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All three fires are awake in the hall of sacrifice. The verse has been recited; the singing comes next. Three singers sit on kusha mats, throats cleared, eyes half closed. A low hum rises first, hum, the way a heavy door stirs on its pin a moment before it swings. Then the prastotar lifts his voice and lays a road down for the melody. Along that road the udgatar says Om and carries the highest stretch of the song upward. The pratihartar catches it at the middle and folds it back, and at the end all three come down together and set the song gently on the ground. Five pieces, joined to one another the way one breath is joined to itself.
The first chapter of the Chandogya Upanishad rested on a single syllable, Om, worshiped there under the name udgitha. The second chapter steps away from that syllable and comes to the whole song, the samasta saman, drilling one exercise over and over through twenty four khandas: seat the pieces of the song on the pieces of the world. No teacher argues with a student here, no king holds court, no starving brahmana walks into a sacrifice. What stands here is a craft, and the craft is this, that a singer learn to read the world by the frame he handles in his throat every morning. That makes this the driest stretch of the Upanishad, and by the same stroke the most finely grained.
Begin with the thing itself, because the word saman covers something narrower than a song. A saman is a melody. It exists on its own, apart from any words at all, held in memory as a shape of rising and falling tone with fixed places to breathe, fixed lengths for every vowel, and meaningless syllables packed in at fixed points to carry the voice over the long stretches. And it has a name. Gayatra, rathantara, brihat, vamadevya, vairupa, vairaja, shakvari, revati, yajnayajniya, rajana: those are names of tunes, and a trained singer holds hundreds of them the way any working musician holds a repertoire. A tune gets laid over a verse, and the same tune can be laid over a different verse without becoming a different tune, and the verse under it does not change what the melody is called. So when the eleventh khanda says the gayatra is woven into the breaths, it is speaking about one particular melody that every man in that enclosure could hum from memory, a thing with edges and a name, and it is telling him what that melody is fastened to.
Every one of those melodies falls into the same set of parts, and the parts are handed out among throats. The hum comes first, then the road of the tune, then the high stretch, then the answering turn, then the setting down, and in the fuller form two more pieces are worked in. The pieces are not decoration on the melody; they are how the melody is built, the way a house is built of a sill, posts, a ridge and a roof, and a singer who has sung since boyhood knows the joints of that frame more exactly than he knows the rooms of his own house. He handles it in the dark, half awake, thousands of times. He can tell you where the seam is between the prastava and the udgitha in a tune he has not sung in a year.
Which brings up the question this chapter lives or dies on. Why would a grown man spend his mornings deciding that spring is the hinkara and summer the prastava, that goats are the hinkara and cows the udgitha. The answer sits in what he owns. A carpenter carries a straightedge and finds himself checking every wall he passes against it, because the straightedge is the one true thing in his bag and the world is full of walls. The singer owns a frame of five parts and seven parts, and he owns it to a fineness nothing else in his life approaches. So the Upanishad hands him back his own instrument and tells him to measure with it. Lay the frame against the rain, against the year, against the herd, against the hours of a day, against your own breath and speech and eye, and the places where the two line up are the joints of the thing you were looking at.
And there is a hard edge on this that a modern reader can miss. The joinings are not private poetry. A fastening of this kind has a name, bandhu, a kinship, and the whole ritual intelligence of this period runs on finding them, because two things built to the same frame are held to be handles on each other. Work the one within reach and you have worked the one out of reach. A saman sung by a man who knows what his portion is fastened to does what it was commissioned to do; the same notes out of a throat that does not know deliver the sound and nothing else. The first chapter made that point at the expense of three professionals. Ushasti Chakrayana walked into a king’s session, asked the prastotar, the udgatar and the pratihartar to name the deity their own portion hung on, and three men who could sing faultlessly sat down in silence. This second chapter is the answer sheet, and it goes through the fastenings one at a time until there are twenty four of them.
The main figures of this chapter
The udgatar: the priest who raises the highest stretch of the song out of Om, and around whose voice every other piece of the saman arranges itself, before and after.
The prastotar and the pratihartar: two fellow singers, one who lays the road of the melody, one who takes hold of it at the middle and turns it home.
The seven limbs of the saman: hinkara, prastava, adi, udgitha, pratihara, upadrava and nidhana; these are the true characters of the chapter, and everything else is what they are laid upon.
Prajapati: whose brooding heat drew out the three Vedas, and out of them the three utterances bhuh, bhuvah, svah, and out of those three the syllable Om.
