On this page
The assembly hall of the Panchalas. This is a room where the business of a country gets done, the court of a ruling house with its officers along the walls, its petitioners waiting, and its learned men seated where everyone can see who has been given which place. King Pravahana Jaivali sits among his attendants, and through the door walks a young man carrying the particular confidence of a boy whose father is counted among the learned. His name is Shvetaketu, son of Uddalaka Aruni, and in that room the name does half his talking for him. The king looks him over and calls to him on a long drawn note, Young man! The boy answers on the same note, Sir! Your father has taught you? asks the king. The youth says Om, which means yes. Then the king sets down five questions, one after another, and to none of the five does that educated boy have an answer.
This is the sixth and last chapter of the Brihadaranyaka Upanishad, the second half of the Khila Kanda, the supplementary portion. In the chapters behind it the text has travelled from Maitreyi’s question to Janaka’s assembly and up to the high thin air of neti neti. Now it comes down into the courtyard of a householder and gathers what a living house has use for: the rank of prana, the two roads after death, the rite of a man who wants eminence, the rite of a man who wants children, and at the end a roll of the teachers through whose mouths all of this came down to us. The chapter asks whether we can see the fire the whole world is cooking in, and it asks as well what we intend to do with what we were handed.
The main figures of this chapter
Prana: the one breath-power of the body, whose threatened departure forces the rest of the senses to concede its rank.
Shvetaketu Aruneya: son of Uddalaka Aruni, a young man swollen with the pride of learning, who goes silent under five questions in the assembly of the Panchalas.
Uddalaka Aruni (Gautama): Shvetaketu’s father, a great teacher, who turns his son’s defeat into his own schooling and goes to the king as a student.
Pravahana Jaivali: the kshatriya king of the Panchala country, holder of the five-fire knowledge, who says this teaching had never until that day passed into the hands of a brahmana.
Yajnavalkya: the Vajasaneya, whom Uddalaka teaches the shrimantha rite, and through whom the stream of the Shukla Yajurveda runs onward.
Satyakama Jabala: the student who once went to a teacher carrying only his mother’s name, here the sixth holder of the shrimantha tradition.
Prajapati: the creator, who settles the quarrel of the breaths and, in the brahmana of the son-mantha, fashions woman and so opens the onward road of creation.
Eldest and best: the quarrel of the breaths, once more
The story opens with a list, and every line of it is a promise. Whoever knows the eldest, jyeshtha, and the best, shreshtha, becomes eldest and best among his own people, and the Upanishad says, “प्राणो वै ज्येष्ठश्च श्रेष्ठश्च”, prana indeed is the eldest and prana is the best. Being eldest and best among your own people was a settled and visible thing in that world, where a joint household ran on seniority, where the eldest ate first and spoke last and decided what the family would do, and where every man in a village knew his own place in a line that had been fixed before he was born. Then five more lines arrive in the same mold. Speech is vasishtha, the most richly settled. The eye is pratishtha, the footing on which a man stands firm on level ground and on broken. The ear is sampad, attainment, since all the Vedas came to their fullness inside the ear. Mind is ayatana, the house of everyone. And retas, seed, the power of generation, is prajati, since from it offspring and cattle increase.
The list is laid down so that what follows will make sense. These six pranas, the six powers of the body, fell to quarrelling over which was greatest, each with its own epithet by heart. Still arguing, they went to Brahma, which is to say Prajapati, and asked which of them was vasishtha. Prajapati gave them the answer that could serve as the scale for any dispute anywhere, “यस्मिन् व उत्क्रान्त इदं शरीरं पापियो मन्यते स वो वसिष्ठः”, he on whose going out this body is reckoned to be in its worst condition, he is the greatest among you. The measure of rank turned out to be simple: whose absence is felt hardest.
So the trial began, and the term of the trial is worth noticing. Each one goes out for a full year and comes back, since a year is the unit these people measured everything by, one turn of the sowing and the harvest and the rains and the cold, long enough for a household to discover exactly what it can do without. Speech went out first and stayed away a year. Coming back it asked, “कथमशकत मदृते जीवितुम्”, how did you manage to live without me? The others said, the way the mute live, silent, breathing with the breath, seeing with the eye, hearing with the ear, knowing with the mind, begetting with seed. Speech went quietly back in. The eye went next, returned after its year, put the same question, and was told, the way the blind live. The ear went, and was told, the way the deaf live. The mind went, and was told, the way the dull live. Retas went, and was told, the way the barren live. Each absence was felt, and through each absence life carried on. Every one of those five conditions was a person somebody in the village could point to, and the answer given to each departing power is the name of a neighbor.
