Picture a quiet ashram, where a student sits before his teacher and a single question rings in his mind, “What, in the end, remains at the root of everything? What is that one thing present in trees, in stones, in stars, and in me as well?” The teacher points inward, toward the cave of the heart (guha, the deepest inner recess of a person), where, as he sees it, the mystery of the whole cosmos lies hidden. Swami Krishnananda says that whoever touches that supreme reality has, in effect, touched the floor of the ocean of truth, and in a single moment all their desires are satisfied. This scene, this inward journey, is the very soul of this Upanishad.
This Taittiriya Upanishad comes from the Taittiriya branch of the Krishna Yajurveda, and its name is bound to that very branch and its lineage. It divides into three parts (the vallis): the Shikshavalli (where the guru gives his student instruction in conduct and the famous convocation address), the Brahmanandavalli (where food, breath, mind, intellect, and bliss, these five sheaths, the layers that cover the atman, the self, are examined, and where an attempt is made to measure bliss), and the Bhriguvalli (where a son named Bhrigu, asking his father Varuna again and again, searches out Brahman). In this Upanishad the immortal definition rings out, “सत्यं ज्ञानम् अनन्तं ब्रह्म” (Brahman is truth, is knowledge, and is infinite), and on its strength this Upanishad answers that one root question: how the supreme reality hidden in the cave of the heart becomes the source of all creation, and how we ourselves are its small reflection.
The main characters of this Upanishad
Varuna: Bhrigu’s father and guru, who by turning his son back to tapas (austere practice) again and again let him find Brahman for himself.
Bhrigu: Varuna’s son, who climbed from food to bliss one rung at a time and recognized Brahman.
The guru’s teaching
“सत्यं वद, धर्मं चर”: the guru’s farewell counsel
The studies are finished. For years the student (the pupil who lived in his guru’s house and read the Vedas) sat at the feet of his teacher (the guru who instructs him), and now he stands ready to go home. This is the moment that arrives in the Shikshavalli of the Taittiriya Upanishad (the first chapter, named the valli of shiksha, of instruction), the moment tradition calls the convocation address, the final counsel given when a student’s learning ends. Before letting him go, the guru stays his hand and speaks a few words, and those words have echoed on the threshold of every gurukul to this day.
The guru’s first command is small but heavy, “सत्यं वद” (speak the truth), “धर्मं चर” (walk the path of dharma, live out your duty). Then he adds, “स्वाध्यायान्मा प्रमदः” (do not grow lazy in your study, never let the thread of learning break). It is as though the guru is saying that even after you return home, the lamp lit here must not go out.
After this comes the line this Upanishad placed in the mouths of generations, “मातृदेवो भव” (hold your mother as a deity), “पितृदेवो भव” (hold your father as a deity), “आचार्यदेवो भव” (hold your teacher as a deity), “अतिथिदेवो भव” (hold the guest, the one who arrives unbidden at your door, as a deity). The guru asks you to bow before all four, because the one who gave you birth, the one who raised you, the one who gave you knowledge, and the one who came to your door in trust all hold within them that same single reality for whose sake all learning was ever composed.
In the mainstream of Shankara’s commentary, these words form a touchstone for the whole of life, a working measure a person carries at every step. The guru warns that actions will come where the road is not clear, where even the word of shastra leaves you in doubt. For such a moment he hands you a plain measure, “यान्यनवद्यानि कर्माणि, तानि सेवितव्यानि” (perform only those acts that stand beyond reproach), and “नो इतराणि” (and no others). Beyond reproach, meaning the acts that leave your own heart unashamed and that make even the good and upright raise no eyebrow.
The guru does not stop here. He says that whenever doubt surrounds you, about an action or about how a person has behaved, look to the settled, thoughtful, gentle, and dharma-loving good souls of that land, watch how they conduct themselves in such a place, and do as they do. Tradition reads a deep humility into this. Even after gaining knowledge, a person does not earn the right to decide alone on the strength of his own ego; he must keep learning from the living example of those whose conduct is spotless.
This is the real beauty of the convocation address. The guru’s parting gift to his student is a habit of character: truth, dharma, an appetite for continued learning, reverence toward elders and guests, and the practice of weighing every act against the measure of reproach. Years of knowledge distill, in the end, into this simplicity, and this is why the farewell teaching still echoes in every honest act, long after the gurukuls themselves have faded away.
The gist: the true parting gift of learning is a habit you keep. Speak the truth, walk the path of dharma, never stop learning, hold mother, father, teacher, and guest as deities, and when the road grows tangled, choose only those acts that stand beyond reproach, and go on learning from the example of good souls whose conduct is spotless.
