42उपनिषद् · The Upanishads

Eknath Easwaran, translator, The Upanishads, Nilgiri Press, second edition 2007

Linked to 22 chapters: supports 12 · contradicts 7 · mechanism 4 · same claim 6 · pairing 3

The Upanishads are not a book. They are a heap of teaching sessions, set down by nobody who signed his name, attached to the ends of the four Vedas and preserved by families who recited them for centuries before anyone wrote them down. About two hundred texts carry the name; one list fixes the number at a hundred and eight; ten have been treated as principal since the eighth century, when Shankara wrote commentaries on them and by doing so made a canon out of an inheritance. Easwaran's edition gives those ten, adds the Shvetashvatara, which is no less treasured and may once have had a commentary of Shankara's that has not survived, and appends four short later texts. What holds the collection together is not a doctrine but a habit of attention. The rest of the Vedas look outward at fire, wind, dawn and rain; the Upanishads turn the instrument around and ask what is doing the looking. Easwaran calls the result a science, and means the word strictly: a discipline with a method, a laboratory and a repeatable result, where the mind is at once the instrument and the specimen. What follows takes the eleven principal texts in the order Easwaran prints them, with the introductions Michael Nagler wrote for each. Four are short enough to be given entire. The Isha is eighteen verses and states the problem; the Katha is a boy's interview with Death and supplies the working model of a person; the Mandukya is twelve sentences and maps consciousness; the Kena asks who is asking. The other seven are long, and what is given from them is the verses their arguments turn on, which for the Brihadaranyaka and the Chandogya is still a good many. The renderings here are made from the Sanskrit and are meant to be plain; Easwaran's own verse translation is the one to read with them.

The supreme science

Easwaran opens with his own case. In middle life, a professor of English literature at an Indian university under British rule, he found that literature, music, friends and teaching had stopped satisfying him, and went to the library to find out what human beings had learned about life and death. A colleague in psychology noticed that a man from the English department had been checking out every significant book in his field and demanded an explanation. Nothing Easwaran read answered the hunger. Then he came across a copy of the Upanishads, expecting no more from four-thousand-year-old texts than from Alice in Wonderland, and read a passage comparing the joy of a young, healthy, cultured man who has everything the earth can offer with a joy a hundred times greater. He was reading his own life. What arrested him was not argument but the confidence of the voice.

The historical setting he gives is the standard one. Indo-European speakers calling themselves arya entered the subcontinent through the Hindu Kush from about 2000 BC and met a civilization in the Indus valley already a thousand years old. The hymns they brought, from perhaps 1500 BC, worship the forces of life — Agni the fire, Indra the storm, Vayu the wind, Usha the dawn, Yama the first being to die — and worship them without fear. Even in the oldest layer one Being is being addressed under many aspects: truth is one, the Rig Veda says, and the wise call it by many names. Priests performed the rites for the warriors and rulers, and wrote commentaries to explain rites already too old to be understood. Hymns and commentaries together are the Vedas, from vid, to know. Each of the four collections has a first and larger part concerned with ritual action, karma kanda, and a second concerned with wisdom, jnana kanda. The Upanishads are the second part, and because they come at the end of the collections and were learned last, they are called vedanta, the end of the Vedas.

The word itself suggests sitting down near: at the feet of a teacher, in a session of instruction, usually in a forest settlement on the upper Ganges where a household of students lived with a teacher for what tradition set at twelve years. Easwaran insists on the difference from Plato. These are not dialogues in which a position is argued; they are darshana, something seen, and the student was expected to realize what he heard rather than agree with it. The settings are dramatic and various: a wife asks her husband about immortality, a king asks a sage for instruction, a boy is taught by Death, another by fire and beasts and birds. Some of the teachers are women. Ritual, the basis of the religion the texts are attached to, is almost ignored in them, and the word brahman in the sense they give it — the single power that pervades creation and exceeds it — does not appear in the hymn portion of the Rig Veda at all. Easwaran takes this seriously enough to suggest the Upanishads may not be a late flowering of Vedic thought but an independent tributary; a seated figure excavated in the Indus valley would be identified by a villager today without hesitation as Shiva, lord of yoga, in meditation.

