The Brahma Sutra · Book 3: Sadhana · Pada 2 · The qualified and unqualified forms of Brahman, and the states of consciousness

The pada turns from the soul’s journey to its states, and begins with dream. Brihadaranyaka 4.3.9 to 4.3.10, Yajnavalkya to Janaka: “There is a third state, the intermediate one (sandhya), the place of dream … there are no chariots there, no horses, no roads; he creates chariots, horses, roads … for he is the maker.” Is the creation of dream real, as the creation of waking is taken to be, or is it maya?

The opponent takes the first two sutras as his own. 3.2.1: in the intermediate place there is creation, for scripture says so; “sandhya” is the Veda’s own name for the dream state, which lies at the join of the two worlds, or of waking and deep sleep, and a text that says “he creates chariots” and closes with “he is the maker” must be believed. 3.2.2: and one shakha calls the Self the shaper of lovely things there, “the person who is awake in those who sleep, shaping one desire after another” (Katha 2.2.8), where “desires” means sons and the rest, the subject of Yama’s earlier offer to Nachiketa, and the shaper, the text goes on, “is the bright, that is Brahman, that alone is called the immortal.” If the highest Self makes the dream as it makes the waking world, the dream is as real as the day, and the Brihadaranyaka itself says “what he sees awake, that he sees asleep” (4.3.14).

3.2.3 answers: it is maya alone, since its nature does not show itself with the whole of what marks a real thing: place, time, cause and the absence of sublation. Chariots have no room inside the body, and the dreamer does not go out, since no sleeper covers a hundred yojanas and returns in a moment; a man lying in Kurukshetra who dreams he has gone to the Panchalas wakes in Kurukshetra, while the bystanders watch his body on its bed; “away from the nest the immortal moves” (4.3.12) is said of a self that stays inside the body and makes no use of it, and the same Upanishad says plainly that he “moves about within his own body” (2.1.18). The times are wrong, since a man asleep at night dreams it is day and lives through years in a muhurta. The causes are missing, since the senses have withdrawn and there are no eyes for seeing chariots and no stuff for making them. And the dream is sublated, by waking and even by itself, when the chariot turns into a man and the man into a tree. Scripture says it outright: “there are no chariots there.”

3.2.4: the dream is still a sign, shruti says so and those who know say so. “If he sees a woman in a dream while engaged in a rite for some wish, let him know success”; a black man with black teeth foretells death; the dream-readers call the elephant lucky and the donkey unlucky. The thing signified may be real; the dream that signifies it is sublated when the sleeper wakes. So “he creates chariots” is figurative, as “the plow supports the oxen” means that plowing is why oxen are kept: the dreamer is the cause of his dream because his good and evil deeds cause the delight and the fear it brings. The description of dream is given so that the Self’s own light may be told apart from the sun’s, and that purpose fails if the chariots are real. As for the Katha, “the person awake in those who sleep” restates something already known, the jiva, which another text calls “himself shaping the dreams by his own light” (Brihadaranyaka 4.3.9); and “that is Brahman” then teaches, like “that you are,” that this jiva is nothing other than Brahman. The world of space and air stands until Brahman is known as the Self of all; the dream is undone every morning. Its being maya is to be understood with that difference.

3.2.5: the jiva is a part of the Lord as a spark is of the fire, the objector says, so it shares his lordship and should make chariots by its wish. Shankara: the equality is there and is hidden, and it comes to light through meditation on the highest, for from him come the soul’s bondage and release, “when that god is known all fetters fall away” (Shvetashvatara 1.11), as a blind man’s sight is brought out by a strong medicine. 3.2.6: or the hiding comes from the soul’s union with a body, with senses, mind and objects, as fire lies hidden in the wood or under ash; the “or” rules out the thought that soul and Lord are two, since “it entered with this living self” (Chandogya 6.3.2) and “that you are” make the Lord the soul’s own Self. If the dreamer had the Lord’s power no one would ever dream what he fears. “Dream is the same as waking” (4.3.14) means only that dreams are built from the impressions of the day. The decision: the dream is maya, and the dreamer, though Brahman in truth, makes nothing there by his own power.

