individuals who have suffered some loss of self-esteem on the other, really produces only one type of individual, whose attention is fragmented by constant interruptions and self-assessments that serve no other purpose than to grade or validate oneself about his or her degree of competence or excellence in the game of survival."
Another revelation was his discovery that color-coded diagrams provide an effective way to explain the complexity of Sanskrit's sound structure. It comes as no surprise to graphic designers that "mapping" the mouth with diagrams would help the student to identify where the sound of each letter is generated by the tongue, throat, palate, or lips. Houston then carried color relationships from this diagram into alphabet charts that demonstrate how sounds relate to letterforms.
Houston's other graphic breakthrough occurred once when he forgot to bring prepared charts and had to reconstruct them on the spot using calligraphy. The act of slowly drawing every Sanskrit character so heightened everyone's attention that he achieved a much higher level of group concentration. Now his classrooms routinely become wallpapered with polychromed pages of drawn Sanskrit characters, visual metaphors for the rhythms of verse chanted intermitently throughout class.
Houston's holistic teaching method is particularly appropriate to Sanskrit because it engages the student in a direct aural and visual experience that reveals the language as a "river of sound." And the beauty of it is that the philosophy for this teaching method, which emphasizes doing and feeling over thinking, comes directly from ancient Sanskrit lessons. Houston explains: "The message which permeates the Bhagavad Gita is about action, which if applied to learning, allows for the possibility of extraordinary performance."