The Prashna Upanishad: six questions, one year of waiting

Three doors into this treatise have opened onto drama: a deathbed, a vanishing spirit, a boy in the house of Death. The fourth opens onto something quieter and, in its way, rarer in ancient literature: a classroom, observed closely enough that we can still watch the method.

Six men arrive at the door of the sage Pippalada, “devoted to Brahman, firm in Brahman, seeking for the Highest Brahman,” carrying fuel in their hands, the firewood that marks a student presenting himself for instruction (Prashna 1.1, tr. Müller). Their names are given, and Shankara reads most of them as clan names: Sukesha Bharadvaja, Shaibya Satyakama, Sauryayani Gargya, Kausalya Ashvalayana of Kosala, Bhargava Vaidarbhi of Vidarbha, Kabandhi Katyayana. Six seekers from six lineages and regions, converging on one teacher.

Pippalada does not teach them. He tells them to wait.

“Stay here a year longer, with penance, abstinence, and faith; then you may ask questions… and if we know them, we shall tell you all” (1.2). A year of tapas, brahmacharya, shraddha, before a single question is permitted. And notice the hedge a teacher of this tradition allows himself: if we know. The Prashna Upanishad, the “question text” of the Atharva Veda, begins with the two disciplines the modern reader least expects of scripture: patience, and epistemic humility.

Then the year passes, and the six ask, one each, in ascending order of difficulty. Pippalada himself says so partway through: “You ask questions more difficult” (3.2). The architecture is the teaching. Watch it climb.

Where do creatures come from?

Kabandhi Katyayana asks the widest question first: from where are all these creatures born? Pippalada answers with a creation compressed into a couple: Prajapati, desiring creatures, “produces a pair, matter (rayi) and spirit (prana)” (1.4, tr. Müller), and the pair turns out to be everywhere once named. “The sun is spirit, matter is the moon” (1.5). The rising sun receives “all spirits into his rays” (1.6). The year is Prajapati, and it too splits: “there are two paths thereof, the Southern and the Northern” (1.9). Those who live by rite and gift travel the southern path to the moon-world “and return again”; that path of the Fathers, pitriyana, is matter. Those who seek the Self “by penance, abstinence, faith, and knowledge” go by the northern path to the sun: “From thence they do not return, for it is the end” (1.10). The text names only the path of the Fathers; the tradition calls its northern twin the devayana, the way of the gods, after the older Upanishads that pair the two.

The halving continues downward, year to month (bright half and dark half), month to day-and-night, down to food, “hence proceeds seed” (1.12–14), until the whole visible world is a lattice of the original couple. And then, having descended from Prajapati to procreation, the answer ends somewhere unexpected: in ethics. The changeless Brahma-world belongs to those “in whom there is nothing crooked, nothing false, and no guile” (1.16). Na jihmam anritam na maya. The first question began in cosmology and lands on honesty. Remember that landing; the sixth question will return to it.

What holds the body, and who is chief?

Bhargava Vaidarbhi asks the second question: how many powers, devas, sustain a creature, and which is best? Pippalada answers with a story the older Upanishads also knew, the quarrel of the faculties. Ether, wind, fire, water, earth, speech, mind, eye, and ear each boast: “We support this body and keep it” (2.2). Prana, the life-breath, corrects them: “Be not deceived, I alone, dividing myself fivefold, support this body and keep it” (2.3). They do not believe him. So, stung by pride, he “did as if he were going out.”

“As he went out, all the others went out, and as he returned, all the others returned. As bees go out when their queen goes out, and return when she returns, thus (did) speech, mind, eye, and ear.” (Prashna 2.4, tr. Müller)

One small honesty about that famous image: the Sanskrit says madhukara-rajanam, the king of the bees, and Müller knew it, noting the Sanskrit in his footnote while naturalising the biology for his English readers. Queen or king, the demonstration ends the argument, and the question closes with a hymn to prana: “As spokes in the nave of a wheel, everything is fixed in Prana” (2.6), the Vedas, the sacrifice, the warriors and the priests, ending in petition: “Protect us like a mother her sons, and give us happiness and wisdom” (2.13).

Where is breath born?

Kausalya Ashvalayana sharpens the point: if prana is chief, where does prana come from? The answer is the metaphysical center of the text:

“This Prana is born of the Self. Like the shadow thrown on a man, this (the prana) is spread out over it (the Brahman). By the work of the mind does it come into this body.” (Prashna 3.3, tr. Müller)

Breath is the Self’s shadow: inseparable from it, shaped by it, and not it. Shankara presses the image further, reading “the work of the mind” as past karma, the momentum that carries a life into its next body. Then the physiology, the classic map of the five breaths: apana below, governing excretion and generation; prana itself in eye, ear, mouth and nose; samana “in the middle,” distributing food “equally”; vyana moving through the heart’s web of channels, the hundred and one arteries, each branching a hundredfold, “and for each of these branches” seventy-two thousand more (3.6); and udana, the vertical breath, which at death “leads (us) upwards to the good world by good work, to the bad world by bad work, to the world of men by both” (3.7). Each breath has a cosmic twin, sun, earth, mid-air, wind, light, and the close makes the deathbed doctrine precise: “Whatever his thought (at the time of death), with that he goes back to Prana” (3.10), and is led “to the world, as deserved.” A person exits along the line of their final attention. The Bhagavad Gita would later build a whole discipline on that sentence’s theme.

