The Brihadaranyaka Upanishad: the forest of Yajnavalkya

The last door is the widest. After the short verse books and the classroom of Pippalada, after the Chandogya’s great chain of teachers and its lesson of the salt in the water, the treatise arrives at the text the first chapter already named in passing: the Brihadaranyaka, the vast forest text of Yajnavalkya’s debates. It is the oldest of the ten and the largest, and it does not open onto a deathbed or a boy at Death’s door. It opens onto a horse.

“Verily the dawn is the head of the horse which is fit for sacrifice, the sun its eye, the wind its breath, the mouth the Vaishvanara fire, the year the body of the sacrificial horse” (Brihadaranyaka 1.1.1, tr. Müller). The horse is the ashvamedha, the royal horse-sacrifice, the most public and expensive rite the old religion knew. And the text does something quiet and enormous with it in a single sentence. It takes the animal on the altar and turns it into the cosmos. The stars become its bones, the clouds its flesh. “When the horse shakes itself, then it lightens; when it kicks, it thunders; when it makes water, it rains.” The greatest of the outward sacrifices is dissolved into a meditation, the body of the horse spread across the whole visible world. That move, from the altar to the inward reading of the altar, is the move the Upanishads make everywhere. Here it is the first thing the largest of them says.

The great forest and the oldest door

The name says where the text lives. Brihat, great; aranyaka, forest book. Paul Deussen, translating in 1906, noted that the Upanishad “attaches” to an Aranyaka, “the ‘forest-book,’ to the close of which the Upanishad is attached,” and passed on the two old explanations of the word. One, from Hermann Oldenberg, is that these teachings were secret, to be taught “not in the village, but outside of it,” in the aranya, the forest. The other, from the commentator Sayana, is that the book was “appointed for the vow of the anchorite.” Either way the name carries a direction: away from the settlement, out toward the trees, which is exactly where Yajnavalkya will walk in the second act of this text.

Its Vedic address was given in this treatise’s opening chapter. The Brihadaranyaka closes the Shatapatha Brahmana of the White Yajur Veda; Müller notes that the horse-brahmana of chapter one “is found in the Madhyandina text of the Shatapatha,” and that what is the first chapter of the Upanishad is the third of the Aranyaka. The text sits at the far inner end of a ritual manual, the place where the handbook of the sacrifice turns to ask what the sacrifice was ever about. It survives in two recensions, the Kanva that Müller translates and the Madhyandian he footnotes, and the seams between them are visible, most of all in one dialogue the text tells twice.

On its age the scholarship is as settled as it gets. Patrick Olivelle, whose 1998 edition is the standard, places the Brihadaranyaka among the very oldest of the corpus, an edited compilation with older material inside it, in all likelihood pre-Buddhist. This treatise’s first chapter reported his governing caution: any dating “closer than a few centuries is as stable as a house of cards.” Of the ten doors, this is the first one built. And Shankara, centuries later, wrote more on it than on any other Upanishad. His Brihadaranyaka commentary is the longest he left on any text of the corpus. The largest door drew the largest reading.

I am Brahman

The first chapter, having built its horse, tells a creation. “In the beginning there was nothing here whatsoever. By Death indeed all this was concealed, by hunger; for death is hunger” (1.2.1). And then a second telling, the one the tradition never forgot: “In the beginning this was Self alone, in the shape of a person. He looking round saw nothing but his Self. He first said, ‘This is I’” (1.4.1). What follows is a psychology of loneliness written into cosmology. “He feared,” the text says, “therefore any one who is lonely is afraid,” and then reasons its way out of the fear: “Verily fear arises from a second only.” He felt no delight alone, and “wished for a second.” He was as large as a man and woman embracing, and “made this his Self to fall in two,” and from the falling arose pati and patni, husband and wife (1.4.3). She hid as a cow, a mare, a she-goat; he followed, “and thus he created everything that exists in pairs, down to the ants” (1.4.4).

