The Aitareya Upanishad: the Self that entered through the skull

The last chapter ended with a Self climbing a ladder of five sheaths, from food to breath to mind to understanding to bliss, and standing at the top as the joy from which all beings live. This chapter begins with the same Self, and a problem the Taittiriya never had to face. If the Self is to live inside a human being, how does it get in?

The Aitareya Upanishad answers with the strangest image in the whole corpus of the ten. The Self builds a body, fits it with gods, and then finds it has locked itself out. So it breaks in. It opens the seam at the top of the skull, the soft suture an infant is born with, and enters its own creation through that crack like a thief through a skylight. The text names the door. It calls it the vidriti, the tearing asunder (Aitareya 1.3.12, tr. Müller).

This is the Rig Veda’s one book among the principal Upanishads, and it is short, three brief prose chapters sitting inside a larger ritual forest-text called the Aitareya Aranyaka. Max Müller, who translated the whole Aranyaka around it, marked the exact line where the ritual matter stops and the teaching begins. His headnote reads simply: “With this adhyaya begins the real Upanishad.” What comes just before, he explains, had answered the question “whence this world?” with Prana, life-breath. The Upanishad overturns that answer. Its whole purpose, in Müller’s words, is to teach “that Atman, the Self, and not Prana, Life, is the last and only cause of everything.” Hold that reversal. The Prashna Upanishad had crowned breath as chief of the faculties; the Aitareya dethrones it, and puts the Self in its place.

The Self alone, and the four worlds

The text opens on absolute solitude. “In the beginning all this was Self, one only; there was nothing else blinking whatsoever” (Aitareya 1.1.1, tr. Müller). The word Müller renders “blinking” is mishat, living, moving, the faint stir of a creature that opens and shuts its eyes. Before creation there is not even that. There is only the Self, and it thinks: “Shall I send forth worlds?”

It does. “He sent forth these worlds” (1.1.2), four of them, named in a compressed cosmic geography: Ambhas, the water above the heaven; Marichi, the light-rays that are the sky; Mara, the mortal earth, called mortal, Müller notes, “because all creatures living there must die”; and Ap, the waters under the earth. Hume gives the same four plainly: “water (ambhas), light-rays (marīci), death (mara), the waters (ap).” One honesty about this passage, because it circulates in loose modern summaries: neither public-domain translator renders ambhas as “water-clouds.” The word is water. The four worlds are the stage. Nothing lives on it yet.

The cosmic person, brooded into being

Now the Self needs guardians for these worlds, and it makes them out of a single body. “He then formed the Purusha, taking him forth from the water” (1.1.3), a cosmic person drawn up like a shape lifted from a pool. Sayana, the fourteenth-century commentator, calls this the virat-pinda, the cosmic lump, the raw form before it is articulated.

Then comes one of the most physical acts of creation in any Indian text. “He brooded on him.” The verb is abhyatapat, from tapas, the heat of austerity, used here, Müller notes, for creation by sheer will, the way a bird broods warmth into an egg. And the person breaks open like an egg. “When that person had thus been brooded on, a mouth burst forth like an egg” (1.1.4). From the mouth came speech, and from speech the fire, Agni. The rest hatches in the same rhythm, each organ opening onto a power, each power onto a presiding god: the nostrils breathe out, and breath becomes the wind, Vayu; the eyes open, and sight becomes the sun, Aditya; the ears, and hearing becomes the quarters of space; the skin sprouts hairs, and the hairs become the plants and trees; the heart forms, and from mind comes the moon; the navel opens downward as the down-breath, and from it comes death; and from the generative organ comes seed, and from seed the waters. A body cracks open and a cosmos climbs out of it. Every faculty in a human being, in this account, is a god who once had a world to guard.

The gods who starved

Here the story turns, and it turns toward hardship, which is rare in a creation account. The world-guardians, freshly hatched, “fell into this great ocean” (1.2.1). And the Self “besieged him with hunger and thirst.” The gods, homeless and starving, come back to their maker. “Find out an abode for us in which we may be settled and may eat food.”

