The Mandukya Upanishad: twelve verses, four states, one sound

The Mundaka chapter ended on a sword-edge: two birds on one tree, the eater and the watcher, and a text bold enough to file the four Vedas under the lower knowledge. That was a long poem making a large claim. The door this chapter opens is the opposite in every dimension but one. It is the shortest book in the whole treatise. It has no story, no named seer, no dialogue, no dying king. It is twelve prose sentences. And a later tradition looked at those twelve sentences and judged them, alone, enough.

Recall the scene the first chapter set in Ayodhya. Rama, asked by Hanuman how a person is liberated, answers with a graded prescription, and the first line of it is startling. For the seeker after kaivalya, liberation in absolute aloneness, one text is sufficient: mandukyam ekam evalam mumukshunam vimuktaye, “the Mandukya alone suffices for the liberation of the seeker” (Muktika Upanishad 1.26). Only if certainty does not come from that does the prescription go on to the ten, then the thirty-two, then all one hundred and eight. The ranking is Advaita theology, spoken from a settled position that formed long after the ten were composed; the first chapter said so and it holds here. But set the theology aside and the claim still arrests. Of all the Upanishads, the one singled out as a complete path by itself is the smallest of them.

What could twelve sentences carry that would earn that verdict?

The shortest of the ten

Count them and there are twelve. In the recension most readers meet, the twelve prose mantras run without interruption, and later they were interleaved with a commentary in verse, but the Upanishad itself is these twelve sentences and no more. It is the latest of the ten by the scholarly sequence this treatise adopted from Patrick Olivelle: a work of “later prose” that “cannot be much older than the beginning of the common era,” ascribed, like its two neighbours the Prashna and the Mundaka, to the Atharva Veda, with the same caveat attached that Atharvan ascriptions are somewhat suspect.

There is a further oddity in the name. The sober derivation ties it to a teacher-lineage, the Mandukeya teachers named at Aitareya Aranyaka 3.1, which would make it a Rigvedic teacher’s name sitting on an Atharvan text, one more crack in the ascription. The tradition of the Madhva school offers a different origin: that Varuna took the form of a frog, manduka, to reveal the mantras. That is what the tradition holds; the record cannot confirm it, and the frog-symbolism readings that circulate beyond it are modern speculation with no textual anchor.

The reason twelve sentences could be judged sufficient is that they are not twelve separate teachings. They are one machine, built in a single downward and inward motion, from the whole world to the syllable that is the world to the Self that the syllable names. Watch it run.

All this is Om

The first sentence states the equation the rest of the text will unfold:

“Om! This syllable is this whole world. Its further explanation is this: The past, the present, the future, everything is just the word Om. And whatever else that transcends threefold time, that, too, is just the word Om.” (Mandukya 1, tr. Hume)

The syllable and the world are set equal at the outset. Hume notes that the word the text uses for “syllable,” akshara, also means “imperishable,” so the opening sentence carries a double sense: this syllable, and this imperishable, is all this. Om as the seed of everything is not new; the Upanishads reach for it from many directions. What the Mandukya does with it is new. It takes the sound apart.

The second sentence lays the architecture bare: sarvam hy etad brahmayam atma brahma so ‘yam atma catushpat, “For truly, everything here is Brahma; this self (atman) is Brahma. This same self has four fourths” (Mandukya 2, tr. Hume). Four quarters of one Self. The word to hold onto is Hume’s careful “four fourths,” catushpat, four feet or quarters. The machine is now specified. The rest of the text will walk down the four.

The four quarters of the Self

The first three quarters are the three states every human being already knows, described in the same clipped formula, each a further step inward.

The waking state comes first: jagaritasthano bahihprajnah, “the waking state, outwardly cognitive… enjoying the gross, the Common-to-all-men (Vaishvanara), is the first fourth” (Mandukya 3, tr. Hume). Vaishvanara, “common to all men,” is the Self turned outward, feeding on the gross world through the body. Hume, following Shankara, unpacks its “seven limbs” and “nineteen mouths”: the nineteen are the five organs of sense, the five of action, the five breaths, and the four inner faculties, mind, intellect, ego, and attention. This is the ordinary waking person, mapped as a quarter of the Self.

