The Taittiriya Upanishad: the ladder of selves, from food to bliss

Volume I took the six narrow doors, the short books a reader can hold in an evening: eighteen verses at the end of a ritual collection, a text named for its first question, a boy at the house of Death, a year of waiting outside a sage’s door, a poem that filed the four Vedas under the lower knowledge, twelve verses on the syllable Om. Six short books, six drums struck once each.

The great forest begins here.

The four long prose Upanishads of Volume II sit deeper in the Vedic corpus than the six before, and they read differently: less like sudden strokes, more like buildings a reader walks through room by room. The first of them is among the older texts of the whole set. Olivelle places the Taittiriya, with the Aitareya, in the sixth to fifth centuries before the Common Era, probably pre-Buddhist, behind only the two prose giants that close the volume. It is a text with a strange shape. It ends with a liberated man singing, in ecstasy, “I am food! I am the eater of food!” And it begins with a lesson in pronunciation.

Why does the Upanishad that ends in the food-song open with phonetics? Because the Taittiriya is a curriculum, laid out in the order a student meets it: first the classroom, then the anatomy of the person, then the student walking the whole ladder himself. Its three sections are called vallis, and they climb.

The partridges and the mixed Veda

First, the name, and the honest gap between what the tradition says and what the record shows.

The Taittiriya belongs to the Taittiriya branch of the Krishna Yajur Veda, the “black” Yajur Veda, so called because it interweaves mantra and prose commentary in one running text rather than separating them as the “white” recension does. The Upanishad is not a free-standing book. It forms prapathakas seven to nine of the Taittiriya Aranyaka, the “forest text” of that school (Müller, SBE 15, intro pp. xxvii–xxx). The forest has a classroom folded into its middle chapters.

Where does Taittiriya come from? The tradition offers a story, and half-disowns it. The Vishnu Purana (3.5, in H. H. Wilson’s 1840 translation) tells that the sage Yajnavalkya, ordered by his teacher Vaishampayana to give back the Yajur Veda he had learnt, “disgorged” it, whereupon his fellow pupils, taking the form of partridges, tittiri, picked up the texts he had brought up. Hence, the Purana says, the Taittiriya school. Wilson marks the tale plainly as “a Pauranik invention,” a pun, since Tittiri is also recorded simply as a teacher’s name. This treatise reports the legend as the tradition’s own etymology and lets Wilson’s caution stand beside it. We do not know how the school got its name.

The three vallis are the map. Shankara names the first the Shiksha Valli and the second the Brahmananda Valli; Sayana, commenting on the Aranyaka, prefers Samhiti-upanishad for prapathaka seven and Varuny-upanishad for eight and nine (both reported in Müller’s apparatus). The names differ; the three-part shape does not.

The classroom: pronunciation, then ethics

The Shiksha Valli, the first valli, is the part a reader least expects of scripture, and the most quietly radical. It opens with a peace-invocation, “Adoration to thee, O Vayu! Thou indeed art the visible Brahman” (1.1, tr. Müller), and then it teaches, of all things, how to speak.

“Let us explain Shiksha,” the text says, “the doctrine of pronunciation, viz. letter, accent, quantity, effort, modulation, and union of letters” (1.2). Shiksha, phonetics, is one of the six limbs of the Veda, the Vedangas, and here is its germ, treating the correct sounding of the sacred word as a subject fit for revelation. Then the text does something stranger. It takes sandhi, the joining of two sounds where words meet, and raises it to cosmology. There are five “great samhitas,” five great junctions: earth and heaven joined by the air between; fire and sun joined by lightning; teacher and pupil joined by the recitation that passes between them; mother and father joined in the child; the lower jaw and the upper joined by speech (1.3). The place where two things meet, the seam itself, is where the world is made. A grammar of sound has become a grammar of the cosmos.

