Nachiketas and the god of death

A father is giving things away, and the things are no good.

This is how one of the great conversations about death begins, and it begins pettily. In the Katha Upanishad, a man named Vajashravasa performs a sacrifice that requires him to give away his wealth, and the cattle he hands over are old, barren, past milking, past calving. He is buying merit on the cheap. His young son, Nachiketas, watches this and is troubled, because a gift that costs the giver nothing is not a gift, and the boy has shraddha, a word that means faith but also a kind of earnest seriousness, the quality of a person who cannot let a thing be hollow.

So the boy asks a question that is really an accusation. To whom will you give me? He asks it once. He asks it twice. He asks it a third time. And the father, goaded past patience, says the words you cannot take back. Mrityave tva dadami. I give you to Death.

A word taken seriously

Here is the first strange thing, and the whole text turns on it. Nachiketas takes the word literally. A curse spoken in anger is still a thing that was said, and the boy treats his father’s careless sentence as binding, on himself and on his father’s honesty. He will go to Death, because to do otherwise would make his father a liar. He comforts the old man, who is now horrified at what he has said, with a verse about how generations pass like corn and are born again like corn, and then he goes.

And Death is not home.

Nachiketas arrives at the house of Yama, the god who receives the dead, and Yama is away. The boy waits at the threshold three nights without food, without the welcome owed to a guest. This detail matters more than it looks. In the world of the text, an unfed guest in the house is a danger, a small tear in the order of things, and a guest is held to be a form of the divine. When Yama returns and finds a young Brahmin who has sat at his door for three nights unhonoured, he is alarmed. To repair the breach he offers three boons, one for each wasted night.

The structure is set. A boy has walked into death of his own accord, and death now owes him three answers.

Two easy gifts, one hard one

The first boon is gentle. Let my father’s anger be gone, Nachiketas says, let him know me and greet me in peace when I return. He asks first for the healing of the quarrel that sent him here. Yama grants it without hesitation.

The second is larger. Nachiketas asks to be taught the fire, the sacrificial fire that is a rung toward heaven, the knowledge of how it is built and what it means. Yama teaches it in full, and then, pleased, does something telling: he declares that this fire shall from now on be called by the boy’s own name. The Nachiketa fire. The student has become part of the teaching.

Then comes the third, and the temperature drops.

When a man has died, Nachiketas says, there is this doubt: some say he still is, and some say he is not. Teach me that. This is the third boon.

Watch what Yama does, because it is the most human moment in the text. He flinches. Even the gods, he says, were once in doubt about this; it is subtle, do not press me on it; choose another boon, and let me off this one. And when the boy holds, Yama begins to bargain. Take sons and grandsons who will live a hundred years. Take cattle, horses, elephants, gold, a great kingdom on the wide earth. Take long life. Take beautiful women with their chariots and their music, the kind no mortal is given. Only do not ask what lies beyond death.

The good and the pleasant

Nachiketas answers with the line the whole Upanishad is built to hold.

These things, he says, last only until tomorrow, and they wear out the vigour of the senses even while they last. The longest life is still short. Keep your horses and your dancing and your songs. Na vittena tarpaniyo manushyah. A man is not made content by wealth. He has seen Death’s face; how could he want Death’s toys?

And so Yama, defeated into honesty, names the thing the boy has just done. There are two paths, he says, and they come to every person, and they go by two names. There is the shreyas, the good, and there is the preyas, the pleasant. The two have different ends. The wise one, the dhira, examines them and pulls them apart, and chooses the good over the pleasant; the dull one chooses the pleasant, for the sake of having and holding. Nachiketas, Yama says, you have looked at everything desirable and let it go. You chose the other road.

This is the hinge of the text, and it is worth sitting with, because it is not a sermon against pleasure. The pleasant is not called evil. It is called preyas, dear, the thing you reach for. The teaching is only that it is a different road from the good, that they fork, and that almost everyone takes the near one without noticing there was a choice. The whole drama of the boy at Death’s door exists to stage that one decision in its sharpest possible form, where the bribe is everything a life can want and the price is the truth.

What death finally says

Now Yama teaches, and the third boon is paid.

The self, he says, the knower, is not born and does not die. Na jayate mriyate va vipashchit. It did not come from anywhere and did not become anyone. Unborn, constant, eternal, ancient, it is not slain when the body is slain. If the killer thinks he kills and the killed thinks he is killed, both have misunderstood; this does not kill and is not killed. Centuries later the Bhagavad Gita would put almost these exact words into Krishna’s mouth on the battlefield, in its second chapter, to a warrior frozen by the fear of causing death. The Katha said it first, to a boy, in the house of death itself.

Then Yama gives the image people remember. Know the self, the atman, as the rider in a chariot, he says, and the body as the chariot. Know the buddhi, the discerning intellect, as the charioteer, and the mind as the reins. The senses are the horses, and the things they run after are the roads. The self joined to body and senses and mind is what experiences the world. When the charioteer is unwise and the reins are loose, the horses run wild, as bad horses do. When the charioteer is wise and holds the mind firm, the horses are governed, and the rider reaches the end of the road. That end, the text says, is the highest place, what the tradition calls moksha, beyond which there is nowhere to go.

And then, near the close, the line that has outlived its setting. Uttishthata, jagrata. Arise. Awake. Find the great ones and learn. The path is a razor’s edge, the poets say, narrow and hard to cross. Twenty-five centuries later a young monk named Vivekananda would carry that half-verse around the world as his own motto, arise, awake, and stop not till the goal is reached, and most who heard it never knew it was first spoken by Death to a child.

Why it was given to death to say

There is a quiet audacity in how this text is built, and it is easy to miss because the story is so plain. The Katha is one voice in the long conversation that is the Upanishads, and few of them stage their question so starkly.

The deepest teaching the tradition has about what survives dying is not placed in the mouth of a sage, or a god of creation, or a sweet-natured saviour. It is placed in the mouth of Yama, the one being in the cosmos whose entire office is death, who has no reason to flatter and nothing to sell once the bribes have failed. The question that frightens everyone is put to the one who would actually know. And the answer, when it finally comes, is not consolation. Yama does not say you will see your loved ones again, or that a better self goes on. He says something stranger and harder: that the thing in you that was afraid of dying is the one thing that was never going to die, and that you will not find it by wanting the pleasant, only by choosing the good, on a road as narrow as a blade.

The boy asked an honest question and refused every answer that was not the real one.

That, more than the doctrine, may be what the text is teaching.