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There is a great ocean, and some gods have fallen into it. Agni is there, Vayu is there, the sun, the directions, the moon, and every one of them is homeless. They have just been made, coming out of somebody’s mouth, somebody’s nostrils, somebody’s eye, and the moment they came out there was no place left for them to live in. They need food, and they have nowhere to stand while they eat it. So they turn to the one who made them and say something very plain: find us a dwelling, some place to settle, where we may hold still and eat. A cow is brought before them first, then a horse, and both times they shake their heads. And then a man is brought, and all the gods call out together, well made, this one is properly built. The largest thing the Aitareya Upanishad has to say sits inside that sentence, that this body, which we drag about every day taking it for something ordinary, is the place the gods chose.
This Upanishad, which comes out of the Rig Veda, finishes in three chapters, and its gait resembles no other Upanishad. No student arrives at the opening with a question, no assembly gathers, no king hands over a fee. Here a creation is made first, then the gods who keep that creation running are brought down into a body, then food is made and refuses to be caught, and only after all that does the question rise for whose sake the entire spectacle was set up: in the middle of all this work, who am I. The third chapter asks that same question again, answers it in two words, and sits down.
The main figures of this Upanishad
Atman: the self, alone in the beginning, who looked and made the worlds, and who at the end split a way through the crown of the head and came down into his own making.
Purusha: the shape hauled up out of the water, whose limbs burst open one by one under tapas, and who later became the house of the gods.
The deities: Agni, Vayu, Aditya, the directions, the plants and forest trees, the moon, death and the waters, who ask for a dwelling once they find themselves homeless.
Ashanaya and Pipasa: hunger and thirst, who were given no separate house of their own, and who received in exchange a share in every offering.
Anna: food, which began running the moment it was made, and which only apana could catch, after seven attempts had failed.
Vamadeva: the seer who, lying inside the womb, came to know all the births of the gods and broke out of it like a hawk.
In the beginning only the self, and nothing else at all
The very first sentence is the kind after which a reader wants to stay quiet for a while. “Atma va idam eka evagra asit”, in the beginning all this was one self alone, and there was nothing else whatever. The word doing the most work in that line is idam, this. Which is to say, whatever lies spread around us today, all of it, was that solitary self then. No other material came in from anywhere, no raw stock was lying ready beforehand. Between the one who makes and the thing made there is no third thing standing anywhere.
And then comes the quietest working word in this Upanishad, ikshata, he looked. No hand was raised before the making, no tool arrived, no word was spoken. He looked, and that was all. The way something occurs to a person all at once and the thing begins taking shape along with the occurring. He looked and saw that he would now make the worlds. That one verb settles the nature of the whole creation. Nothing here was kneaded out of a lump of clay. What happened was the spreading out of a seeing.
Then he makes four worlds, and their names come across as slightly unfamiliar. Ambhas, marichi, mara, and apah. The Upanishad goes on to say for itself which of them lies where. That which is ambhas is beyond the sky as well, and the sky is its floor. The marichis are the ones in the middle space. Mara is what we call the earth, and the name itself says that this is the place where dying happens. And the lowest of them is apah, the waters. From top to bottom this four-story frame is put up in a single breath, the way the plan of a house is drawn.
Stand at the bottom of that frame and look up, because the Upanishad built it to be looked at. Underfoot, the waters, dark and going down past any reach. Above them the ground where things die, hard enough to be walked on and to be buried in, which is why it carries that name and no prettier one. Above the ground the middle space where the rays travel, the region a man stares into when he watches dust turn inside a shaft of light, or lightning cross a hill. And over all of it, past the floor of the sky, the ambhas, more water, held up where nobody reaches. Water at the bottom and water at the top, and everything anyone will ever own laid out on the shelf between them. Nothing in that description asks to be taken on faith. It is what a person sees who stands outdoors at evening and turns his head slowly from his own feet to the stars.
Notice how plain the names are. Water, ray, dying ground. Nowhere does this Upanishad manufacture a vocabulary meant to frighten whoever is listening. Whatever is being made is being made in the language people use for their daily talk, and perhaps that is why this story still takes hold of a reader by its plainness three thousand years later.
