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A long note of the saman has just come to rest. The singer has stopped, the listeners have stopped, and out of that silence a question rises whose asker is left nameless in the mula. The question steps past the ranking of the gods. It steps past the size of the reward a sacrifice pays out. It asks one thing only. That mind which went running after the note a moment ago, who set it running. “Keneshitam patati preshitam manah”, by whose will does this mind go, sent forth and impelled. The one asking is laying a finger inside his own chest, and until the answer arrives, everything else stays something heard from somebody else.
This Upanishad sits inside the brahmana of the Talavakara branch of the Samaveda, which is why it is also called the Talavakara Upanishad. Its name came from its own first word, kena, meaning by whom. The whole of it runs to four khandas, and there is a beautiful hinge in the way it is built: the first two khandas are in meter and move like question and answer, the last two are in prose and open straight into a story. What the first half says through hints and denials, the second half lets happen to the gods themselves, and they take it in through a bruise. Catch hold of that hinge and this Upanishad begins to open on its own.
It helps to stand for a moment in the place where a sentence like this would have been spoken. The Samaveda is the veda of singing. Its verses come over from the Rigveda and are then stretched, bent and held on long vowels until the words lie almost buried under the tune, and a man who sang them had been trained for it from boyhood in a house where his father had done the same work. At a large sacrifice he was one of a small crew. One priest measured out the offerings and did the handling, one spoke the verses aloud, one sat through the whole proceeding in silence watching for errors, and the singer carried the rite on his voice for hours while the fire was fed. The work paid. Cattle changed hands at the close of a session, and a family’s standing for a generation could rest on a singing that went through without a fault.
So the question that opens this Upanishad rises inside a working world, from a man whose living comes out of a sound. He has spent his life placing a note in the exact spot the tradition fixed for it. He knows what it takes to hold the mind on that note to the end of a line. And what he asks, with the last of the singing still in the air, is who it is that sends the mind out after a sound in the first place.
The main figures of this Upanishad
The one asking: his name never arrives in the mula. A question arrives, and the whole text runs off that question.
The one telling: who stands another question up inside his answer, and who does not flinch from admitting his own limit.
The yaksha: the unknown presence that appears before the gods. Khanda 4 reveals that it was brahman all along.
Agni: also called Jatavedas, who steps forward carrying the claim that he can burn everything there is.
Vayu: also called Matarishvan, who steps forward carrying the claim that he can carry everything away.
Indra: Maghavan among the gods, whom the yaksha does not even speak to, and who for that very reason recognizes it first.
Uma Haimavati: the woman of great shining beauty met in the open sky, whose few words undo the entire knot.
Who sends the mind running (khanda 1, mantra 1)
The first mantra puts four questions down together, and all four raise a finger in the same direction. Impelled by whom does the sent mind go. Yoked by whom does this first prana, the breath, move forward. Willed by whom do people speak this speech that they speak. And which deva yokes the eye and the ear. The verb that arrives in the last line, yunakti, is the verb of yoking, the way a charioteer yokes horses to a chariot. So the eye and the ear do not run of themselves. Someone yokes them, and the mantra is asking for the address of the one who does the yoking.
The image would have landed at once on anybody hearing it. A chariot stood in the yard of every house that counted for anything, and horses were the most expensive property a family owned. Loose in a field a horse is speed with no direction inside it. Strapped to the pole, with a man’s hands on the reins, the same animal takes a road. The entire difference between those two horses sits in the hands, and the mantra lifts that difference and lays it over the eye and the ear. The senses supply the speed. The direction comes from somewhere they cannot see, and the first mantra wants the name of what is holding the reins.
Notice how inverted this question is. From morning to night we ask where the mind has gone, what it snagged on, what soured it. Our whole inquiry stays an inquiry into the object the mind went and sat down on. This mantra does not look toward the object at all. It turns around and asks who did the sending. In a single question the direction of the entire search swings, from outside toward inside, from the seen toward the one who sees.
And the things listed inside this question were picked with care. Mind, breath, speech, eye, ear. These five are what we have. With these we measure the world, with these we speak it, with these we collect the evidence of our own existence. When somebody asks who you are, we produce the testimony of these same five: we are thinking, we are breathing, we are speaking, we are seeing, we are hearing. The mantra calls exactly these five witnesses into the box and asks them for the name of their owner.
