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The sacrifice is finished and Vajashravasa is giving away everything he owns. The enclosure has been swept, the fires have burned down to a steady red, the priests who conducted the rite stand in a loose half circle waiting to be paid, and the neighbors have come in to watch a man do in public what he announced he would do. Cows are being led out as the fee, one behind another, halters in the hands of the herdsmen, hooves lifting a fine dust that hangs in the slanting light. The line of them has crossed the courtyard and gone out through the gate. His son Nachiketa stands at the edge and watches, and what he sees goes into him like a splinter. The cows are old. Their water has been drunk, their grass has been eaten, their milk has been taken, and no strength is left anywhere in them. A man who keeps cattle can read an animal the way a banker reads a ledger, from the teeth, from the slack of the hide over the hips, from the shriveled udder, and every person standing in that courtyard can read these. Something comes down into the boy at that moment. The Sanskrit gives it one word, shraddha, the trust that lets a thing be taken seriously, and with that trust comes a hard thought: what worlds does a man walk into after a gift like this.
This Upanishad comes from the Katha branch of the Krishna Yajurveda and finishes in two chapters of three vallis each. A branch is a family of reciters, generation after generation of them, who hold one shape of the Veda in memory and hand it down by mouth, syllable by syllable, with the accents in place. This is what such a family carried. Its frame is plain enough for a child to hold on first hearing: one boy, one door, three boons. Inside that plain frame sits the question no assembly had settled, what becomes of a man when he dies, and the one who answers it is Death himself. A story that begins with three hungry nights travels out to the chariot with its horses, the edge of a razor, the fig tree hanging with its roots in the sky, and comes to rest on the knots inside a human heart.
The main names in this text
Nachiketa: Vajashravasa’s son, who asks one question three times after watching his father’s gift, and then sits three nights without food at the door of Death.
Vajashravasa: the father at the sacrifice, called Gautama and Auddalaki Aruni in the Sanskrit, whose single sentence sets the whole Upanishad moving.
Yama: lord of death, who settles three nights of hunger with three boons, first deflects, then tempts, and at last gives in and opens the most hidden teaching he holds.
Shraddha: what came down into the boy while the fee was being handed out; the Sanskrit names it in a single word, and without it this story never starts.
The Nachiketa fire: the altar taught in the second boon, whose bricks Yama counts out himself, and which afterward carries the boy’s own name.
Old cows, and a boy’s three questions
Vajashravasa had performed the sacrifice in which the giver hands over all he has. It is the most public thing a householder can do. He declares the intention, engages the priests, feeds the people who come, and then, in front of all of them, strips his house down to its walls. Everything that made him a man of standing is carried out through his own gate while he watches. What he gets back is invisible and lies in the future, so the only proof of his seriousness is the quality of what leaves the yard. The Sanskrit says the whole of this in one line and then, at once, names the son. The boy is at the age where a person has learned to ask questions and has yet to learn how to stay quiet. He counts the cows walking out into the fee and works the arithmetic inside himself: these animals have nothing left in them to give, so what fruit is his father buying with them. The Upanishad keeps the sum in the open. It says outright that the worlds a man reaches by such giving carry a name with no joy in them, anandah.
The boy’s stomach turns because of what a cow was to that house. Wealth in that world stood on four legs. A family counted itself in cattle the way a family now counts itself in acres and accounts, and a cow gave milk twice a day, calves every other year, dung dried into fuel for the kitchen fire and smoothed onto the floor, and at the end of her long life a hide. She was the unit of exchange, the dowry, the fine, the ransom. A cow whose milk has stopped and whose organs are spent is a mouth to feed with nothing coming back through it, and a priest who receives her receives an expense. The fee that closes a rite is called dakshina, and the whole point of it is that it should cost the giver something. It is the place where the man’s inner seriousness becomes a number that other people can count. His father has found a way to make the number large and the cost nothing.
Two roads lie open to the boy now. Stay silent, or say it to his father. And silence is the road a son is expected to take, because his father is the yajamana, the man for whom the entire rite is performed, the one whose standing rides on it, and a boy speaking out in that enclosure would put a stain on the day in front of the priests and the guests. He finds a third one, the kind only children find. He makes himself into the thing being given away and asks, “Father, to whom will you give me?” The question is exact. A man who has vowed to hand over everything he owns owns his son as well, and the boy has walked himself into the line of cattle and asked to be counted. He asks once and gets no answer. He asks a second time, and again nothing. At the third asking his father’s patience snaps and the words come out of him, “mrityave tva dadami”, I give you to Death.
A sentence spoken in that courtyard cannot be pulled back. In a rite everything runs on speech. The formulas have to come out of the mouth without a slip, in the right order, on the right breath, and a syllable misplaced can spoil the work of days. A man standing inside that enclosure is standing inside his own word. And a thing asked three times has been made formal; the third answer is the one that stands, which is why the boy asked three times and why the father, having answered on the third, has no way back. In a house where everything is being handed over, a word is as real a gift as a cow.