Deep sleep. The texts name several places for it: “when a man sleeps so soundly that he sees no dream, he has entered the nadis” (Chandogya 8.6.3); “through them he moves out and rests in the puritat, the sheath around the heart” (Brihadaranyaka 2.1.19); “then he becomes one with the Sat, he has gone to his own” (Chandogya 6.8.1); “embraced by the knowing Self he knows nothing outside and nothing inside” (Brihadaranyaka 4.3.21). Are these alternatives, the soul resting now in one and now in another, or one place described from several sides? The opponent says alternatives: all stand in the same case, “in the nadis,” “in the puritat,” and things named in the same case serve the same purpose, like rice and barley for the cake, so the sleeper takes one of them. 3.2.7 answers: the absence of dream takes place in the nadis and in the Self, both together, as scripture says. Option between Vedic statements weakens them, and the same case is used of things that combine, “he sleeps in the palace, he sleeps on the couch”; the Kaushitaki puts the nadis and prana, which is Brahman, in one sentence (4.20), the Brihadaranyaka puts the nadis and the puritat in one sentence, and the puritat is only the wall of the town inside which the space of the heart, already shown to be Brahman (1.3.14), lies.

Three places, then, and of them Brahman alone is the resting place; the nadis and the sheath are the roads, the lodging of the soul’s adjuncts. The soul does not rest in Brahman as a man rests in a house; “he has gone to his own” means it has returned to its nature, which it never left, having only seemed to become something else in waking and dream. This is why the sleeper knows nothing, “how should he know another?” (Brihadaranyaka 4.5.15), where a soul lodged in a vein would still have a world of others before it. 3.2.8: hence the waking is from that, from the Self: “as small sparks fly from a fire, so all the pranas come forth from this Self” (2.1.20), “having come back from the Sat they do not know that they have come back from the Sat” (Chandogya 6.10.2); had the soul options, scripture would sometimes wake it from a vein. What Shankara wants from this adhikarana is the one thing worth knowing about sleep: that the jiva’s lasting home is Brahman, and that the worlds of waking and dream do not touch it.

When the sleeper merges in Brahman, is it the same jiva that wakes? The opponent says there is no rule: pour a drop into the ocean and no one can draw out the same drop, so the soul that sank into bliss cannot rise as itself, and what wakes is the Lord or some other soul. 3.2.9 answers: the same one, because of work, memory, scripture and injunction. Men finish in the morning the work they left at night, and no one completes another’s half-done task; a man remembers what he saw yesterday and says “I am the one who was,” which no other self could say; scripture says “he hastens back as he came to the place from which he started, to waking” (Brihadaranyaka 4.3.16), “all these creatures go day after day into the world of Brahman and do not find it” (Chandogya 8.3.2), “whatever they are here, tiger or lion, wolf or boar, worm or gnat, that they become again” (6.10.2); and if another rose, sleep alone would be release and the injunctions of works and knowledge would be idle. Every other candidate fails: a soul from another body would leave that life cut short; a released soul cannot return to nescience, nor can the Lord, who never had it; and souls would reap what they never sowed. As for the drop, the soul differs from water in carrying marks of its own, its works and its knowledge; the swan is said to part milk from water that men cannot part; and in truth there is no drop at all, since Brahman itself, through its adjuncts, is called the jiva, and each set of adjuncts runs on through sleep as a seed and through waking as the plant. The one who slept is the one who wakes.