These same five were the working tools of the people this was said among. A priest’s entire competence sat in them. His breath had to carry a line to its end without breaking in the middle. His speech had to land every syllable on the pitch the tradition had fixed for it, since these verses had come down for generations with the rise and fall of each word held in place like a set of coordinates. His eye stayed on the fire. His ear held the other voices and kept his own line clear of them. His mind carried the whole long shape of a rite in view while his mouth was busy with one phrase of it, and a sacrifice could run for days. A man who had spent twenty years grinding these five into instruments is the one now being asked who owns them.
Try a small experiment. Sit down to read something this evening and watch where the mind has gone by the time you reach the third line. Perhaps to something from yesterday, perhaps to an unfinished account. Now ask who gave the order to go there. You did not give it, because you wanted to read. The mind did not take it upon itself either, because the mind comes back on its own a while later and stands there embarrassed. So there is somebody else in between, at whose sending it goes and at whose pull it returns. This is what the Upanishad catches hold of in its first word.
And one more thing lies hidden in this mantra. The one asking wants something other than the name of a god. If a name had come back in the answer, some Indra, some Varuna, the question would have stayed unsolved and merely slid one step further along. The instant a name arrives, the next question stands up: who sent the one with that name. So the answer that is coming will hand over a thing of an altogether different order in place of a name, and the real difficulty of this Upanishad begins right there.
In short: The first mantra turns away from the object and asks for the address of the sender. Mind, breath, speech, eye and ear, the five on whose testimony we claim our own existence, are the very five being asked for the name of the one who yokes them. An answer made of a name will be no use here, and the one asking knows it.
The ear of the ear, the mind of the mind (khanda 1, mantras 2 to 4)
The answer comes and it names nobody. “Shrotrasya shrotram manaso manah”, it is the ear of the ear and the mind of the mind, the speech of speech, the breath of the breath and the eye of the eye. In place of five names for five questions, the same five came back doubled, each one with another of its own name standing behind it. It sounds like a riddle, and it carries something very solid inside.
What does the ear do. The ear catches a wave in the air. The ear has never heard anything; the ear has no means of hearing. Hearing happens at the place where that wave turns into meaning, and that place lies further in than the ear. In sleep the ears stay open too, waves of air keep falling into them, and the hearer is absent there, so nothing gets heard. So there is another ear inside the ear, and the Upanishad is counting exactly that one. The same holds for the eye, the same for the mind. The mind raises a thought, and who is it that watches the thought. When you say the mind is restless today, the restlessness is in the mind and the one seeing it stands apart from it.
The second half of this same mantra carries it further. Those who are steady, atimuchya, having loosened their hold on all of this, become deathless as they go forth from this world. Atimuchya is a lovely word; it holds the sense of letting go, the sense of passing clear over the top. Nobody was told to throw the ear away. What was said is to slacken the clinging that comes with the ear, to accept that the hearer is no property of the ear.
And then the third mantra arrives, the most honest line in this entire Upanishad. “Na tatra chakshur gachchhati na vag gachchhati no manah”, the eye does not go there, speech does not go, the mind does not go either. And straight after it the one telling says of himself that we do not know, we do not understand how this might be taught. Think of it. A teacher, in the middle of his own lesson, says that the method of teaching this is unknown to him. Such a sentence is hard to find in any other shastra. Here it is the correct measurement of the subject. How is speech to teach what speech cannot touch.
Weigh what a teacher put at risk in saying it. None of this was written down. The whole body of the learning traveled from a mouth into an ear and lived in memory, and a teacher’s standing in his own district rested on the completeness of what he could hand across. Boys came to him and stayed for years. They gathered his firewood, tended his fire, watched his cattle and ate at his house, and what their families were buying with that service was his ability to deliver the goods entire. For such a man to stop inside his own lesson and say that he does not know how this is to be taught is a public act with a price on it. He says it anyway, because the other road available to him is to hand over a sentence that sounds like the answer and is not one.
