A Path of Thought in a Māori Chant

Something stirs. A remembered thing comes up behind it. Then a sense of who is asking, and a wanting. Then, if it is carried to other people, a conversation. That is one modern reading of a Māori chant about how coming to know begins. KTT counts each step as a thought, noticed or not. The sources read for this article did not test whether the chant describes how a thought forms in one person.

The chant

A chant recorded in 1854 from Te Kohuora of Rongoroa names a sequence: kune, pupuke, hihiri, mahara, hinengaro, manako, and then wānanga. In the translations read here, mahara is remembrance, manako is desire or longing, and wānanga is knowledge becoming fruitful. A glossary in one scholarly article gives wānanga as to meet, discuss and deliberate.

What the translations decide

Hihiri is the word that moves. The Te Ara translation of the chant renders it as “the thought.” Another source describes it as pure energy or vital striving, the stirring force from which thought and memory emerge. A third translation reads “rising thought.” The choice decides whether the chant begins with a thought or with a force.

Hinengaro is also translated more than one way. One source gives “consciousness,” and another “mind-heart,” and the same source explains it as the place where a person comes to understand who they are.

Read as a path

Māori scholars have read the chant as a path of coming to know. Nicholson (2020) offers it in the MAI Journal as a research process, Te Hihiri. A parenting charity uses it to walk families through memory. In these readings, the path ends in wānanga, a gathering to think together. A private conclusion is not where it stops.

The chant’s own setting

The chant belongs to a cosmological account of how the world came to be. Te Ara, the New Zealand encyclopedia, gives other sequences from other traditions as well, and says they do not describe one central act of creation. They are an attempt to understand the continuing process of life. Reading the chant as a psychology of thought is a later interpretation, made by people who hold the chant dear.

What is not known

Whether the chant was ever meant as an account of one person’s thinking is not known.

Whether everyday thoughts form in this order is not known. The sources read here did not test it.

Which translation of hihiri is closest is also open. Different tribal traditions keep different versions of these sequences.