The classroom runs on: a hymn for intelligence (1.4), the doctrine of the vyahritis, the three sacred utterances bhu, bhuvas, suvas, to which “Mahachamasya taught a fourth, viz. Mahas, which is Brahman, which is the Self” (1.5), and a meditation on the syllable Om: “Om means Brahman. Om means all this” (1.8).

Then three named teachers argue about what matters most, and the text preserves the argument without settling it. Satyavachas Rathitara holds that the essential thing is truth only; Taponitya Paurashishti, that it is penance, tapas, only; Naka Maudgalya, that it is the study of the Veda, “for that is penance, that is penance” (1.9). The text lets all three stand. Where the lineages diverge, the older texts often name the divergence and decline to adjudicate it.

Speak the truth, do your duty

Then the course ends, and the teacher sends the student home.

The eleventh anuvaka of the Shiksha Valli is a convocation address, one of the most quoted passages in the whole corpus, because it is where the Upanishads speak most directly to how a person should live. Müller’s translation keeps the cadence of a charge delivered aloud:

“After having taught the Veda, the teacher instructs the pupil: Say what is true! Do thy duty! Do not neglect the study of the Veda!… Do not swerve from the truth! Do not swerve from duty!” (Taittiriya 1.11, tr. Müller)

Under the English stand two of the most durable phrases in Indian ethical life: satyam vada, speak the truth, and dharmam chara, walk in dharma. Then comes the household rule, the one line of this text most Indians can still finish:

“Let thy mother be to thee like unto a god! Let thy father be to thee like unto a god! Let thy teacher be to thee like unto a god! Let thy guest be to thee like unto a god!” (1.11, tr. Müller)

Matru devo bhava, pitru devo bhava, acharya devo bhava, atithi devo bhava. Mother, father, teacher, guest, each to be treated as one would treat a deity. Then the address does something a reader schooled in scripture as a book of commandments may not expect. It teaches the student how to think for himself when the rule runs out. In doubt about conduct, the teacher says, “conduct thyself as Brahmanas who possess good judgment conduct themselves therein… as long as they are not too severe, but devoted to duty” (1.11). Look to the practice of the wise. That is the rule for when there is no rule.

Then the close, and its final word is the word the tradition took as this whole genre’s name: “This is the rule. This is the teaching. This is the true purport, the Upanishad, of the Veda” (1.11). The classroom ends. What follows goes inward.

Brahman is the real, knowledge, the infinite

The second valli, the Ananda Valli, opens with a promise, “He who knows the Brahman attains the highest” (2.1, tr. Müller), and then a definition of three words, the Taittiriya’s contribution to how the tradition talks about the absolute:

“The real, knowledge, the infinite is Brahman.” (Taittiriya 2.1, tr. Müller)

Satyam jnanam anantam brahma. Brahman is satyam, the real; jnanam, knowledge or awareness; anantam, the infinite, the boundless. Shankara reads these three words as a definition by distinguishing marks, a lakshana, each word ruling out a false idea: Brahman is the real, so not the unreal changing world; knowledge, so not the insentient; the infinite, so not any bounded thing. Three words that fence off what Brahman is not, and so point at what cannot otherwise be said.

From that Self, the valli says, the world comes out in order, ether from Self, air from ether, on down through fire, water, earth, herbs, food, and at last man: “Man thus consists of the essence of food” (2.1). Annarasamaya. Made of the essence of food. Which is where the ladder begins.

The ladder of selves, from food to bliss

Here is the passage the later tradition built an entire system on. The Ananda Valli describes the person as a sequence of selves, each nested inside the next, each subtler than the last. The text calls every one of them atman, a self. The word kosha, sheath, by which most readers now know this doctrine, is a later Vedantic label; the Upanishad itself does not use it. The later system of the subtle body descends directly from this passage, and it is worth watching before it hardened into a diagram.

Each self has the same five-limbed shape: a head, a right side, a left side, a trunk, and a base which Müller renders “the seat” or “the support,” the Sanskrit puccha, tail. One honest note. Müller records that the Persian translators read these limbs as the members of a bird, wings and body and tail, and calls the reading “not unlikely.” But the wings are the translators’ inference. The Sanskrit gives a head, two sides, a trunk and a puccha; this treatise will not print wings as if the text supplied them.