Out of that helplessness comes the fourth mantra, and it gives a definition that closes the door from every side. “Anyad eva tad viditad atho aviditad adhi”, it is other than the known and it is beyond the unknown as well. Other than the known we can follow, because whatever we have come to know is an object, and it is no object. Why beyond the unknown, though. Because the unknown is an object too, one that has simply yet to be entered in our register. There is a fish at the bottom of the sea we know nothing of; it is unknown, and if it comes up in a net tomorrow it becomes known. What is under discussion here will never enter that register, from this side or from that, because the one who makes the register is that very thing.
The mantra does not stand on its own strength. It adds that we heard this from those who came before, and that they explained it to us this way. A whole lineage puts its shoulder under this one sentence. This is humility and it is evidence at once, because for a matter the senses cannot test, the testimony available is the line of people who have already walked the road.
In short: No name arrives in the answer. Behind the senses another form of the same senses gets set down, the ear of the ear, the mind of the mind. Then it is said plainly that eye, speech and mind have no road there, and also that the one telling has no method for teaching it. It is other than the known and beyond the unknown, and this came down as something heard from those who came before.
That by which speech is spoken, know that as brahman (khanda 1, mantras 5 to 9)
Now five mantras arrive cast in a single mold, and their last line returns unchanged all five times. The first says that what speech does not speak, and by which speech is spoken, know that as brahman. The second says the same thing for the mind: what the mind cannot think, and by which the mind is thought. The third for the eye, the fourth for the ear, the fifth for prana. The same turn every time, first a denial, then the source, then that one line.
The line is “tad eva brahma tvam viddhi nedam yad idam upasate”, know that alone as brahman, and what people worship here in this form, the saying does not come to rest on that. The second half moves like a sharpened knife. In worship we place something in front of ourselves, an image, a name, an imagining, and we sit down before it. The instant a thing comes in front, it has become an object, and a separate seer of that object has stood up. The mantra points toward the seer left standing there and says the address is over here.
Worship in that world had an address and a cost. A householder took a fire at his marriage and fed it at dawn and again at dusk for the rest of his life, and letting it go out was a failure the neighborhood heard about and a thing he had to make good. Butter went into it. Grain went into it. The smoke rose because somebody had paid for what was burning, and out beyond the smoke stood the one being fed, a name with a season attached, a share due to him, a temperament that could be pleased or soured. Harvests, sons, cattle and rain were all understood to move through that transaction. Into the middle of it comes a line saying that what is being described here has no relation to the thing you have set in front of you and are feeding. Whoever heard that first heard it with his hands full of the offering.
Look closely at the first mantra. Speech cannot speak it. That much we might grant. The second half goes deeper: speech is spoken by it. The reality that speech cannot describe is the very strength on which speech is running. The words that lose the contest of catching it are rising out of it as well. This is a strange enclosure, and our entire life is being spent inside it. What we speak by, we cannot speak. What we see by, we cannot see.
The mantra about the mind holds one more fine point. It says, by which they call the mind mata, the known. The mind is our largest instrument, and we have seated it as the final court. Whatever arrives in the mind is true, and whatever will not settle in the mind is false. The Upanishad puts the mind in the box as well. The mind is itself known, so the mind is an object too. At night when the mind sinks into sleep, somebody still remains who says in the morning that we slept deeply. His testimony was taken with the mind out of the room.
Now the question is why one thing was said five times. The meter had nothing to do with it. Our grip sits in five separate places, and it has to be worked loose at every one. One man is enchanted by his own intellect, one by his eye, one by his voice, one by his practice with the breath. All five times the same sentence returns exactly as it stood, the way a hand is laid on a face and turns it again and again in one direction. Wherever the mind runs, it has to meet that same line coming the other way.
The first khanda finishes here, and so far it has stated nothing straight out. It asked, then denied, then pointed, then repeated the same pointing five times over. A reader arriving at this place can think, good, now I have understood. The second khanda turns toward that very reader and takes hold of his hand.
In short: Five mantras take speech, mind, eye, ear and breath one at a time and return the same line every time, that what these cannot catch and what these run on is brahman. Whatever gets placed in front during worship falls outside the grip of this saying. The repetition is the method for working the hand loose from every instrument.