What the forest schools did that has no parallel elsewhere, on Easwaran's account, is to apply the assumption that a law of nature holds uniformly to the medium of knowing itself. The sages observed dreaming and dreamless sleep and asked what is known in each, and what could be called the knower. They looked for invariants: in a flow of experience that never stops changing, is there anything that stays the same. And they did not stop at debating it, because they found that as concentration deepens the mind actually passes through the states under discussion, so that the strata can be separated and watched as a botanist watches a flower. The study was called brahmavidya, which means both the supreme science and the science of the Supreme, and its method was nididhyasana, meditation — not reflection, not discursive thought, not intuition, but concentration so complete that the senses close and the outside world is forgotten while inner wakefulness increases. Easwaran quotes William James on the faculty of voluntarily bringing back a wandering attention, which James called the root of judgment, character and will, and notes that James taught himself the skill well enough to lift himself out of a life-threatening depression. James's phrase for an education built on that faculty, education par excellence, is close to a literal translation of brahmavidya.

The report the sages bring back is set out in stages. Dreaming and waking are made of the same stuff: a man dreaming that he is being chased by an elephant has the heart rate and the stress hormones of a man actually chased. Waking from a dream is therefore not a passage from unreality to reality but from a lower grade of reality to a higher one, which leaves open the question whether there is a grade above waking. In dreamless sleep the observer detaches not only from the body but from the mind — as a tethered bird, the Brihadaranyaka says, tires of flying about and settles on its perch. Easwaran's claim is that one can wake up in that state, and that this is what the Upanishads call turiya, the fourth. In meditation, as concentration deepens, physical identification dissolves first; then awareness withdraws from the senses, emotions, intellect and will, and the sages found that these have no life of their own, that the mind is not conscious but is an instrument of consciousness. What is left when even the sense of "I" goes is what the Upanishads call Brahman, from the root brih, to expand: the ground of existence. The same withdrawal discovers that this ground is also the core of one's own personality, called Atman, the Self, and that the two are the same thing. That equation is what the collection is for. Its most famous statement is tat tvam asi, you are That, and Easwaran is careful about the pronoun: "you" is not the finite personality but, in his words, the consciousness "which makes the eye see and the mind think".

He is equally careful about what the state is not. It is not emptiness but purnata, fullness: in it reality is condensed into pure potential the way all the matter of the universe was condensed before the Big Bang, and physicists, asked what came before, answer that the question does not apply. The triad sat-chit-ananda names it — absolute reality, pure awareness, unconditioned joy — and the practical claim that follows is an economic one. Finite things cannot satisfy an infinite hunger; every human activity is an attempt to fill the same void from outside. Nagler draws the same conclusion in political terms in his introduction to the Isha: materialism enforces a paradigm of scarcity, spiritual economics begins from the infinitude of consciousness, and there is no shortage of love, respect or meaning. Neither of them claims that the world is unreal. The illusion, Easwaran says repeatedly, is only that we appear separate.

Isha: the inner ruler

The Isha stands first in most Indian collections, and Gandhi said that if every scripture were burned and only its first verse remained in memory, Hinduism would live. Asked by a journalist for the secret of his life in three words, he gave two from that verse: renounce and enjoy. It is the only Upanishad that has come down as part of a Samhita rather than attached to one, which is why it is entirely in verse and is still recited in the Vedic manner. Its name is taken from its first word and is unusually personal for the collection; Nagler notes that isha is cognate with German eigen, one's own, and glosses it as the inner ruler.

The first word is isha, the lord, and the second, vasyam, is a verbal form of a root with five homonyms, so that it can mean to be pervaded, to be dwelt in, to be clothed, or to be hidden — Max Müller took the last. The opening phrase for "all this" is jagatyam jagat, all that moves in what is ceaselessly moving, which is what samsara also means. The pair of demands in the first two verses is the whole text in miniature and the reason Gandhi valued it: possession is denied and enjoyment commanded in one sentence, and then a full working life, a hundred years of it, is prescribed on the ground that action performed this way leaves no residue.