What is a swoon? The opponent counts the states of an embodied soul as three, waking, dream and deep sleep, with death as a fourth, and knows no fifth from shruti or smriti, so fainting must be one of these. 3.2.10 answers: in the senseless man there is a half-union, because that is what remains. He is not awake, since he perceives nothing, and his case differs from the arrow-maker who sees only his arrow, for the arrow-maker says afterward “I was aware of nothing except the arrow,” while the man who comes round says “I was shut in blind darkness”; a waking man holds his body up, and this one has fallen. He is not dreaming, being wholly unconscious. He is not dead, since warmth and breath go on, which is what the family checks at the heart and the nostrils before they carry a body to the forest or sprinkle it with water, and no one returns from Yama. And he is not asleep: a swooning man may stop breathing for a long time, his limbs shake, his face is dreadful and his eyes stare, while a sleeper breathes evenly with a calm face and closed eyes; a touch of the hand wakes the sleeper, and a blow from a club does not wake the other; sleep comes from weariness and a swoon from a blow. So it is half of one thing and half of another, deep sleep on one side, since like the sleeper he feels neither pleasure nor pain, and death on the other, since the swoon is death’s door: if work remains, speech and mind come back; if none remains, breath and warmth leave. That it is not commonly counted as a fifth state is because it is rare and compounded of the others, though physicians know it well.

With what does the sleeper unite? The pada now asks what Brahman is in itself, and the texts seem to pull two ways: “he to whom belong all works, all desires, all odors, all tastes” (Chandogya 3.14.2), and “it is not coarse, not fine, not short, not long” (Brihadaranyaka 3.8.8). Does Brahman have a double nature, with attributes and without, or one of the two? The opponent says double, since both kinds of text are scripture and both must be true. 3.2.11 answers: not even by place (sthana), by the adjuncts it enters, can the highest have a twofold mark, for everywhere scripture teaches it as one and the same. In itself one thing cannot both have color and lack it. Nor can its adjuncts give it a second nature, since contact with an adjunct never changes what a thing is: the crystal stays clear beside the red flower, and whoever sees it as red is mistaken; and Brahman’s adjuncts, earth and the rest, are themselves set up by nescience. So of the two sets of texts the one that describes Brahman’s nature wins, and those are the texts of negation, “without sound, without touch, without form, without decay” (Katha 1.3.15). (Ramanuja reads the same sutra the other way, as saying that Brahman everywhere bears the twofold mark of being free from evil and full of good qualities; the argument that follows is Shankara’s.) 3.2.12: the vidyas teach different forms, the objector says, four-footed (Chandogya 3.18.1), of sixteen parts (Prashna 6.1), the size of a thumb, with the three worlds for its body, named Vaishvanara, and if these come from adjuncts they are still taught.

No, because with regard to each such difference scripture declares Brahman “not so,” as when it says of the bright immortal person in the earth and the one in the body, “this is that Self” (Brihadaranyaka 2.5.1). 3.2.13: and some teach it outright, with a curse on the seer of difference, “by the mind alone it is to be seen; there is no diversity here; he who sees diversity here goes from death to death” (4.4.19), and the Shvetashvatara makes enjoyer, enjoyed and mover all Brahman (1.12). 3.2.14: then how is Brahman settled as formless and not also the other? Because the formless texts carry the main intent: “not coarse, not fine,” “without sound, without touch,” “that in which names and forms rest is Brahman” (Chandogya 8.14.1), “without body, within and without, unborn” (Mundaka 2.1.2), “without cause and without effect, without inside or outside” (Brihadaranyaka 2.5.19). These, as 1.1.4 showed, state what Brahman is; the texts of form enjoin a meditation, and where the two collide the text about Brahman’s nature is the stronger. 3.2.15: and like light Brahman takes on form, since the form-texts are not meaningless: as the light of the sun or the moon, after crossing space, bends with the finger it falls on and is straight or bent “as it were,” so Brahman takes “as it were” the shape of earth and the other adjuncts, and a text may teach that shape for the sake of worship without that shape becoming a second nature, since what comes from an adjunct is no attribute of the substance. 3.2.16: and scripture says it is that alone, intelligence: “as a lump of salt has no inside and no outside and is one mass of taste, so this Self has no inside and no outside and is one mass of knowledge” (4.5.13).