Now the turn of prana. Here the Upanishad gives a figure that stands up in front of your eyes the moment you read it. Prana made ready to leave, and the way a great horse of the Sindhu country wrenches its tethering stakes out of the ground in one heave, so did prana wrench all the other breaths out of their places. Horses from the Sindhu were the finest anyone knew of, brought a long way and worth a fortune, and a valuable animal was picketed on a line with wooden pegs driven into the ground at each corner. Everyone had seen what happens when a horse of that size decides to go, the pegs coming up out of the earth with the dirt still on them and the whole line of ropes torn along with it. Speech, eye, ear, mind, seed, every one shook loose at the root. Then they spoke together, “मा भगव उत्क्रमीः”, Lord, do not go out. Without you we shall have no way of living. Prana said, then make me an offering, pay me my due. They said, so be it.
One by one each power laid its crown on prana’s head. Speech said, what I am as vasishtha, that you are. The eye said the same of pratishtha, the ear of sampad, the mind of ayatana, seed of prajati. Every quality the separate senses had taken for their own belonged to prana all along, and the senses had been running it on loan. Then prana asked, what will my food be, and what my garment? The answer came, whatever is eaten, from dogs down to worms and insects and moths, all of it is your food, and the waters are your garment.
A small daily habit is born right here. For the man who knows that everything is the food of prana, nothing is left that may not be eaten, nothing unclean to accept. That sentence carries a charge in a society where what a man could eat, and from whose hand, was the most carefully policed thing about him, and where a wrong mouthful was a matter the whole village would hear about. And water being prana’s garment is why shrotriyas, the men who carry the Veda, sip water before eating and again after. This is a thing done at every meal, a small brass vessel at the right hand, a sip taken from the palm before the first mouthful and another after the last. The Upanishad says they do it holding this in mind, that they are keeping the food, which is prana, from sitting there naked, dressing it in water before and after. This same story came in the first chapter of this Upanishad as the war of the gods and the asuras. Here it is a quarrel among brothers and sisters, and a year of absence that shows each of them the place that is properly theirs.
In short: the greatest is the one whose absence is felt hardest, and in the body that one is prana. Speech, eye, ear, mind, life continues through the loss of each, and the moment prana stirs, everything stirs. For the man who knows this, every food is prana’s food, and the sip of water is a small daily act of clothing that breath.
Five questions in the assembly of the Panchalas
Now the scene we began with. Shvetaketu Aruneya, son of Uddalaka the grandson of Aruna, came into the council of the Panchalas. King Pravahana Jaivali asked whether his father had taught him, and on hearing the boy’s yes, set down five questions. First, do you know how these creatures part company and take separate roads when they depart? No. Second, do you know how they come back to this world? No. Third, do you know why that world beyond is never filled, though so many go there dying over and over? No. Fourth, do you know at how many oblations the waters rise up, take on a human voice, and speak? No.
And then the fifth question, which is really the key to this whole brahmana. Do you know the way onto the devayana, the road of the gods, and the pitriyana, the road of the fathers, that is, by doing what do people enter the one and by doing what the other? The king recited a seer’s verse as well, “द्वे सृती अशृणवं पितॄणामहं देवानामुत मर्त्यानाम्”, two roads have I heard of for mortals, one of the fathers and one of the gods, and between those two moves everything here that stirs, everything that lies between father and mother, which is to say between sky and earth. The boy said, of these I know not a single one.
Consider where he is standing while he says it. A public hall, the king on the seat, the officers and the learned men of a rival country looking on, and the son of a famous teacher has been taken apart in five questions by a man of the warrior class, in front of people who will repeat the story. The king offered him lodging for the night, which was the ordinary courtesy owed a visitor of standing. The sting was too fresh for that. Shvetaketu left the offer unanswered, ran out, and got to his father. What he said is what every educated son says on some day of his life: you used to tell me we had been taught everything, and now look. Uddalaka asked in an even voice, what has happened, Sumedha? The boy said, that rajanyabandhu, that man of the warrior class, asked me five questions and I could not answer one of them. The word he uses is a sneer, and it is the reflex of somebody who has lost. And the boy laid all five in front of his father, in exactly the clipped form the king had used.
Here comes the most beautiful turn in this story. Uddalaka said to his son, my boy, understand this much, that whatever I knew, all of it I told you. This I do not know myself. Come, let us go there together and live as brahmacharins. The boy said, you go. And a formidable teacher of that age, a man students travelled long distances to reach, got up quietly and presented himself at the door of the kshatriya king where his son had come home beaten a few hours before. To go as a brahmacharin means to go as a boy goes, to live in the other man’s house, to serve him, to wait until he chooses to speak. The king rose, had a seat brought and water fetched, made him the arghya offering, and said, we grant the venerable Gautama a boon; ask whatever you wish. All of that is the reception owed to a great brahmana at a king’s door, water for the feet, a seat, the honey mixture in a dish, and it is being offered by the man who is about to be asked to teach.