The five sheaths and bliss
The five sheaths: the layers from food to bliss
In the Brahmanandavalli of the Taittiriya Upanishad (the valli, the chapter, of bliss, where the definition of Brahman opens up), the teacher sets a large question before his students. First he names Brahman, सत्यं ज्ञानम् अनन्तं ब्रह्म (that which is truth, which is knowledge, which has no end). Then he says that this supreme reality lies hidden in the cave of the heart (guha, the innermost recess) of every single person. Now the question arises: if that reality sits within, why must we cross so many layers to reach it? From this very curiosity the picture of the panchakosha (the five coverings) opens.
Swami Krishnananda reads this passage in a strikingly original way. He says that the same creation which descended outward from Brahman step by step, from space to air, air to fire, fire to water, water to earth, earth to plant, plant to food, and food to this human body, that entire sequence is repeated inside us in miniature. In his telling, the universe he calls the brahmanda, and this individual the pindanda (the small egg, the whole cosmos in subtle form). The layers that stand rising outward are the very ones that, turned inward within us, have become the sheaths. This is why he says that if you know yourself, you have known the whole world, because you are a small map of all creation.
The first layer is the annamaya kosha (the gross body built from food). Swamiji describes it as our outermost and most solid layer, the one the eye can see, which is in truth the settled form of the food we have eaten. Within it lies the pranamaya kosha (the sheath of breath and vital force). Here he offers a caution about the word prana. It means an inner pulse, a vital force by which the body seems alive, and it reaches well past the air that moves in and out of the nose. Wherever this force spreads, life beats all the way to the fingertip, and wherever it is withdrawn, paralysis or death sets in.
The next layer is the manomaya kosha (the sheath of mind). Swami Krishnananda adds a lovely link here: prana does keep the body alive, yet it is itself bound to the mind’s thoughts. Whichever way the mind turns its thinking, the energy of prana begins to flow that way. He gives the example that small children look beautiful for just this reason, because their vital force is spread evenly through the whole body, and no craving of any sense organ has yet pulled it to one side. As a person grows, the senses begin to seize that energy, each for its own work. Within this lies the vijnanamaya kosha (the sheath of intellect and judgment). He makes the difference plain: the mind says “there is something,” but the certainty that “yes, this is a tree, this is a lamppost, this is a human being,” that recognition is the work of the intellect (vijnana).
And seated within them all is the anandamaya kosha (the sheath of bliss), which Swamiji ties to that deep, formless condition inside us that we taste in deep sleep (sushupti). This layer is the storehouse of all past experiences and the seedbed of all experiences to come. His subtle argument runs this way: sleep cannot be sheer blankness, because on waking from it a person says “I slept happily,” and the taste of that happiness is impossible without some consciousness. King or beggar, everyone longs for the fullness of deep sleep. Swamiji says that a king who cannot sleep for nights on end would trade his vast kingdom for just a few days of peaceful sleep. This is the sign that the layer within is made of bliss. As you peel the layers away, what finally comes to hand is सत्यं ज्ञानम् अनन्तं ब्रह्म, the atman hidden in the cave of the heart.
For this whole picture Swami Krishnananda offers a homely comparison. Just as the layers of an onion together make the onion, these sheaths together compose our personality, and this is the very method by which all creation is built. In one sense, he says, the entire universe is a single covering over Brahman. Remove one layer, the next lies within, then another within that, and at the end the atman that depends on no layer at all. Going outward yields nothing here, because what is utterly far (in the reach of creation) is the very thing that is utterly near (in the form of your own being).
The gist: within the layers sits the one who counts them, and that one is you. The body of food, the breath, the mind, the intellect, these are all coverings wrapped one inside the next, and if you keep peeling them like an onion, what remains at the end is bliss itself, the atman hidden in the cave, with no further layer beneath it. To know yourself is to know the whole of creation.
The inquiry into bliss, and “रसो वै सः”
Now we have arrived in the Brahmanandavalli (the part of the Taittiriya Upanishad that speaks of the bliss of Brahman). Here the rishi sits down to work out an unusual calculation. Ordinarily one reaches Brahman by way of reasoning, but here the Upanishad builds a staircase, a staircase of happiness, and says, come, let us measure bliss and see where it truly lives. Tradition calls this reckoning the ananda-mimamsa (the investigation of bliss, its careful analysis).