In short: the Upanishad keeps the self alone at the beginning and says that whatever is visible today was that aloneness then. The making starts with a looking, with no hand in it anywhere. The names of the four worlds are so plain that they read like the plan of a house.
The purusha drawn out of the water, and a mouth splitting like an egg
The worlds having been made, he looked again: these worlds are here, now let me make keepers for them. And then comes the line with a remarkable verb hidden inside it. “So’dbhya eva purusham samuddhrityamurchhayat”, out of the waters themselves he drew a purusha up and set him, thickened him, gave him a shape. Samuddhritya carries the sense of lifting something out, the way a thing is taken out of a pot. And the water he was drawn from is that very lowest world, made a moment ago. The maker takes his next making out of what he has already made.
That purusha so far is a shape with no window in it. So he heats him. Tapas returns again and again in this Upanishad and its work is the same every time, staying with something long enough that it begins to open on its own. Being heated, the mouth of that purusha bursts open, the way an egg breaks, and out of the mouth comes speech, and out of speech Agni. This stairway of making is very particular: first an opening in the body, then a power out of that opening, then a deity out of that power.
The word for that heating deserves a moment, because nothing in it resembles a furnace. Tapas is what happens when a bird settles onto eggs and refuses to rise, when a man holds one question in his chest for a year without setting it down, when heat is kept on a single spot long enough that the spot gives way. The Upanishad supplies its own comparison, “tasyabhitaptasya mukham nirabhidyata”, the mouth of the heated one split open, in the manner of an egg. An egg opens from the inside. Pressure gathers within until the shell has no choice left, and whatever comes out was finished before the shell gave. That is the shape of every opening in this chapter. Nothing gets carved and nothing gets attached. A closed form is held under attention until it parts along a line it was already carrying.
The same order runs seven more times, in that same sequence each time. The nostrils burst open, from them prana, from prana Vayu. The eyes burst open, from them sight, from sight Aditya. The ears burst open, from them hearing, from hearing the directions. The skin bursts open, from it the body hair, from the hair the plants and the forest trees. The heart bursts open, from it mind, from mind the moon. The navel bursts open, from it apana, from apana death. And the generative organ bursts open, from it seed, from seed the waters.
Read this list slowly and one thing opens up. Here the body comes first and the world comes afterward. The eye opened first, and then the sun was made. The ears burst open first, and then the directions came to be. We ordinarily think it the other way around, that the sun stood there first and an eye was built later in order to see it. The Upanishad reverses the order deliberately, because what it wants to show is that the power that sees and the world that is seen came out of one place and are twins to each other. That is why an eye can see the sun, an ear can catch a sound, a nose can smell the air.
And this kinship is going to matter a great deal further on. When these deities come back homeless, they will enter no unfamiliar place. Each one will go exactly where it came from. Agni into the mouth, Vayu into the nostrils, Aditya into the eye. This first round of making is in truth the preparation for that return.
In short: to make keepers for the worlds the self draws a purusha out of the water and heats him. Under the heat the limbs burst open one after another, and out of each limb comes first a power and then a deity. Here the eye is made before the sun, because the Upanishad wants the twinship of the seer and the seen kept in plain view.
The deities who fell into the great ocean, and the hunger fastened to them
Now the story turns very human all at once. Once made, all those deities fall into this great ocean. What had just become the sun, what had just become fire, all of them lie scattered across a wide expanse with no roof over them. And in the same hour he joins that purusha to hunger and thirst. This carries no flavor of punishment; it belongs to the build. A creature that feels no hunger will go looking for no food, and a creature that goes looking for no food will never stir at all.
Picture the situation from where they are standing, if standing is even the word. Fire with nothing to burn on, no hearth, no wood. Air with nothing to move through. The sun with nothing to fall on and nobody to warm. The directions, which carry meaning only when a body stands at the center of them to say this way and that way, spread out over open water with no center in it anywhere. A power that has no place to act is the same as no power at all. They are enormous and they are useless, and they can feel the difference between those two conditions in themselves. “Ta eta devata srishta asmin mahaty arnave prapatan”, these deities, once created, fell into this great ocean.