Gautama said, the boon is granted already; now give me that speech you spoke in front of my son. The king tried to steer him away: Gautama, that one belongs among divine boons, ask me for a human one. Gautama answered that elephants and gold, cattle and horses, serving women, robes, all of this he had; let the king be no miser toward him in the matter of the thing that is vast, endless, without a far shore. The list is worth hearing as an inventory of what a man of his rank actually held, since the reception he had just been given was made of exactly these things and he is pushing the whole pile aside. The king said, Gautama, ask for it by the proper procedure, by the tirtha, the way a student asks a teacher. And Uddalaka said, I come to you. That was the old formula with which men of former times approached a teacher, spoken with firewood in the hand as a sign that the man was offering his service to the household fire, and having made that declaration, Uddalaka stayed on there.
Then the king said something that stands as an extraordinary admission inside this Upanishad. Gautama, hold no fault against us, neither you nor your forefathers, because this knowledge until today has dwelt in no brahmana; it has always stayed among the kshatriyas. Even so I shall tell it to you, for who could turn away a man who speaks as you have spoken. The moment is worth marking in the history of brahma-vidya: a brahmana teacher grows humble and learns from a king, and the king teaches him saying the knowledge now belongs to his house too. The two orders were held apart by everything else in that society, by what each could do, eat, marry and inherit, and here a possession moves across the line in one direction and a man crosses it in the other.
In short: five questions, and an educated boy with no answer to any of them. His father Uddalaka turns the defeat into his own schooling and becomes the king’s student. In this Upanishad the road to knowledge looks at only one thing, whether the asker came by the proper procedure.
The five fires: the blaze the world is cooking in
What the king taught is the panchagni-vidya, the knowledge of the five fires. To follow it, hold the sacrificial hearth in mind, and hold it as a physical thing, since everybody hearing this had built one that morning. A pit is dug and squared. Sticks of the right wood are split and stacked. The fire is started and goes through its stages in front of you: the samit, the fuel, taking hold; the smoke that comes off before the wood is properly alight; the archis, the clear standing flame; the angara, the bed of embers underneath; the visphulinga, the sparks that jump when a log settles. Then the oblation goes in, and out of the burning something comes. The king said the whole cosmos is a row of five such hearths, and whatever comes out of one hearth becomes the oblation poured into the next. The first hearth, “असौ वै लोकोऽग्निर्गौतम”, that world yonder is the fire, Gautama. Its fuel is the sun, the rays are its smoke, day is its flame, the quarters are its embers, the corner quarters are its sparks. Into this fire the gods pour the oblation of shraddha, faith, and out of that oblation King Soma, the moon, comes into being.
The second hearth is Parjanya, god of the rain cloud. Its fuel is the samvatsara, the year; clouds are its smoke, lightning its flame, the thunderbolt its embers, the rolls of thunder its sparks. Into it the gods pour Soma, and out of that comes rain. The third hearth is this world, this earth. Its fuel is the ground itself, fire its smoke, night its flame, the moon its embers, the stars its sparks. Into it the gods pour rain, and out of that comes food. These three hearths descend from sky to ground, and each time what was poured above becomes the fruit below. Anyone farming that country could follow the chain with his eyes, since the same sequence decided whether his family ate: the sun, the moon and its fortnights, the clouds coming up over the horizon in the month they were due, the rain, and then the green coming out of the ground.
The fourth hearth is purusha, man. “पुरुषो वा अग्निर्गौतम”, man indeed is the fire, Gautama. His fuel is the open mouth, prana his smoke, speech his flame, the eye his embers, the ear his sparks. Into this fire the gods pour food, and out of that comes retas. The fifth hearth is yosha, woman. “योषा वा अग्निर्गौतम”, woman indeed is the fire, Gautama. Her fuel, smoke, flame, embers and sparks are the parts of her body and her delight, and into this fire the gods pour the oblation of retas, out of which purusha, a new human being, comes into the world. He lives as long as he lives. And then he dies.
Then they carry him to the fire. Here the language of the Upanishad goes suddenly plain, and just as suddenly deep. That pyre’s fire becomes the fire, fuel is fuel, smoke smoke, flame flame, embers embers, sparks sparks. No figure of speech survives, because now the fire is an actual fire, built out of the same split wood in a clearing by the water, with the same smoke that comes before it takes, and the same sparks going up when a log settles. Into this fire the gods pour the man himself as oblation, and out of that oblation, “तस्या आहुत्यै पुरुषो भास्वरवर्णः संभवति”, a purusha of shining color comes into being. This is the answer to the king’s fourth question. Shraddha, which has the nature of water, keeps coming down as oblation after oblation, and at the fifth oblation those waters stand up and speak in a human voice, which is to say that the newborn cries.