3.2.17: scripture shows this, and smriti says it too: “now the teaching: not this, not this” (2.3.6), “other than the known and above the unknown” (Kena 1.4), “from which words turn back with the mind, failing to reach it” (Taittiriya 2.9), the silence of Bahva when Vashkali asked him three times for Brahman, “I am teaching you and you do not understand; this Self is silence”; and in smriti, “it is called neither being nor non-being” (Gita 13.12), and Narayana to Narada, “that you see me with the qualities of all beings is my maya; do not know me so.” 3.2.18: for this very reason, because the Self is intelligence without difference and beyond speech, the books of release compare it to the sun’s images in water: “as the one bright sun, meeting many waters, is made many by its adjuncts, so the one unborn Self”; “the one Self of all beings dwells in each, and seems one and many, like the moon in the waters.” 3.2.19: the objection: the likeness fails, since there is nothing in Brahman’s case like the water; the sun is a body in one place and the water a body in another, while the Self is everywhere and nothing stands apart from it to receive its reflection. 3.2.20: the likeness holds, since a comparison rests on one shared point and never on total sameness, and the shared point is here: the reflection grows when the pool spreads, shrinks when it shrinks, trembles and divides with the water while the sun stays as it is, and Brahman, within the body and the other adjuncts, seems to grow and dwindle with them while remaining one.

Since the two agree on that, the comparison is sound, and the sutrakara is only explaining a comparison that scripture itself makes. 3.2.21: and scripture declares the entering: “having become a bird he entered the bodies as the person” (2.5.18), “with this living self it entered them” (Chandogya 6.3.2). Shankara also answers teachers who split these sutras into two adhikaranas, the second asking whether Brahman is being or thought: nothing is left for a second topic, since being without thought and thought without being are both denied, and two natures in one thing would reopen the plurality just refuted. Nor will he let the form-texts be swallowed into the formless ones as things named only to be negated: where plurality appears in a chapter on knowledge, as with the hundreds and ten horses of 2.5.19, it is named to be dropped; where it appears with an injunction to meditate, “he who consists of mind, whose body is prana, whose form is light” (Chandogya 3.14.2), it stands as taught, bears its own fruit, the warding off of harm, lordly power or release by stages, and sets that text in a class of its own. Texts about Brahman are not injunctions at all; they state a thing that is, as the rope is pointed out and the snake goes without any further command; “see this, hear this” only turn the eye; and true knowledge is neither made by a hundred injunctions nor stopped by a hundred prohibitions, since it follows the thing and never the will. What is decided: Brahman is without attributes everywhere and in every place; the texts of attributes serve meditation; and the reflected sun is the right picture of its presence in the body.

Brihadaranyaka 2.3 names two forms of Brahman, “the formed and the formless, the mortal and the immortal, the standing and the moving, the sat and the tya,” sorts the five elements between them, gives the essence of the formless, called the person, the color of saffron and the rest, and then says, “now the teaching: not so, not so (neti neti); for there is nothing higher than this, that it is not so.” What does the double “not” deny? The word “so” points to what is near, and near at hand are the two forms and the Brahman whose forms they are. The opponent says both are denied, one “not” for the forms and one for their owner; or Brahman alone, since a thing beyond speech and thought may well not exist, while the forms are plain to perception and cannot be denied, the repetition being for emphasis. 3.2.22 answers: the text denies the “so much” (etavattva) that was its topic, the forms, and then says something more. Denying everything would land in the void, and every denial of an unreal thing, the snake, rests on a real one, the rope; if nothing were left no denial could be made. Brahman cannot be the thing denied, since the chapter opened with “shall I tell you Brahman?” (2.1.1), since “he who knows Brahman as non-being becomes non-being” (Taittiriya 2.6), since “he is to be grasped as ‘he is’” (Katha 2.3.13), and since the Vedanta, having labored to establish Brahman, would be stultified; better never to touch dirt than to bathe after it, as the saying goes.