The outermost self is annamaya, made of food: the body itself, built of what is eaten (2.1). Within it, “filling” it and “having the shape of man,” is pranamaya, the self made of breath (2.2). Within that is manomaya, the self made of mind, and its limbs are telling: they are the Vedas themselves, the Yajus for a head, the Rik and the Saman for its sides (2.3). A self woven out of scripture. Within that is vijnanamaya, the self made of understanding, “Absorption is its trunk” (2.4). And innermost is anandamaya, the self made of bliss:

“Joy is its head. Satisfaction its right arm. Great satisfaction is its left arm. Bliss is its trunk. Brahman is the seat, the support.” (Taittiriya 2.5, tr. Müller)

Five selves, from the coarse to the subtle, from the body of food to the self of bliss, with Brahman as the support at the base of the innermost. The ladder inward is the Taittiriya’s most influential single image.

It is also the site of an old, precise dispute, and this treatise names it rather than smoothing it. Is that innermost bliss-self, the anandamaya, itself Brahman, the goal reached? Or is it one more sheath, with Brahman merely as its support? Shankara takes up exactly this question in his Brahma Sutra commentary (1.1.12 to 1.1.19, the anandamaya-adhikarana, in Thibaut’s translation). He first expounds the straight reading, the bliss-self as the highest Self. Then, at the end, he reverses himself: “But, in reality,” the suffix -maya means a modification, an effect, exactly as it does in annamaya, “made of food,” so the bliss-self too is a sheath, and it is Brahman, named as “the tail, the support,” that is the principal thing, “the one nest of all worldly bliss.” Shankara reads against the surface of the very sutras he is glossing. The tradition argued this seam, and this treatise leaves the argument where the tradition left it.

The calculus of joy

Having named bliss as the innermost self, the text asks a question no other Upanishad asks so literally: how much joy is that? And it answers with an arithmetic.

First, a warning about the ground the bliss stands on. The seventh anuvaka states the fear-rule that governs the whole valli: “When he finds freedom from fear and rest in that which is invisible, incorporeal, undefined, unsupported, then he has obtained the fearless. For if he makes but the smallest distinction in it, there is fear for him” (2.7). Fear comes from twoness, from the smallest crack of separation. The eighth anuvaka opens on a cosmos held in awe: “From terror of it the wind blows, from terror the sun rises; from terror of it Agni and Indra, yea Death runs as the fifth” (2.8), the same terror the Katha Upanishad invokes when it says the whole world trembles before Brahman.

Then the measuring begins. Take one unit of human joy: a young man, noble, “well read, very swift, firm, and strong,” with the whole earth full of wealth laid before him. Now multiply. A hundred such human joys make one joy of the human Gandharvas. A hundred of those, one joy of the divine Gandharvas. A hundred of those, one joy of the Fathers “enjoying their long estate.” Then the various orders of gods, each a hundredfold the last: the Devas born into heaven, the Devas who became gods by sacrifice, the thirty-three gods, then Indra, then Brihaspati, then Prajapati, and at the summit, Brahman (2.8). Ten multiplications by a hundred, a hundred raised to the tenth power of a single human’s joy, and only there does the ladder reach the bliss of Brahman.

But the arithmetic has a refrain, and the refrain is the point. At every single rung, from human joy up to Prajapati, the text repeats one clause: this is also the bliss “of a great sage who is free from desires” (2.8). Shrotriya akamahata, the man learned in the Veda whom desire has not struck. At every level of the tower of heavens, the desireless sage on earth stands already even with it. The whole vast calculus is built, it turns out, to say that the man free of craving here and now is not climbing at all. He is already at the top. Müller sets the Taittiriya’s ladder beside the differing versions in the Brihadaranyaka and the Shatapatha Brahmana; this treatise reports the Taittiriya’s own and lets the divergence stand.