The unit of measure they choose with great care. Take a young man, youthful, of good character, learned, firm, and quick, who holds all the splendor of this abundant earth. The happiness of such a flourishing person, take that as one unit. This human bliss (the happiness of a human being) is the first rung. Then the Upanishad goes on multiplying this unit a hundredfold at each step. The bliss of the human gandharvas (those souls who reached the gandharva world through their own practice) is a hundred times that human happiness. Beyond them the divine gandharvas, then the long-lived deities of the pitri-loka (the world of ancestors), then the gods who attain godhood through action, then the gods by birth, then Indra (lord of the gods), then Brihaspati (guru of the gods), then Prajapati (master of creation), and above them all the bliss of Brahman. At every rung the same condition is repeated, one who is akama-hata, whose desires have already grown still.
This last condition is the key to the whole calculation. The Upanishad says a higher being is blissful exactly to the degree that its craving has burned away. The smaller the thirst, the deeper the sip. So this staircase runs inward and downward, toward fulfillment, growing deeper as it descends. The bliss of Brahman is supreme for the plain reason that there, nothing at all is left to ask for.
Swami Krishnananda grips the root of this whole passage right here. He says that every happiness in the world rests on the support of some external thing, and a thing that stands outside us never becomes wholly ours. He gives the example of a king. The king thinks, “all this earth is mine,” yet the earth lies outside him, and never comes into the grasp of his consciousness. And so, in Swamiji’s view, the king’s happiness is only an imagining, and every external thing arrives carrying its own anxiety, the worry of managing it, guarding it, not losing it. Fill your palm with a heap of gold and it gives you restlessness. This is why, the higher you climb on the outside, the more the unease grows, and the more contentment shrinks.
Then he opens up the real difference between the bliss of Brahman and this worldly happiness. Swami Krishnananda says that the experience of Brahman is a oneness with one’s own existence, and it comes through no contact with an object, no touching, gaining, or enjoying. There the one being known and the one who knows become a single thing. Sat (being) and chit (knowing) merge into each other, and so that bliss is the very nature of our being; it does not arrive from outside. And this same bliss, he reminds us, already sits hidden in the cave of the heart (the deepest inner recess) of every human being.
Tradition catches this very point in a single line, “रसो वै सः” (he is rasa itself, savor itself, sweetness itself). Meaning that on every step of the staircase of bliss we just climbed, the little taste of rasa we were given was borrowed, dripped from that one rasa. In the gandharva’s pleasure, in Indra’s pleasure, even in one small moment of our own laughter, it is the same rasa that sits. The Upanishad says that only on receiving that rasa does a living being become full of bliss, because without rasa no one can even draw breath, cannot even live. And all of this is carried along by that same rasa. Fear is not what drives it. Just as a flower feels no fear of the sun, it blooms in that very light.
The gist: the staircase of bliss runs inward and deep, and every rung is measured by one thing, how far the thirst has burned out. The small taste of rasa we chase outside, that “रसो वै सः”, already sits in the cave of our own heart. Once you find it, you begin to live on the strength of that rasa, and fear no longer carries you.
Bhrigu’s search
The Bhriguvalli: Bhrigu’s search from food to bliss
In the solitude of the ashram a son comes to his father, hands folded, carrying a single curiosity in his mind. The son’s name is Bhrigu, and the father is Varuna (in the Vedic tradition the presiding deity of water and of rita, cosmic order, here Bhrigu’s father and guru). Bhrigu asks for one thing, “Revered one, teach me Brahman (the supreme reality from which everything comes).” This part of the Taittiriya Upanishad, named the Bhriguvalli, opens on this one question, and with great simplicity it says something very deep.
Varuna does not hand his son a memorized definition. He gives only this much of a hint, “Desire to know that from which all these beings are born, in which, once born, they live, and into which, at the end, they return; that is Brahman.” Then he commands, “Go, perform tapas (concentrated contemplation and inward practice), and find out for yourself.” Here the weight of tradition (the mainstream of Shankara’s commentary) rests on just this: Brahman is a thing recognized only by descending into one’s own depths, never a borrowed answer that someone can hand over.
Bhrigu settles into tapas and receives his first answer, “Food (anna, the substance that is eaten) is Brahman.” The reasoning is straightforward: it is from food that the body is built, and on food that beings live and grow. But his mind does not settle. He returns to his father again, and each time Varuna repeats the same one line, “Desire to know Brahman through tapas; tapas is Brahman.” Meaning, go beyond the answer you have found.
The next time Bhrigu feels that prana (the life-force, the conscious energy behind the breath) is Brahman, because food becomes life only when prana takes charge of it. Then mind (the power of thought and resolve) appears to him as Brahman, because prana too finds its direction only when the mind thinks. After that vijnana (the deciding intellect, which recognizes precisely what a thing is) seems to be Brahman. At every step Varuna kept sending him back to tapas, as if to say that there is still further to descend within.