Then those deities come to him and speak. “Ta enam abruvann ayatanam nah prajanihi”, they said to him, find out an ayatana for us, some dwelling, in which we may settle firmly and eat food. The word ayatana is a fine one. It means more than a spot on the ground; it is the place where one can spread out and sit, where one can hold. Powers lying scattered accomplish nothing. They need a frame in which to settle and start working.
A cow is brought before them first. A cow is no ordinary offering; in the Vedic world no property stands higher. Yet the deities look at her and say, “na vai no’yam alam”, this one is not enough for us. Then a horse is brought, the swiftest and most splendid thing of that age, and the same answer comes again, this one too is not enough for us. Both times the word alam appears, sufficient, equal to the task. The matter turns on capacity alone, and the question of beauty or of price never enters.
Take the measure of what has just been turned down. “Tabhyo gam anayat”, to them he brought a cow. A cow was the unit in which a man counted out his life. She gave milk at dawn and milk again at dusk, she gave the curd and the clarified butter that went into the fire whenever anything at all was offered, her calves were the increase that carried a bare household into a settled one, and a man took the measure of his own standing by how many of them he walked past on his way out of his own yard. To be handed a cow was to be handed a living income for years ahead. The deities looked at her and said no. Then a horse, which no ordinary household ever kept. A horse meant speed, and speed meant chariots, raids, and the arrival of a king with his retinue coming up behind him. A horse was what one ruler sent another when he wanted something large in return. The deities looked at that too and said no. Twice the finest thing anybody could set down was set down in front of them, and twice they turned away from it, because neither one could hold them.
And then the purusha is brought before them. “Tabhyah purusham anayat”, to them he brought a man. The gladness in the reaction of the deities appears nowhere else in this whole Upanishad. They say, sukrita, ah, this one is well made. “Purusho vava sukritam”, the purusha truly is well made. Sukrita is su and krita, well done, properly built, and the sense of merit sits inside the same word. Standing in front of the very body that people so often carry about like a load, the gods said, yes, this one will do.
Why this one will do, the Upanishad leaves unopened here, though the story ahead makes it clear. A cow has eyes too, a horse has ears too, and both of them see and hear. The question that will rise in the third section, atha ko’ham, can rise only here. The deities needed the one frame in which a being can ask itself about itself, because only there can they do their work while knowing that they are doing it.
In short: the newly made deities lie scattered in the great ocean and ask for a dwelling, because no power can work without a frame. The cow and the horse are sent back both times. The moment they see the purusha they are glad, and they call him sukrita, well made.
Each by its own door, and a share for hunger too
Then he said to them, “yathayatanam pravishata”, enter, each according to its own dwelling. There is no force anywhere in that order. Every deity has to return to the very doorway it came out of, and that doorway lies open for it already. The power that issued from there will sit back down in that same place, with one change: now it sits inside a body, in the company of all the rest.
Consider what that order spares them. Nobody is sent into a strange room. Fire goes back to the one place in the body that already burns, the mouth, where speech comes out warm and where food first begins to be undone. Wind goes back to the two openings that have been pulling air in and pushing it out without a pause since the beginning. The sun goes back to the one organ that stops working the instant the sun is taken away from it. Each of them walks in through the opening it was born out of, and the opening fits, because their leaving is what cut it. A homecoming is being described here, and the body is the home.
And then the entering happens, one by one. “Agnir vag bhutva mukham pravishat”, Agni became speech and entered the mouth. Vayu became breath and entered the nostrils, Aditya became sight and entered the eyes, the directions became hearing and entered the ears, the plants and forest trees became body hair and entered the skin, the moon became mind and entered the heart, death became apana and entered the navel, and the waters became seed and entered the generative organ. The most startling line in this whole list is the one in which death also comes inside, and comes in the manner of a resident, taking up a room of its own like everyone else.
Now look at this scene once as a whole. This body has stopped being a heap of flesh. Fire is seated in its mouth, in its nose is seated the air that moves through all of space, in the eyes is seated the sun, in the ears the directions, and in the heart the moon. Whatever is very large outside is at work inside on a very small scale, and this is the greatest gift this Upanishad makes. The distance between outside and inside is wiped out by that single scene.
