Not This, Not This

A sage is asked to describe the ultimate reality, and he refuses to describe it. Not because he does not know it. Because describing it would be the one thing that proves you have missed it.

This is the deepest problem the Upanishads set themselves, and it is worth stating as a problem before we watch them solve it. The reality they point to, brahman, the Self, is by their own account the subject of all experience, the one that sees and is never seen, the knower that can never be turned into a known thing. The eye cannot see itself seeing. And anything you can name, point to, or hold in the mind has by that very fact become an object, which is to say it is not the seer. So the teaching faces an impossible task. It must convey what cannot be made into a content of thought, to a student whose every mental move turns things into contents of thought.

The Upanishads did not flinch from this. They built a set of methods for it. This chapter is about four of them.

The way of no

The first and starkest is the way of negation, and it belongs above all to Yajnavalkya, the sharp sage of the Brihadaranyaka whom the third chapter met.

His formula is two words. Neti neti. Na iti, na iti. Not so, not so. Not this, not this. Whenever the description of brahman threatens to settle into a positive statement, he withdraws it. Müller renders the great occurrence at Brihadaranyaka 4.4.22:

He, the Self, is to be described by No, no! He is incomprehensible, for he cannot be comprehended; he is imperishable, for he cannot perish; he is unattached, for he does not attach himself; unfettered, he does not suffer, he does not fail.

Read what the negation is doing. It is not scepticism. It is not the claim that there is nothing to find. It is a precise refusal to let the Self be reduced to any of the things that can be said about it, because every such thing would be a limit, and the Self is what has no limit. The same move recurs across the text, at 2.3.6, where Yajnavalkya first reaches it after describing the forms of brahman and then sweeps them aside, and again at 3.9.26 and 4.2.4 and 4.5.15. Five times the greatest teacher in the corpus arrives at the edge of speech and says, in effect, whatever you are now picturing, that is not it.

The schools that came later divided over exactly how much the negation removes, and the divergence matters enough to name. For Shankara and the non-dualists, neti neti strips away every attribute and leaves brahman without qualities at all, pure and featureless awareness. For Ramanuja and the qualified non-dualists, the negation removes only the false and limiting descriptions, not brahman’s real perfections, so that what remains is a fullness, never a blank. The Upanishad gives the formula. It does not tell you how far to push it. The sixth chapter returns to what the schools made of that silence.

The five wrappings

The second method is gentler and more architectural. Rather than negate from the outside in, it travels inward, layer by layer, and it comes from the Taittiriya Upanishad.

The image is of the self as something wrapped. There are five wrappings, five koshas, sheaths, each fitting inside the last like the cases of a nested set, and the teaching leads the student through them from the coarsest to the subtlest. The outermost is the annamaya kosha, the sheath made of food, anna, which is to say the physical body, built of what we eat and returning to the earth that food comes from. Within it is the pranamaya kosha, made of prana, the vital breath, the living animation of the body. Within that the manomaya kosha, made of manas, mind, the layer of sensation and ordinary thought. Within that the vijnanamaya kosha, made of vijnana, understanding or discerning intelligence. And innermost, the anandamaya kosha, made of ananda, bliss.

Each sheath, the text says, is filled and pervaded by the one within it, and the movement of the teaching is a movement toward the centre, from the body you can touch to the bliss at the core. It is a map for meditation as much as a doctrine, a set of instructions for turning attention progressively inward past each layer it had mistaken for the self.

And then, exactly where the reader expects the destination, the tradition opens a quarrel. Is the innermost sheath, the bliss-sheath, brahman itself, the thing sought? Or is even bliss still a sheath, a covering, with brahman beyond it? Shankara argued that the anandamaya is still a wrapping and not the Self, and built the point into his reading of the Brahma Sutras. Ramanuja and others held that the bliss-sheath is brahman itself. The disagreement is not a quibble. It is the question of whether the search ends in an experience, however refined, or in that which has no covering at all. The texts handed both readings to the future. We will not adjudicate between them.

The syllable

The third method is the strangest to a modern reader and was perhaps the most important to the tradition. It is the meditation on a single sound.

