The Mundaka Upanishad: two birds, and the lower knowledge

The last chapter ended in a classroom and pointed at the poem behind it. Here is the poem.

The Mundaka opens on a doorstep. No deathbed here, no battlefield, only a man come to a teacher’s door, and he is the wrong sort of man to be there. Shaunako ha vai mahashalo angirasam vidhivad upasannah: Shaunaka, “the great householder,” approaches the teacher Angiras “according to rule” (1.1.3). Hold both halves of that sentence. A mahashala, a man of a large house and a settled life, comes carrying the fuel of a student, and he comes correctly, in the proper form. And then he asks the question that a text of this ambition has been waiting for: “what is that through which, if it is known, everything else becomes known?” (1.1.3, after Müller). One question, and the whole house of a settled man is quietly put at risk by it. The answer will end in a vow of renunciation. The irony is built into the frame.

Before the question, a lineage. “Brahma was the first of the Devas, the maker of the universe… He told the knowledge of Brahman, the foundation of all knowledge, to his eldest son Atharva” (1.1.1, tr. Müller). Brahmavidyam sarvavidyapratishtham: the knowledge of Brahman, the ground on which all other knowing stands. From Atharva the teaching passes to Angir, to Satyavaha Bharadvaja, to Angiras, a chain of names paravaram, “in succession.” What the chain establishes is not a chronology. It is a warranty. This teaching has a pedigree, and Shaunaka has come to the right end of it.

The two knowledges

Angiras answers by sorting. “Two kinds of knowledge must be known, this is what all who know Brahman tell us, the higher and the lower knowledge” (1.1.4, tr. Müller). Para and apara vidya. And then the Mundaka does the thing for which it is remembered above almost anything else. It fills the lower heap:

“The lower knowledge is the Rig-veda, Yagur-veda, Sama-veda, Atharva-veda, Siksha (phonetics), Kalpa (ceremonial), Vyakarana (grammar), Nirukta (etymology), Khandas (metre), Gyotisha (astronomy); but the higher knowledge is that by which the Indestructible (akshara) is apprehended.” (Mundaka 1.1.4–5, tr. Müller)

Read that list slowly, because a great deal hangs on it. The four Vedas themselves, and their six ancillary sciences, the Vedangas, the whole apparatus of Vedic learning, are placed on the lower shelf. Some manuscripts, Müller noted, extend the list further, adding history, the Puranas, logic, Mimamsa, and the law books, until nearly every branch of classical Indian learning stands in the lower rank. The higher knowledge is a single thing, and it is not learnable in the way the rest is. It is “that by which the Indestructible is apprehended.”

This is a bold text ranking itself. An Upanishad that files the Veda under apara vidya is making a claim about where it stands in relation to the ritual tradition that produced it, and the claim is vertical. What the higher knowledge apprehends is described by negation: “That which cannot be seen, nor seized, which has no family and no caste, no eyes nor ears, no hands nor feet, the eternal, the omnipresent, infinitesimal, imperishable… the source of all beings” (1.1.6, tr. Müller). Shankara, whose commentary Müller digests, glossed agotram avarnam, without family and without caste, as “without origin and without qualities.” The source has no address in the world of the lower knowledge. You cannot look it up.

And then, having said what it is not, the text says what it does, in the image that anchors the first chapter:

“As the spider sends forth and draws in its thread, as plants grow on the earth, as from every man hairs spring forth on the head and the body, thus does everything arise here from the Indestructible.” (Mundaka 1.1.7, tr. Müller)

Three homely pictures, a spider spinning, grass rising, hair growing, for a metaphysics that refuses every other picture. Creation as effortless emanation, from a source that loses nothing by emanating. The Mundaka is already quoting the family of images the older Upanishads had built.

The frail boats

Having named the two knowledges, the Mundaka does something a reader might not expect from a text that just demoted the Veda. It turns and honours ritual. The second chapter of the first mundaka praises the fire sacrifice in detail, names the seven tongues of its flame, and tells the seeker, “Practise them diligently, ye lovers of truth” (after 1.2.1). The oblations, offered rightly, carry the sacrificer along the rays of the sun “to the holy Brahma-world” (after 1.2.5–6). For a moment it reads like a straightforward endorsement of the older way.