The yajamana: the householder on whose resolve and expense the whole sacrifice stands, and who in the twenty fourth khanda asks for the world that was left out of the accounting.
The Vasus, Rudras, Adityas and Vishvedevas: the owners of the three pressings, who hand a knowing yajamana his share with their own hands.
Good itself is the saman: the meaning hidden in the song’s name (khanda 1)
The chapter sets down a large claim in its first line, and sets it down plainly. “समस्तस्य खलु साम्न उपासनꣳ साधु”, worship of the whole saman is good, and whatever is good is what people call saman. “यत्खलु साधु तत्सामेत्याचक्षते”, whatever is truly good, that they call saman; and whatever is ungood they call asaman. This is no philosophical proposition waiting to be argued into place. It is evidence lifted out of the daily speech of that time. In a society where singing had sunk so deep that goodness and song came to share one word, the sentence works as a reminder of something the mouth already knew.
The Upanishad then counts out two turns of ordinary speech. People say, that man went to him with saman, and what they mean is that he went with decency in his hands. They say, that man went to him with asaman, and what they mean is that he came carrying bad intent. The second idiom is even more domestic. Something good happens and the mouth says, ah, saman for us, meaning, ah, good for us. Something bad happens and the mouth says, alas, asaman, meaning, alas, this is bad. The language had hung goodness and tune on a single peg.
This overlap is no accident. The business of a saman is joining. In a song where seven throats carry seven separate pieces and one whole thing still comes of it, a single voice slipping off its place scatters everything. Goodness works the same way, as a kind of agreement, between oneself and another, between what is said and what is done, between the intention and the outcome. Where that agreement breaks, a life goes out of tune, and we have our own names for being out of tune: bitterness, dishonesty, the feeling of something coming apart.
The khanda states its fruit as well. For the man who knows it this way and worships, good practices begin to arrive of their own accord, and they arrive with their heads bowed. The word is abhyasha, meaning this stands very much within reach. The Upanishad promises nothing falling out of the sky. It says only that when the recognition settles in a man that being good and being in tune are one thing, goodness starts collecting around him, the way the open strings of a tanpura sound on their own when the right note is struck beside them.
In short: the whole chapter stands on this one footing, that saman and sadhu are two names for one thing. The frame of a song is the shape goodness takes when it is audible. So the twenty four worships that follow all teach the same lesson underneath, which is to hear the world as one bound song, every separate piece a note inside it.
The song in five pieces, and laying it over the world (khandas 2 to 6)
Before going further it is worth knowing what a saman actually is in performance. The singer of the Sama Veda does not read out the verse; he mounts a melody on it, and that melody falls into five parts in a fixed order. First the hinkara, the deep hum that opens the throat of the song, wordless, with no syllable inside it. Then the prastava, in which the prastotar lays out the road of the tune. Then the udgitha, the highest and longest stretch, which the udgatar begins with Om. Then the pratihara, in which the pratihartar takes hold of that height and folds it back. And last the nidhana, the settling in which all of them bring the song to the ground.
Now look at that shape closely. It holds an opening, a climb, a summit, a descent, and a place of rest. Those five links turn up in anything that begins, swells, comes to its full size and stops. For a singer the shape is as familiar as his own fingers. The Upanishad picks up that familiar thing, puts it back in his hand, and tells him to measure the world with it. That is the device of the chapter and its finest quality, since a man learns fastest through the tool he already holds.
One word is going to carry most of the weight from here on, and it comes off a loom. Prota means woven in, the way the crosswise thread is carried through the threads held on the frame. Cloth is the standing image because everyone in that world had watched it made: the warp stretched and waiting, the weft driven through it, and after enough passes there is one fabric and no way to lift a single thread out of it without pulling the whole piece apart. When the Upanishad says a saman is woven into fire, or into the seasons, or into the body, it is claiming that kind of bond. The melody is not painted onto the seasons as a comparison anybody could make up. It is being called the thread already running through them, which a singer can find and take hold of.
The first laying out is over the worlds. Climbing upward, the earth is the hinkara, fire the prastava, the mid-space the udgitha, the sun the pratihara, and the sky the nidhana. Then the order runs back down: the sky is the hinkara, the sun the prastava, the mid-space the udgitha, fire the pratihara, and the earth the nidhana. Notice that on both passes the mid-space keeps its seat at the udgitha, the way the middle point of a swing rope holds its place through the forward push and the backward one alike. For the man who knows this, the text says, the worlds arrange themselves both ways, going up and coming down.