Then the primal person enters what he has made. “He entered thither, to the very tips of the finger-nails, as a razor might be fitted in a razor-case, or as fire in a fire-place” (1.4.7). The Self is not outside its creation looking on. It is inside it, to the fingernails. And inside that same brahmana sits the sentence that this treatise’s first chapter listed among the great sayings, the mahavakya:

अहं ब्रह्मास्मि

aham brahmāsmi

“Whosoever knows this, ‘I am Brahman,’ becomes all this, and even the Devas cannot prevent it, for he becomes their Self.” (Brihadaranyaka 1.4.10, tr. Müller)

Bṛhadāraṇyaka Upaniṣad 1.4.10 #

Aham brahmasmi. I am Brahman. It is worth being exact about what the text claims. It does not say a man may declare himself God. It says that the one who knows the identity of self and Absolute enters the condition of the Absolute, and that even the gods, who “wish men not to know this,” cannot stop it, “for he is their Self.” The knowing is the whole of it. Shankara would build a tradition on the sentence; the Upanishads as a body circle it from every side. Here it arrives early, folded into a story about a lonely person who split himself in two to have company, then walked into every crack of the world he made.

The chapter has one more thing to create, and it is not what a reader expects. Having made the four social orders, the primal Brahman “was not strong enough,” and “created still further the most excellent Law, dharma.” The account is startling in its plainness: “Law is the Kshatra of the Kshatra, therefore there is nothing higher than the Law. Thenceforth even a weak man rules a stronger with the help of the Law” (1.4.14). Dharma is the power behind the power, what lets the weak hold the strong to account. And the text equates it, in the same breath, with truth: to declare what is true is to declare the Law, “thus both are the same.” This chapter is the primary-text engine behind the site’s account of dharma, karma, and rebirth, and the equation of law with truth is where that engine starts.

The wife who wanted what does not die

The second act belongs to a marriage. Yajnavalkya is about to leave the household life for the forest, and before he goes he means to divide his estate between his two wives. The text names them with a candour that has troubled and fascinated readers ever since: “Yajnavalkya had two wives, Maitreyi and Katyayani. Of these Maitreyi was conversant with Brahman, but Katyayani possessed such knowledge only as women possess” (4.5.1). The line is Müller’s, translating the text as it stands. It sits here without softening, because the whole scene that follows turns on the first half of it. One of these wives knows Brahman. Watch what she does with it.

“Maitreyi,” Yajnavalkya says, “verily I am going away from this my house. Forsooth, let me make a settlement between thee and that Katyayani” (2.4.1). Maitreyi does not take the settlement. She asks a question instead. “My Lord, if this whole earth, full of wealth, belonged to me, tell me, should I be immortal by it?” He answers without flattering her: “No, like the life of rich people will be thy life. But there is no hope of immortality by wealth” (2.4.2). And she says the sentence that makes her one of the named seers of the corpus: “What should I do with that by which I do not become immortal? What my Lord knoweth, tell that to me” (2.4.3). She refuses the estate and asks for the teaching. It is the refusal the boy Nachiketa made at Death’s door, made here by a wife across a domestic threshold.

So he teaches her, and the teaching is one of the most quoted passages in all the Upanishads:

“Verily, a husband is not dear, that you may love the husband; but that you may love the Self, therefore a husband is dear.” (Brihadaranyaka 2.4.5, tr. Müller)

Then he runs the same knife down the whole list of what we love: not for the wife’s sake is a wife dear, not for the sons, not for wealth, not for the worlds, the gods, the creatures, not for anything’s own sake is anything dear, “but that you may love the Self.” Everything we reach for, the text says, we reach for because the Self is in it, and mistaking the container for the treasure is the whole of our confusion. The climax names the cure: “Verily, the Self is to be seen, to be heard, to be perceived, to be marked, O Maitreyi. When we see, hear, perceive, and know the Self, then all this is known” (2.4.5). Atma va are drashtavyah. The Self is to be seen, to be heard, to be reflected on. That single instruction, see it, hear about it, think it through, became a template for the whole path of knowledge in later Vedanta.