Here is the first turn of the story, and the most affecting one. The boy does not cry and he does not argue. He talks his own mind down, and the way he does it belongs to someone much older. He says that among many he walks first, among many he walks in the middle; what business of Yama’s will be done through him today. Then he reminds himself of the thing every generation forgets, to look ahead at how the earlier ones went and to look back at how the later ones will go. And then comes one of the quietest lines in this whole Upanishad, “sasyam iva martyah pachyate sasyam ivajayate punah”, a mortal ripens like grain and like grain comes up again.
In that one comparison the boy has cut the fear out of his own going. He is the boy who counted his father’s cows going out as the fee, cows that had drunk their water, eaten their grass, given their milk, and had nothing left to give. Grain ripens, is cut, and comes up again. Nachiketa sets out. The Sanskrit describes no road, gives no farewell scene, offers not one word from his mother. That silence is hard, and the Upanishad lets it stay hard. The next thing we are told is that the boy has reached the house of Yama and Yama is away.
Three nights he sits there at the door without food. Those three nights weigh as they do because of what should have happened the moment he arrived. A guest reaching a house at evening is taken in without a question asked about who he is. Water is brought for his feet, a seat is spread for him, water is given for his mouth, and then he is fed, and the householder and his family eat afterward, from what is left. A house that has almost nothing still does this, and a house that fails at it has done the one thing the neighborhood will remember. On those three nights the Sanskrit spends two lines, and both of them are warnings, spoken to the son of Vivasvan, the child of the sun, as Yama is called here, master of a house like any other man. The first: a brahmana guest enters a house the way Vaishvanara, the fire that lives in all men, enters it, so bring water for him and put that fire out. A guest at the door is a live coal carried indoors; the water set down in front of him is what keeps it from burning the house.
The second cuts deeper, and it is an inventory of everything a household saves up. In the house of the small-minded man who lets a brahmana sit hungry, hope and expectation, good company and kind speech, sacrifice and merit, sons and cattle, all of it is eaten by that hunger. The sacrifice and the merit are the two halves of what a man builds in a lifetime, the rites he performs at his own fire and the works he leaves standing in the open, the well dug at the edge of the village, the mango trees planted along the road, the shed where travelers sleep out of the rain. A hungry guest at the door eats all of it while he sits there. Even in the house of Death a guest holds this right.
On the fourth day Yama comes back. The first thing he does comes out of a householder’s shame. He folds his hands and says that the guest has passed three nights in his house without eating, that a brahmana guest is worthy of salutation, that salutation be to him and well-being to his host; and in return, let three boons be chosen. Three nights for three boons, one for each night, the arithmetic of a man settling a debt he can name exactly. The lord of death is paying for a lapse in his own house, and out of that payment this entire Upanishad is about to open.
In short: The story begins with an unfinished gift, where a father is handing over what is of no further use to him. The boy’s shraddha forces one question out of him three times, and his father’s anger sends him to the door of Death. That door stays shut for three nights, and when it opens it opens with three boons.
The first boon, the second boon, and a fire that was given a name
The first boon the boy does not ask for himself. He asks it for the house he left behind. His words are that Gautama’s resolve be calmed, that his mind be glad, that his anger go out of him, and that when I come back, released by you, he know me and speak to me. Notice what the boy leaves out. He asks for no remorse, no reckoning, no admission of a wrong done. He wants recognition kept and conversation kept. The first wish of a child standing at the door of Death is that his father talk to him when he gets home.
Yama grants it on the spot, and in granting it he uses another of the father’s names, Auddalaki Aruni. A man in that world carries his own name, his father’s, and the name of the line he comes out of, and to be addressed by the lineage name is to be placed, the way a village placed a stranger by asking whose son he was before asking anything else. Yama names the man twice over, and by doing it he sets the father back inside his family, with the son restored to his place in it. He says the man will know the boy as before, that his anger will leave him once Yama has let the boy go, that he will sleep easy through his nights, and that he will see his son come out free from the mouth of death. One phrase there carries a great deal, “sukham ratrih shayita”, to lie down at ease through the nights. A father who gave his son away in anger would have served his sentence in his own sleeplessness, and the son has that sentence lifted with the very first thing he is offered.
The second boon the boy asks for the world in which there is no fear. He describes that world first, and in describing it he says Yama’s own limit to his face: in the world of heaven there is no fear of any kind, you are not there, and nobody there is frightened of old age; having crossed both hunger and thirst, a man lives there past sorrow, in gladness. There is something in the boy’s choice of the two things crossed. He has been sitting at this door for three nights on nothing at all, and the world he asks about is the one where hunger and thirst have been left behind. Then he asks: you know the fire that carries a man to that heaven, tell it to me, I am one who trusts.
This time Yama holds nothing back. He lays the whole ordinance of that fire out in the open, which bricks go into the altar, how many of them, and in what order they are laid. That list is the technical heart of the whole Veda this boy’s people carried, and it is a builder’s manual. An altar of this kind is raised out of thousands of fired bricks, laid in courses, shaped to a plan, each brick set down with its own formula spoken over it, the count fixed and the sequence fixed, the ground measured out with a cord and pegs before a single one goes down. It takes many hands and many days, and a brick in the wrong course undoes the work. The Sanskrit does not repeat the detail here; it says that Yama told him the fire that stands at the beginning of the worlds. The real matter comes after.
