The Brihadaranyaka Upanishad

Picture northern India some twenty-five or thirty centuries ago. In those days the deepest questions of life and death were not settled in books. They were settled in open assemblies and in forest huts. Kings staged contests of knowledge in their courts, the great scholars sat facing one another and took each other’s measure, and whoever left everyone with nothing to say walked off with the prize. The hero of such contests was Yajnavalkya, one of the most fearless minds of his age, a man who could silence a full assembly single-handed.

The name of the text tells you its temperament. Brihat means vast, aranyaka means a text of the forest, so the whole is a vast text composed in the wilderness, drawn from the closing portion of the old Shatapatha Brahmana. It falls into three kandas. This Upanishad does not ask how the world was made. It asks what is left when everything is taken away, who it is that is seeing, hearing, thinking. In that search, here, for the first time, the sentence was spoken that the whole later Vedanta tradition would keep repeating, “aham brahmasmi”, I am Brahman. And with it the method too, “neti, neti”, not this, not this.

The main figures of this Upanishad

Yajnavalkya: the towering rishi of that age, King Janaka’s court philosopher, and the founder of the Shukla Yajurveda tradition. He loses no debate.

Janaka: king of Mithila (Videha), who ran a kingdom and was also besotted with the knowledge of Brahman, and who convened assemblies on exactly these questions.

Maitreyi: Yajnavalkya’s wife and a brahmavadini, a woman given over to the search for Brahman. His other wife, Katyayani, was an ordinary householder, at home in the world of house and family.

Gargi Vachaknavi: the one woman scholar in Janaka’s assembly, whose questions the greatest learned men preferred to sidestep.

Uddalaka Aruni and Shakalya: two more formidable teachers in the assembly, who closed in on Yajnavalkya.

Prajapati: the creator, who taught gods, humans, and asuras, all three, from a single syllable.

Madhu Kanda · Chapters One and Two

Read it chapter by chapter

Each chapter has its own full page: the story, the dialogue, a summary, and pointers into the source. If this is your first reading, begin with chapter 2 (Maitreyi) or chapter 3 (Janaka’s assembly).

1. Chapter 1: The Ashvamedha, the Contest of the Breaths, and Aham BrahmasmiA sacrificial horse that is the whole universe, a hunger that is death, the contest of the breaths, and the first word spoken at the beginning of the world, I am.
2. Chapter 2: Neti Neti, Maitreyi's Question and the Honey TeachingGargya's twelve answers and the king's single reply, the road that runs inside a sleeping man, the two forms of brahman, and the conversation in which Maitreyi asked for deathlessness.
3. Chapter 3: Janaka's Assembly, Gargi's Arrows, and the ImperishableA thousand cows with gold bound to their horns, eight scholars with questions, Gargi Vachaknavi's two arrows, and the imperishable on which space itself is woven.
4. Chapter 4: Janaka, Yajnavalkya, and the Light of the SelfIn the assembly of Videha a king lays out every answer he has ever collected, and Yajnavalkya walks him through waking, dream, deep sleep, and the far side of death.
5. Chapter 5: One Syllable, Truth, and the Prayer at the Hour of DeathOne syllable of teaching, the worship of the heart and of truth, the fourth quarter of the Gayatri, and the prayer asked of the sun at the hour of death, still spoken today.
6. Chapter 6: Five Fires, Two Roads, and the Thread of the LineageThe breaths quarrel once more, five questions in the assembly of the Panchalas, the fire the world is cooking in, the road of the gods and the road of the fathers, and a line of teachers counted by their mothers' names.

And in the end, toward yourself

“Neti, neti.” Whenever we say, “This is what I am,” this body, this name, this rank, this savings, the Upanishad answers from behind, not this, not this. This does not empty you out. It lifts the finger off every handhold and points toward the one who is watching all of it.

And the shanti-mantra with which this Upanishad opens and closes reminds us of just this, “That is full, this too is full. Take the full out of the full, and the full still remains.” We are already that same fullness, with no road to travel from some incompleteness toward it. The Brihadaranyaka’s invitation is only this: put Maitreyi’s question to yourself once, of all these things I am chasing, which will truly make me immortal? And then, if only for a moment, turn toward the one who is asking that question.