441 · 442

Verse 441 begins with an ocean. Sense objects come to the renouncer parerita, thrust on him by others: the food someone sets before him, the question a visitor brings, the noise of the road he walks. They enter him as rivers enter the sea, and they merge in him as mere existence, sanmatrataya, because existence is what he is, and they produce no change in him. Such a renouncer, the verse says, is free. He has no need to keep the objects away, since whatever reaches him only finds Brahman there. Verse 442 states the test from the other side. For one who has known the truth of Brahman, there is no samsara as there was before, no round of birth and death waiting to be resumed. If the round goes on as before, the man has not known Brahman as himself; he is bahirmukha, turned outward, his senses still flowing toward the objects, and the knowledge he claims is a claim.

443 · 444

An objection opens verse 443. The knower, it is said, still goes round in samsara, carried by the momentum of his old vasanas, the tendencies laid down by past desire. The verse answers in one word, no, and gives the reason: through the knowledge of oneness with Being, the vasana grows weak, mandi bhavati. It loses its force the way a current loses force when its source is cut; what remains of it drifts and does nothing. Verse 444 shows the same weakening in an ordinary life. Even in a man wholly given to lust, the urge is blunted, kunthati, in the presence of his mother; the thought cannot rise in that presence. So it is for the thoughtful one when Brahman, which is bliss entire, has been known: the craving for lesser things goes blunt in that presence, and it stays blunt, since the presence does not end.

445 · 446

Verse 445 grants what everyone can see. One given to deep meditation, nididhyasana-shila, whose whole practice is dwelling on the Self, is still observed to have outer perceptions: he eats when hungry, he answers those who come to him with questions. For such a man, Shruti speaks of prarabdha, and it does so by inference from the result in view, since the body’s continuing is a result and a result has a cause. Madhavananda points to the Chandogya, 6.14.2, where the delay for the knower lasts only as long as the body lasts. Verse 446 states the rule the inference rests on. Prarabdha is granted for exactly as long as pleasure, pain, and the rest are experienced; every result is preceded by an action; and nowhere is a result seen to arise with no action behind it. The knower performs no new action, so the fruit he is seen to live through must come from action already done. That is what prarabdha names.

447 · 448

Verse 447 turns to the store. Sanchita, the karma accumulated over hundreds of crores of kalpas, each kalpa an age of the world, dissolves through the knowledge aham brahma iti, “I am Brahman,” the way the deeds of a dream dissolve on waking. The store is named at its full size: the whole of it, however long it took to gather, goes in one awakening, because the awakening removes the one who gathered it. Verse 448 supplies the proof from a night’s sleep. The merit a man earns in a dream, or the dreadful sin he commits there, can it send him to heaven or to hell once he has woken? The dreamer who acted is gone with the dream, and no fruit can find him. The deeds done in ignorance belonged in the same way to the ignorant doer, and knowledge ends that doer; no one is left to whom the sanchita could be delivered.

449 · 450

Verse 449 closes the account of agami, the karma still to come. Having known himself as asanga, unattached, and as indifferent as the sky, the knower is never touched in the least by actions yet to be done. Action requires a doer who takes himself to be acting and an enjoyer who waits for the result; the sky does neither, and the knower has found that he is what the sky is like. Verse 450 presses the image. The sky inside a jar of liquor takes on no smell from its contact with the jar; the liquor smells, the jar smells, and the sky is as it was. In the same way the Self, joined in appearance to its adjuncts, the body, the senses, the mind, is never tainted by their properties. Pleasure and pain, merit and fault, anger and desire belong to the adjuncts, and the Self that seems to be inside them is touched by none of them.

451 · 452

Prarabdha remains, and verse 451 states the first account of it plainly. The karma that fashioned this body began its work before knowledge dawned, and knowledge does not destroy it without its first yielding its fruit; it is like an arrow loosed at a target. Verse 452 lets the arrow fly. An archer takes a shape in the grass for a tiger and shoots; the moment after the release he sees that it is a cow. The arrow does not stop. It drives on with its full force and pierces the mark. The deeds that made this body were done in the belief that the body was oneself, and when the belief is seen through, the arrow of those deeds is already in the air; it finishes its flight, and the body lives out what was set in motion for it. This is the popular account, and the verses that follow will say how far it holds.

453 · 454

Verse 453 holds all three karmas in a single verse and then steps above them. Prarabdha, it says first, is stronger even for the knowers, and it is spent only by bhoga, by being lived through; sanchita and agami are destroyed in the fire of perfect knowledge. Madhavananda notes that this first half is an anuvada, a restatement of the common view, kept because the Shruti argues from it. The second half gives the view that is held: for those who have seen the oneness of Brahman and the Self and live always absorbed in it, none of the three exists anywhere, since such knowers are Brahman itself, beyond every attribute, and Brahman has no karma to spend. Verse 454 draws the consequence. For the sage who abides in himself as Brahman alone, with no identification with any adjunct, talk of prarabdha’s existence is out of place, like asking a man who has woken what ties he still has to the things he saw in his dream.

455 · 456

Verse 455 stays with the man who has woken. Toward the body he had in the dream, and toward the dream world that served that body, he has no “I,” no “mine,” and no “this”; he stays awake as himself, and the dream has nowhere to attach. For the knower the body and the world are that dream body and that dream world, present as a memory is present, with no one inside them. Verse 456 adds the mark that tells the waking man from the one who only says he has woken. He has no wish to prove the unreal things real, and he is never seen gathering them up, sangraha, keeping hold of that dream world as if it were still his. If a man still runs after the unreal, the verse says, he is surely not yet free of sleep; the words “I know” can be spoken from inside the dream, and the hands that keep gathering show where the speaker is.