The boy gives the whole of what he has heard back to Yama exactly as it was said to him. Nothing in that world is written down. There is no page to check against, no copy in a box, and a body of knowledge this exact survives only inside people who can say it back without a slip. Repeating a teaching to the teacher, in his hearing, in his words, is the only receipt anyone issues, and until the pupil has done it the transmission has not happened. This test of learning weighs so much for the Upanishad that it gets a line of its own, and Yama is pleased.
Being pleased, he does what no promise required of him. He says: today I give you one more boon, off the count. This fire will be known from now on by your name, and take this many-formed shrinka as well. From this moment the altar is called Nachiketa. A rite carries the name of the man who first set it down, and every household that lays this fire in the centuries after will say the boy’s name while doing it, which is a kind of continuance a father’s house could never have given him. Then Yama tells its fruit: whoever lays this fire three times, who joins with the three and keeps up the three acts, crosses over birth and death; and whoever, knowing these three, kindles the Nachiketa fire, pushes the nooses of death aside in front of him and lives past sorrow, in gladness. Shankara reads the three as mother, father and teacher, and the three acts as sacrifice, study and giving.
The second boon closes here. Yama sets his own seal on it: this is your fire that goes to heaven, which you chose with the second boon, and people will speak of it by your name; now choose the third. One thing has been running quietly under all of this. Each time, the boy has asked for something that will come back and serve somebody else, and up to the third boon he has asked for nothing on his own account.
In short: The first boon is for the house, that the father’s anger cool and recognition survive. The second is for the fire that carries a man to a world past fear, and the boy repeats it back word for word as he heard it. On that repeating Yama is pleased, and gives the altar the boy’s own name.
The third boon, and everything Yama offers in exchange
The third question the boy has been carrying with great care. He says: there is this doubt about a man who has died, some saying he is, some saying he is not; this I want to know, taught by you; of the boons, this is my third. Look at how the question is built. He leaves aside the easy form, what happens after death, which any storyteller can answer by inventing something. He asks what the doubt is a doubt about, and how the being or the not-being of that thing gets settled. This was live ground in his time. Men argued it in the assemblies where kings sat and brahmanas came from other countries to be beaten or to win, and the boy has walked past all of that and put the question to the only householder in the world who has the answer at first hand.
For the first time Yama steps back. He says that even the gods had this doubt long ago, that this dharma is fine-grained and hard to know well; choose another boon, do not press me on this, let me off it. The lord of death with his hands folded, asking to be released: this scene exists nowhere else. And the boy gives the answer a real student gives. He hands Yama’s own words back to him: even the gods doubted here, and you yourself say it is hard to know well; another speaker like you will not be found, and there is no boon equal to this one.
Now Yama does what every great teacher does in an examination, and what every great tempter does as well. He puts the world on the table. Ask for sons and grandsons who live a hundred years, ask for cattle in herds, elephants, gold, horses; ask for a wide holding of earth; and live yourself as many autumns as you please. Every item there is a real and specific power. Sons and grandsons living out a hundred years are a line that will not break, and a man with a line behind him is remembered and fed by it after he is gone. Cattle in herds is the standing wealth this whole story opened on. Elephants and horses are what a king keeps, the machinery of war and of state, the difference between a man who is protected and a man who is taken. A wide holding of earth is the ground that all of it rests on. And the years are counted in autumns, by the harvest, which is the only calendar a farming country keeps. Then he goes on: if you think anything equals this, ask for that, ask for wealth, ask for long life; be great on this great earth, I will make you an enjoyer of every desire.
Then he goes lower, because a temptation follows the rule that each offer must be more solid than the last. He says: whatever desires are hard to come by in the world of men, ask for all of them as you please; here are these women with their chariots and their music, women of a kind men are never given; let them wait on you, they are my gift. They come from his own household, and that is the weight of the offer. He is a host who left a child hungry at his gate for three nights, and he is now emptying his house at him. And then the sentence in which the whole fear stands open: Nachiketa, do not ask about dying. Yama has stopped trying to delay the answer, and is trying to buy the question.
The boy clears the whole heap away in one breath, and the reasoning he uses is very cold. He says: Antaka, all this lasts only until tomorrow, and all of it wears out the sharpness of the senses; even a whole life is short; keep your chariots, keep your dance and your song. He calls his host the Ender to his face while he is refusing the Ender’s gifts, which is the nerviest moment in the book. Then he puts his hand straight on the root of wealth, “na vittena tarpaniyo manushyah”, wealth is no thing to fill a man with. And he adds that wealth will come to us anyway now that we have seen you, and we shall live as long as you rule; the boon for me is that one boon worth asking for.