Whoever said he had known it has missed it (khanda 2)
The second khanda lays its hand directly on the reader. The one telling says that if you have settled into the belief that you have known it well, the truth is that a very small form of brahman has come into your grasp. The word used for it reads dabhra in some texts and dahara in others, and both mean little, tiny, a mere bit. The matter goes further: what of it is inside you and what of it is among the gods, that is still fit only to be examined. In one jolt the whole achievement is set back on the table of inquiry.
This blow comes from no stranger. It comes from one’s own teacher, and it lands at exactly the moment the student felt the matter was in hand. This Upanishad knows the danger: the first khanda is very beautiful, its lines stay in the memory, and staying in the memory is itself a deception. A man who can repeat the business about the ear of the ear begins to take himself for a knower. The second khanda picks that understanding up and sets it down on the floor.
Now the student’s answer comes, and it is the most composed sentence in the whole text. He says we do not hold that we have known it well, and we do not say that we do not know. We know, and we also do not know. This is an exact description of the condition in which the knower is knowing himself. Whatever we can say of that we know it lies apart from us. And what is not apart from us at all turns apart the instant we claim to know it.
Picture the position he is standing in while he says it. A student in that house answered in front of the others, and what he could answer was the whole of his standing among them. The ones who cannot bring themselves to say that a thing has failed to come into their grasp go on producing the correct words for years and grow old inside them, and everybody in the room can hear the difference and nobody mentions it. This one says both halves and holds his ground on both. We make no claim to have known it. We make no claim to the opposite either.
The next mantra binds this into a line that startles on first hearing. “Yasyamatam tasya matam matam yasya na veda sah”, for the one to whom it is unknown, it is known, and the one to whom it has become known does not know it. The mantra opens itself further: it is unknown to those who know and known to those who do not know. Take this as grammar. Knowing always demands two things, a knower and an object to be known. Where the second thing is absent altogether, that whole apparatus of knowing stops working. So the man who says honestly that it has not come into his grasp is standing in the right place.
The fourth mantra sets a lamp down in this darkness, and the lamp is very useful. “Pratibodha-viditam matam amritatvam hi vindate”, in pratibodha, meaning along with each and every act of awareness, it is known, and knowing of that kind gives deathlessness. Pratibodha means every act of waking up, every single instance of understanding. You look at something and it comes clear, somebody speaks and the meaning opens, a name comes back to you. Inside every one of those small openings it is present. The hunt for it in some distant moment of samadhi can be set aside; it sits inside this ordinary daily understanding, the way water sits in every wave. The mantra goes on to say that strength is found through the self and deathlessness through vidya, knowledge.
And then the khanda takes its leave after putting down its hardest saying. If it has been known here, in this very life, then there is truth, and if it has gone unknown here, there is a vast destruction. Mahati vinashtih. No heavier word than this appears anywhere in this Upanishad. Along with it the road is given: “bhuteshu bhuteshu vichitya dhirah”, discerning it in creature after creature, the steady ones, the steady go forth from this world and become deathless. The looking happens nowhere outside, in every living being, one after the next.
In short: The second khanda turns toward the reader who felt he had understood and says that what came into his grasp is very little. The student’s answer is finely balanced: we know and we also do not know. The man who says he has known it has missed it, and the man who recognizes it inside every act of awareness finds deathlessness. If this fails to happen in this very life, there is a vast destruction.
The flush of victory and a stranger yaksha (khanda 3, mantras 1 to 6)
Now the Upanishad drops the meter and comes down into prose, and in its very first line a story opens. “Brahma ha devebhyo vijigye”, brahman won a victory for the gods, and in that victory of brahman the gods grew great with glory. The mula does not say over whom the victory was won or who the defeated party was. Shankara’s commentary reads it as the victory of the devas over the asuras, and that reading travels down through the tradition, while the mantra itself keeps silent on the matter. Read the story with that silence intact, because its whole weight rests elsewhere, on what rose in the minds of the gods after the winning.
To feel the size of what is about to go wrong, put the gods back where these people kept them, which was close at hand. Fire lived in the house, awake before anybody else in the morning, with a name and a character and preferences about what it was given. Wind came up the valley in the hot months and took the thatch off a roof. Rain arrived when it arrived, and everything a family would eat that year turned on whether it came at the right week. Dawn showed up, and that was somebody showing up. These powers were the working parts of an ordinary day. They were addressed by name, they were fed by hand, and when a household prospered the credit was placed with them out loud. An assembly of the gods is therefore a gathering of everyone who runs the world, seated in order of precedence, and this story opens with that assembly in the best mood it has ever been in.