The second laying out is over rain, and here the shape shows itself even more clearly, since every person alive has watched a storm. The wind that runs out ahead is the hinkara, the one that lifts dust and carries the news. The gathering of the cloud is the prastava. The falling of water is the udgitha, the fullest stretch of the song. The flash of lightning and the crack of thunder are the pratihara. And the lifting of the cloud, the moment the downpour stops, is the nidhana. For the man who worships in this way, the text says, it rains, and he makes it rain for others too.
The third laying out covers all waters. The cloud massing together is the hinkara, its raining the prastava, the streams running east the udgitha, the streams running west the pratihara, and the sea the nidhana, the place where every current arrives, comes to rest and gives up its name. The fruit of this worship is put in very solid words: he does not die in water, he becomes a man of the waters. Once a person has heard the whole circuit of water as one song, water stops being his enemy.
The fourth laying out is over the seasons, and this may be the loveliest of them, since the wheel of the year already turns in the shape of a song. “वसन्तो हिङ्कारः ग्रीष्मः प्रस्तावो वर्षा उद्गीथः शरत्प्रतिहारो हेमन्तो निधनम्”, spring is the hinkara, summer the prastava, the rains the udgitha, autumn the pratihara, winter the nidhana. In spring the year clears its throat, in summer it lays its road, in the rains it opens its full voice, in autumn it holds that voice back, in winter it goes quiet. For the man who knows this the seasons arrange themselves and he becomes ritumant, a man with the weather walking beside him.
The fifth laying out is over animals, and here the order climbs by size. Goats are the hinkara, sheep the prastava, cows the udgitha, horses the pratihara, and the human being the nidhana. The cows stand in the middle, at the udgitha, because cattle wealth was the fullest sound that society could make. And the human being comes last, at the nidhana, where the song settles, since this is the place all that livestock finally comes to rest in. For the man who knows this, cattle come to him and he becomes pashumant, a man with animals.
In short: five khandas set one frame down in five places, the worlds, the rain, the waters, the seasons and the animals. Each time the same five links come up out of it, an opening, a climb, a summit, a descent, a rest. The real work of this worship is a habit, that whatever arrives in front of you gets heard as a complete song and not as a heap of loose events.
The parovariyas saman in the breaths: the ladder inside (khanda 7)
Everything laid out so far has been outside. The seventh khanda turns inward for the first time and sets this same five part song on the pranas, on the faculties through which we touch the world at all. “प्राणो हिङ्कारो वाक्प्रस्तावश्चक्षुरुद्गीथः”, breath is the hinkara, speech the prastava, the eye the udgitha, and past that the ear is the pratihara and the mind the nidhana. One new word joins the list here, a word absent from every earlier laying out: parovariyas, meaning each one higher than the last, upward and upward again.
Take the meaning of that word slowly. Breath moves, the lowest rung, present in everything alive. Speech stands above breath, because it pours breath into meaning. The eye stands above speech, because in one instant it takes in what speech would need an hour to hand over. The ear stands above the eye, because it works in the dark and brings news from behind your back. And the mind stands at the top, because whatever the other four carry in becomes something only on reaching it. The five sit on no single floor. They build a staircase.
That is the particular gift of this khanda. In the earlier layings out the order came from outside things, from high to low or from earlier to later. Here the order comes from depth. And so the fruit takes the same shape: for the man who knows this, his own life goes on becoming higher and higher, and he wins worlds each loftier than the last. Recognizing a staircase as a staircase is the first condition of climbing one. After this the Upanishad closes the five part section in a single line and turns toward the seven.
It is worth noticing what this inward turn costs the earlier layings out, which is nothing. The rain does not stop being a saman when the breath becomes one. Both stay on the shelf, and the singer who has both can move between them; he hears a storm come in over the fields and hears his own breath at night, and the same five joints stand up in each. That portability is the whole point of learning one frame very well instead of many frames adequately.
In short: the last step of the fivefold worships comes in from the outside world to the inside of a person. To know breath, speech, eye, ear and mind as the five pieces of one song, and to recognize them as a rising staircase, is the parovariyas saman. For the man who knows this, his own stature climbs the same stairs.