The second quarter turns inward: svapnasthano ‘ntahprajnah, “the dreaming state, inwardly cognitive… the Brilliant (Taijasa), is the second fourth” (Mandukya 4, tr. Hume). Taijasa, “the brilliant,” made of the light of the mind, feeds on the impressions the waking world has left behind, dreaming.

The third quarter goes deeper still, to the sleep with no dreams:

“Where one, asleep, desires no desire whatsoever, sees no dream whatsoever, that is deep sleep. The deep-sleep state (sushupta-sthana), unified (eki-bhuta), just a cognition-mass (prajnana-ghana), consisting of bliss… the Cognitional (Prajna), is the third fourth.” (Mandukya 5, tr. Hume)

Prajna, “the cognitional,” is the sleeper who dreams nothing, gathered into a single undivided mass of awareness, and, the text says, enjoying bliss. Hume notes that the phrases here are lifted almost word for word from older Upanishads, the Brihadaranyaka and the Taittiriya; the Mandukya is in part a mosaic of the language the tradition had already made. Then comes the sentence that matters most for reading the whole text correctly. The great cosmic epithets, the ones a hurried reader expects to belong to the highest state, are attached here, to deep sleep:

“This is the lord of all (sarveshvara). This is the all-knowing (sarvajna). This is the inner controller (antaryamin). This is the source (yoni) of all, for this is the origin and the end of beings.” (Mandukya 6, tr. Hume)

Lord of all, all-knowing, inner controller, source of beings. These land on Prajna, on deep sleep, not on the fourth. Deep sleep is the causal state, the seed from which the world of experience unfolds and into which it dissolves each night. It is as high as the map of the three familiar states can go. And it is not the end.

Not inward, not outward

The fourth quarter has no experience to point at. The text can only reach it by negation, and it does, in the sentence the whole Upanishad exists to deliver:

“Not inwardly cognitive, not outwardly cognitive, not both-wise cognitive, not a cognition-mass, not cognitive, not non-cognitive, unseen, with which there can be no dealing, ungraspable, having no distinctive mark, non-thinkable, that cannot be designated, the essence of the assurance of which is the state of being one with the Self, the cessation of development, tranquil, benign, without a second (advaita), such they think is the fourth. He is the Self (Atman). He should be discerned.” (Mandukya 7, tr. Hume)

Prapanchopashama, shivo ‘dvaita. The cessation of the phenomenal world, benign, without a second. Every clause is a subtraction. The fourth is not any of the three states, not their sum, not their absence; it is not an object of any kind, because it is the seer that can never be among the things seen. The text names it only as caturtha, “the fourth.” Hume’s eleventh note records something the treatise should keep visible: the Mandukya says caturtha, “fourth,” while the Brihadaranyaka says turiya and the Maitri says turya, and “all later philosophical treatises have the form turiya, which came to be the accepted technical term.” So the word every later tradition uses for the highest state, Turiya, is not quite the Mandukya’s own word. The Mandukya gave the doctrine its grammar. The name settled afterward.

Three states you already visit every day and night. A fourth that is no state at all. It is the Self the other three are quarters of. That is the first half of the machine.

The three sounds of A-U-M

Now the text folds its map of the Self onto the sound of the syllable it began with, and the two halves lock together. So ‘yam atma… adhimatram pada matra matrash cha padah, the quarters are the elements of the sound, and the elements are the quarters: “the letter a, the letter u, the letter m” (Mandukya 8, tr. Hume). Om written out is A-U-M, three sounds, and Hume notes that o is constitutionally a plus u. Three sounds, and then a silence.

