In the vast sacrificial pavilion of Naimisharanya the homa fire is blazing, the ritviks (the priests who conduct the rite) are chanting the mantras, and across the pavilion an assembly of sages sits deep in the discussion of sacred knowledge. From that gathering a great householder named Shaunaka rises. He is no ordinary seeker. He is called Shaunaka Mahashala (mahashala means one whose sacrificial hall stretches for miles), because he has completed hundreds of yajnas. After all of it, one thorn still remains in his mind. Formally, with bowed head, he approaches the sage Angiras (the same Angiras to whom this knowledge came down from Brahma at the beginning, through the lineage of Atharva, Angi, and Bharadvaja) and lays before him a single question, which Swami Krishnananda calls an extraordinary question: “O Lord, what is that one thing which, once known, makes all of this known of itself?” The law of logic says that knowing one thing does not make another thing known, and still Shaunaka is searching for that single root from which all knowledge bursts forth.
This Upanishad, which comes from the Atharva Veda, opens with that question and its answer. Its name is Mundaka, and the name itself declares its nature: just as a renunciate shaves his head and cuts away all the clutter within and without, this Upanishad cuts our delusions off at the root. The answer of Angiras becomes its framework: there are two kinds of knowledge worth knowing, para (the higher, the knowledge of that imperishable Brahman) and apara (the lower, the knowledge of the world). Here Swami Krishnananda says something startling, that even the four Vedas and their six limbs are counted as apara vidya; and explaining it he says that apara vidya is like the feet of the body, the feet are not essential to the atman, yet they are necessary for the body. On the foundation of this distinction stand what follows: the limit of sacrificial action, the famous image of two birds seated on one tree, and the proclamation of “सत्यमेव जयते” (truth alone triumphs).
The principal figures of this Upanishad
Shaunaka: a great householder who went formally to Angiras and asked what that one thing is which, once known, makes everything known.
Angiras: the teacher who opened the distinction between para and apara vidya and turned Shaunaka toward Brahman.
Two kinds of knowledge
Para and apara: two ways of knowing
The scene is set in an ashram, where a long chain of knowledge has been handed down from generation to generation. The Mundaka Upanishad first counts out that chain. Brahmavidya (the knowledge whose subject is Brahman, the root of all) was given at the beginning by the creator Brahma himself to his eldest son Atharva, then it passed from Angi to Satyavaha and at last reached the sage Angiras. Now a great performer of sacrifices, the honorable Shaunaka, comes to that same Angiras with full reverence and lays before him a single question, “O Lord, what is that one thing which, once known, makes everything known?”
Swami Krishnananda grasps this question with great precision. According to him, ordinarily knowing one thing does not make another thing known; every piece of information stays separate, broken into fragments. So how can knowing one make all known? He says the only possible meaning is that everything is made of that one essence. Brahmavidya is a knowledge that does not shut the other knowledges out; it melts them all into itself. It is not fragmented the way intellectual information is; it is that undivided experience in which the essence of the knower and the essence of the known become one.
In answer to Shaunaka’s question the sage Angiras names two kinds of knowledge. He says that two kinds of knowledge are worth attaining, so those who know Brahman have declared, one apara (the lower knowledge) and one para (the higher knowledge). The lower knowledge holds the four Vedas (Rig, Yajur, Sama, and Atharva) along with shiksha (the science of pronunciation), kalpa (the procedure of ritual), grammar, nirukta (the etymology of words), chhanda (prosody, Pingala), and jyotisha (astronomy). And para vidya is that by which the akshara (that which never wanes, the imperishable Brahman) is attained.
Here Swami Krishnananda raises a beautiful point. The honorable Shaunaka had asked about the higher knowledge, so why does the sage Angiras begin by explaining the lower one? According to him, a doubt can rise in the student’s mind about whether all this information has any worth at all. The sage Angiras senses this doubt in advance and makes it clear that the lower knowledge is an incomplete means of reaching Brahman. This knowledge carries you as far as attaining the higher worlds through the gods, their worship, and meritorious deeds. It is not useless, yet it does not carry you to the destination.