What rose was this: “asmakam evayam vijayo’smakam evayam mahima”, this victory is ours alone, this glory is ours alone. Eva comes twice, ours alone, ours alone. That small word holds the whole matter. The gods were telling no lie. They had fought, and they were the ones standing on the field of victory. They simply let one middle piece drop away, the piece their strength had been running on. This slip is so common that we no longer count it as a slip. The first sentence that rises in the mind when a piece of work is finished is usually this very one.
Something concrete sat underneath the swelling. Standing among the gods was measured out in shares. A victory meant the hymns that would be made about it, the offerings that would come to whoever was named inside them, the seat a god would be given at the next gathering and the order in which he would be served. Glory in this world was an account that other people kept and paid into, and it was public. So when the gods say that this glory is theirs alone, they are settling who gets paid, and they are settling it aloud, with the one whose strength actually took the field standing somewhere just outside the light of the hall.
The line that follows is the loveliest line in this story. Tad dhaisham vijajnau, it knew this state of theirs. Nobody lodged a complaint, no messenger went out. The one under discussion knows a sentence rising inside a mind the way we know our own palm, because it is the mind of the mind. And knowing it, it did one thing: it appeared in front of them. No punishment was handed down, no word was spoken. It came and stood there.
The gods could not recognize it. The mula’s sentence is tan na vyajanat, they did not know it, and they began asking one another, “kim idam yaksham”, what is this yaksha. The word yaksha here is the name of no forest deity. Its sense is an astonishing presence, something that stands in front of you while no compartment for it exists in your hands. Think about it and laughter comes, and a shiver with it. The reality whose strength had just won them the field was standing before them, and they could not even give its name.
The gods said to Agni, O Jatavedas, go and find out what this yaksha is. Agni said, tatha, so be it. There is a fine point here as well. Out of the whole assembly nobody went himself. One was sent. Knowing too they handed over as a task, the way a paper gets forwarded to a department.
Agni ran toward it. The yaksha said to him, who are you. Agni answered, I am Agni, and immediately added, I am Jatavedas. Nobody had asked for a second name. The introduction had been completed in one stroke, and the second name got added for the sake of his own standing. The yaksha put the next question, what power is in you. Agni said, whatever is here upon this earth, all of it I can burn. And it was true. Burning is Agni’s very work, and his limit runs exactly as far as matter runs.
The claim is larger than it sounds in English. Agni is the one everything passes through. Butter poured out at dawn reaches nobody until fire takes it, turns it into smoke and carries it up, so every offering made anywhere on earth goes out through his mouth, and a god eats what Agni hands him. He takes the forest when land is being opened for a field. He takes the body at the end, when the family walks out to the ground past the edge of the village and the eldest son puts the flame to it. A household that let him go out had a repair to make before anything else in its day could proceed. When Agni says that everything here upon this earth he can burn, he is reciting the terms of his office, and every person listening to this story would have nodded along with him.
Then the yaksha set a blade of grass down in front of him and said, burn this. Agni fell on it with his whole velocity; the mula says sarvajavena, with all his speed. And the blade of grass did not burn. Agni came back from that very spot. Stop and weigh what he said on reaching the assembly: I could not know what this yaksha is. He made no mention at all of the failure to burn. The work he had been sent for was knowing, and that is what did not happen. The blade of grass was only the touchstone, and see how small a touchstone was chosen. Had a mountain been set down, some dignity would have survived inside the defeat. A single blade of grass was set down.
Weigh the object that was chosen. “Tasmai trinam nidadhau”, he set a blade of grass down before him, and told him to burn it. Grass is what there is most of. It pushes up between the stones of a yard, it gets pulled by the handful and thrown to the cow, it dries out in a week of sun and goes up off one spark with nobody attending to it. A child can burn grass. Of everything in the world it is the thing that asks least of fire, and he came at it with everything he had, and it lay exactly where it had been laid. That is the sentence he then carried back to the hall, “naitad ashakam vijnatum yad etad yaksham”, I could not know what this yaksha is, with the grass left out of the report altogether.