He gives her images to hold it. As a drum struck cannot have its sound seized apart from the drum, so the Great Being cannot be seized apart from its knowing (2.4.7). The Vedas themselves, he says, were “breathed forth from this great Being,” like smoke rising from damp fuel (2.4.10). And then the image the Chandogya chapter met at a father’s instruction, reappearing here in a husband’s mouth:

“As a lump of salt, when thrown into water, becomes dissolved into water, and could not be taken out again, but wherever we taste the water it is salt, thus verily does this great Being, endless, unlimited, consisting of nothing but knowledge, rise from out these elements, and vanish again in them.” (Brihadaranyaka 2.4.12, tr. Müller)

Maitreyi says he has bewildered her: “Here thou hast bewildered me, Sir.” He answers gently, “O Maitreyi, I say nothing that is bewildering. This is enough, O beloved, for wisdom” (2.4.13). And he leaves her with the hardest turn in the passage, the one that will echo through Advaita Vedanta: where there is duality, one sees another, hears another, knows another, “but when the Self only is all this, how should he see another? How should he know Him by whom he knows all this? How, O beloved, should he know the Knower?” (2.4.14). The eye that sees everything cannot turn and see itself seeing. That is not a failure of the teaching. It is the teaching. Then Yajnavalkya walks into the forest, and the text does not follow him there. It follows him instead back into the world one last time, to the noisiest room in the corpus.

The gold on the horns

King Janaka of Videha wants to know who the wisest brahmin in the land is, and he stages a contest to find out. “Janaka Vaideha enclosed a thousand cows, and ten padas of gold were fastened to each pair of horns,” and he told the assembled priests: “He who among you is the wisest, let him drive away these cows” (3.1.1). A thousand cows with gold on their horns, and no one moves. To claim the cows is to claim to be the wisest, and no one wants to be tested. Then Yajnavalkya breaks the silence with an arrogance the text plainly relishes. He tells his pupil: “Drive them away, my dear.” The other brahmins are furious. He has taken the prize before the debate has begun. “I bow before the wisest,” he says to them, “but I wish indeed to have these cows” (3.1.2). The cows are the stake. The whole tournament that follows is the theologians of the kingdom trying to win them back by proving him wrong.

They come at him one after another, eight challengers, and each one falls. Ashvala the priest asks how the sacrificer escapes death, and Yajnavalkya answers through the fire and the voice, “this constitutes freedom” (3.1.3). Artabhaga asks what happens when a man dies, and the text does something remarkable: it stops the public debate for a private one. “Take my hand, my friend. We two alone shall know of this; let this question of ours not be discussed in public.” The two men walk out, and “what they said was karman, work, and what they praised was work, that a man becomes good by good work, and bad by bad work” (3.2.13). Deussen, in 1906, read that whispered aside as the birthplace of a doctrine. “In the last words,” he wrote, “the motive which lies at the basis of the doctrine of transmigration is clearly expressed”: a man’s “inborn character is the fruit and consequence of his previous action.” The oldest clear statement that we carry our deeds forward into what we become is spoken here, off to one side, in a voice low enough that the crowd is not meant to hear it.

Ushasta and Kahola press on the Self within all, and Yajnavalkya turns their questions back on the questioner: “Thou couldst not see the true seer of sight, thou couldst not hear the true hearer of hearing. This is thy Self, who is within all” (3.4.2). The seer is never among the things seen. It is the Prashna’s point and the Katha’s point, made here to a man who wanted to catch it in a definition and could not.

Gargi, do not question too much

Then a woman rises, and she is the most formidable challenger in the room. Gargi Vachaknavi is a philosopher, and her method is a regress. She asks Yajnavalkya on what a given thing is woven, “like warp and woof,” and when he answers, she asks on what that is woven, and climbs. Water is woven on air, air on the sky-worlds, those on the worlds of the Gandharvas, those on the sun, the sun on the moon, the moon on the stars, the stars on the gods, the gods on Indra, Indra on Prajapati, Prajapati on the worlds of Brahman. She is walking the whole cosmic ladder rung by rung, and she is about to ask what the worlds of Brahman are woven on. And Yajnavalkya stops her.