Then the poem breaks.

“But frail, in truth, are those boats, the sacrifices, the eighteen, in which this lower ceremonial has been told. Fools who praise this as the highest good, are subject again and again to old age and death.” (Mundaka 1.2.7, tr. Müller)

Plava hy ete adridha yajnarupah. Frail boats. The sacrifices will float, and they will sink, and the person who trusts them to cross the water comes back “again and again to old age and death.” Müller’s commentator counted the “eighteen” as the sixteen priests plus the sacrificer and his wife; Müller himself doubted the count. The next verses are harsher still: “Fools dwelling in darkness, wise in their own conceit… go round and round staggering to and fro, like blind men led by the blind” (after 1.2.8), a line Müller flagged as shared with the Katha. Those who win heaven by rite and gift “having enjoyed their reward on the height of heaven… enter again this world or a lower one” (after 1.2.10). Heaven is a return ticket. The ritual world is a wheel.

So where does the seeker go? The chapter answers with the verse that turns the whole treatise, the one that supplies the doorstep scene the Prashna would later dramatise as a classroom:

“Let a Brahmana, after he has examined all these worlds which are gained by works, acquire freedom from all desires. Nothing that is eternal (not made) can be gained by what is not eternal (made). Let him, in order to understand this, take fuel in his hand and approach a Guru who is learned and dwells entirely in Brahman.” (Mundaka 1.2.12, tr. Müller)

Parikshya lokan karmachitan brahmano nirvedam ayat. Having examined the worlds that works pile up, let him come to nirveda, dispassion. The logic underneath is a single dry sentence that Shankara built a whole polemic on: the eternal cannot be reached by the non-eternal. No amount of made things adds up to the unmade. And so, samitpanih, fuel in hand, the same firewood that the six seekers carried to Pippalada’s door, the examined seeker goes to a shrotriya brahmanishtha, a teacher learned in scripture and settled in Brahman. The classroom of the last chapter is this verse, staged.

Sparks from the fire

The second mundaka takes up the higher knowledge directly, and it opens with the image that pairs with the spider from the first. Where the spider showed emanation as spinning, this shows it as scattering:

“As from a blazing fire sparks, being like unto fire, fly forth a thousandfold, thus are various beings brought forth from the Imperishable, my friend, and return thither also.” (Mundaka 2.1.1, tr. Müller)

Yatha sudiptat pavakad visphulingah sahasrashah prabhavante sarupah. Sparks, and they are sarupah, of the same form as the fire. Beings issue from the Imperishable as sparks from a flame, resembling their source, and they go back into it. Müller cross-referenced this to the Brihadaranyaka. It says two things at once: that everything shares the nature of its source, and that everything is going home. The heavenly Person from whom the sparks fly is “without breath and without mind, pure, higher than the high Imperishable” (after 2.1.2). Shankara, in Müller’s apparatus, read the double comparative carefully: the “high” is the creative Brahman, the “higher” the Brahman that does not create. Even the Imperishable has something above it.

From the Person come breath and mind and the senses, the elements, the cosmic body, the gods, the rain, the seas and the rivers (2.1.3–9). And the point of knowing this cosmology is not information. It is release: the knower “scatters the knot of ignorance here on earth” (after 2.1.10). Avidyagranthim. The knot of not-knowing, cut. Which brings the second mundaka to its instrument.

The bow and the target

How is the higher knowledge to be won in practice? The Mundaka answers with a picture of an archer, and it is one of the most quoted meditation instructions in the whole corpus.