In short: The victory belonged to brahman and the gods put the credit down in their own names. That state of mind was caught inside them, and it came and stood before them, and nobody could recognize it. Agni went counting off his two names and claiming he could burn everything there is, and fell on one blade of grass with his whole velocity and lost. On returning he said only that he could not know.
Vayu’s empty hands, and the vanishing in front of Indra (khanda 3, mantras 7 to 12)
Now the gods said to Vayu, O Vayu, you go and know what this yaksha is. Vayu too said, tatha. Here the mula repeats almost letter for letter what happened with Agni, and the repetition is deliberate. The assembly changed none of its habits. Nobody learned from the first failure that the method of sending might itself be the error. They picked a second name, the way a second tool gets pulled out of the same drawer when the first one breaks.
Vayu ran toward it. The same question came, who are you. And the same answer returned, with two names inside it: I am Vayu, I am Matarishvan. The name Matarishvan carries the sense of the one who moves through the middle air without ever stopping. Like Agni, Vayu added his second and heavier name of his own accord. The yaksha put the same next question, what power is in you. Vayu said, whatever is here upon this earth, all of it I can carry away. And this was true as well. When the wind moves it takes a roof off, brings a tree down with its roots, stands the sea up on end.
The yaksha set that same blade of grass down in front and said, pick this up. Vayu pounced on it with his whole velocity, and the blade of grass did not stir from its place. Vayu came back, and he too spoke the very sentence Agni had spoken: I could not know what this yaksha is. Two gods, two different capacities, one blade of grass, and one sentence. The comedy of the story lives in this repetition and so does its sting. In the blade of grass on which the burner of the whole earth and the carrier of the whole earth both lose, nothing had changed. What had changed was whose will was holding it there.
Now the gods said to Indra, O Maghavan, you go and know what this yaksha is. Indra too said, tatha, and ran toward it.
Indra is the king of them, and the name chosen here says why. Maghavan is the bountiful one, the holder of the gifts, the one with enough in hand to distribute, and more of the old hymns go to him than to any other god. He is the one who leads when there is fighting to be done. A victory of the kind the assembly has just been congratulating itself over is exactly the kind of victory his name usually gets attached to. He is sent out third, after two failures, which is the order any court in the world would follow, the heaviest man held back until the lighter ones have been spent.
And here the story turns without warning. Tasmat tirodadhe, it hid itself from him, it went out of sight in front of his eyes. No question was asked, no name was given, no blade of grass was set down. Indra did not even get the chance of a test.
Seen from above, this looks like the worst of the three. Agni and Vayu at least got a conversation, at least got the occasion to introduce themselves. Indra had no story even to carry back. Wait a moment longer, though. Agni and Vayu had gone out with their claims and returned with those claims intact. When that presence withdrew from in front of Indra, what was left was empty sky, and inside that emptiness Indra went on standing, with no claim, no answer, no name. That very emptiness became his largest gain.
And he never returned to the assembly. The mula says that in that same sky he came upon a woman of great shining beauty, Uma Haimavati. And he asked her, what is this yaksha.
The place he is standing in matters. Akasha is open room, the space everything else is standing inside, and there is nothing in it to take hold of. Indra had walked out of a hall full of seated gods with an assignment in his hands, and now he is in the one place with no walls, no assembly, no precedence being observed and nothing to carry back. A woman is there, shining, and the mula gives her no errand and no introduction. And Indra does the thing nobody inside the hall had done.
Notice that Indra has now put the same question to somebody else. The question Agni and Vayu went out to settle by winning, Indra is settling by asking. What running did not fetch is about to come through asking, and for the asking his hands had to be empty first.
In short: Vayu’s episode is a copy of Agni’s, the same two names, the same large claim, the same blade of grass, the same defeat spoken aloud on returning. With Indra the story turns. The presence simply hides from him and empty sky is left behind. Inside that emptiness Indra goes to Uma Haimavati and puts the same question to her, and this asking is what opens his road.
Uma Haimavati says the name (khanda 4, mantras 1 to 3)
Uma’s answer is very short. She said, it is brahman. Then she added a second thing, and that is where the real blow lands: “brahmano va etad vijaye mahiyadhvam”, it is in the victory of brahman alone that you have all grown great with glory. The title to the glory the gods had swelled over was handed back in one sentence. Only then did Indra know that it is brahman. The mula’s phrase is tato haiva, right after that, only then.