At last Bhrigu reaches the level where he recognizes that bliss (ananda, supreme gladness, the sense of fullness that rests on no external thing) is Brahman. Because it is from bliss that all these beings are born, in bliss that they live, and into bliss that they return. This is the culminating declaration of the Bhriguvalli, आनन्दो ब्रह्म (bliss is Brahman). The five layers, food, prana, mind, vijnana, and bliss, had been set one within another, and on the deepest layer of all sat the fullness for whose sake the whole search had been moving.
In his commentary on this same Taittiriya Upanishad, Swami Krishnananda calls these layers koshas (coverings that veil consciousness), and offers a lovely comparison: just as the layers of an onion, stacked one over another, are what make the onion, these sheaths together compose our personality. In his account the whole of creation has come down in a sequence, from space to air, air to fire, fire to water, water to earth, earth to plant, plant to food, and food to this person (the embodied individual); so Bhrigu’s starting from food is exactly right, his hand closing on the first rung of the very staircase whose far end is Brahman. Swami Krishnananda says that the individual is a small replica of the brahmanda (the entire universe), a pinda; and this is why “know yourself and you have known everything,” because what is utterly near to us also holds within it the very farthest thing of all.
And where Bhrigu arrives at bliss, a moving observation of Swami Krishnananda fits exactly. In his view the experience of Brahman is the recognition of one’s own self, reached through no contact with any object; there sat (existence) itself becomes chit (consciousness), and the experiencer and the thing experienced no longer remain two. Every happiness in the world is incomplete for this reason, that its object stands outside us; a heap of gold in your hand gives only worry, how to manage it, how not to lose it. But Bhrigu’s bliss is the awareness of oneself becoming that very fullness, nothing external at all, and so it never lessens.
The gist: Brahman has to be sought within, across the layers of food, prana, mind, and intellect, since no one can hand it to you as a borrowed answer. And the fullness we hunger for, the hunger that makes us cling to every outer thing, sits in the depth of your own self, in no object at all; to find it is to know आनन्दो ब्रह्म.
And at the end, toward yourself
Recall for a moment the hour at which this Upanishad leaves us. Varuna (the presiding deity of water and Bhrigu’s father) had given his son Bhrigu (a questioning young rishi) the same invitation again and again, to seek Brahman (the supreme reality from which everything comes) through tapas (concentrated practice). Bhrigu kept returning and asking, and climbed step by step, first knowing food (anna, the gross world) as Brahman, then prana (the life-force), then mind, then vijnana (intellect, understanding). Each time the father said neither yes nor no, and simply sent him back toward tapas. And returning the last time, Bhrigu came to rest, because he had found the thing beyond which no question remains, “आनन्दो ब्रह्मेति व्यजानात्”, he knew bliss itself as Brahman.
Opening this final step, Swami Krishnananda says that bliss is the very substance of existence itself, no mere attribute or ornament of Brahman. In his view happiness shows itself the moment our consciousness stops running outward for even an instant, and the atman seated within (our own self that never lies outside) reveals itself for the span of a fragment. The happiness we call getting-the-thing-we-wanted, Swamiji says, comes in that one moment when the mind falls quiet and sinks into its own rasa; the outer object is not its source. This is the very bliss from which, according to the Bhriguvalli, all beings are born, in which they live, and into which they return and dissolve. In Swami Krishnananda’s account these three speak of one and the same substance, from which everything springs, in which everything rests, and in which everything finds repose.
And the deepest point of all is that Swamiji does not place this somewhere far off in the sky. He says that the one shining as the sun in the distant heavens and the one waking within us as consciousness are one and the same. This supreme reality goes on disclosing itself in every ordinary moment, and we fail to recognize it only because we stay glued to objects. Swamiji’s illustration is very homely, that even a single sip from a cup of tea is that same light. Tradition too closes the Bhriguvalli in this key, that the wise one neither condemns food (anna, the savor of life) nor rejects it; he celebrates it in song, “I am food, I am the eater of food,” meaning that the one who feeds and the one who eats are both waves of a single bliss.
So this invitation, the one Bhrigu received at the end, is set out today for you. You need not travel to any place of pilgrimage, need not climb any distant peak. The bliss for which the whole world is running already sits in the rasa of every breath, in that stillness that comes for a moment on getting something you love, in that silence that lingers after a deep sleep. Only stop running outward for a while, and turn toward yourself. There it is, the one from which you came, in which you are, and into which you will return.
The gist: the supreme thing Bhrigu found was just this, that bliss is Brahman, the one substance from which all is born, in which all lives, and into which all returns. And that bliss is not far away; it sits in the rasa of every breath, in every quiet moment, waiting for you to turn toward your own self.
This commentary is based mainly on the discourses on the Taittiriya Upanishad given by Swami Krishnananda (Divine Life Society).