Swami Krishnananda spells out the deep difference between the two. According to him, in the lower knowledge, knowing gives birth to action, meaning that after you learn something you still have to make an effort to attain it. When you gain the knowledge of some deity, you then have to perform worship to reach that deity. In the higher knowledge, all activity ceases even before the knowing arrives. He goes on to say that the higher knowledge is not the knowing of any particular deity, and truthfully it is not information in the ordinary sense at all. It holds no relation between a knower and a known; it is the knowing of the knower himself, where no veil of knowing or cognition remains in between.
Along the same line he opens the difference between dharma and knowledge. According to him, the nature of dharma is to push a person toward action. The one with the lower knowledge, having gained the knowledge of dharma, throws himself into action, because the sense of incompleteness that lingers in that knowledge is exactly what goads him to do still more. The higher knowledge is complete in itself; once you attain it, no need remains to do anything further. And what is that akshara like? The Mundaka Upanishad says it is that which the eye cannot see and the hand cannot grasp, which has neither lineage nor color, which lies beyond eye, ear, hand, and foot, unborn, eternal, all-pervading, seated in the heart of all, extremely subtle, and the source of all beings. According to Swami Krishnananda this imperishable essence is the subject of para vidya, and only those whose vision has turned inward can see it.
The gist: information and self-knowledge are two different things. Information, even if it is all four Vedas and every shastra, stays broken into fragments and always pushes you onward toward some action, because the sense of incompleteness lingers in it. Self-knowledge is that undivided experience which is complete in itself; once you attain it, nothing more remains to know and nothing more to do. Knowing one thing makes everything known for this reason, that the single akshara is the root of all.
The unsteady boats of sacrifice
The first Mundaka of the Mundaka Upanishad now reaches its second section. The previous section counted out two kinds of vidya (knowledge), apara vidya (the lower, worldly information) and para vidya (the higher knowledge by which the imperishable Brahman is known). Here the Upanishad first walks us through the most brilliant form of apara vidya, the sacrificial ritual of the Vedas, and then with great patience shows how far this road carries you and where it leaves you.
At the outset the Upanishad does not deny the glory of yajna. It says that the fruits of the rites the sages saw in the mantras were spread out and practiced in the Treta Yuga. Homa (offering oblations into fire), agnihotra (the daily fire-rite), and darsha-purnamasa (the sacrifices of the new moon and the full moon) each have their own ordinance. This Upanishad tells even the fine moment of the oblation, that only when the flames of the fire begin to quiver should the middle oblation of ghee be poured. It counts out even the names of the seven tongues of the sacrificial flame, Kali, Karali, Manojava, and the rest. The one who offers his oblations on time and by the rule is carried by the rays of the sun up to the world of the gods, and the oblations take form and call to him in sweet words, “Come, come, this is your heaven earned by merit.”
Yet at exactly this height the Upanishad says the thing that is the pivot of the whole section. In the seventh mantra it calls those sacrifices, and the entire apparatus of the eighteen people bound to the sacrifice (the ritviks, the patron, and the rest), “unsteady and unsafe boats,” boats one climbs onto hoping to cross the ocean of samsara. Swami Krishnananda opens this image up. The original word is plava, which means a boat, and also a bubble of water. These rites are like bubbles, Swami ji says, because their fruits burst like a bubble, along with all their stored-up force. His reasoning is direct: every action happens only within space and time, so it cannot reach anything that lies beyond space and time. However adorned the boat, it floats in the very water it is meant to carry you across.