The story keeps going, because two more are standing about with no house given to them. Hunger and thirst come and say, find something for us two as well. The answer is worth reading closely. He says that he will give them no separate house, that he is making their share within these very deities, that in these they shall both be sharers. And for this reason, the Upanishad adds, whatever deity an offering is taken up for, hunger and thirst both hold a share in it.
Set this beside daily experience and it startles. The eye hungers for form, the ear for sound, the skin for touch. There is no sense organ anywhere that stands full. A power with no hunger inside it would never stir, so hunger needed no room of its own; it is already seated in every room. This is why the man who obtains the most still asks for one thing more by evening.
In short: every deity comes down through the same door it came out of, and the body turns into an inhabited house in which fire, air, the sun, the directions, the moon and even death live in rooms of their own. Hunger and thirst get no separate house, and in its place they receive a share in every deity.
The food that would not be caught
The third section opens with that same verb again. He looked: the worlds are here and the keepers of the worlds are here, now let me make food for these. And he heats the waters once more, and out of the heated waters a form is born, a shape, and that is food. Notice that the food too came from the very place the purusha came from. The eater and the eaten have both come out of one water, and for that reason the contest between them ahead becomes so interesting.
Because the moment it is made, the food starts running. This is the most comic part of the story and the deepest as well. The food turns its face away and wants to get out, and he tries to catch it. He tried first with speech, and it would not be caught. The Upanishad tells us at the same time that had it been caught with speech, a man would have been satisfied merely by talking about food. That line returns with every attempt, and every time it opens a sharp truth.
Then he tried with breath, and it would not be caught, or else a man would fill his stomach by smelling. With the eye, and it would not be caught, or else the sight of it would have satisfied. With the ear, or else the hearing of it. With the skin, or else the touching of it. With the mind, or else the thinking of it. With the generative organ, or else the releasing of it. Seven times the attempt is made and seven times the food slips out of his hands. No sense organ whatever is able to take food truly inside.
See how exact a map this list is of our own day. Nobody’s stomach fills from the discussion of a dish. Hunger dies from no sight of a beautiful thing; it flares up further. All day long we try to take the world in through these same doorways and by evening we are left empty. The Upanishad puts this experience down as the story of a failed attempt, with no sermon attached anywhere, and it lands far harder that way.
At the end the attempt is made with apana, and the food is caught. The Upanishad says that this is the seizer of food, this is that air, and this is the one that lives by food. All the outer senses can touch food, taste it, smell it, and the one that truly takes it down inside and joins it to the body is that downward-moving air, which has no face and carries no fame. Whatever goes unseen is doing the real work, and this is a note that keeps returning in this Upanishad.
In short: the food too was made from the same water that made the purusha, and it began running the moment it was made. Speech, breath, eye, ear, skin, mind and the generative organ, all seven attempts went empty, and each time the Upanishad tells us that had it been caught there, a stomach would fill merely by speaking or by looking. In the end apana catches it, the air that has no face.
Then who am I, and the way in through the head
Now the hour arrives for which this whole frame was put up. Everything has been made. The worlds are there, the keepers of the worlds are there, the body is there, the food is there, and inside the body every deity sits in its room doing its work. And then he stops and thinks: how would all of this run without me. And after that, by which way shall I go down into it.
And then the whole list is repeated, in an entirely different key this time. If speaking is being done by speech, breathing by breath, seeing by the eye, hearing by the ear, touching by the skin, thinking by the mind, the downward air by apana, and releasing by the generative organ, “atha ko’ham”, then who am I. That question is the heart of this Upanishad. A doer was counted out for every action, the whole list was completed, and after all of it one place stayed empty. Whatever was left over, whose work appears nowhere on the list, is the self.
Bring this down onto yourself. Everything that happens in a day has doers who can be counted. The eye saw, the ear heard, the mind thought, the hand lifted. And the one who called all of these his own stands nowhere on that list. We keep identifying ourselves by the sum of these actions, and the moment this question arrives that sum slips out of the hand.