The last stroke is the finest. He asks: having come to those who never age, who never die, having come to know them, how shall a mortal down here, aging, sit and count over the pleasures of beauty and taste; who would take delight in a very long life. And he brings his own request back to the place it started from: that in which men have this doubt, that which counts in the great crossing over, tell us that; this boon has gone deep into the hidden, and Nachiketa asks for no other.
In short: The third boon is a doubt, and to be rid of it Yama offers the whole world. The boy weighs every offer on a single scale, how long will it last. On the day a person picks up that scale, temptation begins to weigh very little.
Shreyas and preyas, two ropes pulling at once
Yama gives in, and the moment he does his voice changes. Until now he was a gatekeeper; now he is a teacher. His first move is to set down the distinction this whole Upanishad rests on, “anyach chhreyo’nyad utaiva preyah”, the good is one thing and the pleasant is quite another. The two of them bind a man with different purposes. He who takes up shreyas, the good, comes out well; he who chooses preyas, the pleasant, falls away from what he is for. The division stands inside the man, where he cannot walk around it.
Yama goes on: both of these come to every human being, both of them, and they pass nobody by. The steady man turns them all the way round and separates them; the steady man chooses shreyas over preyas, and the dull man chooses preyas out of a hunger for yogakshema. Yogakshema means getting what is not yet had and keeping safe what is. It is the whole working economy of a household in two syllables: the herd has to grow, and the herd has to be watched at night. Most lives go by inside those two errands, and most people never notice that a choice was ever made.
Then Yama turns to the boy and shows him his own work. You thought it over and let the desires go, the dear ones and the ones that look dear; you did not take up that shrinka of wealth in which many men drown. And then the line that sends every reader groping around his own position: avidya and vidya, the not-knowing and the knowing, stand far off from each other, turned opposite ways, and they carry a man in opposite directions. Yama can recognize a man who wants vidya, and he takes Nachiketa for one, a boy whom many desires could not make greedy.
The picture Yama draws of those who live inside avidya is unsparing. They hold themselves steady, they hold themselves learned, and they go round and round wandering, like blind men led by a blind man. That comparison needs no commentary. A man who cannot see the road points it out with perfect confidence, and that confidence walks everyone behind him into a deeper ditch. Yama goes on: the crossing over shows itself nowhere to the child who is dazed with the lure of wealth; he holds that this world is all there is, there is no other, and so he comes into my power again and again.
After this Yama comes to the thing every tradition repeats, that many never get so much as to hear of this, and many who hear it fail to know it. The speaker of it is a wonder, the one who gets it is skilled, and a knower taught by a skilled man is a wonder too. Then he says it will never come clear when a lesser man teaches it, since it has been thought over in many ways, and it is finer than the measure of an atom. This understanding comes by no argument; it comes easily when another has spoken it, and you have reached it, you are steady in truth; may we get another questioner like you. That last line is a teacher’s line, said by the one being asked, and it tells a reader what these people actually prized. A house that fed a good questioner had been paid.
The most unusual thing in this valli is what Yama says about himself. He admits: I know that the hoard a man piles up is impermanent, and that the fixed is never reached by unfixed means; still I laid the Nachiketa fire and with impermanent things I have reached the permanent. The limit of works and the use of works, in one breath. Then he says: the fulfilling of desire, the ground of the world, the endlessness of the rite, the far shore of fearlessness, that wide and much-praised standing place, you saw all of it and let it go with a steady hand. And whoever hears this, gathers it in, and comes to hold that fine thing, he is glad; the house, says Yama, stands open for a Nachiketa. The man whose door stayed shut for three nights is saying that his door stands open, and he means it as high praise.
In short: Shreyas and preyas both come to every man and both pull. The steady one holds them apart and looks at them; the dull one takes them for the same thing. Yama opens his own limit here too, that the road from the impermanent to the permanent is one he has walked himself.
That syllable, and the one who neither kills nor is killed
Now Nachiketa asks the question he sat three hungry nights for, and this time he gives it a sharper edge. He says: that which is other than dharma, other than adharma, other than this done and undone, other than what has been and what is to come, what you see, tell that to us. The question is asked from outside both merit and sin, and it asks for the whereabouts of the one thing time can get no grip on.
Yama’s answer is very short. He says: the station that all the Vedas speak again and again, that all austerities speak of, wanting which men live in brahmacharya, that station, in brief, is this: Om. Living in brahmacharya is a definite arrangement, and every listener of that time had either done it or watched an older brother do it. A boy is handed over to a teacher, goes to live in his house, sleeps there, eats what that household eats, tends the fire, herds the cows, and walks out at dawn to bring back an armload of firewood, and in the intervals of that work he is given the text by mouth, line by line, for years. Men shaped their whole youth around it, and Yama is saying that what they were after the entire time comes down to one syllable. Then he lays his hand on it three times: this syllable is brahman, this syllable is the highest, and knowing it, whatever a man wants is his. This is the best support, this is the highest support, and knowing this support a man is great in the world of brahman. A support here means the thing a man takes hold of to climb, the way a rope is taken hold of on the way down a well.