In the eighth mantra the Upanishad grows sharper. Those who are drowning in the middle of avidya (ignorance) yet take themselves to be great and learned go round and round in the wheel of samsara, battered by foolish old age, disease, and death, exactly like the blind walking while holding the hand of another blind man. Swami Krishnananda explains this “blind leading the blind” in a deeply moving way. According to him, a person even takes his counsel, for living by his own self-interest, from those who will feed that self-interest. A mind full of desires cannot bear the counsel of the wise at all, because true wisdom runs against desire. Rejecting the words of knowledge, he chooses his own way and in his ego assumes he has reached the destination. Swami ji says there are three flaws in the enjoyment of fruits: desire does not last until the fruit arrives, so what one gets is no longer the thing one wanted; the happiness it seems to offer is a momentary stir raised by contact with what one desired, nothing more; and since all desires are not fulfilled in a single birth, one has to take many more births. In the same way the heaven of the tenth mantra does not last either, and the moment the merit runs out the soul falls back into this very world, sometimes all the way down.
Then the Upanishad shows the way, and here comes the true alternative to the unsteady boat. In the twelfth mantra it says that the wise seeker should examine the reality of these worlds earned by action and grow completely detached from them, because that which was never made (akrita) cannot be reached through what is made (krita). Swami Krishnananda presses this point: a relation forms between like things, not between unlike ones; and since every action runs on change and movement, the knowledge that springs from it will be just as fleeting. Brahman is not something made, so it is reached neither by any action, nor by purifying, nor by altering, and only by pure knowledge. For this reason, Swami ji says, however learned a person may be, without an experienced guru this inner knowing does not descend. The seeker should take samidha (sacrificial wood, the emblem of the disciple’s spirit) in hand and go to a guru who is shrotriya (versed in the scriptures) and brahmanishtha (established in Brahman).
The thirteenth mantra completes it. To the disciple who comes to the guru properly, with a calm mind and full self-restraint, that wise guru gives Brahmavidya, by which the akshara purusha (the imperishable being) is known. Swami Krishnananda names the disciple’s first condition as nirichha (the complete renunciation of desires), so far that even the wish to remain in the body must fall away. According to him the seeker must combine the qualities of both the head and the heart, viveka (discerning the eternal from the fleeting, a quality of the head) and vairagya (letting go of the fleeting, a quality of the heart), which are perfected in the sadhana-chatushtaya (the four preparations of practice). Only then does the unsteady boat fall away and the road opens that truly carries you across.
The gist: yajna and meritorious deeds are not bad, yet they are means built within space and time, so they cannot reach that akshara which lies beyond space and time. Those who take these as the ultimate and stay aboard the unsteady boat go round in birth and death like the blind man walking behind another blind man, all while thinking themselves wise. The real road is to grow detached from fruits and, with a calm and disciplined mind, samidha in hand, go to a guru established in Brahman, because that which is not made is attained only by pure knowledge, never by doing.
From Brahman to Brahman
Like sparks from a fire: one source for all
Now the second Mundaka (chapter) of the Upanishad begins. The first section spoke of two kinds of vidya, apara vidya (worldly knowledge tied to activity and rite) and para vidya (Brahmavidya, the knowledge of that supreme being from which everything issues). Now the sage turns toward that same supreme source and sets before us a small, homely picture. In a courtyard, in the dark of night, a fire is blazing. Thousands of sparks leap out of the flames, each in a different direction, each of a different shape, and in an instant they return into the same fire.
The sage says, this is the truth (this is his “एतत् सत्यम्”, meaning “this is truth”). Just as countless sparks rise from a blazing fire and merge back into it, so from that akshara purusha (the imperishable supreme being) all creatures, all worlds, and all gods take birth and then return into the very same.
Here Swami Krishnananda pauses on a delicate point. According to him, this simile of the sparks is not given to teach that creatures live cut off from their source, independent, the way a spark leaps free of the fire. Its real purpose is to show that the nature of the effect (the thing produced) is one with the nature of its cause (the source). Whatever is true in each creature, whatever endures and is eternal, is the same in all. What appears separate is only each one’s own way of thinking. Swami ji says that moksha (liberation) therefore means breaking the wall of this limited, separative awareness of ours and dissolving into that shared essence.
