The Ones Who Asked

A father, mid-sacrifice, is giving away his possessions as the rite requires, and he is giving away the worn-out ones, the old cattle past milk and calf. His son, still a boy, watches the cheapness of it and asks a child’s relentless question. To whom will you give me? The father ignores him. The boy asks again. And again. The father, goaded past patience, snaps: I give you to Death.

It is said in anger, the way such things are said. But a word given at a sacrifice is not easily taken back, and the boy takes it literally. He goes to the house of Death.

This is the opening of the Katha Upanishad, and it is the first thing to understand about the Upanishads as literature. The deepest teaching in the tradition is not delivered as a treatise. It is delivered as a scene, with people in it who want something, who are angry or proud or afraid, and the doctrine arrives through the cracks the drama opens. This chapter is about the people who asked the questions, because the tradition chose to remember the answers in their company.

The boy at the door of death

Nachiketa arrives at Yama’s house and Yama is away. The boy waits three nights without food or welcome. When the god of death returns and learns that a brahmin guest has gone unhonoured at his threshold for three nights, he is alarmed, for that is a serious lapse, and he offers three boons to make it good, one for each night.

With the first, Nachiketa asks that his father’s anger be gone and that the father receive him kindly when he returns. With the second, he asks to learn the fire-sacrifice that leads to heaven, and Yama teaches it and, pleased, names the fire after the boy. Then comes the third, and the boy does not ask for a thing. He asks a question.

There is that doubt, when a man is dead, some saying, he is; others, he is not. This I should like to know, taught by thee; this is the third of my boons.

What happens to a person after death. Yama does not want to answer. He tells the boy this question is subtle, that even the gods of old were uncertain of it, and he tries to buy his way out. In Müller’s translation he offers:

Choose sons and grandsons who shall live a hundred years, herds of cattle, elephants, gold, and horses. Choose the wide abode of the earth, and live thyself as many harvests as thou desirest.

He offers maidens, chariots, music, every pleasure. Choose anything, he says, but do not press me on death. And the boy, who is a boy, refuses all of it, in lines that have the cold clarity of someone who has already seen through the offer:

These things last till to-morrow, O Death, for they wear out this vigour of all the senses. Keep thou thy horses, keep dance and song for thyself.

He has made the choice the whole text turns on, and Yama, satisfied at last that here is a fit student, gives him its name. There are two paths, the god says, the good and the pleasant, shreyas and preyas. They approach a person together and bind him. The one who clings to the good fares well; the one who chooses the pleasant out of craving misses the end. The wise can tell them apart. The foolish cannot. Only after the boy has demonstrated, by refusing the bribes, that he can tell them apart, does the teaching of the deathless Self begin. The knowledge is not free. It is earned by the refusal that precedes it.

And the path, Yama warns, is hard. In one of the most quoted images in the corpus:

The sharp edge of a razor is difficult to pass over; thus the wise say the path to the Self is hard.

The man who left, and the woman he taught

Move west and back in time, to the oldest of all the Upanishads, the Brihadaranyaka, and to its central figure, the sage Yajnavalkya. He is unlike the gentle fathers of the other dialogues. He is sharp, combative, a winner of debates and of cattle, a man with two wives and a coming departure from the world.

The departure is the setting for his most tender teaching. Yajnavalkya announces that he is leaving the householder’s life for the forest, and that he will divide his property between his two wives. One of them, Maitreyi, described in the text as conversant with the knowledge of brahman, stops him with a question that cuts past the inheritance. If the whole earth full of wealth were mine, she asks, would I be immortal through it? Müller’s rendering of his answer:

No, replied Yajnavalkya; like the life of rich people will be thy life. But there is no hope of immortality by wealth.

Then there is no point in it, she says. Tell me instead what you know. And he gives her, in place of a widow’s portion, the teaching of the Self. The passage that follows is among the most famous in the literature, and its form is a kind of unmasking of love itself:

Verily, a husband is not dear, that you may love the husband; but that you may love the Self, therefore a husband is dear. Verily, a wife is not dear, that you may love the wife; but that you may love the Self, therefore a wife is dear.