Who sleeps, who dreams, who is happy?

Sauryayani Gargya’s question is the most intimate: when a man sleeps, who is it that sleeps, who dreams, and whose is the happiness of dreamless rest? The answer opens with one of the text’s finest images: as the sun’s rays at sunset “are gathered up in that disc of light” and stream out again at rising, so the senses gather into the mind in sleep (4.2). The body meanwhile keeps its own liturgy going: “the fires of the pranas are, as it were, awake in that town (the body)” (4.3), and Pippalada maps the five breaths onto the household fires of the Vedic rite, with the mind as the sacrificer and udana leading the sacrificer nightly “to Brahman” in deep sleep. Sleep itself described as a sacrifice, performed without ceasing, in a body imagined as a town.

In dream, “that god (the mind) enjoys in sleep greatness”: “What has been seen, he sees again; what has been heard, he hears again… he sees it all; he, being all, sees” (4.5). When even the mind is “overpowered by light,” no dreams come, “and at that time that happiness arises in his body” (4.6). And where does everything finally rest? “As birds go to a tree to roost, thus all this rests in the Highest Atman” (4.7), and the text unrolls its census of “all this,” elements and organs and objects, intellect, ego, attention, down the list, before naming the one in whom the list sits: “For he it is who sees, hears, smells, tastes, perceives, conceives, acts, he whose essence is knowledge, the person” (4.9). The seer is never among the things seen. The Upanishads circle this point from many sides; the Prashna reaches it through a question about a good night’s sleep.

What does Om obtain?

Shaibya Satyakama asks the practical question: if a man meditates on the syllable Om until death, what does he win? Pippalada answers with a grammar of attainment, grading the syllable by its matras, its measures. “The syllable Om is the highest and also the other Brahman; therefore he who knows it arrives by the same means at one of the two” (5.2). One measure, and the meditator returns quickly to the world of men. Two measures carry him to the moon-world, and back. But three, the full A-U-M fixed on the Highest Person:

“He comes to light and to the sun. And as a snake is freed from its skin, so is he freed from evil. He is led up by the Saman-verses to the Brahma-world; and from him… he learns to see the all-pervading, the Highest Person.” (Prashna 5.5, tr. Müller)

The same sound, at three depths, three destinations. The Prashna’s matra-doctrine is the sibling of the Mandukya’s, which will map the same three measures onto waking, dream, and deep sleep; reading the two texts side by side, one can watch the tradition standardising its most compressed mantra theology. Used separately, Pippalada warns, the measures are mortal; rightly joined, “the sage trembles not” (5.6).

Where is the person of sixteen parts?

The last question arrives with its own back-story, and the story matters. Sukesha Bharadvaja reports that a prince, Hiranyanabha of Kosala, once asked him: “Do you know the person of sixteen parts?” And Sukesha, a teacher’s son, answered the prince: “I do not know him… he who speaks what is untrue withers away to the very root; therefore I will not say what is untrue” (6.1). The prince mounted his chariot and left in silence. Now Sukesha lays the question he could not answer before his own teacher. The first question’s close, no crookedness, no falsehood, no guile, has become a scene: the text shows a man refusing to bluff, and makes the refusal the qualification for the final teaching.

Pippalada answers: “that person is here within the body, he in whom these sixteen parts arise” (6.2). Not in a heaven. Here. The sixteen are listed, breath and faith, the five elements, sense and mind, food, vigour, austerity, sacred verses, sacrifice, the worlds, and last of all name (6.4). And then the dissolution, in the image this treatise has met once already and will meet again in the Mundaka:

“As these flowing rivers that go towards the ocean, when they have reached the ocean, sink into it, their name and form are broken… exactly thus these sixteen parts… their name and form are broken… and he becomes without parts and immortal.” (Prashna 6.5, tr. Müller)

The parts rest in the person “like spokes in the nave of a wheel” (6.6), the hymn’s image for prana in question two, now promoted one level up, prana was the wheel’s hub for the body, the purusha is the hub for prana and all the rest. And then Pippalada ends the year of teaching with the same humility he began with: “So far do I know this Highest Brahman, there is nothing higher than it” (6.7). So far do I know. The students’ reply closes the book: “You, indeed, are our father, you who carry us from our ignorance to the other shore” (6.8).

The school and its textbook

Where does the Prashna sit among the ten? Late, by the scholarly consensus this treatise reported in its opening chapter: Deussen’s later-prose period, Olivelle’s “cannot be much older than the beginning of the common era,” with the usual caution attached to the Atharvan label. And it is a text with a visible relationship to another of the ten. Shankara opens his commentary by calling the Prashna a Brahmana that “more fully repeat[s] what has been declared in the Mantra,” and his glossator Anandagiri identifies that mantra-text as the Mundaka; Müller endorsed the connection in his introduction. The shared images agree: the rivers and the ocean, the spokes and the nave. The Prashna reads like the taught version of the Mundaka’s sung doctrine, a curriculum built on a poem, which is one more reason the classroom frame fits it so well.

Six questions, six answers, one hedge at the start and one at the end. Between “if we know” and “so far do I know” stands everything this teacher was willing to claim.

The next chapter takes up the poem behind the classroom: the Mundaka, the text that dared to file the four Vedas under the lower knowledge, and gave India both its two birds and its national motto.