And then comes the scene that makes this Upanishad worth remembering. “Sa etam eva simanam vidaryaitaya dvara prapadyata”, he split this very suture and entered by that door. Siman is the place where the hair of the head parts to the two sides, that thin line above the forehead. All the other deities had come in through the lower doorways, through the mouth, the nose, the eye, the ear, and for them the doors were lying open already. He had a door of his own nowhere, so one had to be made, at the very top, and by that road he came down.
The Upanishad hands over the name of that door itself. “Saisha vidritir nama”, this is the one called vidriti, the crack made by tearing. And the place where he came down is nandana, the place of delight. Then comes a line the Upanishad leaves unopened, that he has three dwellings and three dreams, this dwelling, this dwelling, this dwelling. The words stop after being said three times, as though three places were being pointed at with a finger.
Having been born, he looked out at the beings all around and thought, what other would anyone speak of here. And he saw that very purusha as brahman, spread out on every side, and said, this I have seen. Out of that seeing came his name, Idandra, the one who saw this. Yet people call him Indra, turning the name a little aside. And the Upanishad gives the reason too, and likes the reason so well that it says it twice, “paroksha-priya iva hi devah”, the gods are fond of the indirect, of speech kept a little covered over.
In short: once a doer has been counted out for every action, the place that stays empty is where the question rises, then who am I. All the other deities had come in through the lower doors that stood open; the self had to split its own door open above the crown, and the name of that crack is vidriti. The name Idandra, which came out of that seeing, is what people bend into Indra.
Three births, and Vamadeva awake in the womb
The second chapter is very short and it steps away from story straight into a reckoning. The first embryo formed in a man is the seed, and that seed is a brilliance gathered from all the limbs. He holds his own self inside himself in it. When he places it in a woman, then he brings it to birth, and this is its first birth. Notice that the Upanishad has called first that birth which is already over before a mother’s lap comes into the matter at all.
Then it goes into the woman as a self of her own, like a limb belonging to her, and for that reason it does her no injury. And she nourishes this self that has come into her. “Sa bhavayitri bhavayitavya bhavati”, she who nourishes becomes one who is herself to be nourished, and that sentence is the tenderest thing in the whole chapter. The care of a pregnant woman has arrived here with no appeal to custom. It has been drawn out of the logic of the story, that whoever is raising another is now everybody’s charge to raise.
That woman carries the embryo, and the father begins nourishing the child even ahead of the birth. And the Upanishad adds that when he nourishes that child he is in truth nourishing his own self, for the continuation of these worlds, because it is in this manner that these worlds keep running on. This is his second birth. What we ordinarily call birth this Upanishad places at number two.
And the third birth is the one after death. This self of his is set in his place for the sake of meritorious works, and his other self, having finished what it had to do and having finished its years, departs. Going from here, it is born again, and this is its third birth. Set the three births side by side and a thread shows itself, running from father into son and from son onward, never once breaking.
After this comes the verse that lifts the chapter suddenly higher. “Garbhe nu sann anv esham avedam aham devanam janimani vishva”, while still in the womb I came to know all the births of these gods. And then, a hundred forts of iron held me penned, and I broke out at speed like a hawk. The Upanishad tells us that Vamadeva said this while lying inside the womb.
The image of a hundred iron forts is exact. The body is that fort, and no enemy built it; it is built out of one’s own doing. And breaking it calls for no weapon, since knowing is enough, which is why the simile that came is flight and why no tunnel is dug anywhere in it. The chapter finishes on this, that the one who knows in this way, when this body falls away, rose upward, obtained all desires, and became immortal, became immortal. That repetition stands in the mula, and it comes at the place where the matter is already over.
In short: the second chapter counts out three births of one man, the forming of the embryo in the father, then the birth of the body, and then the birth after death. She who nourishes becomes fit to be nourished, and that sentence is the tenderest part of the chapter. At the end Vamadeva speaks from inside the womb, that a hundred iron forts stood around him and he went out of them like a hawk.
Who is the one we worship
The third chapter opens with a plain question, as though somebody had stood up in an assembly to ask it. Who is this self that we worship, and which of the two is he. Then the questioner makes it sharper: is it that by which one sees, or by which one hears, or by which one smells odors, or by which one articulates speech, or by which one tells the tasty from the tasteless. The same question from the first chapter has come back here, and it sits now in our mouths, where before it sat in a maker’s.