“Having taken the Upanishad as the bow, as the great weapon, let him place on it the arrow, sharpened by devotion! Then having drawn it with a thought directed to that which is, hit the mark, O friend, viz. that which is the Indestructible!” (Mundaka 2.2.3, tr. Müller)

And then the picture is decoded, member by member, in the verse that the tradition carries as its shorthand for the whole practice of Om:

“Om is the bow, the Self is the arrow, Brahman is called its aim. It is to be hit by a man who is not thoughtless; and then, as the arrow (becomes one with the target), he will become one with Brahman.” (Mundaka 2.2.4, tr. Müller)

Pranavo dhanuh sharo hy atma brahma tal lakshyam uchyate. Om the bow, the self the arrow, Brahman the target. The genius of the image is its last clause. The arrow does not merely reach the target; the arrow becomes it. Sharavat tanmayo bhavet. The archer who strikes home is absorbed into what he aimed at. Knowing here is no longer a relation between a knower and a thing known. It is the collapse of the two into one. “Meditate on the Self as Om,” the text urges two verses on, “that you may cross beyond the sea of darkness” (after 2.2.6).

When the arrow lands, the knot in the Mundaka’s first image is cut for good. “The fetter of the heart is broken, all doubts are solved, all his works perish” (2.2.8, tr. Müller), a line Müller paired with the Katha again. And what is found in the broken-open heart is a verse that later texts could not leave alone: “The sun does not shine there, nor the moon and the stars, nor these lightnings, and much less this fire. When he shines, everything shines after him; by his light all this is lighted” (Mundaka 2.2.10, tr. Müller). Müller noted the verse recurs in the Katha, the Shvetashvatara, and the Bhagavad Gita at 15.6. It is a shared coin of the tradition, and the Mundaka is one of the mints. The chapter closes by dissolving the last distance: “That immortal Brahman is before, that Brahman is behind, that Brahman is right and left… Brahman alone is all this, it is the best” (after 2.2.11). There is nowhere the target is not.

The two birds

The third mundaka opens with the image that, more than the sparks or the arrow, is the Mundaka’s signature in the memory of India:

“Two birds, inseparable friends, cling to the same tree. One of them eats the sweet fruit, the other looks on without eating.” (Mundaka 3.1.1, tr. Müller)

Two birds, sayuja sakhaya, yoked companions, on one tree. One eats. One only watches. The verse is old; Müller traced it to a hymn of the Rig Veda (1.164.20) and noted its reappearance in the Shvetashvatara, the seam where Deussen thought the Mundaka had borrowed from that theistic text. The next verse supplies the reading:

“On the same tree man sits grieving, immersed, bewildered by his own impotence. But when he sees the other lord contented and knows his glory, then his grief passes away.” (Mundaka 3.1.2, tr. Müller)

The grieving bird is the man caught in eating, tasting fruit sweet and bitter, anisha, without lordship over what befalls him. The watching bird is the isha, the lord, the Self that does not eat and does not grieve. The turn is in the seeing. When the sorrowing bird looks up and recognises the other, and knows whose glory that is, the sorrow lifts. Two birds, one tree, and the whole distance between bondage and freedom is the distance between the bird that thought it was alone and the bird that looked. The tradition would return to this tree for two thousand years.

How is the watching bird reached? By a discipline the text lists plainly: “By truthfulness, indeed, by penance, right knowledge, and abstinence must that Self be gained; the Self whom spotless anchorites gain is pure, and like a light within the body” (Mundaka 3.1.5, tr. Müller). Satyena labhyas tapasa hy esha atma. Truth first in the list. That ordering is not accidental, because the very next verse is the one the world knows by heart.

The True alone conquers

“The True prevails, not the untrue; by the True the path is laid out, the way of the gods, on which the sages who no longer wish for anything ascend to where there is that highest place of the True One.” (Mundaka 3.1.6, tr. Müller)

Satyam eva jayate nanritam. The True alone conquers, and the untrue does not. Two words of that verse, Satyameva Jayate, were adopted as the national motto of the Republic of India in 1950, inscribed in Devanagari beneath the Lion Capital of Ashoka on the state emblem. It is very likely the single most reproduced line from any Upanishad, printed on currency, courts, and passports.