So the passage denies of Brahman, whose nature is permanent purity, intelligence and freedom, the whole limited form built up before, gross and subtle, down to the person of saffron hue, and leaves Brahman, the ground of every superimposition, untouched; the two forms were set out only to be denied, and the repeated “not” is best taken as emphatic, cutting off the question whether anything else might be Brahman. The “something more” is the clause that follows, “there is nothing higher than this,” or the name the text then gives, “the true of the true, for the pranas are the true and this is their true,” which no void could carry. 3.2.23: why then is this Brahman not perceived? Because it is unmanifest, scripture says so: “not grasped by the eye, nor by speech, nor by the other senses” (Mundaka 3.1.8), “unseizable, for it is not seized” (Brihadaranyaka 3.9.26); it is the witness in every seizing. 3.2.24: and in perfect meditation (samradhana) it is seen, by shruti and smriti: “some wise man, seeking deathlessness, turned his eye inward and saw the Self” (Katha 2.1.1), “when the mind is purified by the clear light of knowledge, meditating, he sees him who is without parts” (Mundaka 3.1.8), and the yogins “see him, the shining, the eternal.” Do the one who meditates and the one meditated on make two selves? 3.2.25: no; as with light, space and the sun, which seem divided by the fingers, pots and pools they fall on, the difference of selves comes from the adjunct on which the knowing light works, and scripture repeats the identity again and again.

3.2.26: hence the soul, its nescience gone, is one with the infinite, “he who knows that highest Brahman becomes Brahman” (Mundaka 3.2.9), “being Brahman he goes to Brahman” (Brihadaranyaka 4.4.6). Then the sutrakara states other views of the relation before he settles his own. 3.2.27: because scripture designates the two both as different (“he sees him,” “he goes to the divine person,” “who rules all beings from within”) and as one (“that you are,” “I am Brahman,” “this is your Self within all”), some hold the relation to be that of a snake to its coils, one as a whole and many in its hood and folds. 3.2.28: or like that of light to its source, both of them fire and yet spoken of as two. 3.2.29: or as before, as 3.2.25 said: for only if bondage is nescience is release possible; a soul really bound, as a state of the Self or a part of it, could never be unbound, and the promise of release would be absurd; and scripture does not teach difference and non-difference alike, since non-difference is what it sets out to establish, while difference it mentions as a thing already known from perception when speaking of other matters. 3.2.30: and because of the denial: “there is no other seer than he” (Brihadaranyaka 3.7.23), and the texts that deny a world apart from Brahman, “not so, not so,” “without inside or outside.” The decision: “not so, not so” denies the forms and keeps Brahman; Brahman is unmanifest, seen in perfect meditation; and the soul’s difference from it is the work of adjuncts and of nothing else.

Is there anything beyond this Brahman? 3.2.31 states the opponent’s case, and Shankara is clear that it is the opponent’s: something higher exists, because Brahman is designated as a bank, as measured, as connected and as divided. “That Self is a bank (setu), a boundary” (Chandogya 8.4.1), and a bank of earth and timber holds back water that is other than itself, while “having crossed the bank” (8.4.3) is like crossing a dam into a forest, so beyond the Self lies something that is other than the Self; “this Brahman has four feet, eight hoofs, sixteen parts” (3.18.2), and whatever has a measure, a coin for instance, has something outside it; “then he is united with the Sat” (6.8.1), “embraced by the knowing Self” (Brihadaranyaka 4.3.21), and what is joined to a thing, as men are to a town, is other than it; and the person in the sun and the person in the eye are two lords with two realms (Chandogya 1.6 to 1.7), like the kings of Magadha and Videha. 3.2.32 answers: the terms are used because of a likeness. Nothing exists apart from Brahman, since no proof of it is found: whatever has a beginning comes from Brahman and is no other than it, as the earlier books showed, and nothing beginningless stands beside it, since “being alone was this in the beginning, one without a second,” and since knowing one thing was promised to make all known.