Verse 3 is the only threat in the text and the word it turns on is atmahan, killers of the Self, which the commentators take to mean not suicides but people who live as though there were nothing in them to kill. The worlds they go to are called asurya, sunless, and the darkness is described twice over, as blind and as a covering.

Verse 4 uses the contradiction deliberately, and verse 5 makes it a method: whatever is said of the Self, the opposite has to be said in the same breath. Matarishvan in verse 4 is a barely known figure, something like Prometheus, distributing the offices and functions of life; the same motif of a first apportionment comes back in verse 8. The verb in verse 6 that Easwaran renders as knowing no fear is vijugupsate, a strong word carrying revulsion: the one who sees this way shrinks from nothing and is disgusted by no part of creation. Augustine, Nagler notes, says the same in the Confessions — there is no sanity in those who dislike any part of what was made.

The pattern of the four verses is fixed and worth watching before the argument about them begins. Two terms are named; both are condemned when taken alone, and the second is condemned more heavily; then the two are prescribed together, with one of them used to cross death and the other to reach what does not die. The same four lines are then repeated with a new pair of terms.

Verses 9 to 14 are what scholars call a crux, and the difficulty is not textual but doctrinal. The structure is plain — two terms, both condemned when taken alone, both prescribed when taken together — but the terms are unstable. Vidya and avidya are knowledge and ignorance; sambhuti and asambhuti are becoming and its absence, the manifest and the unmanifest; and the sentence that pairs them says that the way through death runs by the lower term and the way to the deathless by the higher. Easwaran reads the first pair as the outer world and the inner, and the second as the immanent and the transcendent, and takes the passage as a rule against half-measures in either direction. Nagler draws attention to the harder half of the lesson: in each pair it is the higher term that the text says is the darker trap. Being hypnotized by one's own sensations and forgetting the world is worse than materialism, and the point lands, he says, on solipsistic escapes such as drugs, where the private reality manufactured is falser than the multiplicity outside.

The last four verses change register completely. They are addressed to the sun, to the wind and to fire, in the vocabulary of the hymns the Upanishads elsewhere leave behind, and they are said at a cremation. The golden disc of the sun is the cover that hides the face of truth, the same disc whose brightness must be dimmed before the form behind it can be looked at. The final line of verse 16, so'ham asmi, that am I, is one of the four great formulae; the Sanskrit carries a pun that the English cannot, since the demonstrative used for the person in the sun is also the one used for the person in the heart. Verse 17 asks the mind to remember what it has done, at the moment when there is nothing else left to do, and the text that opened by refusing possession closes by asking a fire god for the good road.

Katha: death as teacher

The Katha belongs to the Black Yajur Veda, whose home was the midland region around what is now Agra and Delhi. Of the sage Katha after whom it is named, tradition records only that he founded the school and studied under Vaishampayana. On the evidence of metre, language and the style of its thinking it is among the earliest of the verse Upanishads, and it shares whole verses with the Bhagavad Gita and whole sections with the later Maitri. Its six chapters are called vallis; editions that group them into two parts of three number the chariot verses I.3.3 to I.3.9, which counted straight through the vallis are 3.3 to 3.9. That is the numbering used here, and the same rule of counting the sections straight through is applied to the other texts below wherever their divisions run three deep.

The story is older than the Upanishad and smaller. A brief myth in the Taittiriya Brahmana tells of a boy called Nachiketa to whom Yama reveals a sacrifice that is then named after him, and in that version the boy's third request is for the secret of punar mrityu, redeath: the ability to come back each time one dies. The Upanishad takes that request and enlarges it into the question of whether there is anything that does not die at all.

What Nachiketa objects to is a sacrifice in which the cows given away have stopped giving milk. He is not a rebel; his complaint is that his father is not taking his own religion seriously. The word the text gives for what enters him is shraddha, which Nagler translates as determined seriousness rather than belief, and which is the only trait the boy is ever assigned.