And here the treatise owes the reader the honest history, because the motto’s fame has almost entirely detached it from its home. In the verse, “the True prevails” is not a slogan about honesty in public life. It is a sentence about the devayana, the way of the gods, the northern path this treatise met in the Prashna and the Isha. Satya here is the True in the sense of the Real, that which finally is; the path “laid out by the True” is the road the desireless sages take upward to “the highest place of the True One,” Brahman itself. The line is a piece of eschatology lifted into civic use. None of that makes the motto wrong. A nation could do worse than build its emblem on a verse about the Real defeating the unreal. It is only worth knowing that the phrase carried a much larger cargo before it was cut down to four syllables under a lion.

The chapter’s next verses insist on how the True is finally seen, and it is not by effort of the ordinary kind: “He is not apprehended by the eye, nor by speech, nor by the other senses, not by penance or good works. When a man’s nature has become purified by the serene light of knowledge, then he sees him… without parts” (Mundaka 3.1.8, tr. Müller). Jnanaprasadena. By the grace, the clearing, of knowledge. And in a line the Mundaka shares word for word with the Katha, Müller’s footnote confirms, the last word on effort is given to something past effort: “He whom the Self chooses, by him the Self can be gained” (3.2.3). The archer draws the bow, and the target chooses the arrow.

Rivers into the ocean, and the vow at the end

The Mundaka ends where the Prashna ended, with the same image, and this treatise flagged the coincidence when it walked the Prashna’s sixth question. The fifteen parts of a person return to their elements, and then:

“As the flowing rivers disappear in the sea, losing their name and their form, thus a wise man, freed from name and form, goes to the divine Person who is greater than the great.” (Mundaka 3.2.8, tr. Müller)

Brahmaiva bhavati. He becomes Brahman itself. The rivers reach the ocean and lose the names they were called by upstream, and so does the liberated person. The Prashna used the identical picture at 6.5, and Müller’s footnote points from one to the other. Two Atharvan texts, sharing a coastline. Read side by side, they show a tradition settling on its favourite way of saying what the end of the person is. It is neither extinction nor preservation. It is the loss of a boundary.

Before it closes, the Mundaka names its own conditions of transmission, and they return the poem to the frame it opened with. This science is to be told only to those “who have performed all necessary acts, who are versed in the Vedas, and firmly established in Brahman… and by whom the rite of carrying fire on the head has been performed, according to the rule of the Atharvanas” (Mundaka 3.2.10, tr. Müller). Shirovratam vidhivad yais tu chirnam. The shirovrata, the head-vow. Shankara, in Müller’s parenthesis, read it as the Atharvavedic observance of carrying fire on the head. A rival reading takes it as the shaving of the head at sannyasa, which would loop the closing rule straight back to the puzzle of the title, Mundaka, the shaving Upanishad, the text for the shaven ones. The treatise cannot decide between the two. What is clear is the shape. The great householder who came to the door in chapter one is sent, by chapter three, toward a vow.

This is the ground on which Shankara staged one of his sharpest doctrines. Digesting the Mundaka, he insisted that “works and knowledge can be as little together as darkness and light,” and that “the Sannyasin alone, who has given up everything, is qualified to know and to become Brahman.” Whether the Mundaka itself is quite so absolute is a fair question; the poem honours works before it demotes them. But it is easy to see why Shankara reached for it. A text that files the Vedas under the lower knowledge, calls the sacrifices frail boats, and ends in a renunciant’s vow is a natural home for that reading. The Mundaka supplies three of the twenty-eight base passages behind the Brahma Sutras’ first chapter, by Deussen’s count more than any other Atharva Upanishad. For a short poem in a doubtful Veda, it carries an unusual amount of the weight of Vedanta.

Two birds on one tree. One eats, one watches, and the whole teaching is the moment the eater looks up.

Four words under a lion, and behind them a verse about the road the desireless take home.

The next chapter opens the shortest door of all: twelve verses that a late text judged sufficient on their own for liberation, and a famous doubt about who wrote the commentary that made them famous.