After that Yama comes to the subject this whole conversation was for, and he arrives without a preamble. “Na jayate mriyate va vipashchit”, the knowing one is not born and does not die. He came from nowhere and nothing came from him; unborn, constant, everlasting, ancient, he is not killed when the body is killed. And the practical face of it arrives at once: if the killer thinks he kills, and the killed thinks he is killed, neither of them knows; this one does not kill and is not killed.
Then comes the description that breaks size open at both ends. He is smaller than the small and larger than the large, and he is set down in the cave inside this creature. The man who sees him is the man whose wanting has fallen away and whose sorrow has gone, and he sees him by the clearing of the dhatus. The word is disputed; Shankara reads dhatu-prasada as the clarity of the senses and the mind, so that the greatness shows itself when the instruments go quiet. “Asino duram vrajati shayano yati sarvatah”, seated, he travels far; lying down, he goes everywhere; and Yama asks who other than himself can know that god of gladness and gladlessness.
The next line is bound into two words the whole later tradition kept repeating: bodiless among bodies, standing firm among things that do not stand. Knowing that great and pervading self, the steady man does not grieve. The Upanishad prescribes no separate remedy for grief here; it calls the knowing itself the remedy, because for a man who has found the bodiless one inside himself the ground under grief has slid away.
And then comes the line that makes this Upanishad the humblest of them, “nayam atma pravachanena labhyah”, this self is never got by discourse, nor by a good memory, nor by hearing a great deal. Every one of those three was the pride of the men this was spoken to. Discourse was their profession, memory was their library, and hearing a great deal was the whole of a long education. The line takes all three off the table. The one this self chooses is the one who gets it, and to him it opens its own shape. A condition is laid down along with it: a man who has yet to turn from bad conduct, who is unquiet, whose mind is scattered, whose mind is restless, cannot reach it even with prajna. The valli ends on a hard picture: he for whom brahmana and kshatriya are both food and death itself is the relish, where is he, who knows him so. The two names in that line are the two highest powers a listener could think of, the man of the sacred word and the man of the sword, and both of them are being served up on the same plate.
In short: The answer starts from a syllable and comes to rest on a refusal. The knowing one is never born and never dies, so the arithmetic of killing and being killed has no hold on him. And he comes by no reading and no memorizing; conduct and quiet are the first condition.
The chariot, the driver, and the razor’s edge
The third valli opens on a picture. Two there are who drink rita in the world of good deeds, both entered into the cave, both seated on the far height; the knowers of brahman call them shadow and sunlight, and so do those of the five fires and those who have laid the Nachiketa fire three times. Two in one place, of whom one eats and one watches, and the distance between them is the distance between sunlight and the shadow it throws. Then the Upanishad makes a prayer: that we may master that Nachiketa fire, the bridge for those who sacrifice, the syllable that is the highest brahman, the fearlessness of those who want to reach the far shore.
And then comes the image this Upanishad is best known for. “Atmanam rathinam viddhi shariram ratham eva tu”, know the self as the one riding in the chariot, and know the body as the chariot itself. Further: know the intellect as the driver and the mind as the reins. The senses are called the horses and the objects of sense are the roads those horses run on. And the self yoked to senses and mind is what the thoughtful call the enjoyer. A whole human being has opened out in a single sentence, with no definition anywhere in it.
The picture lands harder for anyone who has seen the thing itself. The chariot of that age is a light two-wheeled vehicle, built for speed over open ground, with a floor barely wide enough for two men to stand on. The fighter stands at the back with his bow. In front of him stands the driver, and the reins come back over the horses’ necks and through the driver’s fists, and it is the driver who chooses the ground, who decides when to close and when to wheel away, who keeps the wheels off the rocks. The man with the weapon is carried. Everyone in that audience knew of battles lost because a driver panicked and battles won because a driver held his line. So when the intellect is called the driver, nobody needed the point explained; they had watched the whole of it happen in a field.
Two conditions of this chariot are then given. The man who has no discernment, whose mind is always off the rein, has senses that stay out of hand the way a driver’s bad horses do. The man who has discernment, whose mind is always yoked, has senses in hand the way good horses are. The comparison works because it never calls the horses bad. The horses are the same in both, and running is their work; the difference sits with the driver and with the reins.
The next two lines give the outcome. The man with no discernment, without a mind and always unclean, misses that station and comes back into the round of the world. The man with discernment, possessed of mind and always clean, reaches that station from which there is no being born again. Then it is tied into a single line: the man whose driver is discernment and who holds the reins of the mind reaches the end of the road, and that is the highest station of Vishnu.
After this the Upanishad builds a stair, and this stair was repeated through the whole later tradition. Above the senses are their objects, above the objects is the mind, above the mind is the intellect, above the intellect is the great self. Above the great is the unmanifest, above the unmanifest is the purusha, and above the purusha there is nothing; that is the end of the road, that is the highest going. From every tread of this stair one question can be asked: the one who knows what I am at this moment, who is he.