Look at this teaching closely and a circle appears inside it. Shraddha to soma, soma to rain, rain to food, food to retas, retas to a human being, and the human being back into fire. What we call our birth is one link of that circle, and what we call death is one more oblation in the same circle. The vedic seer took up the figure of the yajna because in a yajna nothing burns idly. Every oblation is given to someone, and out of it something is born. A man who had spent his life at those fires knew that the whole procedure exists to transfer a thing from one state into another and send it where it is meant to go, and knew as well that nothing put into a fire is ever simply destroyed. The world too is running on the same terms. Everything in it is the oblation of the next thing, and the gods, meaning the powers of nature, keep this fire going without a pause.
In short: the sky world, the rain cloud, the earth, man and woman are the five fires, and the oblation of shraddha passing through them becomes soma, rain, food, seed and a human being. At the fifth oblation the waters speak with a human voice. The man who knows this begins to see his own birth as an offering.
Devayana, pitriyana, and those on neither road
Now the rest of the answers, and this is the passage readers have been holding in memory for centuries. Those who know the five-fire teaching in this way, and those who live in the forest and meditate on shraddha as satya, on faith as truth, reach archis at death, the flame. From flame to day, from day to the bright fortnight, from the bright fortnight to those six months in which the sun travels north, from those months to the world of the gods, from there to the sun, from the sun to lightning. Every stage on that list is a real division of the calendar these people kept, and they kept it by looking. The fortnight was read off the moon, the northward turn of the sun was read off where it came up against a known ridge or tree line morning after morning, and the day it stopped moving south and started back was a date everybody knew. The road upward is made of the bright half of every one of those pairs. There a manasa purusha, a person made of mind, comes to them and leads them on to the worlds of brahman. In those worlds of brahman they dwell far off, very far, and the Upanishad says, “तेषां न पुनरावृत्तिः”, for them there is no returning. This is the devayana.
Shankara’s commentary sets down a fine point here. Meditating on shraddha as satya he takes to mean that these people worship Hiranyagarbha, the collective prana, with faith, and that this is why their road climbs by way of sun and lightning instead of descending toward the moon. The manasa purusha he takes as a non-human being sent from the world of brahman, who takes inside whoever has arrived at the gate. The plain course of the text runs straight: shraddha, satya, the forest, and then a journey from flame to flame that never turns its head.
The second road belongs to those who conquer worlds by sacrifice, giving and austerity, the people who do good works without knowing this teaching. These are the solid men of that society, the ones who kept the fires, paid for the sessions, fed the brahmanas, married their daughters well and gave away cattle at every turn of their lives. They reach smoke. From smoke to night, from night to the dark fortnight, from the dark fortnight to those six months in which the sun travels south, from those months to the world of the fathers, and from there to the moon. Reaching the moon they become food, and the gods consume them there the way they say to King Soma, wax, wane. The merit on whose strength they arrived fills and empties like the moon going from full to new, and the emptying is visible from the ground every night for fifteen nights running.
And when that merit is used up, they come down by the same route the five-fire oblation came down. From the moon to space, from space to wind, from wind to rain, from rain to the earth. Reaching the earth they become food, then they are poured as oblation into the fire of man, then they are born from the fire of woman. Rising toward the worlds again and again, they keep going round in the same circle. This is the pitriyana. With that the king’s first two questions are answered: beings part onto two roads when they depart, and the ones who come back are the ones who went by way of smoke.
The answer to the third question, why the world beyond is never filled, lies inside these same two roads. Those who went by the devayana leave it unfilled because they have gone past the worlds altogether, and those who went by the pitriyana because they return. Then the Upanishad adds one more sentence, short and hard. Those who know neither of these two roads, who have no such knowledge and no sacrifice or giving or austerity either, become the insects and the moths and these creatures here that bite. That is the third place, and the Upanishad declines even to call it a road. Only a birth over and again, with no climb upward in it and no journey as far as the moon. The creatures named are the ones that were in the house every night, the insects circling the one lamp and going into it, the biting things that came up out of the wet ground in the rains, born in thousands and gone by morning, which nobody counted and nobody mourned. This was what all of Shvetaketu’s arrogance and all his father’s humility had been drawn toward.
In short: those who know this teaching and meditate on faith as truth go by the road of flame to the world of brahman and do not return. Those who sacrifice, give and practise austerity go by the road of smoke as far as the moon, and when the merit runs out they come down again as rain onto the earth. And those who know neither road are born as insects and moths.
Shrimantha: leaves on a dry stump
In the third brahmana the Upanishad turns toward the man who says, I want greatness, I want to reach the large thing. To him it hands an entire rite, which the tradition came to call the shrimantha. Mantha means a drink brought together by churning, and shri means prosperity, luster, the shine that draws other people toward a man. The season chosen is the northward course of the sun, the bright fortnight, an auspicious day, which is to say the rising half of the year and the rising half of the month, since the timing of a rite in that world was part of the rite. For twelve days the sacrificer keeps the upasad vow, living on restricted food, so that by the time the day arrives he has been hungry for a week and a half and the whole household knows what he is preparing for. In a bowl or cup of udumbara wood, the cluster fig, he gathers all the herbs and fruits, sweeps the ground, smears it, kindles the fire, spreads the grass, and under a male nakshatra mixes the mantha and begins to offer.