Seven pieces in speech: the full song of talking (khanda 8)
From the eighth khanda the count changes. Five limbs until now, and seven from here. It is worth knowing what has been added. After the prastava one more piece arrives, the adi, the first open tone in which the melody takes on its real body. And after the pratihara one more, the upadrava, the stretch in which the udgatar makes one more run upward before everyone comes down together into the nidhana. So the full order runs hinkara, prastava, adi, udgitha, pratihara, upadrava, nidhana.
This sevenfold song is laid over speech, and the way it is laid is unlike anything else in the chapter. Here no objects are used, only sounds. Whatever in speech is like hum, that is the hinkara. Whatever is like pra, that is the prastava. Whatever is like a, that is the adi. Whatever is like ud, that is the udgitha. Whatever is like prati, that is the pratihara. Whatever is like upa, that is the upadrava. And whatever is like ni, that is the nidhana.
Look at what has happened. All seven are the opening pieces of the names of the song’s own limbs. Pra opens prastava, ud opens udgitha, prati opens pratihara, upa opens upadrava, ni opens nidhana. So every time one of these prefixes comes into ordinary talk, a limb of the saman has sat down on the tongue. Our daily speech is built of the same bricks the saman is built of. The observation is fine grained and very solid: speaking is itself a song, and for a man who knows this, speaking becomes a practice.
The fruit carries the color of speech as well. Speech yields him her milk, the text says; whatever there is of milk in speech comes to him, and he becomes annavan and annada, a man with food and a man who can digest it. The old way of putting it was that speech does not stay barren for him, that whatever he says bears. A man whose words carry a tune has words that carry weight, and weight in the end brings bread to the house.
In short: the sevenfold saman is made by adding the adi and the upadrava, and its first laying out is over speech itself. Our prefixes are the very names of the song’s limbs, so a small saman hides inside every sentence we utter. The man who speaks with that recognition finds his speech carrying him all the way to food.
The sun’s whole day, in seven parts (khanda 9)
The ninth khanda gives the steadiest picture in the chapter. Here the sevenfold saman is laid over the sun, and before laying it the Upanishad explains the name. The sun is always the same, therefore it is sama, therefore it is saman. And it is the same toward everyone; whoever looks at it feels that it faces him, it faces me, it faces me. Whatever behaves one way toward all is sama, and sama is saman. After this the text says that all these creatures here hang upon it.
Now the day is divided. The time before the sun comes up is the hinkara, that ash colored hour when light is still only a rumor. The animals hang on this piece, and so it is then that they make their hin sound; the first lowing in a cattle shed lifts out of exactly that darkness. The moment first light breaks, the prastava begins, and human beings hang on it; and so a man’s hunger is to have his name taken, to be praised, to be spoken about. The day’s first stretch and a man’s first appetite sit in the same place.
Then comes the sangava hour, mid morning, when the cows are gathered in to graze. This is the adi, and the birds hang on it. That is why they stay up in the air with nothing beneath them, holding themselves aloft on their own strength alone. Midday is the udgitha, the highest and fullest stretch of the day, and the gods hang on it; that is why they are counted the best among the children of Prajapati. The summit of the song and the summit of the day carry the same tenants, the ones who live highest.
The time after midday and before the afternoon proper is the pratihara, and the darbha grasses hang on it. That is why they stay gathered up and held together, standing without scattering to the ground. The time after the afternoon and before sunset is the upadrava, and the wild animals hang on it. That is why in that hour, the instant they see a man, they break for a thicket or a burrow. That panicked running at dusk has given its name to the stretch of the song where the voice makes one more dash upward.
And the moment the sun goes down, the nidhana comes. The fathers hang on this piece, which is why they are laid down, put to rest, quieted by the taking of their names. In this way a whole day becomes a whole song, one that opens with the lowing of cattle and comes to rest on the names of ancestors. The man who worships the sun as the sevenfold saman starts living inside the song he watches being performed in front of his eyes every day of his life.
In short: the sun’s day divides into seven stretches, and a different household hangs on each one, the animals, human beings, the birds, the gods, the darbha grass, the creatures of the forest and the fathers. This worship teaches that the hours from dawn to dusk are no flat strip. They rise and fall, and every hour belongs to somebody.
Twenty two syllables and the saman past death (khanda 10)
The tenth khanda looks the strangest and turns out to be the deepest. Here the saman is laid over nothing outside itself. Here the names of the song’s seven limbs are counted out, syllable by syllable. The mula names it before it counts anything: “अथ खल्वात्मसंमितमतिमृत्यु सप्तविधꣳ सामोपासीत”, now let him worship the sevenfold saman that is atmasammita, made to one’s own measure, and atimrityu, carrying past death. Every other worship in this chapter ties a man to the world. This one claims to carry him over the boundary that the world stops at.