OM. Written also AUM. The Upanishads treat this syllable as the sonic body of brahman, the sound in which the whole of reality is concentrated and through which it can be approached. The Chandogya opens by enthroning it: let a person meditate on the syllable OM, it begins, for the high chant of the Sama singers starts with it and it is the essence of all essences. The Katha makes the claim flatly. Müller’s rendering:

That word which all the Vedas record, which all penances proclaim, which men desire when they live as religious students, that word I tell thee briefly, it is OM. That syllable means Brahman, that syllable means the highest. He who knows that syllable, whatever he desires, is his.

The fullest treatment is the shortest text. The entire Mandukya Upanishad, twelve verses, is given over to OM, and it does something remarkable with it. It breaks the syllable into its sounds, A, U, M, and the silence that follows them, and maps each onto a state of consciousness. This is the fourth method, and it is the one that has travelled furthest.

Waking, dream, sleep, and the fourth

The Mandukya divides all experience into four states.

The first is jagrat, waking, in which awareness is turned outward and knows the world of solid external things. It is mapped to the letter A, the first sound, the open mouth, the beginning. The second is svapna, dream, in which awareness is turned inward and knows the subtle world of impressions and images built from memory, lit from within. It is mapped to U, the sound that rolls on from A. The third is sushupti, deep dreamless sleep, in which there are no objects at all, neither outer nor inner, and awareness rests as an undivided mass, the text says, a state of peace from which one wakes saying that one knew nothing and yet was not absent. It is mapped to M, the sound that closes the mouth, the end.

Three states, three sounds, A and U and M, the whole of OM. And then the Mandukya points past them, to what it calls simply caturtha, the fourth, or turiya, by the same meaning. It is not a fourth state alongside the other three. It is the awareness that is present in and under all three, the constant witness in which waking, dream, and sleep arise and pass. The text describes it only by negation, in the manner of Yajnavalkya: not turned outward, not turned inward, not a mass of awareness, unseen, ungraspable, without marks, the cessation of the world, peaceful, the Self, that which is to be known. It is mapped to the silence after the syllable has been spoken, the quiet into which OM dissolves.

It is one of the most economical pieces of analysis in any spiritual literature. Four states of consciousness everyone passes through every day, used as a ladder to the awareness that holds them, with a single syllable as the rail. Because Müller did not include the Mandukya in his great edition, the renderings of its terms here follow the public-domain translation of Robert Hume from 1921.

The honey and the two birds

Two more images, briefly, because they show that negation was never the whole of the method. The Upanishads also taught by radiant assertion.

The Brihadaranyaka has its honey doctrine, the madhu-vidya, a long incantatory passage in which each thing is declared the honey, the concentrated sweetness and essence, of every other. Müller’s rendering of its opening:

This earth is the honey of all beings, and all beings are the honey of this earth. Likewise this bright, immortal person in this earth, and that bright, immortal person incorporated in the body. He indeed is the same as that Self, that Immortal, that Brahman, that All.

It runs through water, fire, air, sun, the quarters, the moon, lightning, thunder, space, law, truth, and at last the Self, and each is the honey of all the rest, every thing the sweetness of every other, the whole world bound together in a single immortal reality met everywhere. It is the positive face of the same teaching the negations approach from the other side.

And there is the image of the two birds, from the Mundaka, repeated in the Shvetashvatara, which the tradition has loved above almost any other. Müller:

Two birds, inseparable friends, cling to the same tree. One of them eats the sweet fruit, the other looks on without eating.

One bird tastes the fruit of action and is caught in its sweetness and its grief. The other sits still and only watches. They are the same self, the text means: the one entangled in experience and the one that silently witnesses it, the very distinction the Mandukya drew between the three states and the fourth. When the grieving bird sees the other, the watcher, and knows it for its own deepest self, the Mundaka says, its sorrow passes away.

These are the methods. The refusal, the inward peeling, the syllable, the four states, the honey, the watching bird. Each is a way of pointing at what cannot be pointed at, and the tradition kept all of them rather than choosing, because the target is the kind of thing that needs more than one finger aimed at it.

The texts were finished, more or less, by the start of the common era. Their afterlife had barely begun. The final chapter of this volume follows what happened next: how three great readers built three contradictory philosophies on the same verses, and how, more than a thousand years later, a syllable of this teaching reached a lonely philosopher in Germany and became, in his words, the solace of his life.