The valli closes on what all the arithmetic was for: “He who knows the bliss of that Brahman fears nothing” (2.9). And more, he is past the reckoning of his own deeds: “He does not distress himself with the thought, Why did I not do what is good? Why did I do what is bad?” (2.9). The freedom named here is from fear and from remorse together. Abhaya. The fearless.

Bhrigu goes back to his father

The third valli, the Bhrigu Valli, does what the first two only described. It shows a student walking the ladder himself, one rung at a time, over repeated returns to his teacher, who is his father.

“Bhrigu Varuni went to his father Varuna, saying: Sir, teach me Brahman” (3.1, tr. Müller). Varuna does not answer with a definition. He gives his son a formula and a task: “That from whence these beings are born, that by which, when born, they live, that into which they enter at their death, try to know that. That is Brahman” (3.1). The origin, the sustenance, the end of all beings. Go find it.

Then the pattern that makes this valli unlike anything else in the ten. Bhrigu performs tapas, austerity, and returns with an answer: food is Brahman. Varuna does not say yes, and does not say no. He says only: “Try to know Brahman by penance, for penance is the means of knowing Brahman” (3.2). Go back. So Bhrigu does tapas again, and returns: breath is Brahman. Same reply. Again: mind is Brahman. Again: understanding is Brahman. Four times the son climbs a rung, four times the father sends him back to the fire without correcting him. The austerity itself is the whole teaching; the answers he brings back are, one notices, the very five selves of the second valli, met now from the inside, in sequence.

The fifth return is the last. Bhrigu, after his final tapas, “perceived that bliss is Brahman” (3.6). Anando brahmeti vyajanat. He has reached the innermost self of the Ananda Valli, and the text marks the arrival: “This is the knowledge of Bhrigu and Varuna, exalted in the highest heaven” (3.6). The son who began asking about food has climbed, through five austerities, to bliss. The ladder of the second valli and the story of the third are the same ladder, one drawn as a diagram, one walked as a life.

I am food, I am the eater of food

And then the strangest ending in the ten principal Upanishads.

Having reached bliss, the text does not soar off into the abstract. It comes back down to food, and turns eating itself into reverence. “Let him never abuse food, that is the rule” (3.7). “Let him never shun food” (3.8). “Let him acquire much food” (3.9). Then the rule of the guest, reaching back to the household ethic of the first valli: “Let him never turn away a stranger from his house, that is the rule… If he gives food amply, food is given to him amply; if fairly, fairly; if meanly, meanly” (3.10). The reverence for food and the feeding of the guest are not left behind on the climb. They are where the climb lands.

Then the last verse, and it does not read like philosophy at all. It reads like a man overcome. The knower, the text says, “assuming as many forms as he likes, sits down singing this Saman”:

“Havu, havu, havu! I am food, I am food, I am food! I am the eater of food, I am the eater of food, I am the eater of food! I am the poet who joins the two together… He who gives me away, he alone preserves me: him who eats food, I eat as food. I overcome the whole world, I, endowed with golden light. This is the Upanishad.” (Taittiriya 3.10, tr. Müller)

The distinction the whole text was built on, food and the eater of food, the fed and the feeder, the outer self and the inner, collapses. The man who has walked the ladder sings that he is both ends of it at once. That is why the Upanishad that ends in the food-song had to begin with the classroom. The whole curriculum, the phonetics and the ethics and the five selves and the calculus of joy and the five austerities, was the long way to the place where the eater and the eaten are no longer two.

This is the valli’s answer to its own fear-rule. “If he makes but the smallest distinction in it, there is fear for him,” said the seventh anuvaka. The singer at the end makes no distinction at all. He fears nothing.

He fears nothing.

The next chapter goes to the shortest and oldest of the great prose texts, the Aitareya, and to the moment when the Self, having made the world and the human body, is said to have entered the person it had made through the crown of the skull.