The counting runs like this. Hinkara has three syllables, prastava has three as well, so the two come out equal. Adi has two and pratihara has four; borrow one syllable from the pratihara and hand it to the adi, and both stand at three, equal again. Udgitha has three and upadrava has four; three and three come out equal, and one syllable is left standing over, and counted by itself that leftover comes to three as well. And nidhana has three, equal on its own. Added together they make twenty two syllables, “तानि ह वा एतानि द्वाविꣳशतिरक्षराणि”.
This borrowing and lending is more than arithmetic. There is conduct hidden in it. The limb that had less was given from the limb that had more, and no limb was cut down; the work was only to make them even. The whole song stands on that evenness, and the evenness is what makes it sama, which is to say what makes it saman. The claim made in the opening line, that the good itself is the saman, gets shown here, come down into the counting of syllables where anyone can check it.
Now the heart of the number twenty two. With twenty one a man reaches the sun, the text says, since counted from here the sun stands twenty first. Shankara opens the count: twelve months, five seasons and three worlds make twenty, and the sun is the twenty first. So at twenty one a man arrives where nothing in this world lies further on. And with the twenty second he conquers past the sun as well, “तन्नाकं तद्विशोकम्”, that is the place of no pain, free of sorrow. Reaching the sun is a great thing, and the Upanishad still sets down one more syllable, and by that one syllable grief ends.
The khanda closes by saying that the man who knows this wins the conquest of the sun, and a conquest higher than that one. And then the phrase is doubled, samopaste samopaste, in the way the Upanishads mark the finish of a section. The sevenfold saman comes to its end here, and with it the whole stretch of inward reckoning within the song shuts its door.
In short: the syllables of the song’s seven names are counted, evened out, and come to twenty two. At twenty one a man reaches the sun, and by the twenty second he passes beyond it, into what the text calls the place without sorrow. This is the saman called atmasammita and atimrityu, a song cut to one’s own measure that walks out past the edge of death.
The named samans and their vows (khandas 11 to 20)
From the eleventh khanda to the twentieth a new rhythm starts, and it repeats ten times. Each khanda picks up one famous saman of the Sama Veda: gayatra, rathantara, vamadevya, brihat, vairupa, vairaja, shakvari, revati, yajnayajniya and rajana. These were names singers handled every day, the way a musical house keeps the names of its ragas in daily use. Each khanda says that this saman is woven into such and such a thing, prota, the thread already running through it. Then it counts out the five limbs, then it names the fruit, and at the end it lays down a vow.
These ten names would have landed on the first listeners the way the names of standard pieces land on players who share a repertoire. A man hearing rathantara knew the tune, knew roughly where in a long day it fell, knew which of his teachers had a particular way of taking its climb, and could have started humming it in the middle of a sentence. The chapter is going down a list of pieces that a working singer performs in the course of his year and telling him, for each one, what it is hooked into. Ten khandas, ten hooks, and the list is arranged to travel: it starts at the breaths inside a man, goes out to fire and the marriage bed and the sun and the rain, widens to the seasons and the worlds and the animals, comes back into the hair and skin and bone of the body, and ends among the deities. By the end the singer has been handed his repertoire back with the world attached to it at ten points.
And the vows are professional before they are moral. A man who curses the rain has said, with his own mouth, in front of witnesses, that the thing he sang at dawn is worth cursing. Every listener who heard him sing the vairupa that morning now knows exactly how much of it he meant. The vow keeps the singer from being the first person to break the fastening he spent the morning making.
The vow is where the life of this whole stretch sits. The first nine khandas told a worshiper what the worship would yield. Here for the first time something is asked of him. And what is asked is no severe discipline. It is a very plain piece of conduct: the thing in which you have seen a song, do not speak ill of it. That is the condition. A worship stays unfinished so long as the worshiper fails to carry the same respect into his ordinary daily dealings with that same thing.
The gayatra is woven into the breaths, “एतद्गायत्रं प्राणेषु प्रोतम्”: mind is the hinkara, speech the prastava, the eye the udgitha, the ear the pratihara, breath the nidhana. The man who knows this becomes full of breath, lives his whole span, lives in the light, grows great with offspring and cattle, great in fame. Its vow is to be mahamanah, large minded. The rathantara is woven into fire: the rubbing of the sticks is the hinkara, the rising smoke the prastava, the blazing the udgitha, the coals the pratihara, the dying down the nidhana. Its vow is to neither sip water nor spit while facing the fire.