The Self offers them a cow. They look at it and say: “This is not enough.” It offers a horse. “This is not enough.” Then it offers a human being. “‘Well done, indeed.’ Therefore man is well done” (1.2.3). The Sanskrit is sukrita, well-made, with the alternate reading svakrita, self-made, that Müller flags. Man is the vessel that satisfies the gods, because man is the only creature made well enough to house them. So the Self tells each power: “Enter, each according to his place.” And they re-enter the body they were hatched from, fire returning to the mouth as speech, wind to the nostrils as breath, the sun to the eyes as sight, each god sliding back into the organ it presides over. The human being is assembled from the inside out, a house filled with its divine tenants.

And one line closes the scene with a strange, hard theology. Hunger and thirst, the two that besieged the gods, ask for a place too, and the Self settles them into the very oblations men will later offer: “to whatever deity an oblation is offered, hunger and thirst are co-partners in it” (1.2.5). Every sacrifice feeds the gods and the hunger together. The appetite is built into the world at the ground floor.

The food that ran away

The gods are housed. But a house needs to eat, and the next chapter is a small comedy of a body learning to feed itself. The Self broods again, and food is born, “and it wished to flee, crying and turning away” (1.3.1). The image is exact and a little absurd. The food runs. The body chases it.

First it tries to catch the food by speech. If it had caught it by speech, the text says, then “one would be satisfied by merely naming food.” It cannot. It tries to seize the food by smell, by sight, by hearing, by touch, by mind, by the generative organ, and each time the food slips the grip. Naming is not eating, seeing is not eating. Then it tries the down-breath. “He tried to grasp it by the down-breathing. He got it” (1.3.10). The breath that pulls downward, apana, is what swallows. So it is the wind, Vayu, working as swallowing and digestion, that finally lays hold of food, “and the Vayu is verily Annayu (he who lives by food).” The body has found its mouth in the deepest sense. It can take the world in.

Then what am I?

The body is built. The gods are inside it. It eats. And the maker stands outside it and asks the question the whole text has been climbing toward.

“If speech names, if the breath smells, if the eye sees, if the ear hears, if the skin feels, if the mind thinks, if the down-breath digests, if the organ sends forth, then what am I?” (1.3.11, tr. Müller). Every function is accounted for, assigned to a god within the body. There seems to be no room left for the one who made the whole thing. The creator has worked itself out of a job. It has built a house so complete that it has no way in.

So it forces one. “Opening the suture of the skull, he got in by that door. That door is called the Vidriti (the tearing asunder), the Nandana (the place of bliss)” (1.3.12). The vidriti is the fontanelle, the seam at the crown of the head where a newborn’s skull has not yet fused, the one soft door in the bone. The Self enters through the top of the skull. And the door of entry, the tearing-open, is also named the place of bliss, because what enters by it is the joy the last chapter left standing at the top of its ladder.

Once inside, the Self takes up “three dwelling-places, three dreams.” The commentators map them differently, and the difference is worth marking rather than smoothing over. Sayana reads the three as the right eye in waking, the throat in dream, the heart in deep sleep, and in a second reading as the bodies of the father, the mother, and oneself. Shankara reads them as the right eye, the inner mind, and the ether within the heart. This is Sayana’s gloss and Shankara’s gloss, side by side, and the text itself only points, “this, and this, and this.”

I have seen this

Now the Self is in. It looks out through the eyes it made, and it sees. “When born he looked through all things around him, to see whether anything wished to proclaim here another. He saw this person only as the widely spread Brahman. ‘I saw it,’ thus he said” (1.3.13). The Sanskrit for that recognition is idam adarsham, “I have seen this.” Müller adds a small honesty here: this passage is very obscure, and Shankara’s comment on it has not survived.