Nagler's reading of the consignment is that the boy is given to death by his own father because every parent does exactly that: birth is the beginning of a trajectory to death, and love cannot stop it. Verse 5 is the boy reasoning about his own usefulness to Death, and verse 6 is the answer he reaches before Yama says a word — that the crop is cut and comes up again, and that this is not a consolation.

He waits three nights at Yama's door without eating, a detail that is both hospitality law and a folk-tale rule, since a visitor to the land of the dead who eats its food cannot leave. Yama's apology is exact about what is at stake: an unfed guest consumes the merit of the house. The three nights buy three wishes, one for each.

The first wish is domestic. The boy asks that his father's anger be gone and that he be recognized and received when he comes back, and the two things he asks for, recognition and the end of anger, are the two things a returning child would want. Yama grants it without comment.

The second wish is for a ritual, and Yama teaches it, names it after the boy and adds a gift of his own. The three of verse 17 are the three meetings named in tradition as father, mother and teacher, and the three works are sacrifice, study and giving. What the fire buys is heaven, and the text will shortly say what heaven is worth. The boy repeats the instruction back word for word, which is how the schools tested a student, and the repetition is what pleases Yama.

Yama says the gods themselves were in doubt about it, that the matter is subtle, and asks to be released from his promise. The boy's counter is a piece of logic: the difficulty of the question is a reason to ask the one person qualified to answer it, not a reason to withdraw. Then Death makes his offer.

Nagler notes that the offer is a piece of psychology and that Yama gives himself away with a single word: all of it is to be enjoyed svargaloke, in the world of heaven, which in this scheme is not the goal but a cul-de-sac where the results of good acts are consumed and after which one returns. The list also runs in an order — sons, cattle, land, a lifetime of one's own choosing, then pleasure — which is the order in which a man is usually bought.

The refusal has three parts and the middle one is the argument. Whatever Yama can give wears out the faculty that would enjoy it; the goods are shvobhava, things that only last until tomorrow; and a man who has stood in front of Death cannot be paid in a currency Death controls. The last line returns the question in Yama's own words, and the interview becomes a lesson.

Shreya is what conduces to well-being and preya is what one is fond of, often by conditioning. Nagler's gloss is that the choice is faced at every moment, waking and even sleeping, and that the distinction has to be attended to for exactly as long as the compartments in a personality last.

Verse 4 sets the pair the Isha also works with, and sets it as a fork rather than a ladder: vidya and avidya run in opposite directions. Verse 5 is the sharpest sentence in the chapter and the one most often lifted out of it. What it condemns is not ignorance but the confidence that comes with a certain amount of learning, and the image of the blind following the blind is repeated almost word for word in the Mundaka.

Verse 8 contains the whole doctrine of the teacher: ananya-prokte gatir atra nasti, where the teaching does not come from one who is not other than it, there is no way forward. Verse 9 adds the negative half of the same claim by ruling out the alternative method, and the word it rules out is tarka, reasoning. The Katha does not say that reasoning is wrong; it says that reasoning does not terminate, since the matter is finer than any premise available to it.

Yama's admission in verse 10 is remarkable for a god: he says he built his own position out of impermanent materials and knows the limit of what that buys. The phrase in verse 12 for where the Self is found, guha-hitam, set in the cave, is the standard Upanishadic location, and the cave is the heart. Verse 13 closes the frame of the interview; the door is open and the teaching proper begins.

The boy's question in verse 14 asks for something outside every pair the moral vocabulary has, including the pair of done and not done, and the answer is a sound rather than a description. That is the Katha's way of making the same point the Mandukya will make at length: what is beyond every category can be held by a syllable and not by a sentence.

Verses 18 and 19 are the two the Bhagavad Gita takes over almost unchanged into its second chapter, where they are spoken on a battlefield and have been read ever since as an argument about killing. In the Katha they are spoken to a boy who has been given away to Death, and they answer his question and no other: what is asked is whether anything survives, and the answer is that the thing in question was never in the class of things that begin.