The prayer of the very first oblation opens the mind of this rite. O Jatavedas, O fire, however many gods there are inside you lying athwart and killing the desires of a man, to all of them I give their portion; let them be satisfied and let them satisfy me with every desire. What has been assumed here is that behind the wishes of ours that stay unfinished stand powers that have gone without their share. Then a long garland of oblations follows, and after each one the ghee left in the sruva, the offering ladle, is poured into the mantha, so that every god’s portion comes to rest inside that drink. The ladle is a small wooden thing with a shallow bowl at one end and a channel cut down it, and the last of the ghee is tipped off it deliberately each time, so that the bowl on the ground fills drop by drop with what has already been given away.
The roll of who receives an offering is itself this chapter in miniature. To the eldest, to the best, to prana, to vasishtha, to speech, to pratishtha, to the eye, to sampad, to the ear, to ayatana, to the mind, to prajati, to seed. That whole list from the first brahmana, in which each sense handed its crown over to prana, comes back here as oblation. Then to Agni, to Soma, to bhuh, to bhuvah, to svah, to the three together, to brahman, the priestly power, to kshatra, the ruling power, to what has been, to what is to come, to vishva, to sarva, to Prajapati. Whatever has happened and whatever will happen, whatever is and whatever is the whole of it, each gets its portion, and the remainder of every portion goes into that single bowl.
Then the sacrificer touches the mantha and speaks to it as though something living sat in front of him. He calls it whirling, blazing, full, steady, holder of one assembly, the hinkara made and the hinkara being made, the udgitha sung and the udgitha being sung, food, light, nidhana, which is the close of the chant, and samvarga, the one that draws everything into itself. Every station of the saman chant is brought down onto that bowl. A saman is sung in fixed parts, opening hum, the raised song, the close, and a singer trained in it has those divisions in his body the way a dancer has counts. Naming them one after another over a bowl of food puts the whole shape of a chant into it. Then he lifts it and says, we have known you, yours is the greatness; he is king, he is ruler, he is overlord; may he make me king and ruler and overlord too.
Now he drinks it, and as he drinks he recites the gayatri in a curious braided fashion, its three feet plaited into the honey verses of the Rigveda. After the first foot, on the desirable splendor of Savitar, he says, the winds pour honey for the keeper of the rita, the rivers pour honey, let the herbs be sweet for us, bhuh svaha. After the second foot, on meditating upon the splendor of the god, let the night be honey, the dawn honey, the dust of the earth full of honey, let heaven our father be honey for us, bhuvah svaha. After the third foot, which sets our thoughts moving, he says, let the forest tree be full of honey, let the sun be full of honey, let the cows be sweet for us, svah svaha. And at the end the sentence for whose sake all of this was done, may I myself become all of this.
He washes his hands and lies down behind the fire, head to the east. Sleeping beside a fire you have just fed, in the open, on the swept and smeared ground, with the embers still working, is part of the procedure and not an afterthought. In the morning he rises and stands before the sun in worship, saying, you are the one lotus of the quarters, and then, “अहं मनुष्याणामेकपुण्डरीकं भूयासम्”, may I become the one lotus among men. Then he comes back, seats himself behind the fire, and recites the vamsha, the names of the teachers from whom this knowledge reached him. The rite of a man who wants eminence arrives at a prayer to become a lotus in front of the sun and finishes with the saying of his teachers’ names. Whoever wants to rise has first to keep in mind the root he rose out of.
After this the Upanishad recites that lineage itself, and repeats one sentence along with it six times over. Uddalaka Aruni told this rite to his resident student Vajasaneya Yajnavalkya and said, “अपि य एनं शुष्के स्थाणौ निषिञ्चेज्जायेरञ्छाखाः प्ररोहेयुः पलाशानि”, if a man were to pour this even on a dry stump, branches would be born on it and leaves would break out. The stump is the one standing in the corner of a cleared field, cut years ago, gray and split, with the plow going around it every season and nobody expecting anything of it again. Yajnavalkya said the same sentence to Madhuka Paingya, Madhuka to Chula Bhagavitti, Chula to Janaki Ayahsthuna, Janaki to Satyakama Jabala, the same Satyakama who in the Chandogya went to a teacher carrying his mother’s name, and Satyakama to his own students. Every time the same sentence, palasha leaves on a dry stump.