From that first act of seeing comes a name, and the name is a riddle. “Therefore he was Idam-dra (seeing this). Being Idamdra by name, they call him Indra mysteriously. For the Devas love mystery, yea, they love mystery” (1.3.14). Idam-dra, “this-seeing,” becomes Indra, the greatest of the Vedic gods, by a deliberate disguise. Hume renders the reason parokṣa-priya, the gods are fond of the hidden, the cryptic, the name that keeps its meaning behind a veil. The most familiar god in the Rig Veda turns out, in its own Upanishad, to be a code-name for the seeing Self. The tradition, this text says openly, likes to hide its plainest truth inside its loudest name.

That is the first chapter. A Self alone, four worlds, a cosmic person cracked open into gods, a body that learns to eat, and a maker who breaks into his own house through the skull and, looking out, sees only himself everywhere and takes a secret name. The Upanishads return to this recognition from many angles. The Aitareya reaches it through a creation story that reads almost like a break-in.

The three births

The second chapter changes register completely, from cosmology to the human life-cycle, and it opens with a stage direction that tells you how seriously it was taken. Some manuscripts begin: “Let the women who are with child move away.” The chapter that follows, on rebirth, was cleared of pregnant listeners before it was recited, and the next chapter opens by calling them back, “let the women go back to their place.” The teaching of the three births was held to be dangerous in a specific, bodily way, and the text protected the unborn from hearing it.

What it teaches is a self born three times. The first birth is the seed. “That which is the seed is the strength gathered from all the limbs of the body; he holds the self in his self. When he commits the seed to the woman, then he causes it to be born. That is his first birth” (Aitareya 2, tr. Müller). A man’s self is first born when he becomes a father, carried in the seed he passes on.

The second birth is the child. The seed becomes part of the mother, “as if one of her own limbs, therefore it does not injure her,” and she nourishes what will nourish her in turn. The father who tends the mother and the child “really elevates his own self, for the continuation of these worlds.” Then the child is born, and that birth “is his second birth.”

The third birth is the one the pregnant women were sent away for. The son takes the father’s place “for all good works,” and the father, “having done all he has to do, and having reached the full measure of his life, departs. And departing from hence he is born again. That is his third birth.” Death is not an end in this account. It is a third delivery. This is among the earliest plain statements of rebirth in the whole Upanishadic corpus, and it is stated without hedging.

To seal it, the text reaches back into the Rig Veda itself and quotes a seer. “While dwelling in the womb, I discovered all the births of these Devas. A hundred iron strongholds kept me, but I escaped quickly down like a falcon” (Rig Veda 4.27.1, quoted at Aitareya 2). The seer is Vamadeva, and the text names him: “Vamadeva, lying in the womb, has thus declared this.” A man who knew, before he was even born, the births of all the gods, and broke out of the womb’s hundred iron forts like a hawk stooping. The chapter ends on the note the whole series keeps returning to: one who knows this “stepped forth, after this dissolution of the body, and having obtained all his desires in that heavenly world, became immortal, yea, he became immortal.” The doubled phrase is not an accident of translation. The text says it twice, and it will say it twice again.

Which is the Self?

The third chapter is the shortest and the summit. It asks the question the whole book has circled: “Who is he whom we meditate on as the Self? Which is the Self?” (Aitareya 3.1.1, tr. Müller). And it answers by pointing at everything the mind does. “That by which we see, that by which we hear, that by which we perceive smells, that by which we utter speech, that by which we distinguish sweet and not sweet, and what comes from the heart and the mind.”

Then the text does something quietly overwhelming. It lists the names of knowing, sixteen of them, one after another, as if emptying a drawer of every word the language has for the act of awareness. Hume keeps the Sanskrit, and the roll is worth hearing: samjnana, consciousness; ajnana, perception; vijnana, discrimination; prajnana, intelligence; medhas, wisdom; drishti, insight; dhriti, steadfastness; mati, thought; manisha, thoughtfulness; juti, impulse; smriti, memory; samkalpa, conception; kratu, purpose; asu, life; kama, desire; vasha, will. Sixteen names, and then the verdict that collapses them into one: “all these are various names only of knowledge” (Aitareya 3.1.2). Every faculty the Sanskrit language can name is a mask on a single face.