Then the warning: this self, hidden in all beings, does not show itself; it is seen by those fine-sighted men whose intellect is keen and subtle. And the means is given too: let the wise man gather speech into the mind, the mind into the self that is knowledge, knowledge into the great self, and that into the self that is at peace. Right after this comes the call India has repeated like morning for centuries, “uttishthata jagrata prapya varan nibodhata”, rise, wake, and go to the great ones and learn. And with it the truth about the road, “kshurasya dhara nishita duratyaya”, the sharpened edge of a razor, hard to cross over; the poets call this road a fortress. A fortress in that country sits on a hill with one path up it, narrow, turning, watched from above, and an army can stand in front of it for a year.
The valli ends on a description in which every handhold lets go: soundless, touchless, formless, undecaying, tasteless, constant, odorless, without beginning and without end, beyond the great, fixed; recognizing it, a man comes free of the mouth of death. Then the Upanishad sets a seal on its own story: this ancient Nachiketa tale told by Death, having told it and having heard it, the man of understanding is great in the world of brahman, and whoever recites this highest secret in an assembly of brahmanas, or with self-control at the time of a shraaddha, becomes fit for endlessness. A shraaddha is the rite a family keeps for its dead, held on the day the death fell, with brahmanas fed in the house and offerings set out for the three generations gone before. This story of a boy who went to Death and came back is what the text wants said aloud in that room, to those people, on that day.
In short: The body is the chariot, the intellect the driver, the mind the reins, the senses the horses, and the objects of sense the roads they run on. No blame is put on the horses; the attention stays on the reins. And about the road a hard truth is told, that it is the edge of a razor.
Doors cut outward, and the refrain that keeps returning
The second chapter begins with a sentence that makes a man aware of his own eyes as he reads it. The self-existent cut the openings of the senses to face outward, and so a man looks outward and misses the self inside. Some rare steady man, wanting deathlessness, turns his eye around and looks inward, and sees the self that faces the other way. The eye is made in such a fashion that it can see everything except itself, and this is the ground the whole chapter stands on.
Next: children go after desires that lie outside and walk into the spread noose of death; and steady men, knowing deathlessness, ask for nothing fixed among the unfixed things here. The noose is Yama’s own working tool, the cord he throws over a man at the hour, and he is describing it to a guest in his own house. Then Yama sets a very shrewd question. That by which a man knows form, taste, smell, sound and touch, by that same one he knows all of this; so what is left over here. And then comes the refrain that will return again and again in this chapter, “etad vai tat”, this indeed is that.
This refrain is a particular device of this Upanishad. Each time Yama shows one thing, now the waking and the dreaming, now the living one who eats the honey, now that which was born before austerity, now Aditi who comes to be along with prana, now Jatavedas hidden inside the fire-sticks, now that from which the sun rises and into which it goes down; and each time at the end he sets down the same sentence, this indeed is that. The finger goes up in a different place every time and the pointing goes the same way. That refrain is the structure of the chapter, and it is also how a thing gets fixed in memory in a world without books. A line repeated at the close of every verse is a peg, and the listener hangs the verse on it.
One of these pictures stays with a reader in particular: fire hidden in the two fire-sticks, lying inside the wood the way an unborn child lies carried in its mother, worshiped day after day by wakeful men with their offerings. Those two sticks sat in every house that kept a fire. The lower one has a socket cut into it and is held down by the foot; the upper one is set into the socket and spun with a cord looped around it, pulled back and forth, and a man works at it in the half dark while his arms burn, until a thread of smoke comes up and then a coal, which is fed and carried to the altar. Everyone listening had done it or had watched it done before sunrise. The fire is in the wood the whole time and nothing in the wood shows it.
After these comes the warning repeated twice in nearly the same words, that a man who sees anything here as many goes from death to death. What is here is there, and what is there is here as well.
Then comes the famous measure, “angushtha-matrah purusho madhya atmani tishthati”, a purusha of the size of a thumb, seated in the middle of the self, lord of what has been and what is to come; knowing him, a man stops shrinking from himself. The next line brightens it further: that thumb-sized purusha is like a light with no smoke in it, the same today and the same tomorrow. A lamp with no smoke in it is a thing anyone who has lived by lamplight knows to be rare, since the wick gutters and blacks the wall and stings the eyes; a flame that burns clean is the standard of steadiness. The measure is there to name a place inside the body, and no tape is being run over anything; the Upanishad is raising a finger toward the heart, the way a man says, this matter is kept here.
The valli closes on two water comparisons set facing each other. As rain fallen on broken ground scatters down the hillsides and runs away, so the man who sees dharmas as separate goes scattering after those very things. Anybody who has watched a first storm break over rough country has seen that water go: it arrives in one sheet and leaves in fifty threads, and the ground is dry again by evening. And “yathodakam shuddhe shuddham asiktam tadrig eva bhavati”, as pure water poured into pure water becomes exactly that, so becomes the self of the muni who knows, O Gautama. Here Yama calls Nachiketa by his family name, and with that one word of address the whole conversation turns domestic.