The vamadevya is woven into mithuna, the coming together of woman and man. The approach is the hinkara, the winning of consent the prastava, being together the udgitha, being with one another the pratihara, and arriving past time the nidhana. The Upanishad does not hesitate here for a moment, neither blushing nor decorating; it treats this limb of a householder’s life as the same music it found in fire and in rain. The fruit is that he becomes a pair, and pair comes from pair. And the vow is that he turn nobody away.
The brihat is woven into the sun: the rising sun is the hinkara, the risen sun the prastava, midday the udgitha, the afternoon the pratihara, the setting the nidhana. Its vow is to speak no ill of the burning sun, however hard the glare comes down. The vairupa is woven into parjanya, the rain god: clouds massing, the cloud forming, the raining, lightning and thunder, then the lifting. Its fruit is cattle of every kind and of beautiful kinds, and its vow is to speak no ill of a raining sky, even when the work of the fields halts.
The vairaja is woven into the seasons, the same order from spring through winter that had already come in the fifth khanda, and here it is stated plainly as woven into the seasons. The fruit is that he shines with offspring, cattle and the luster of brahman, and the vow is to speak no ill of the seasons. The shakvari verses are woven into the worlds: earth, mid-space, sky, the directions and the sea. The fruit is that he becomes a man of the worlds, and the vow is to speak no ill of the worlds.
The revati verses are woven into animals, the same order of goat, sheep, cow, horse and human being, and the vow is to speak no ill of animals. The yajnayajniya is woven into the limbs, and this laying out is over one’s own body: hair is the hinkara, skin the prastava, flesh the udgitha, bone the pratihara, marrow the nidhana. The fruit is that he stays whole in his limbs and goes lame in none. The vow here runs a little differently, that marrow be left uneaten, for one year, or for a lifetime. The rajana is woven into the deities: fire, wind, sun, the stars and the moon. Its fruit is the world of those deities, their splendor and union with them, and its vow is to speak no ill of brahmanas.
Repeated ten times over, this frame makes one thing clear. To speak ill of a thing you have once seen a song in is to put your own song out of tune. When the glare burns you, it is still the summit of the saman you worshiped at dawn. When the rain blocks your road, it is still the udgitha. The body growing old is still that yajnayajniya you had called your own song. The real test of worship comes in no quiet seated hour. It comes when that very thing arrives wearing the face of inconvenience.
In short: ten khandas show ten famous samans woven into ten things, from the breaths up to the deities, and down into the bone and marrow of the body. A vow is attached to each, and nearly every vow says one thing: whatever you have seen a song in, do not curse it. This is the place where worship turns into conduct.
One saman woven into everything, and the singer’s manner (khandas 21 and 22)
The twenty first khanda gathers every laying out and makes them one. Now no single thing carries the song; one saman is shown woven into all of it. The three Vedas are the hinkara. The three worlds are the prastava. Fire, wind and sun are the udgitha. The stars, the birds and the rays of light are the pratihara. Serpents, gandharvas and the fathers are the nidhana, “एतत्साम सर्वस्मिन्प्रोतम्”, this saman woven into everything there is. Notice that each limb now holds a group of three instead of one item, like a large song inside whose every note three more notes are sounding.
After this comes a verse, and it is the highest sentence in the chapter. Of these fifteen things standing in five sets of three, “तेभ्यो न ज्यायः परमन्यदस्ति”, nothing is greater than they are and nothing lies beyond them. Having counted fifteen things the Upanishad declares that the counting has left nothing outside. Whoever knows this knows everything, and all the directions carry him their tribute. And then the last vow arrives, of a different order from every vow before it, “सर्वमस्मीत्युपासित”, let him worship with the thought, I am all this.
The turn here is enormous. Until now the worshiper stood outside and laid a song over the world. Here he walks inside that song and says, this entire spread is my own extent. The udgitha that was one syllable in the first chapter has come out the size of the universe, and the singer has come out the size of the universe with it. What the Chandogya Upanishad will say further on as tat tvam asi, you are that, makes its first faint sound right at this spot.
The twenty second khanda comes back down to the ground and talks about something very fine grained: the throat. A singer of this training has more than one voice available to him, and the choice is made deliberately before he opens his mouth, the way a player decides how hard to bow a string. He can put an edge on the tone and make it roar, he can keep it soft and let the edges blur, he can hold it clear and cut, he can drive it hard and strong, he can make it break upward in a cry. Each of these settings is the property of a deity, and singing in one of them is a way of placing the song in that deity’s hands.