To deepen this, Swami ji gives two more pictures. The first, of trees. The roots of all trees are in one and the same earth, all are nourished by the sap of that single earth, yet the branches do not touch the earth and every tree looks separate from above. In the same way all creatures are rooted in that one universal atman, and only the outer form differs. The second picture is subtler still. The air in different vessels may carry different scents, yet the space (the void) inside those very vessels stays untouched by scent. According to Swami Krishnananda only two things create the difference, the vessel and the scent, meaning the body and the mind. Remove these two and no difference remains at all. The atman is the same in all, however many the colors of the mind.
The second and third verses open the very nature of that purusha. That purusha is divine, formless, within and also without, unborn (having no cause, and so no birth), beyond prana and mind, pure. Swami ji explains that the “purusha” is that which fills all space and dwells also in the cave of the heart. It is within and without because it is immaterial, made of no substance. Prana and mind are limiting instruments, so they have no place in the boundless purusha. From that one, prana bursts forth, mind bursts forth, the senses and the five elements (ether, air, fire, water, and the earth that holds all) come out. Name and form are only a world of appearance; Swami ji says the real being is sacchidananda (sat-chit-ananda, that is existence-consciousness-bliss), and it is by the falling of its reflection that these names and forms seem real.
So for Swami ji that one fire in the courtyard and the countless sparks rising from it and returning to it, this is the story of the whole world. The expanse of a single being, spreading into a thousand forms, then drawing back into one.
The gist: the spark is not separate from the fire, it leaps out carrying the very nature of the fire. Body and mind are the two vessels that stage the illusion of difference; cross past them and the space within turns out to be one and the same in all. What you count as “I” and “that” is, deep down, the spreading of a single purusha.
“सत्यमेव जयते”: the bow of ॐ, the arrow of the atman
We stand at that turn in the second Mundaka (chapter) of the Mundaka Upanishad where the guru now turns the direction of his teaching toward the disciple. The Parabrahman (the supreme being) spoken of until now is no distant object. It is the very one seated in the cave of your own heart, the one on which all the worlds rest. The guru describes that Brahman, which is life, which is speech, which is mind, which is self-luminous, subtler than the subtle. And then he calls out plainly, “O disciple! Fix your meditation on this.” It is here that the image of upasana (the practice of meditation) opens, the image that has become the signature of this Upanishad.
The thread of that same truth, coming forward into the third Mundaka, becomes a proclamation, सत्यमेव जयते (truth alone triumphs). The Upanishad says that truth alone wins the victory. Devayana, the path of the gods, by which the seekers of truth reach that supreme station, is a path bound to truth. The sage calls it the path of the sincere, desireless seeker, whose inside and outside are one.
Now that central image. The guru says, take hold of the great bow that is the essence of the Upanishads. Fit to it the arrow that is the atman, an arrow sharpened and made keen by ceaseless manana (repeated contemplation). Then, gathering your attention onto that target, draw the bowstring with the conscious feeling of it alone. And, O disciple, pierce the mark that is the akshara (that which never decays, the imperishable Brahman). Then comes the proclamation that stays in memory: ॐ is the bow, the atman is the arrow, and Brahman is the mark to be pierced. Pierce it with full care, and just as the arrow sinks into the mark and becomes one with it, dissolve into Brahman.
Swami Krishnananda opens this image with great precision. According to him, by ceaseless meditation on ॐ the limited individual consciousness slowly takes on the very form of ॐ, and ॐ in its own nature is boundless. He says the one who meditates finally turns into the object of meditation (the dhyata becomes the dhyeya). ॐ is the symbol of Brahman, and so meditation on ॐ carries you to the direct realization of Brahman. The moment the mind settles on ॐ it grows pure, drops its scattering tendency, and comes to rest in the waveless state of that calm ॐ.