In short: The doors of the senses open outward, so looking inward runs against the grain and few walk that way. Yama shows one thing after another and sets down the same refrain each time, this indeed is that. Scattered water runs off down the hills; pure water poured into pure stays pure.
The city of eleven gates, and the light by which everything shines
The second valli of the second chapter opens by making the body a city. This is the city of eleven gates, belonging to the unborn one whose thinking runs straight; the man who settles in it properly does not grieve, and being released, he is released altogether. Shankara counts the gates out as the openings of the body, seven in the head, the navel, the two lower outlets, and the one at the crown. A walled town of that time had its gates counted and named, each with a watch on it, and the whole security of the place turned on who was let through which one. Then comes the verse that seats a single hamsa everywhere at once: he sits in the bright sky, he is the vasu in the mid-air, the hota at the altar, the guest in the house, he is among men, among gods, in rita, in the wide space; born of water, born of earth, born of rita, born of the mountain, and himself the great rita. The hota is the priest who stands at the fire and calls the gods by name, and the guest in the house is the one whose hunger Yama had already been reminded about. In one sweep the verse puts the same presence in the sky, at the altar, and at the door.
Then the Upanishad comes to the breaths. He carries prana upward and throws apana downward, and all the gods worship that dwarf seated in the middle. Immediately after this comes the question that is the root of the whole conversation: when this body goes slack and the embodied one comes loose from this body, what is left here. And the answer is given the other way round: no mortal lives by prana or by apana; men live by something else, on which these two are propped.
What Yama says now is the gentlest line in this Upanishad. He says: come, I will tell you this secret and ancient brahman, and what becomes of the self on reaching death, O Gautama. The boy asked this question at the gate and has been kept waiting through an argument, a refusal, a bribe and a long teaching, and now the answer arrives with a word that means something like sit down, here it is. And he answers straight out: some of the embodied go into a womb for a body, and others go into what is fixed and standing, each according to his works and according to what he has learned. What was done and what was learned travel together. This is the first plain answer to the question that was asked after three nights.
Then comes the line any man can test against his own sleep: he who stays awake among the sleeping, shaping one desire after another, that is the bright one, that is brahman, that is what is called deathless; in him all the worlds are set, and nobody gets past him. The scenes that build themselves in a dream are somebody’s making, and the maker is awake. The Upanishad puts a finger into that crack and holds it open.
Then three comparisons come one after another, all three saying one thing from three angles. As one fire, having entered the world, takes the shape of every shape it enters, and as one wind takes the shape of every shape, so the one inner self of all beings takes the shape of every shape, and stays outside as well. And as the sun, the eye of the whole world, is untouched by the outward faults of eyes, so that inner self is untouched by the sorrow of the world.
After this two lines arrive like twins. One ruler, the inner self of all beings, who makes one form into many; the steady men who see him seated within their own selves have lasting happiness, and no others have it. And he who is constant among the inconstant, conscious among the conscious, who alone fulfills the desires of many; the steady men who see him within their own selves have lasting peace, and no others have it. The repetition is there to remind a listener where the place of seeing is.
And then comes the question that must have been in Nachiketa’s own mind: the highest happiness that men speak of cannot be pointed at; how am I to know it, does it shine, or does it shine by another’s shining. The answer is the peak of this Upanishad. There the sun does not shine, nor the moon and stars, nor do these lightnings shine, so where would this fire be; everything shines after him as he shines, “tasya bhasa sarvam idam vibhati”, by his light all this is shining. The four things named in that line are the entire stock of light a person in that world ever had, the sun by day, the moon and stars by night, the lightning in the storm months, and the household fire. All four are put out in one sentence and the room stays lit.
In short: The body is a city of eleven gates, and the one who lives in it lives by neither prana nor apana. What happens after death is answered on two things together, works and learning. And the light by which sun, moon and fire are lit takes its own shining from nowhere.
The upside-down tree, yoga, and the knots of the heart
The last valli opens on a picture that stops the mind for a moment. “Urdhva-mulo’vak-shakha esho’shvatthah sanatanah”, this ancient ashvattha has its root above and its branches below. The ashvattha is the tree the whole village lives around, the one with the heart-shaped leaves that move in air nobody else can feel, planted at the crossroads and at the edge of the water, with a platform built up around its trunk where the elders sit in the afternoon. It is also the tree that already grows the wrong way: its seed lodges high in the crack of a wall or in the fork of another tree, and it sends its roots down from up there, feeling their way toward ground. So the tree we see every day has its root in the ground and its branches in the air; here the same tree has been turned over, root up, branches down. And at once the same sentence returns that came earlier: that is the bright one, that is brahman, that is called deathless, in that all the worlds are set, and nobody gets past it.
After this a strange thing is said about fear. All this world, whatever it is, moves within prana, having come out of it; that is a great terror, a thunderbolt held up, and those who know it become deathless. Then it is opened out: out of fear of this, fire burns; out of fear of this, the sun burns; out of fear of this, Indra and Vayu, and Death runs as the fifth. Fear here is the law under which the greatest of them cannot walk off his work. The fifth in that list is the one who is speaking, and he includes himself in it without softening anything: Death runs his rounds because he has been set running.