The udgatar chooses what kind of voice he will sing in, and every kind of voice belongs to some deity. The roaring voice belongs to Agni, and it is good for cattle. The voice that cannot quite be pinned down belongs to Prajapati, and the one that can be clearly pinned down to Soma. The soft and smooth belongs to Vayu, the smooth and strong to Indra, the cry like the krauncha bird to Brihaspati. One voice remains, broken and put out, and that one belongs to Varuna.
Here the Upanishad gives a clear instruction, “तान्सर्वानेवोपसेवेत वारुणं त्वेव वर्जयेत्”, let him practice all of them and leave the one belonging to Varuna alone. A singer should master every color of voice, and stop short of the color in which the voice sounds sunken, cracked, gone out. The matter is one of the throat, and the matter is larger than the throat. Where the tune starts going out in a piece of work, a man should stop and set the tune right, since a voice that has gone out delivers nothing to a listener except that same condition of having gone out.
Then the feeling to hold while singing is described, and this sits among the tenderest passages of the chapter. Keep this in mind as you sing: let me sing deathlessness for the gods, “स्वधां पितृभ्य आशां मनुष्येभ्यस्तृणोदकं पशुभ्यः”, svadha for the fathers, hope for human beings, grass and water for the animals, heaven for the yajamana, and food for myself. Holding these in the mind, allowing no lapse of attention, let him sing the praise. Five requests, his own last of all, and his own only for bread. To human beings falls hope. In the whole chapter nothing is said more exactly than that.
Last comes pronunciation. All the vowels are the bodies of Indra, all the sibilants the bodies of Prajapati, all the stopped consonants the bodies of Death. If anyone faults a singer on his vowels, let him answer that he has taken refuge in Indra and Indra will reply for him; on the sibilants, refuge in Prajapati; on the stops, refuge in Death. And the handling runs this way: let the vowels be spoken with resonance and strength, thinking, let me give strength to Indra; let the sibilants be neither swallowed nor thrown out, kept open, thinking, let me hand myself over to Prajapati; and let the stops be spoken with the lightest touch, barely grazed, kept from running into one another, thinking, let me draw myself back from Death.
In short: in the twenty first khanda every laying out becomes one and the vow changes to, I am all this. The twenty second returns to the throat and lays out whose voice is whose, which voice to avoid, what to ask for whom while singing, and with what feeling each class of sound is to be touched. The height of knowledge and the fineness of pronunciation are set down in one breath.
Three branches of dharma, Om, and the door of the world (khandas 23 and 24)
The twenty third khanda opens on something that seems to arrive from nowhere in this long sequence about singing, and it has arrived from somewhere. “त्रयो धर्मस्कन्धा यज्ञोऽध्ययनं दानमिति”, there are three branches of dharma; the first is sacrifice, study and giving. The second branch is austerity alone. And the third is the brahmacharin who lives in his teacher’s house, who wears himself entirely into the household of his teacher. All three of these attain worlds of merit, and then one line leaves all of them standing, “ब्रह्मसꣳस्थोऽमृतत्वमेति”, the man established in brahman reaches deathlessness.
This is the same thing the twenty first khanda had just said with sarvam asmi, now put into the language of work done. Sacrifice, study, giving, austerity and the years in a teacher’s house all secure very high worlds, and a world means a place, and from every place there is a coming back. Being established in brahman is no place, so there is no coming back from there either. The chapter is packed with worships, and right here it also marks the limit of what worship can carry a man to.
After this a very old story is told in two lines. Prajapati brooded over the worlds, and out of the heated worlds the three Vedas flowed. He brooded over them, and out of the heated Vedas flowed three utterances, bhuh, bhuvah, svah. He brooded over those, and out of the heat of those three came Om. The brooding here is no punishment. It is the act of pressing something down; each time what remains grows smaller and grows thicker, until one syllable is all that is left standing in the vessel.
And then the image comes that lodges in a person on first hearing. “यथा शङ्कुना सर्वाणि पर्णानि”, as all the leaves are pinned through by a single stalk, so all speech is pinned through by Om. The fingers that stitch leaf cups do exactly this every day, driving one sliver through a heap of scattered leaves and making a single object out of them. And in its closing sentence the Upanishad adds that all this here is Om, all this here is Om. The udgitha of the first chapter comes back and ties the second chapter shut.