He runs the formula through sons, wealth, the priestly and ruling classes, the worlds, the gods, all beings, all. Nothing, he tells her, is loved for its own sake. Everything is loved for the sake of the Self that is the reality within it. It is not a cold doctrine, though it can be misread as one. It is the claim that what we reach for in everyone we love is the one reality, and that to know it directly is to come to the source of why anything was ever dear at all.

The woman who rose to fight

The same sage, in the same text, meets a different kind of woman, and the encounter is preserved with its tension intact.

The scene is a great sacrifice held by Janaka, king of Videha, who has offered a thousand cows with gold bound to their horns to whichever brahmin present is the most learned. Yajnavalkya simply tells his pupil to drive the cattle home, which is to say he claims the prize before the contest, and the assembly erupts. One after another the learned men rise to bring him down with questions, and one after another he answers and silences them. Then a woman rises. Gargi Vachaknavi.

Her method is relentless. She asks what the world is woven on, like warp and woof. Water, he says. And the water? Air. And the air? The sky-worlds. She climbs the ladder rung by rung, each answer becoming the next question, the worlds of the sun, the moon, the stars, the gods, until she reaches the worlds of brahman itself and asks what those are woven on. And here Yajnavalkya stops her, in a line that has troubled readers for centuries:

O Gargi, do not ask too much, lest thy head should fall off. Thou askest too much about a deity about which we are not to ask too much. Do not ask too much.

She holds her peace. But the text does not leave her defeated, and this is the remarkable part. Later in the same assembly she rises a second time, and now she announces herself like a warrior:

O Yajnavalkya, as the son of a hero from the Kashis or Videhas might string his loosened bow and take two pointed arrows in his hand and rise to do battle, I have risen to fight thee with two questions.

This time she asks after the imperishable, the akshara, that on which all of space itself is woven. And this time Yajnavalkya does not silence her. He answers, at length, with one of the great negative descriptions of brahman: it is neither coarse nor fine, neither short nor long, without eye, without ear, without speech, without mind, unseen but seeing, unheard but hearing, unknown but knowing. He gives her the teaching he had warned her not to reach for. At the end she turns to the assembly and tells the assembled brahmins that not one of them will beat this man at the knowledge of brahman, and she sits. She has lost the cattle. She has also extracted the answer, and pronounced the verdict.

What to make of the warning that her head would fall off is contested. Some read it as a real rebuke, the limit of what may be asked. Others note that the second exchange, where he does answer, suggests the first was a warning against asking the wrong kind of question, not against a woman asking. The text does not explain itself. What it does, plainly, is keep her in the room, twice, as the most formidable questioner the greatest sage of the age has to face. A later tradition would call her one of the gems of Janaka’s court. That framing is not in the Upanishad. The Upanishad only gives her the bow.

The son, and the boy with no father

Two more, briefly, because they round out the picture of who got taught and how.

Shvetaketu, whom the last chapter met, is the proud son sent away to study and returned at twenty-four conceited and unenlightened. His father Uddalaka deflates him with a single question he cannot answer, and then rebuilds him through the salt and the seed and the refrain, tat tvam asi, that thou art. The drama here is domestic and exact. A father who can see that his son has acquired learning and missed the point, and who takes him back to the beginning.

And Satyakama, in the Chandogya, the boy who wants to become a student and does not know his lineage to declare it, as the custom required. He asks his mother. She tells him honestly that she does not know either; she had moved about a great deal as a servant in her youth, and she gives him only her own name. Say that you are Satyakama, son of Jabala, she tells him, Satyakama Jabala, and say no more than that. He goes to the teacher and repeats it exactly, the awkward truth and all. And the teacher, Müller’s rendering, replies:

No one but a true brahmin would thus speak out. Go and fetch fuel, friend, I shall initiate you. You have not swerved from the truth.

The boy with no known father is admitted on the strength of his refusal to invent one. In a literature obsessed with lineage, it is a quiet thunderclap. The qualification for the highest knowledge turns out to be the same thing Nachiketa showed at the door of Death and Gargi showed with her bow. Not birth, not wealth, not even certainty. The willingness to stand in the truth and keep asking.

These are the ones the texts remember. The next chapter steps back from the people to the books themselves, and asks the flat bibliographic questions the drama tends to make us forget. How many Upanishads are there. Which ones count. And who decided.