But Swami ji catches a deeper point that turns this image inward. He says an ordinary arrow travels toward some external object, while this arrow of the atman turns inward instead of flying outward. So it does not happen that the person slides toward Brahman and then goes and meets it. What happens is that the person passes beyond his own private, limited existence and is extinguished deep within. Swami Krishnananda calls this a self-centering rather than a meditation performed upon an object. Brahman is called the mark not because it sits somewhere far off for the arrow to go and pierce. It is the mark because, when the seeker’s own sense of personality is lost, the supreme experience that remains is Brahman itself. Whatever form the mind rests on for long, it finally becomes that form, and then it begins to see that form everywhere. Yet seeing one form in every place, the mind cannot save its own separate identity, and so it dissolves of itself. This is the self-dissolution and the recovery of the atman.
Swami ji warns that this piercing does not come from carelessness or from an undiscerning habit. It comes from the very power that rises out of the complete renunciation of all objects and states, by which the mind settles into supreme vairagya (desirelessness). One thing can become one with another only when it takes on that other’s nature. Any desire, whether open or pressed down inside, stands against this oneness. For this reason this becoming one-formed with Brahman, this total identity with the target, comes only when one is supremely desireless. Sink into that mark like the arrow, and sinking in, be extinguished in it.
The gist: this bow of ॐ is not loosed at a mark seated somewhere far off. The arrow turns inward, and the atman passes beyond its own being-limited and goes out like a flame. Brahman is no distant target. It is the very experience that remains once your sense of being separate falls away. This is why truth alone triumphs, because the one who has dropped every desire is the one who stays one with the target, made of its very form.
Moksha
Two birds on one branch: the one who tastes and the one who watches
The Mundaka Upanishad now reaches the third Mundaka and sets before us a picture of the kind found only in poetry. On one and the same tree sit two birds, both golden, both close friends of each other. One bird is tasting the sweet fruit of that tree, and the other simply keeps watching, eating nothing, not stirring the branch. This image is the whole riddle of this section, and in it the whole secret of life lies hidden.
According to Swami Krishnananda those two birds are not some outer pair, they dwell within all of us. The first bird is the jiva (that consciousness which has become bound to body and mind), the second is Ishvara (the same consciousness in its real, unobstructed form). They live side by side the way a reflection and its original live together, and both have one and the same ground, Brahman (the supreme being that is the reality of both). The tree on which they sit is this body. Swami ji calls it a tree because, like a tree, it can be cut down, it is not a thing that lasts forever. This same body he calls the kshetra (the field, the tilled ground of action and enjoyment), and the one who knows it the kshetrajna (the knower of the field).
Then Swami Krishnananda raises a deep point, that the difference between the jiva and Ishvara is of only one thing, and that is the mind. In truth the mind is the jiva. This very mind gets colored by avidya (the darkness of not knowing the reality), kama (craving), and karma (the seeds of deeds done), and because of this attachment it has to suffer the fruits of its deeds, sometimes pleasure, sometimes pain. The calm bird on the other side, Ishvara, is bound by no limiting condition, has no karma to do at all, and so no fruit to suffer either. Swami ji says its very being is its action, and the worth of just this being of it is greater than all the motion of the entire universe, because that being alone is running all of creation.
Now in the second mantra the Upanishad carries the same tree forward. That same jiva-bird sits on its own tree, drowned in grief, cheated by delusion and taking itself to be helpless. Swami Krishnananda opens the root of this grief, that this sorrow is the fruit of old deeds done without thought or understanding. Such deeds keep no rhythm with the law of truth, so they come back as bitter experiences and torment him, and every new incomplete experience adds more grief to the heap of old grief. Caged in the mold of its own cravings and deeds, the jiva feels itself incapable, tangled, and helpless. It even comes to believe that this one experience alone is real, that beyond it there is no reality at all. In this delusion it keeps joining with things and parting from them, taking birth, dying, and passing through all kinds of yonis (forms of birth) according to its deeds.