Stop on this tato haiva. The knowledge came from no running, and from no passing of a test. It came when somebody else told him, and the one who told him was a presence that had never sat in the assembly. The full sitting of the gods, their whole arrangement, their business of parceling work out department by department, none of it served. What served was a question asked while standing in open sky with nothing in hand.
About Uma the mula says only this much, of great shining beauty, Uma Haimavati. Haimavati means the one connected with Himavan. Beyond this the story gives no introduction of her, no lineage, no earlier tale, and we should go no further either. Shankara’s commentary reads her as vidya taking form, the knowledge that comes and stands in front at exactly the right moment, and that reading belongs to the commentary, with no word of its own in the mula. This much is clear from the mula itself: the answer came from outside the assembly of the gods.
The next mantra distributes the fruit of this story, and the distribution is startling. It is said that for this reason these three gods, Agni, Vayu and Indra, stand above the other gods, because they touched it most closely and because they were the ones who first knew it as brahman. Consider that. The two who took open defeat rose as well. The ones who stayed sitting in the assembly, against whose names no defeat was ever recorded, stayed behind.
Nedishtham pasparshuh, they touched it most closely. The word touch has been placed here with a great deal of thought. Agni put his whole force into a blade of grass, and his limit opened in front of him right there. The same happened with Vayu. Whoever sees his own limit with his own eyes arrives closest to the reality that lies past every limit. For the man who never went as far as his own boundary, this meeting never takes place at all.
And the third mantra places Indra at the very top, for those same two reasons: he touched it most closely, and he was the first to know it as brahman. Indra’s close touching was the moment it went out of sight in front of him and nothing was left in his hands. His knowing first was the moment he asked. Height in this story carries a different measure. The measure is how close a person went, and who showed the humility of asking.
In short: Uma undoes the knot in a few words, it is brahman, and all your glory came out of its victory. Only then does Indra recognize it. Agni, Vayu and Indra rose above the other gods because they touched it most closely, which is to say they saw their own limit with their own eyes, and Indra stands highest because he recognized it first.
A flash of lightning, the blink of an eye, and the name Tadvanam (khanda 4, mantras 4 to 9)
The story ends and the Upanishad does one last thing. It says, now hear the adesha of this, the manner of pointing toward it. And then it offers no definition. It sets down two scenes. The first is on the plane of the gods: as lightning flashed and a sound came out, ah. The second comes from there as well: as an eyelid blinked and the same sound came out. In the mula a long mark is laid on that vowel, a3, so the sound is drawn out, exactly the way it comes out of the mouth on being suddenly dazzled.
This is a very odd way to teach and a very exact one. Lightning flashes for one moment and the whole sky becomes visible, and in the next moment the dark is just as it was. A blink takes the same amount of time. The Upanishad is saying that its address is of that same measure, that sudden and that small. To people sitting in wait for some long, durable, practiced experience, this mantra says that what comes will come like a flash, and that recognizing it is your work.
Then it turns inward and says, now hear from the side of adhyatma, the inner reckoning. That toward which the mind goes as if going, and by which this mind remembers it again and again, and which is sankalpa, the will. Note the word iva here, gachchhati iva, goes as if. The mind cannot truly go toward it, because it is the mind of the mind, and the very first khanda has already said that the mind does not go there. And every time the mind leans that way, something like a going happens. The remembrance that keeps rising inside, the wanting that keeps turning in that same direction, is a sign of the same thing.
Now the Upanishad gives it a name, and this name is the tenderest place in the whole text. It says, it is named Tadvanam, and it should be worshiped as Tadvana. The root van means to want, to love. Tadvanam means that which all want, toward which every wanting is going. And the mantra gives the fruit of it: whoever knows it in this way, all beings come to want him. The man who has recognized the center of everyone’s wanting comes himself into everyone’s love. That so severe an Upanishad ends on this sweet saying tells us something on its own.