457

Verse 457 carries the same waking into the knower’s ordinary day. Dwelling in the supreme Brahman, he abides as the real Self, sad-atmana, and sees nothing else; there is no second thing in his seeing for the world to be. What he does with the body, eating, relieving it, and the rest, stands to him as the things seen in a dream stand to a man an hour after waking: a memory with no one in it, recalled without a trace of “I did that.” The actions are performed, the body is kept, and nothing of it is his.

458 · 459

From verse 458 the idea of prarabdha is taken apart at its root. The body was fashioned by karma, so prarabdha may be imagined for the body; that much is granted. It cannot be attributed to the Self, which has no beginning and was never made by karma at all, since what karma did not make, karma cannot be owed by. Verse 459 brings in the witness whose word does not fail, amogha-vak. Shruti says of the Self, “unborn, eternal, everlasting,” the words of the Katha Upanishad, 1.2.18, as Madhavananda notes, and the verse asks its own question from them: for the one who abides as That, where is the room for a fancy of prarabdha? A thing that was never born has no past deeds in flight toward it.

460 · 461

Verse 460 names the one condition on which prarabdha stands. It holds for as long as a man abides as the body, taking the body for himself; the whole account depends on that identification. In the knower that identification is not admitted, naiva ishtah, since knowing oneself as Brahman is the end of taking oneself for the body, and so prarabdha is to be set aside in his case. Verse 461 goes further and withdraws it even from the body. To imagine prarabdha for the body is itself a delusion, and the verse asks four questions in a row, each resting on the one before it: how can what is superimposed have any being of its own; how can the unreal be born; how can what was never born be destroyed; and how can the unreal have a prarabdha? The body is superimposed on the Self as the snake is on the rope, and a karma that is lived out through a superimposition has nothing real to be lived out by.

462 · 463

Verse 462 lets the doubt be spoken. If knowledge destroys the effects of ignorance together with their root, how does this body go on standing? Those who hold this doubt the verse calls jadan, the dull, since the doubt assumes that a body which is seen must be real. Verse 463 explains why Shruti speaks of prarabdha at all. It speaks to settle such doubters, and it speaks from bahya-drishti, the outsider’s standpoint, the standpoint from which bodies are seen to continue; it has no intention of teaching the wise that the body and the rest are real, because Shruti’s intent has a single object, the supreme truth. The word prarabdha, then, is a concession made to the one who asks why the knower’s body is still seen; the one who has stopped asking is given the truth with nothing added.

464 · 465

With verse 464 the refrain begins: ekam evadvayam brahma, neha nanasti kinchana, Brahman is one only, without a second, and there is no multiplicity here at all. Its first half echoes the Chandogya Upanishad, 6.2.1, ekam evadvitiyam, “one only, without a second”; its second half is the line of the Katha, 2.1.11, and of the Brihadaranyaka, 4.4.19. Seven verses carry it, and each one sets its own epithets before the line. Verse 464 gives four: wholly full, without beginning or end, beyond measure, since no instrument of knowing can take its size, and changeless. Verse 465 adds the word ghana, dense or solid, three times over, sad-ghana, chid-ghana, ananda-ghana: Brahman is being through and through, awareness through and through, bliss through and through, with no gap in it where anything else could stand. It is eternal, and it is without action, since there is nothing outside it to act on.

466 · 467

Verse 466 begins with pratyak, the inmost: Brahman is what is inside everything, the innermost in each one. It is of one taste throughout, ekarasa, admitting no variation from place to place; full; endless; and sarvatomukha, facing every way, present in every direction at once. Verse 467 says what can be done with it, which is nothing. It cannot be given up, since it is the Self of all and no one can shed himself; it cannot be taken up, and it cannot be received, since it is already what the taker is. It is anashraya, without support, resting on nothing, because, as Madhavananda notes, it is itself the support on which everything else rests. One only, without a second; there is no multiplicity here at all.

468 · 469

Verse 468 strips away in five words. Brahman is nirguna, beyond the three gunas and every attribute; nishkala, without parts; sukshma, subtle, beyond what the senses can take hold of; nirvikalpa, beyond division; and niranjana, stainless. Four of the five carry the negating prefix; sukshma, subtle, stands without one. Each word removes an obstruction, and what is left when the five have done their work is wide open. Verse 469 then says what the words have been doing. Brahman’s nature is anirupya, beyond definition, and it lies outside the range of mind and speech; the Taittiriya Upanishad, 2.4.1, says the same, “from which speech turns back, with the mind, having failed to reach it.” The verse describes while declaring that description falls short, and both halves are true at once: the epithets clear away what Brahman is mistaken for, and Brahman itself stays where speech turns back.

470

The seventh and last refrain, verse 470, ends on five positive words. Brahman is sat-samriddha, full of being, rich with it, with nothing in it that is lacking or on the way. It is svatah-siddha, self-established: it needs no proof from outside, since every proof is itself lit by it, and it is its own evidence. It is pure, with nothing added. It is awake, buddha, awareness itself, as Madhavananda reads the word. It is anidrisha, like nothing else, with no exemplar anywhere to which it could be compared. One only, without a second; there is no multiplicity here at all. The repetition, Madhavananda notes, is for the sake of Brahman’s absolute and unconditioned aspect, and when the seventh saying is finished the line has become the quiet the reader is left in.