But the same mantra opens the door of liberation too. The moment that enjoying bird lifts its head and sees the other one seated beside it, the calm, adorable Lord, in that very moment its grief falls away. Swami Krishnananda explains it this way, that the jiva’s real freedom is in this very seeing, in the darshan of that supreme Lord who is not separate from it at all, who is its own true nature. This realization of Ishvara is in truth the rising of the jiva’s own consciousness up to the consciousness of Ishvara. And the instant this happens, no separate thing called the jiva remains there at all, the way one recognizes one’s own glory the moment the veil is lifted. This lifting of the veil, this darshan of Ishvara, is the end of all incompleteness and all grief.
So the two birds are really two modes of a single consciousness, one become the doer and enjoyer, sunk on the branch, the other become the drashta (the witness atman), watching in calm. As long as the fruit-tasting bird stays bent low, grief is its companion. Yet the moment it lifts its gaze toward its friend above, it turns out that the enjoyer and the watcher were never two, and in this recognition the tree of the body loses all its bitterness.
The gist: within you are two modes of a single consciousness, one a doer who tastes the fruit and weeps, the other a witness who quietly watches. Grief lasts only as long as the gaze stays bent on the fruit. The moment we recognize that calm drashta, who is our own true nature, the enjoyer and the watcher become one and the very root of grief is cut.
The breaking of the heart’s knot
The Mundaka Upanishad stands at its last stage. By now this Upanishad has told us that there are two kinds of knowledge, apara (the small, bookish, outer information) and para (the great one, by which the imperishable Brahman is known). Here the sage comes to that last question for which the whole journey was made, how that atman (one’s own true nature, which is Brahman itself) is finally reached. And the answer is startling.
The Upanishad says this atman is not reached through discourses, nor through a sharp intellect, nor through hearing a great deal. However much we speak, think, or memorize the scriptures, all of that is an outer road, and the atman is not a thing lying outside at all. So how is it reached? The Upanishad’s answer is that the one whom it chooses for itself, to that one alone it shows its true form.
Swami Krishnananda opens this “choosing” with great care. According to him, no external deity here is sorting us out and calling us close. The one to be attained (the atman) and the one who wishes to attain (the seeker) are not two separate things at all. The atman is not some object different from the seeker, it is the seeker’s own real nature. Swami ji explains that this is why it cannot be reached by any action, by any outer effort, exactly as we do not reach our own body by way of some journey or deed, it is already ours. There is only one condition, and that is intense longing. What is called surrender here, according to Swami Krishnananda, is not the handing of oneself over to someone else, it is the letting go of the false “I,” so that the obstacle in the experience of the real infinite nature (this very counterfeit ego) is removed.
Now the Upanishad paints the picture of that moment when this darshan occurs. It says that the instant it is seen, the knot of the heart (the hridaya-granthi, that deep knot of “I and mine” which keeps the atman bound to the world) comes undone, all doubts (the misgivings, the waverings) are cut, and karma (the seeds of deeds done and their fruits) falls away. Swami Krishnananda’s point here is very clear, that knowledge adds no new thing, it only removes ignorance. The moment ignorance is erased, the moment the sense of being two is canceled, in that very moment there is liberation, without any obstruction. And why would an obstruction even arise? Swami ji says opposition and hindrances surround only the one who sets out to attain some limited, separate thing, because the other limited things resist him. But the one who longs for that all-pervading truth which is shared by all, who indeed will resist him? The whole universe helps such a seeker.
Then the Upanishad gives the image that is the soul of this whole passage. Just as flowing rivers go and merge into the sea and leave their name and form right there, the Ganga is no longer the Ganga, the Yamuna no longer the Yamuna, only the sea remains, so the knower, freed from his own name and form, merges into that supreme purusha who is higher than the high. Swami Krishnananda reads it this way, that this is no loss, the water of the river is not erased, only its limited name and limited shape dissolve, and it becomes boundless.