“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, O Gargi.” (Brihadaranyaka 3.6, tr. Müller)

Gargi, do not question too much, lest your head fall off. Readers have argued for a long time over what that line is. Is it a threat? A ritual formula for a question that has reached the edge of the sayable? A teacher marking the point past which the regress cannot go, because there is nothing further on which the ground of everything could itself be woven? The text does not tell us. Gargi “held her peace.” But she is not done, and this is the detail that matters: the same threat, in this very debate, gets thrown at Yajnavalkya himself. Uddalaka Aruni, another challenger, warns him that if he claims the cows without knowing “the string and the puller within,” then “thy head will fall off” (3.7.1). The head-threat is the currency of the whole tournament. It passes both ways. Yajnavalkya answers Uddalaka with the doctrine of the inner ruler, the antaryamin, the one “who dwells in the earth, whom the earth does not know, who pulls the earth within, he is thy Self, the puller within, the immortal” (3.7.3), repeated through water and fire and sky and sun, an indweller inside every element, unknown to the element it moves.

And then Gargi comes back. She stands before the assembly and says, plainly, that she is done being polite. “As the son of a warrior from the Kashis or Videhas might string his loosened bow, take two pointed foe-piercing arrows in his hand and rise to do battle, I have risen to fight thee with two questions” (3.8.2). She has two arrows and she means to loose them. And the answer she pulls out of him is the finest negative description in the text, the imperishable, the akshara: “It is neither coarse nor fine, neither short nor long, neither red nor fluid; it is without shadow, without darkness, having no within and no without” (3.8.8). “By the command of that Akshara, O Gargi, sun and moon stand apart” (3.8.9). She has forced from him the highest thing in the chapter, and she is the one who does it. Gargi loses the cows. But she is the questioner the text lets rise twice, the only one who makes Yajnavalkya reach that high. The last challenger, Vidagdha Shakalya, asks how many gods there are, and gets marched down from three thousand and six to one; and when he presses too far, “Shakalya did not know him, and his head fell” (3.9.26). The threat that hung over Gargi and over Yajnavalkya himself lands, in the end, on the man who could not stop.

Not this, not this

Somewhere in that long debate, and again in the private teaching Yajnavalkya later gives to King Janaka in the fourth chapter, the text reaches the limit of what description can do and names it. The Self, it says, can be pointed to only by refusal:

“And therefore now there is the teaching, not this, not this, for there is nothing higher than this, that he is thus. And the name of it is ‘the true of the true.’” (Brihadaranyaka 2.3.6, tr. Müller)

Neti, neti. Not this, not this. Every positive word you reach for, the text says, fails, because the Self is not any of the things a word can hold. So the only honest description is a denial that keeps denying. When Janaka, moved from examiner to disciple, receives Yajnavalkya’s teaching, the sage returns to the phrase: the Self is “to be described by No, no. He is incomprehensible, for he cannot be comprehended; he is imperishable, for he cannot perish” (4.4.22, tr. Müller). This is the root of the whole negative theology of later Vedanta, the discipline of approaching the Absolute by stripping away every attribute that would limit it, and this treatise carries the term in its glossary and on its dedicated neti neti page. It is one of the oldest instances on record of a tradition deciding that its highest object is best served by silence about what it is, and precision about what it is not.

The private teaching to Janaka has more than the phrase in it. It has the ladder of lights: what does a man walk by? By the sun; and when the sun sets, by the moon; and when both are gone, by fire; and when the fire dies, by sound, “for when one cannot see even one’s own hand, yet when a sound is raised, one goes towards it” (4.3.2). And when even sound is gone, “the Self indeed is his light,” the one lamp that does not go out (4.3.6). It has the account of dream, where “there are no real chariots, no horses, no roads, but he himself sends forth chariots, horses, and roads” (4.3.10), the sleeper the maker of his own world. And it has deep sleep, described with an intimacy the corpus rarely allows itself: “as a man, when embraced by a beloved wife, knows nothing that is without, nothing that is within, thus this person, when embraced by the intelligent Self, knows nothing that is without, nothing that is within” (4.3.21). The deepest rest we know, offered as a taste of the deepest knowing.

