Like the Taste a Mute Person Cannot Describe
Narada compares the love of God to a sweetness that the one who tastes it knows but cannot communicate to another.
In Sutra 52, Narada offers a memorable simile: divine love is 'like the taste experienced by a mute person' — 'mukasvadanavat.' Just as one who cannot speak may savor a delicious flavor yet has no way to express it to others, so the devotee who tastes divine love knows it intimately but cannot translate it into speech. The simile captures both the certainty and the privacy of mystical experience. Narada thereby validates the devotee's inner knowing while explaining why love resists all argument and proof. This celebrated image has echoed through Indian devotional literature as the classic expression of the gap between direct realization and secondhand description.
Love is like the taste savored by one who is mute — known yet inexpressible.
The 'mute's taste' became a stock metaphor across Indian mysticism, paralleling William James's insistence that mystical experience is fundamentally ineffable and noetic — a knowledge that cannot be transmitted in words.
Narada Bhakti Sutras
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- What the Narada Bhakti Sutras say about loneliness
Sutra 52 compares divine love to a flavour savoured by someone who cannot speak: known with certainty, impossible to hand over. It names a second loneliness the path creates — an inner life you cannot make anyone else understand.