The text assigns each sound to a state, with an etymology for each, playing on the letter. Vaishvanara, the waker, is the letter a, “from apti, obtaining, or from adimatva, being first,” and the one who knows this “obtains all desires and becomes first” (Mandukya 9, tr. Hume). Taijasa, the dreamer, is the letter u, “from utkarsha, exaltation, or from ubhayatva, intermediateness,” raised and set in the middle (Mandukya 10). Prajna, the deep sleeper, is the letter m, “from miti, erecting, or from apiti, immerging”; he “erects this whole world and becomes its immerging” (Mandukya 11, tr. Hume). One honesty about that last word: Hume translates miti as “erecting” and flags that it might mean “destroying”; the common gloss “measuring” is a different reading, not his, and the treatise will not merge them.

Three sounds, three states. And then the fourth, which is the silence:

“The fourth is without an element, with which there can be no dealing, the cessation of development, benign, without a second. Thus Om is the Self (Atman) indeed. He who knows this, with his self enters the Self, yea, he who knows this.” (Mandukya 12, tr. Hume)

Amatrash caturtho ‘vyavaharyah… shivo ‘dvaita. Without a matra, without a measure. The fourth is the soundless silence after A, U, and M have died away, the quiet the whole syllable falls into. The machine is complete. Chant Om once, attending, and you have traversed waking, dream, and deep sleep, and arrived at the silence that is the Self. Twelve sentences. This is what the Muktika called sufficient.

The sibling in the Prashna

A reader who came through the fifth chapter of this treatise will feel a strong echo here, and the echo is real. The Prashna Upanishad, in its fifth question, already graded meditation on Om by its three matras: one measure returns the meditator to the world of men, two carry him to the moon-world and back, all three lead him to the Highest Person, freed of evil “as a snake is freed from its skin” (Prashna 5.5). That chapter flagged this text as the Prashna’s sibling, and standing between the two now one can see the family resemblance exactly. The Prashna grades the three measures by where they carry a soul after death. The Mandukya grades them by which state of consciousness each one is. Same three measures of the same syllable, two neighbouring Atharvan texts, doing two different things with the identical raw material. Read side by side, they show the tradition standardising its most compressed mantra theology in real time, one text turning a soteriology into a psychology.

That is the Upanishad. Twelve sentences, four states, one sound. But almost no one has ever read those twelve sentences alone. They come wrapped in something much larger, and far more contested.

Gaudapada’s four rooms

Riding on the twelve verses is a commentary in verse of two hundred and fifteen karikas, in four books, attributed to a teacher named Gaudapada. The tradition holds him to be the parama-guru of Shankara, the teacher of Shankara’s teacher Govinda, which would place him around the sixth century of the Common Era, though that date is convention only; the firm outer limit is that the eighth-century Buddhist Kamalashila already quotes Books Two and Three as an authoritative text. The Mandukya Karika, also called the Agama Shastra, is where Advaita Vedanta becomes recognisably itself.

Its four books are four rooms of one argument. The first, Agama, “scripture,” walks through the Upanishad’s own teaching and already prefers the later word: its tenth verse calls the highest state turya, not the Upanishad’s caturtha. The second, Vaitathya, “unreality,” takes the Mandukya’s equation of dream and waking as second and first quarters and presses it into a claim about the world itself: “As in dream, so in waking,” and the whole seen world “is seen by the wise in the Vedanta as a city of the gandharvas,” a mirage-city (Karika 2.31). It ends in a startling denial: “There is no dissolution, no origination, none in bondage, none aspiring, none seeking release, none released. This is the highest truth” (Karika 2.32). The third book, Advaita, “non-duality,” gives the doctrine its name in the analogy of space in a pot, the same space seemingly divided by countless jars, undivided in truth, and it introduces a discipline it calls asparsha-yoga, the yoga of no-contact:

“That yoga which is not in touch with anything is hard for all yogins to see, for the yogins are afraid of it, seeing fear where there is no fear.” (Karika 3.39, tr. Dvivedi)

The fourth book, Alatashanti, “the quieting of the firebrand,” delivers the image the whole Karika has been moving toward. Whirl a burning stick in the dark and it seems to draw a circle, a line, a shape of fire. There is no circle. There is one point of light and a motion.