The deed a man goes toward

The teaching to Janaka carries the text’s fullest account of death, and this is where the whispered aside to Artabhaga becomes a doctrine spoken out loud. When a man dies, the self “descends into the heart,” the point of the heart lights up, “and by that light the Self departs, either through the eye, or through the skull, or through other places of the body.” And it does not go empty-handed: “then both his knowledge and his work take hold of him, and his acquaintance with former things” (4.4.2). We leave carrying what we knew and what we did. The text gives the passage two images that have travelled far. One is the caterpillar: “as a caterpillar, after having reached the end of a blade of grass, draws itself together towards another, thus does this Self, after having thrown off this body, draw himself together towards another” (4.4.3). The other is the goldsmith: “as a goldsmith, taking a piece of gold, turns it into another, newer and more beautiful shape, so does this Self make unto himself another, newer and more beautiful shape” (4.4.4). No gap between lives. A drawing-together, a reshaping, the old gold worked into a new form.

And then the sentence that is the doctrine of karma in its earliest clear dress:

“Now as a man is like this or like that, according as he acts and according as he behaves, so will he be: a man of good acts will become good, a man of bad acts, bad. And as is his desire, so is his will; and as is his will, so is his deed; and whatever deed he does, that he will reap.” (Brihadaranyaka 4.4.5, tr. Müller)

Desire shapes will, will shapes deed, deed shapes what we become. “To whatever object a man’s own mind is attached, to that he goes strenuously together with his deed” (4.4.6). We become the thing we reach for. But the text leaves a door in the wall: the man who does not desire, “who is without desire, who is freed from desire, whose desire is satisfied, whose desire is the Self, being Brahman, he goes to Brahman.” The whole machinery of rebirth runs on wanting, and the one who wants nothing but the Self steps off the wheel. That single clause, “being Brahman, he goes to Brahman,” is the Brihadaranyaka’s word for moksha, and it is why this chapter is the primary-text foundation under so much of the site’s account of what happens after we die.

Three words of thunder, and a lineage of mothers

The text has two more movements, appended like echoes after the main hall. There is a fable of the three kinds of creatures, gods and men and demons, who come to their father Prajapati to be taught, and each hears the one syllable Da as a different word. The gods, being unruly, hear damyata, be subdued. Men, being greedy, hear datta, give. The demons, being cruel, hear dayadhvam, be merciful. “The divine voice of thunder repeats the same, Da Da Da, that is, Be subdued, Give, Be merciful. Therefore let that triad be taught” (5.2). Every ear hears in the thunder the lesson it most needs. Twenty-five centuries later, T. S. Eliot ended The Waste Land on those three words, citing this very passage in his notes, though he reordered them to suit his poem. The thunder that speaks three ways was still speaking in 1922.

And then, at the very end, the great forest closes on a list of names rather than a doctrine. The Brihadaranyaka finishes with a vamsha, a lineage of teachers, the chain by which the teaching was handed down, one mouth to the next, back through the generations. This treatise’s first chapter noted that these are among the longest such chains in the corpus, a civilisation remembering its transmitters by name. The final chain has one feature the others do not. It remembers through the mothers. “Pautimashiputra from Katyayaniputra,” the son of one woman receiving from the son of another, a genealogy of knowledge traced through the women who bore the knowers. The oldest and largest of the ten opened on a horse spread across the sky. It ends on the quiet fact of who taught whom, remembered through their mothers’ names.

Ten doors have opened. A hymn at the end of a ritual book, a mystery about who moves the mind, a boy who out-argued Death, a year of waiting at Pippalada’s door, a poem that filed the Vedas under lower knowledge, four measures of a single syllable, a rite dissolved into a self, a man who was and became the All, a father and the salt in the water, and now a forest full of debate, a wife who wanted only the deathless, and a sage who could name the highest thing only by saying what it was not.

The next chapter is the last. It asks what the ten amount to when they are read as one house rather than ten books, and who has been walking through its rooms all along.