The text says the Self is a bank; it does not say there is something beyond it, and to assume an unknown thing only so that a word may keep its ordinary sense is arbitrary; by the same logic the Self would be made of earth and stones. It is called a bank because it holds the world and its bounds in place as a bank holds water and marks off the fields, and “crossing” it means reaching it fully, as a student “crosses” grammar when he has mastered it. 3.2.33: the measures serve the mind, in the manner of the four feet: the dull, the middling and the keen cannot all fix their thought on the infinite, so Brahman is given quarters through its effects, as speech and three more are made the feet of Brahman as mind, and fire and three more the feet of Brahman as space (Chandogya 3.18), or as a coin is split into quarters for the sake of small trade. 3.2.34: connection and division come from difference of place, as with light: when the sense of difference born of the buddhi and the other adjuncts ceases with them, union with the highest Self is spoken of, and division is spoken of while they last, as the one light of the sun is said to be divided by walls and to join again when the walls fall, and as space is cut into pieces by the eyes of needles.

3.2.35: and only such a connection is possible, since “he has gone to his own” (Chandogya 6.8.1) makes the connection one of nature, and a nature cannot be lost as a town can be left; so the “connection” is the ceasing of nescience’s cover, the “difference” is nescience’s work, and the one space is said to be many as “the space outside a man, the space inside him, the space within the heart” (3.12.7). 3.2.36: and because of the express denial of anything else: “he is below, I am below, the Self is below” (7.25.1), “whoever looks for anything elsewhere than in the Self is abandoned by everything” (Brihadaranyaka 2.4.6), “Brahman alone is all this” (Mundaka 2.2.11), “there is no diversity here” (Brihadaranyaka 4.4.19), “than whom there is nothing higher, from whom nothing different” (Shvetashvatara 3.9), and no second self sits inside it, since it is “within all.” 3.2.37: by this its omnipresence follows, with the texts of its extent: “as large as this space is, so large is the space within the heart” (Chandogya 8.1.3), “like space, all-pervading and eternal,” “greater than the sky, greater than space” (Shatapatha 10.6.3.2), “eternal, all-pervading, firm, unmoving” (Gita 2.24). Had the bank been literal, Brahman would have had an edge; had the denials been set aside, there would be substances outside it; either way it would be limited, and it is without limit.

The pada closes on a question that joins Brahman to the world of ruler and ruled: the threefold fruit of action, pleasure, pain and their mixture, which beings taste in samsara. Does it come from the action itself, or from the Lord?

3.2.38: from him, the Lord, because only that is possible. The ruler who makes, keeps and withdraws the world and knows every difference of place and time can match requital to merit; an action perishes the moment it is done and cannot bear fruit at a later time, since nothing comes from nothing; and the apurva that the Mimamsaka posits as the deed’s invisible after-state is a thing without intelligence, like a block of wood or metal, which cannot act unless an intelligent being moves it, and for which there is no proof at all, since the fact of requital is explained as well by the Lord. 3.2.39: and because scripture declares it, “this great unborn Self is the eater of food, the giver of wealth” (Brihadaranyaka 4.4.24). 3.2.40: Jaimini, for the same reasons, holds that dharma, religious merit, gives the fruit: “he who desires heaven is to sacrifice” must have its object, so the sacrifice itself must bring heaven, through an apurva that is the deed’s unseen after-state or the fruit’s unseen fore-state; a single Lord could not account for so various a world, he would be charged with partiality and cruelty, and if the deed did not bear its own fruit no one would perform it. 3.2.41: Badarayana, however, holds the former view, because the Lord is designated as the cause of the deeds themselves: “he makes the man whom he wishes to lead up from these worlds do a good deed, and the man he wishes to lead down do a bad one” (Kaushitaki 3.8), and in the Gita, “whatever form a devotee wishes to worship with faith, that faith I make firm … and he obtains his desires, ordained by me” (7.21 to 7.22).

The fruit comes from the Lord, acting with regard to the deeds done, or, if one prefers, to the apurva that springs from them; and since he has regard to merit and demerit, the charges of partiality and of one cause for many effects fall away, as they did in 2.1.34. This is the ordaining of the fruit by Ishvara. Karma is the occasion of the fruit; the Lord is its giver.