At the end come one hard condition and an inventory. This rite is to be told to a son or to an antevasin, a student living in the house, and to nobody else. Both of those are people who stay, one by birth and one by residence, and a thing given only to them is a thing kept inside four walls on purpose. Four implements are of udumbara wood, the sruva, the chamasa, the fuel stick, and the two churning sticks. Ten village grains are used: rice, barley, sesame, black gram, anu, priyangu or foxtail millet, wheat, lentils, khalva and khalakula. These are the whole spread of what those fields produced, the fine grain and the coarse, the pulses that went in when the rice failed, and to gather all ten meant going around the village and coming back with a handful from several houses. They are ground and steeped in curd and honey and ghee, and the oblation of ghee is made. The Upanishad gives this inventory because the whole thing was a piece of work actually carried out in somebody’s kitchen and courtyard.
In short: for the man who wants eminence the Upanishad lays out a rite in which every power from prana to Prajapati gets its portion, and the remainder of all comes down into one bowl. The man who drinks it says, may I myself become all of this, and in the morning asks the sun to make him the one lotus among men. Six teachers called it the drink that puts leaves on a dry stump.
The son-mantha: the ladder of sap and a child’s secret name
The fourth brahmana opens on a ladder, and every rung of it is the sap of the rung below. “एषां वै भूतानां पृथिवी रसः”, of all these beings the earth is the sap. The sap of earth is water, of water the herbs, of the herbs the flowers, of the flowers the fruits, of the fruits man, and of man retas. The seed that gives rise to a new human being is the concentrate of the entire earth, carried up from soil to water, water to plants, plants to flower and fruit, and from fruit into us. That chain was visible work in that world, since the people saying it dug the soil, watched the rains fill it, watched the shoots come up, and ate what came off them a few months later, with nothing in between that anyone else had handled. Prajapati looked at this sap and thought he would fashion a pratishtha for it, a place for it to rest, and he created woman. That is the footing of this brahmana: woman is the resting place of the thickest sap in creation.
Then the Upanishad does the thing only a vedic seer could have done. It looks at the union of husband and wife and sees a yajna, the altar, the kusha grass, the stones for pressing the soma, the kindled fire in the middle, all of it. And it says that the man who knows this and acts with that sight before him gains the world of the man who performs the vajapeya sacrifice, and draws to himself the merit of those women, while the man who acts without knowing, taking it for pleasure alone, has his own merit drawn away by them. The vajapeya was one of the great public sacrifices, months of preparation and enormous expense, the kind of undertaking that made a man’s reputation across a region, and this brahmana says the same world is reached inside a marriage by a man who knows what he is doing. Naming three teachers, Uddalaka Aruni, Naka Maudgalya and Kumarharita, the Upanishad says that a great many mortal men, brahmanas by name, leave this world stripped of sense-power and stripped of merit, because they do this without knowing.
Shankara’s commentary calls this entire brahmana the path of the man with desire, who still wants the world and wants a child. It helps to know what a child meant in that house. Sons kept the fire alight when the father died, carried his body out, lit it, and then fed him every year with rice and water addressed to him by name, along with his father and his grandfather, so that a man without offspring had nobody standing between him and being forgotten. A household’s whole future sat in this one matter. The Upanishad puts that wish under the light of knowledge so that the wish itself turns into a rite. That is why there are mantras here even for the most private acts of the body. For spilled retas there is a prayer: let my luster come back to me, my sense-power, my portion; let the fires settle again in their proper stations. On catching sight of his own face in water a man is to say, in me be luster, sense-power, fame, wealth, merit. A sentence for each small moment, so that no moment of the day is left blind.
What this brahmana sets down next belongs to the household arrangements of its own time, and it is stated flatly. A marriage in that world was an agreement between two families, settled by the elders, and its declared purpose was children. Inside that arrangement a woman’s yashas, her renown, was a holding with real value, the thing her standing in the house and among the women of the village was made of, and the text treats it as something that can be taken from her or given to her by the words a man speaks. The lines run as follows. If she does not give herself to him, he is to buy her over with presents. If she still does not give herself, he may strike her with a stick or with his hand and overpower her, saying, with sense-power and with fame I take away your fame, and she becomes a woman without fame. The very next verse says that when she gives of her own will he says, with sense-power and with fame I give you fame, and the two of them become renowned together. In the same voice follow the mantras for holding conception back and for taking it on, a heavy curse laid on the man who goes wrongly to a learned man’s wife, and a warning against even wishing to trifle with the wife of a shrotriya who knows. The rules of the three days of the monthly period stand here too, and the bath that follows, since in such a house the days a woman kept apart and the day she returned marked out the calendar of a marriage as plainly as the fortnights marked out the month.
Then comes the list that turns this brahmana human all at once. A man who wants a son who will be fair, recite one Veda and live out his full span, he and his wife eat rice cooked in milk with ghee. A man who wants a son of tawny brown color who will recite two Vedas, the two eat rice cooked in curd. A man who wants a son dark and red-eyed who will recite three Vedas, the two eat rice cooked in water. Each of those dishes is a real dish with a real cost. Rice boiled in milk with ghee poured over it was festival food in a house that kept cattle. Rice in curd was ordinary. Rice in water was what you ate on a plain day. The husband and wife eat it together, that evening, having decided what they are asking for.