And then the great saying. The Self, the text declares, is Brahman, is Indra, is Prajapati, is all the gods, is the five elements, is everything born from egg, from womb, from sweat, and from sprout, is “horses, cows, men, elephants, whatever breathes here, whether moving on legs, or flying, or being unmoved.” All of it “is led by knowledge. The world is led by knowledge. Knowledge is its cause. Knowledge is Brahman” (Aitareya 3.1.3, tr. Müller).

प्रज्ञानं ब्रह्म

prajñānaṃ brahma

Aitareya Upaniṣad 3.1.3 · also numbered 3.3 #

Prajnanam brahma. Consciousness is Brahman. It is one of the four mahavakyas, the great sayings the tradition draws one from each Veda, and this is the Rig Veda’s. Where a sister text will say tat tvam asi, that you are, and another aham brahmasmi, I am Brahman, the Aitareya makes its claim about the ground of all of them at once. Consciousness itself, the bare fact of knowing, is not a property of Brahman. It is Brahman. Müller’s note draws the fine distinction the Sanskrit carries, between prajna, the state of knowing, and prajnana, the act of knowing, and observes that both are names of Brahman, the one ground on which all knowing stands.

The book closes as the second chapter did, on Vamadeva and on immortality, and on the same doubled seal. Having “by this conscious self stepped forth from this world, and having obtained all desires in that heavenly world, he became immortal, yea, he became immortal. Thus it is, Om” (Aitareya 3.1.4, tr. Müller). The refrain that ended the three births ends the great saying too. Knowledge and deathlessness are made to rhyme.

The forest around the door

One last frame, because it explains why so small a text carries so much weight. The Aitareya Upanishad does not stand alone. It sits inside the Aitareya Aranyaka, the forest-book of the Rig Veda’s Aitareya school, and Müller’s introduction lays out its neighbourhood. The chapters just before it, Aranyaka 2.1 to 2.3, form what he calls the “first Upanishad,” a meditation on Prana as the conscious self. The Aitareya Upanishad proper is 2.4 to 2.6, the three chapters walked here, and it corrects its own neighbour, replacing Prana with Atman as the final cause. The tradition sometimes reads the whole block, chapters 2 and 3 of the Aranyaka together, as one larger text, the Mahaitareya or Bahvrica Upanishad, and Shankara calls the Aitareya the “Bahvrika-brahmana-upanishad” and comments on it as its own unit. In his introduction to that commentary, Shankara frames the text for a particular reader. The earlier chapters served the man who combines rites with meditation. This one addresses the seeker who has turned away from ritual works and wants liberation alone, because Self-knowledge, in Shankara’s reading, does not combine with action.

There is even a name attached to the school, a rarity in a corpus of anonymous books. A seer called Mahidasa Aitareya is quoted by name inside the Aranyaka, and the Chandogya remembers him too: “Mahidasa Aitareya, who knew this, said, addressing a disease: ‘Why dost thou afflict me, as I shall not die by it?’ He lived a hundred and sixteen years” (Chandogya 3.16.7, tr. Müller). Sayana’s later introduction to the Aitareya Brahmana tells a story to go with the name: a seer slighted the son of a less-favoured wife, named Itara, until the boy’s mother prayed to the Earth goddess, who set the child on a throne and gave him the Brahmana and the Aranyaka whole. It is a legend, reported by Sayana as later tradition, and it should be marked as such. What can be said plainly is smaller and stranger: a text with no author has, for once, kept a name.

Three chapters. A Self that made the worlds, hatched the gods, built a body, and had to break into it through the skull to live there.

And having entered, it looked out through the eyes it had made, and saw that there was nothing there but itself.

The next chapter leaves the Rig Veda for the Sama Veda and the largest of the ten, the Chandogya, and the most famous lesson in all of it: the father who sat his son down, again and again, and told him tat tvam asi, that you are.