After this comes a short exchange which is the key to the whole text. Somebody says, bhagavan, tell me the upanishad. And the answer comes that the upanishad has been told to you, that we have told you the brahmi upanishad itself. Meaning, what you heard just now was it. The questions about mind, breath and speech, the ear of the ear, the demolition of the claim to have known, and then that blade of grass on which Agni lost. The one asking was perhaps waiting for something more, some secret word to be handed over separately. The one telling says that the secret comes by no separate delivery. It lay distributed through this very story.
Then its foundation is stated, and no concession is granted here. Its resting places are tapas, dama and karma. The vedas are all its limbs. Truth is its home. Tapas means labor upon oneself, dama means hold over the senses, karma means going on doing what is to be done. This list is fixed on the door through which that tender name is received. Hearing the talk of the flash, a person might conclude that all he has to do is sit and watch for a flash. The ground has to be kept ready, or else the flash comes and goes and nothing gets seen.
The three are practices with a cost attached. “Tapo damah karma”, tapas, dama, karma, and then “vedah sarvangani satyam ayatanam”, the vedas are all its limbs, truth is its dwelling place. Tapas in that world was counted in things a body registers, the hot months sat out between fires, the cold ones in wet cloth, one meal where there had been two. Dama was the daily refusal, the hand that could reach and does not. Karma was the fire fed at dawn and fed again at dusk for forty years, on the mornings when it meant something and on the mornings when it meant nothing at all. The flash of lightning arrives free and on nobody’s schedule. The ground it falls on gets built by hand over a lifetime.
The final sentence says that whoever knows it in this way, having struck off evil, stands established in that endless, greatest heavenly world, stands established. Pratitishthati is said twice, and this repetition is the completing of this Upanishad, the way a singer sings the last line twice over and lowers his hand.
In short: The adesha arrives through two flashes in place of a definition, the flash of lightning and the blink of an eyelid. On the inward side it is the sign toward which the mind goes as if going and whose remembrance keeps rising again and again. Its name is Tadvanam, that which all want, and all beings come to want the man who knows it. Tapas, dama, karma, the vedas and truth are laid in the foundation, and here this Upanishad is complete.
And in the end, toward yourself
The yaksha of this story comes into our days as well. It simply arrives with too little blaze on it to get recognized. A piece of work is finished after years of labor, and in the very next moment a sentence rises inside: I did this. The sentence is true enough; we did do it. Only the piece falls out of it from which the power to do it had come: this body we were handed, this intelligence of nobody’s making of ours, those people who turned up at exactly the right hour, that breath which kept running without being asked. The gods forgot the same piece, and no punishment came for their forgetting. A blade of grass was set in front of them.
The blade of grass is a different thing in everybody’s life. For one person it is a relationship he cannot untangle with all his good sense. For another it is a habit that has held on for twenty years. For another it is a night in which sleep refuses to come, however large the decisions he takes during the day. We fall on it sarvajavena, with all our speed, and it lies exactly where it lay. In such a moment Agni’s sentence is worth keeping. He came back saying that he could not know, with no mention of the burning that had failed. To call your own failure by the name of your own ignorance is the first correct step.
And one more piece of this story is worth carrying out of it. Nobody in it is punished. The gods take the credit, and no curse falls, no seat is withdrawn, no share is cut off, no god is put out of the hall. What happens is that something comes and stands in front of them and lets them find out for themselves how far their own strength reaches. Then the two who were humiliated in the open are the two the text raises above everybody who stayed sitting. The assembly kept its dignity all the way through the afternoon and came out of the story with nothing. That is the arithmetic here, and it runs against the way we keep our own accounts, where the aim of a day is to reach the evening without having been caught out at anything.
And after that comes Indra’s step. When the hands are empty, go on standing in that same empty sky and ask somebody, in place of going back to the assembly to explain yourself. Asking is the highest act in this story, higher than running. Keep the pratibodhaviditam matter in your pocket alongside it: it is present in no distant event, it is present in every small understanding of today, in every moment when something opens and you know that it opened. In the shanti path of this same Upanishad there is a prayer, “ma’ham brahma nirakuryam”, let there be no denial of brahman by me. This is the smallest and the largest demand of the whole text: in the flush of victory, in the smart of defeat, in front of a blade of grass, anywhere at all, let no denial of that sender occur.
Source: Kena Upanishad, khandas 1 to 4; read against the Sanskrit, with Shankara’s reading noted where readings differ.