And a man who wants a daughter who will be learned, a pandita, and will live out her full span, the two of them eat rice cooked with sesame. A vedic text, twenty-five or thirty centuries ago, hands a householder the mantra for asking that his daughter be a scholar. After this the largest request of all, a son who will be learned, renowned, a frequenter of assemblies, a speaker of speech people want to hear, who will recite all the Vedas and live out his full span: for him, rice cooked with meat, of a young bull or an ox. That is the heaviest dish on the list and the one that costs a working animal, which tells you how the requests were ranked. The assembly named in that wish is the hall this chapter opened in, where Shvetaketu had gone silent.
Now the rite of the house. Early in the morning, having made ready the sthalipaka, grain cooked in a pot, with ghee, the husband offers to Agni, to the goddess Anumati, and to the god Savitar whose impulse is truth. He eats what remains, then gives to his wife. He washes his hands, fills a vessel with water and sprinkles her three times, saying, rise up and go from here, Vishvavasu, look for another young woman, join the wife to her husband. Vishvavasu is a gandharva, and gandharvas were held to have a claim on a girl before her husband did, so the first act of this rite is to send a prior holder away from her by name. Then he speaks the sentence that is the soul of this brahmana: I am ama, the breath, and you are sa, the speech; you are sa and I am ama; I am the saman and you are the rik; I am the sky and you are the earth. Come, let the two of us hold seed together, for a son, for wealth. The pairing of saman and rik is the pairing that makes a chant possible at all, since the melody has nothing to sing without the verse and the verse stays on the page without the melody.
After this come prayers for the child to Vishnu, Tvashtar, Prajapati, Dhatar, Sinivali and the Ashvins, and a lovely figure: as the earth holds fire in her womb, as the sky is with child by Indra, as the wind is the embryo of the quarters, so do I lay an embryo in you. At the hour of delivery he sprinkles his wife with water and says, as the wind shakes a lotus pond from every side, so let your child stir and come out together with the afterbirth. A birth in that house happened in a side room with the women of the family in it and no physician anywhere, and the husband’s part in it was to stand outside with a vessel of water and say this.
When the child has been born, the father takes it on his lap, sits by the fire, offers curd mixed with ghee, and says, growing in this house may I nourish a thousand in it; let this child’s line stay unbroken in offspring and in cattle; my breaths I offer into you with my mind. Whatever in the rite I have done in excess or left short, let Agni set it right. That last clause is the sentence of a man who knows that half of what he just performed was probably done imperfectly and says so out loud over his newborn. Then he brings his mouth close to the child’s right ear and says three times, speech, speech, speech. Then he mixes curd, honey and ghee, touches the mixture with gold, and gives the child a taste, saying, bhuh I place in you, bhuvah I place in you, svah I place in you, all three worlds I place in you. Gold was the incorruptible thing, the metal that came out of the ground and out of a fire unchanged, and it is touched to the first food a human being tastes.
And then the naming. The father says, “वेदोऽसि”, you are the Veda. The Upanishad says this is that child’s guhya name, his secret name, the one that lives underneath the name the world will give him. Secret names were taken seriously here, since a name in the hands of somebody who wished you harm was a handle, and this one is spoken once, into an ear that cannot yet hear, and then kept. Then the child is handed to its mother and put to the breast, and over that a prayer to Sarasvati, that the breast by which she nourishes all things worth having be here now for this child to drink from.
The mother is addressed as well: you are Ila, daughter of Mitra and Varuna, you have brought forth a hero out of a hero; may you be rich in heroes, you who have made us rich in a hero. And of such a child people say, you have gone past your father, you have gone past your grandfather; in shri, in fame, in the luster of brahman you have reached the topmost point, past which there is nothing further. In a society where a man’s position was largely the one his father had held, and where going past him was rare enough to be worth saying out loud, that is the largest thing anybody could be told. That the first sentence a child hears should be this one is the root wish of this brahmana.
In short: earth to water, water to plants, then flowers, fruits, man and seed, that is the ladder of sap, and woman is the resting place of that sap. The Upanishad turns a householder’s most private hours into a rite, hands him a mantra for asking that his daughter be a scholar, and names the newborn by speaking into its ear and calling it the Veda.
The lineage: teachers counted by their mothers’ names
And now the thing this Upanishad ends on, the vamsha. A list holding nothing except names, this man from that man, that man from another. One feature catches you at once. Pautimashiputra received it from Katyayaniputra, Katyayaniputra from Gautamiputra, Gautamiputra from Bharadvajiputra, Bharadvajiputra from Parasariputra. Each teacher’s name is made from his mother’s name. The son of Pautimashi, the son of Katyayani, the son of Gautami. The sequence runs through two mantras, more than forty names, every man his mother’s son, and comes to rest at Asuri.