The last khanda needs one piece of the working day in front of it. A soma sacrifice runs in three pressings, three separate rounds in which the stalks are crushed, the juice strained and offered, and the singers sing over it. The morning pressing comes first, then the midday pressing, then the third pressing in the afternoon, and the three of them lay out the shape of the day for everybody on the ground, priests, patron and household alike. Each pressing has its owners among the gods, and the portions are spoken for in advance the way seats at a table are spoken for.
The twenty fourth khanda, the last of the chapter, opens with a question, and there is a small restlessness in it. The knowers of brahman say that the morning pressing belongs to the Vasus, the midday pressing to the Rudras, and the third pressing to the Adityas and the Vishvedevas. Then where is the yajamana’s world? Feel the arithmetic of that from where he is sitting. He fixed the days, he emptied his storehouse, he has fed and housed a company of priests, he has been awake before every dawn of it, and the accounting of the day assigns the morning to the Vasus, the midday to the Rudras and the afternoon to the Adityas and the Vishvedevas. Every portion is spoken for and his own name is nowhere in the list. The man who does not know this, how is he even to perform. Let him perform knowing.
And then the procedure is given, in fine detail, down to the place and the direction. Before the morning recitation begins, let the yajamana sit behind the garhapatya fire, facing north, and sing the vasava saman: open the door of the world, that we may see you, for sovereignty. Then let him offer and say, “नमोऽग्नये पृथिवीक्षिते लोकक्षिते”, homage to Agni who dwells in the earth and dwells in the world, find a world for me, for this yajamana; this indeed is the yajamana’s world, and there I shall go. Then he says, at this point, past the end of life, svaha, “अपजहि परिघम्”, strike away the crossbar. Then let him stand up, and the Vasus hand him the morning pressing.
Before the midday pressing the same order runs, with the place changed: now he sits behind the agnidhriya fire, facing north again, and sings the raudra saman, for wide sovereignty. The offering goes to Vayu, who dwells in the mid-space. The Rudras hand him the midday pressing. Before the third pressing he sits behind the ahavaniya fire and sings the aditya saman and the vaishvadeva saman, for self rule and for empire. The offering goes to the Adityas and the Vishvedevas, who dwell in the sky. And they hand him the third pressing.
Each time the same call is repeated, each time the same sentence that this is the yajamana’s world and there he will go, and each time the same request, throw off the crossbar, slide the bolt back. Three fires, gods in three regions, three pressings, and all three times one man asking for a place of his own. The khanda ends by saying that the man who knows this knows the full measure of the sacrifice. The chapter’s accounting comes out even right here: the man who learned to lay the pieces of a song over the world is given, at the end, his own place in it.
In short: having counted the three branches of dharma, the Upanishad says that the man established in brahman is the one who reaches deathlessness. Then Om, drawn out of Prajapati’s heat, pins all speech together like a single stalk through leaves. And in the last khanda the yajamana sits behind each of the three fires asking for the door of a world, and all three times the gods hand him his share.
And in the end, toward yourself
This chapter carries no story. No teacher is explaining anything to a student, no king is bowing before a seer. One exercise is repeated twenty four times. The repetition is its method, and the practice is its meaning. The singer who goes from hinkara to nidhana every day gets that order into his fingers; and once it has settled inside a person, the rain and the seasons and the day and the breath and the body begin to sound in the same order to him. This is a discipline for changing the way a man hears, and nothing gets added to the world outside him.
There is a very plain tool in it for your own days. Take the work that is in your hands and try hearing it in five pieces. A hum it starts with, a road you lay for it, a height where it comes into full voice, a turn where it has to be held back, and a settling where it has to be let go. People who get stuck at the summit find their work going out of tune, since no song is finished without its nidhana. Letting go is a part of the song too, as practiced a part as the lifting.
And at the end, that vow, which this chapter repeated ten times over. Do not curse the burning sun, the raining sky, the seasons, the worlds, the animals, your own limbs. Whatever you have once heard a tune in, keep your respect for it on the day it goes tuneless, because that is exactly where worship gets tested. And when that respect has ripened, the Upanishad says its last word, sarvam asmi, I am all this. The song laid out over the world comes home and sits down inside the singer, and that is the largest fruit this chapter has to give.
Source: Chandogya Upanishad, chapter 2, khandas 1 to 24; read against the Sanskrit, with Shankara’s reading noted where readings differ.