At the end the Upanishad proclaims, the one who comes to know Brahman becomes Brahman itself. According to Swami Krishnananda that soul then becomes the soul of all the gods too, so no one can block his path. He passes beyond grief, passes beyond sin, is freed from pairs such as merit and demerit, the knots of the heart break, and he becomes immortal. This immortality is not some event further along in time, Swami ji insists that moksha is not a moving toward some state, it is the unchanging experience of here and now.
The gist: the atman is not some object lying outside for us to gather by reading, reasoning, or a great deal of hearing, it is our own real nature, which no journey reaches. Simply let the false “I” fall, knowledge adds nothing, it only lifts the veil of ignorance. And just as a river, leaving its name and form in the sea, becomes boundless, so the moment the knot of the heart comes undone all doubts and all karma fall away, and what remains is you yourself.
And at the end, toward yourself
Until now we have sat in that forest hut where an old sage of the line of Angira, a descendant of Atharva, was slowly opening everything up for a seeking disciple. He explained the difference between the two kinds of knowledge, took us on the journey from the flames of the sacrifice to that akshara out of which this whole world is woven. Yet the one sentence of the entire Mundaka Upanishad that keeps echoing longest inside the reader is this, “भिद्यते हृदयग्रन्थिः”, the knot of the heart breaks.
Swami Krishnananda (the learned monk of the Divine Life Society of Rishikesh) does not take this line for a poetic ornament. He says this “knot” (granthi) is a real knot, tied inside every human being, and made of three threads: avidya (not knowing one’s own true nature), kama (the thirst of desires awakened by it), and karma (the running about to fulfill those desires). These three together raise up that feeling of “I am separate, everything is outside me,” and according to Swami Krishnananda this knot of the ego sits clenched in the heart, and it is because of this that a person keeps wandering birth after birth.
His deepest point is that the untying of the knot, the erasing of doubts, and the falling away of deeds are not three separate events that occur one after another. Swami Krishnananda says that in “तस्मिन् दृष्टे परावरे” (the moment that supreme-and-near, highest-of-the-high and closest-of-the-close self-principle is seen), in that one single instant all three happen together. Just as a man who mistakes a rope for a snake and is afraid, the moment he lights a lamp and sees the rope, his fear, his running, and his knot all let go in one and the same instant. When knowledge comes, it comes whole and entire, never in pieces.
And here the Upanishad reminds us again of those two birds seated together on one branch of the same tree (that famous image of the atman and the Paramatman). One bird goes on tasting the fruit of the tree, now the pleasure of the sweet, now the grief of the bitter, and stays drowned, bound, and restless in this very tasting. The other bird eats nothing, just sits calm and keeps watching, luminous, untouched, unmoving. Swami Krishnananda says the real turn comes at the moment the first bird, worn and defeated, lifts its gaze the slightest bit toward the other and recognizes that the watching second bird is no stranger, it is its own true form.
So the liberation this Upanishad has been speaking of all along is not kept in some distant heaven, in some other world after death. Swami Krishnananda says with emphasis that it is “इहैव”, right here, in this very body, in this very life, that it is possible. The knot is tied in this very heart, so it will come undone in this very heart too. The only delay is as long as it takes the first bird to turn its neck toward the other.
So now, as we close the book, truthfully, this story no longer stays the story of some ancient disciple, it becomes our own. The fruits still hang before us, the sweet ones and the bitter ones, and we are still busy tasting them. But on that very branch, within us, sits that calm watcher, silent, luminous, looking toward us. The Upanishad has done its work; now only one slight turning remains, away from the fruits hanging outside, toward that witness seated within.
The gist: the knot of the heart is made of three threads, avidya, desire, and karma, and in the one instant the inner witness is seen, in that instant all three let go together. That instant belongs to this very life, not to some other world; the only delay is in turning away from the fruits toward the watching bird.
The commentary is based mainly on the Mundaka Upanishad exposition of Swami Krishnananda (the Divine Life Society).