The answer begins very plainly: this that is the heart, and this that is the mind. And then the Upanishad does something that turns up rarely elsewhere. It counts out the names of sixteen separate shapes of knowing. Sanjnana, ajnana, vijnana, prajnana, medha, drishti, dhriti, mati, manisha, juti, smriti, sankalpa, kratu, asu, kama and vasha. Knowing a thing properly, taking in a command, telling one thing from another, holding steady, remembering, resolving, wanting, bringing under control: all of these look like separate pieces of work.
And then in one line they are all tied together: every one of these is a name of prajnana. So this is a register of sixteen faces belonging to one awareness. When it remembers it is called smriti, when it resolves, sankalpa, when it wants, kama. No crowd lives inside. One light is there, and it picks up a different name in each different piece of work.
After this the chapter keeps widening its circle until the breath starts to fill as one reads. This is Brahma, this is Indra, this is Prajapati, all these gods, and these five great elements, earth, air, space, water and the lights. And then the seeds that sprout in their different fashions, those born from an egg, those born from a womb, those born from sweat, and those that come up by splitting the ground. And horses, cattle, human beings, elephants. And whatever breathes, whatever walks, whatever flies, and whatever stands still in its own place.
After that long roll comes the sentence that all of this has prajnana for its eye and stands established in prajnana. “Prajnanetro lokah prajna pratishtha”, the world has prajnana for its eye, and prajna is its floor. And then two words, “prajnanam brahma”, prajnana is brahman. Notice that this sentence has come after the long list, with the list standing ahead of it. First everything from grass up to the elephant was counted, and then it was said that all of them have one single eye. The force of the sentence lies in that very order.
And here this Upanishad is completed, on the same line that also stood at the end of the second chapter. With this prajna self he rose up out of this world, obtained all desires in that heavenly world, and became immortal, became immortal. The question with which the third chapter started has now fallen away, because the one who was being looked for turned out to be the same as the one doing the looking.
In short: the third chapter asks who the self is that we worship, and answers by counting sixteen names of knowing and saying that every one of them is a name of prajnana. Then it counts everything from the gods down to grass and the elephant and says that this whole world moves by the eye of prajnana. And only then, after the list, come those two words, prajnanam brahma, prajnana is brahman.
And in the end, toward yourself
The first thing worth carrying away from this Upanishad is that sentence of the gods, the cow will not do, the horse will not do, this man is right. Most of us keep a relationship of complaint with our own body, that it tires, it aches, it grows old, and it does as it pleases. This story stands the gods in front of that same body, glad. This morning the eyes opened and light came in, an ear caught somebody’s voice, a nose recognized the smell of tea. Every one of those times somebody was sitting in his own room doing his own work.
There is a second thing inside that scene worth carrying off. The deities asked for a dwelling before they asked for anything else, because until they had one they could do nothing whatever. The same holds for whatever a person actually has in hand. Attention with no place to stand scatters itself across a whole day and adds up to nothing by dark. Strength with nothing to be spent on turns into restlessness by afternoon. The story says that powers become powers on the day they are housed, and it says so about a body, which means it can be tested tonight in the plainest way there is, by giving one single thing the room to be done properly.
The second thing comes out of the story of the food. All day we try to fill ourselves by seeing, by hearing, by thinking and by saying, and by evening that same emptiness is what remains. The Upanishad put this down as a story of seven failed attempts and then left it alone, with no sermon attached. On the day it becomes visible that filling oneself through any doorway at all arrives at that same failure, the running slows a little, and that slowing is the real fruit of this story.
And at the last there is that question, the one this Upanishad has handed to us and which needs no scripture at all. Once in a day, right in the middle of some piece of work, stop and count that same list. This hand is doing, this eye is seeing, this mind is reckoning, this breath is running. When all of it has been counted, stay in the place that is left empty. The Upanishad has given that empty place one single name, and that name is the one written in its last chapter. Everything else is running by the eye of that one, this body as well, and this moment of reading as well.
Source: Aitareya Upanishad, chapters 1 to 3, sections 1.1 to 3.4; read against the Sanskrit, with Shankara’s reading noted where readings differ.