On why this lineage runs by the names of mothers, the tradition has said several things. The plainest is that in those days a brahmacharin was identified through his mother, the way Satyakama Jabala was, the son of Jabala. That story is worth having in mind here, since Satyakama went to his teacher and was asked his family, and answered that he had asked his mother and she had told him she had served in many houses in her youth and did not know, and that her name was Jabala, so he was Satyakama Jabala. The teacher took him as a student on the strength of having heard the truth said out loud. Lineages of just this kind closed the second and fourth chapters of this same Upanishad, the Madhu Kanda’s and the Muni Kanda’s, and those too ran by mothers’ names. Here stands the lineage of the Khila Kanda, which also shuts the whole book. That is why it comes in two pieces, first the long thread of student succession that arrived at us, and then the thread running upward that says where this knowledge came down from.
In the third mantra that upward thread arrives, and here the names begin to sound familiar. Yajnavalkya received it from Uddalaka, the same Uddalaka who in this very chapter became King Pravahana’s student. Uddalaka from Aruna, Aruna from Upaveshi, Upaveshi from Kushri, Kushri from Vajashravas, Vajashravas from Jihvavan Badhyoga, Jihvavan from Asita Varshagana, Asita from Harita Kashyapa, Harita from Shilpa Kashyapa, Shilpa from Kashyapa Naidhruvi, Kashyapa Naidhruvi from Vak, Vak from Ambhini, and Ambhini from Aditya. The Upanishad says that these white yajus, which come from Aditya, are declared by Vajasaneya Yajnavalkya.
This is the old account that the Shukla Yajurveda tradition takes for its identity, that Yajnavalkya got his yajus from the sun, and that from this the branch was named Vajasaneyi and its recension was called shukla, meaning white. Inside this thread the names Vak and Ambhini climb above any human reckoning. Vak is speech, Ambhini a power joined to the waters, and Aditya the sun. Before the word there was speech, behind speech some deeper power, and behind that, light. Counting the names of its teachers, this Upanishad walks up a ladder from man to god.
The fourth and last mantra treats the thread as the same as far as Sanjiviputra and then counts one further branch beyond him: Mandukayani, Mandavya, Kautsa, Mahitthi, Vamakakshayana, Shandilya, Vatsya, Kushri, Yajnavacha Rajastambayana, Tura Kavasheya, and Tura Kavasheya received it from Prajapati, Prajapati from brahman. And then the sentence on which this whole Upanishad comes to rest, “ब्रह्म स्वयंभु । ब्रह्मणे नमः”, brahman is svayambhu, self-existent; to brahman, salutation. The book that spoke aham brahmasmi and loosened every handhold with neti neti lowers its head in its final line. The salutation goes to the one seated at the root of every name, the one this thread began from.
In short: at its close the Upanishad counts the thread of its teachers, first the masters known by their mothers’ names, then from Yajnavalkya back through Uddalaka to Vak, Ambhini and Aditya. The white yajus came from the sun, and that is this tradition’s own account of itself. Above all of them stands self-existent brahman, saluted in the final line.
And in the end, toward yourself
Three times in this chapter a list comes forward, and behind all three lies the same thing. The senses hand their crowns over to prana, the oblations pour their remainder into one bowl, and the teachers hand their names to the teacher who comes after. Each time somebody sets himself inside something larger and grows large through it. We spend our days collecting separate prizes for our speech, our eye, our mind. This chapter asks who stands behind all of them, the one whose stirring makes everything else stir, and whether we have ever paid him his due, one breath’s worth of attention.
Lay the five-fire teaching over your own life once and look. The food on today’s plate was rain, before the rain moonlight, and before that somebody’s shraddha. What we are is the sap of the earth, arrived here by way of flower and fruit. Knowing that, eating slows down a little and living grows a little lighter. And keep Uddalaka in mind, who heard how his son had been beaten and got up himself and stood at that same door as a student. At the age when men only teach, he went to learn, and he went to a house where his own defeat was already the news of the day. The smaller our pride in what we know, the more doors stay open in front of us.
And at the end, that secret name. Saying speech three times into a newborn’s right ear, the father gives him his name, you are the Veda. Every one of us was given that name once, whether or not anyone spoke it into our ear. It is still there underneath the name the world handed us. This Upanishad closes by counting the thread of its teachers and saluting self-existent brahman, and its real counting is finished on the day we call to mind that secret name inside ourselves and get ready to hand on what we were given, the way six teachers repeated one sentence six times, that even on a dry stump leaves will come out.
Source: Brihadaranyaka Upanishad, chapter 6, brahmanas 1 to 5; read against the Sanskrit, with Shankara’s reading noted where readings differ.