“As a firebrand, when moved about, appears straight or crooked and the like, so consciousness, when it vibrates, appears as the perceiver and the perceived.” (Karika 4.47)

The appearances neither come out of the firebrand nor go into it, “because they are not of the nature of a substance” (Karika 4.49–50). Just so, the perceiver and the perceived neither arise from consciousness nor return to it. Nothing is ever really born. This is ajativada, the doctrine of non-origination, and it is the same claim in Book Two and Book Four, stated once as psychology and once as metaphysics: verse 3.48 and verse 4.71 make it in nearly identical words. The twelve sentences said the fourth is “the cessation of development.” Gaudapada spent two hundred and fifteen verses arguing that there was never any development to cease.

Whose commentary is it?

The first chapter of this treatise left a debt. It noted that within the ten, one commentary attribution is contested, and it named the contestant: Hajime Nakamura argued that the commentary on the Mandukya together with Gaudapada’s Karika, transmitted under Shankara’s name, is not Shankara’s. “The chapter on the Mandukya will take this up where it belongs,” it said. This is the place.

The traditional warrant is strong. The commentary’s colophons name Shankara. Gaudapada is his lineage’s grandfather, so it would be fitting for Shankara to gloss his ancestor’s work. And Anandagiri, the standard sub-commentator, wrote his tika on this commentary as Shankara’s, which means the attribution was accepted deep inside the tradition and not lightly. Many modern scholars accept it too.

Against it stands a real case, made on two fronts. Nakamura, in his history of early Vedanta, doubted the attribution. Vidhushekhara Bhattacharya, editing the Karika in 1943, pressed a stylistic argument: defects of metre in the opening verses, grammatical lapses, and a handling of certain karikas that reads unlike the Shankara of the undisputed works. Bhattacharya’s own conclusion about one traditional defence was blunt: “Anandagiri’s explanation can hardly be accepted.” The record here is genuinely divided, and the honest posture is the one this treatise has kept throughout. The tradition holds the commentary to be Shankara’s, and names its evidence. A line of scholarship doubts it, and names its evidence. No surviving fact settles it, and this chapter will not pretend one does.

The dispute over the commentary sits inside a larger one over the Karika itself. Book Four is saturated with Buddhist vocabulary, the four-cornered logic of the Madhyamaka, terms like samvriti and paramartha for conventional and ultimate truth, even an epithet, dvipadam vara, “best of bipeds,” that Buddhists used for the Buddha and that Shankara’s tradition reads instead as the Purusha. Richard King, reading the Karika against its Mahayana background, treats it as a composite work whose author or authors were Vedantins turning Buddhist arguments to Vedantic ends. Bhattacharya thought the four books may not be by one hand at all. The tradition has its own answer, and it is a verse from inside the text: naitad buddhena bhashitam, “this was not spoken by the Buddha” (Karika 4.99), which the school reads as the Karika marking its own difference, taking the opponent’s tools to defend the shruti’s non-origination. Where the lineages and the scholars diverge, the treatise names the divergence and holds all the rivers in view. That the sources point in different directions is itself the finding.

Twelve sentences that a late text called enough. A commentary that turned them into a system and may or may not carry the name it bears. Both of those are true, and the smallness of the Upanishad and the size of the argument built on it are the whole strange fact of the Mandukya.

The syllable ends in silence. So does the reading of it.

Volume I closes here, at the narrowest of the narrow doors. Six short books, held in an evening: the Lord in the ritual book, the question that named the Kena, the boy who questioned Death, the year of waiting, the two birds, and now twelve verses judged sufficient on their own.

Volume II, “The Great Forest,” opens with Chapter 8, the Taittiriya Upanishad, and its ladder of selves, from food to bliss.