Now the Upanishad comes to the shortness of time, and comes without any softening. If a man is able to grasp this here, before the body falls away, it is well; failing that, he becomes fit for a body again in the worlds that are put together. And then the comparison that says how clearly this shows itself in which state: as in a mirror, so in one’s own self; as in a dream, so in the world of the fathers; as a thing is seen wavering in water, so in the world of the gandharvas; and in the world of brahman as in shadow and sunlight. Take the first of those four seriously and the rest fall into place. A mirror in that house is a disc of polished bronze that has to be rubbed with ash and cloth before it gives a face back, and the face it gives is exact. The clearest place is here, in this birth, inside oneself.
Then the stair is laid down a second time, in a slightly changed order. Above the senses the mind, above the mind sattva, above sattva the great self, above the great the unmanifest; and past the unmanifest the purusha, pervading and with no mark on him, no sign. Knowing him a creature comes free and goes to deathlessness. Then it is said plainly that his form comes into no one’s sight, that nobody sees him with an eye; he is grasped by the heart, by manisha, by the mind, and those who know this become deathless.
Now comes the definition later counted among the oldest definitions of yoga. When the five knowings come to rest along with the mind, and the intellect does not stir, that they call the highest going. That steady holding of the senses is taken to be yoga, and then a man is undistracted. A hard line is attached to it: yoga has a rising and a falling away; Shankara reads it that yoga is both gained and lost, which is why the caution is spoken. What can be lost after it is gained has to be gained again every day.
Then the Upanishad comes to the place where language puts its hands up. He cannot be reached by speech, by mind, by the eye; so how is he to be taken hold of. The answer is one word, “asti”, he is. He has to be taken hold of in just that way, that he is, and then his own true nature grows clear of itself. This is the simplest and the hardest advice in the book: grant the being first, and the nature will open; the reverse order, proving the nature and then granting the being, goes nowhere.
The end comes near and it comes down in two lines. When all the desires lodged in the heart are let go, the mortal becomes deathless and reaches brahman here. When all the knots of the heart are cut open here, the mortal becomes deathless; this much is the whole instruction. Then the channels: a hundred and one channels of the heart, one of them running out toward the crown; going up by that one a man reaches deathlessness, and the rest are for going out in every other direction.
The last picture is the thumb-sized purusha again, the inner self seated always in the hearts of people. He is to be drawn out of one’s own body with patience, the way the reed is drawn out of the munja grass. Munja is the tall coarse grass of the river banks, twisted into rope, woven into mats, and braided into the girdle a boy ties on when he is given over to a teacher. Inside each stalk runs a slender pith, and a steady even pull brings it out whole and white, while a hand in a hurry snaps it and leaves the piece behind in the sheath. The reed comes out whole for the one who can wait. And then the story comes back to its boy. Having received this knowledge told by Death and the whole method of yoga, Nachiketa reached brahman, became free of dust, free of death; and so it goes for anyone else who knows his own self in this way. The Upanishad closes on the same peace-verse it opened with, that he protect us both, feed us both, that we find strength together, and that there be no ill will between us. Two people say it together, the one teaching and the one learning, before the lesson and after it, and the last thing they ask for is that the two of them not come to dislike each other.
In short: The tree is upside down, its root is above, and all the worlds are set in it. Yoga is called the steady holding of the senses here, with a warning attached that it slips away too. The end comes to the knots of the heart, and Nachiketa goes home with the very thing he sat three hungry nights for.
And in the end, toward yourself
The most useful thing in this whole story is probably the thing that happens first. A boy watches a scene of giving and it looks counterfeit to him, and he keeps no silence about it. All of us see scenes like that every day, in our houses, in our offices, inside ourselves, where what gets handed over is the thing that had stopped being of use. Nachiketa’s first act was no spiritual practice at all. He let what he had seen stay what he had seen, and he asked about it. The day a person stops pushing that question down, his journey has started.
The second thing is the three nights. Yama was away and the boy could have gone back, and he stayed where he was. Sitting at a shut door with nothing to eat, in a strange place, where the master of the house owes you a welcome he is failing to give, is a specific kind of hard, and it is made of hours. What we need most often takes its time about opening the door, and we take the delay itself for an answer. The Upanishad says something very ordinary here: the door opens for the one who keeps sitting, and when it opens the account is settled as well. Three nights of hunger turn into three boons.
And the third is that heap Yama laid out. Elephants, gold, horses, sons who live a hundred years, a wide piece of the earth, and attendance with music. That heap is laid in front of us as well, with the names changed. Nachiketa refused it with one plain question, how long will this last. The question still works. The chariot is ours, the horses are ours, the reins are in our own hands; the whole demand this Upanishad makes is that the driver stay awake.
Source: Katha Upanishad, both chapters, all six vallis; read against the Sanskrit, with Shankara’s reading noted where readings differ.