The last line of verse 20 turns on a variant that the tradition has never settled. Read dhatuh prasadat, it means by the grace of the creator; read dhatu prasadat, it means by the settling of the constituents, that is, of the senses. Nagler's remark is that it makes remarkably little difference, since what grace does is still the senses.

Verse 23 is the harder statement, and the alternative reading is worth having: it can also be construed as saying that the Self is won by the one who chooses it, which is equally at home in the collection. Verse 24 is its practical counterweight, and it is a list of disqualifications rather than a list of qualifications. Conduct comes first on the list, before quiet and before concentration.

The last verse of the chapter is the most violent image in the text. Everything a society reckons as power is food for what the boy is asking about, and what seasons the food is death. The line is meant to close off the thought that the Self is a very large item among items.

The two in the cave have been read in two ways for as long as there has been a commentary. Shankara takes them as the individual and the supreme Self, the one that eats the fruit of works and the one that only watches; others take the second as the intellect. Both drink rita, the order of things, and only one of them casts a shadow.

The model is precise about who does what. The rider owns the journey and does not steer; the intellect steers and does not own; the mind is not a faculty but a linkage, the thing through which the driver's decision reaches the horses, and it is the part that can be slack. The word for the roads the horses travel, gocarah, means cow pastures, and it became a technical term in Sankhya. Plato uses the same image in the Phaedrus, less worked out. Two verses later the text turns the chariot into a ladder.

The order in verse 10 is the one that surprises, and Nagler insists it is what the text actually says: the senses do not come first and the objects second, but the other way about. Sense objects are ranked above the senses and below the mind, which is to say that the world as encountered is already a product of the equipment that encounters it. Verse 13 turns the same ladder into an instruction by running it upward one rung at a time, each faculty folded into the one above it.

Verse 14 is the line the Katha is quoted for, and Easwaran takes its severity at face value: the ascent is dangerous, which is why the relation with a teacher who has been up and come back matters more in this collection than anything else. Verses 16 and 17 close the third chapter with the formula that marks the end of a unit of recitation, and in editions that divide the text into two parts of three chapters they close the first part.

The fourth chapter opens with a piece of anatomy used as an argument. The openings of the senses are cut outward, so the natural direction of attention is outward, and the one operation the whole collection asks for is described as avritta-chakshus, the eye turned back. The refrain that closes verse 3 and returns through the chapter, etad vai tat, this is That, is the chapter's signature; each verse points at something and says the pointing is the same in every case.

The honey-eater in verse 5 is the individual soul, taking the taste of its own works, and the same phrase runs through the Mundaka and the Shvetashvatara as one half of the image of two birds on a tree. Verse 8 puts the Self where fire is before it is struck: present in the two sticks, invisible in both, produced by neither alone.

Verses 10 and 11 are the same sentence twice with the second half changed, and the pair is the clearest statement of non-duality in the Katha. The thumb-sized person is the text's oddest image and its most repeated. It is not a homunculus; the measure is a way of locating the Self in the body without granting it a body.

The two water images are placed together and point in opposite directions. Rain on a ridge is divided by the shape it falls on and scatters; water poured into water takes on no shape at all and cannot afterwards be told from what it was poured into. Between them they give the text's account of what is lost and what is not lost when separateness ends.

The eleven gates are the body's openings, counted as the seven in the head, the two below, the navel and the opening at the crown. Verse 2 is lifted from a Rig Veda hymn and is the oldest-sounding thing in the Katha; verse 3 puts the same occupant in the middle of the breathing, between the breath that goes up and the breath that goes down.

Verse 5 separates life from breathing, which is the distinction on which the Prashna will build a whole chapter. Verse 7 gives the Katha's one sentence on what decides a rebirth, and it names two things: yatha-karma, according to what was done, and yatha-shrutam, according to what was heard and learned. Knowledge is treated there as a cause and not only as a result.

The three comparisons in verses 9 to 11 are a set, and the third is not a repetition. Fire and wind show how one thing can be many without dividing; the sun shows the limit of what contact costs. What the eye looks at does not soil the light by which it looks, and the claim carried across is that the Self is present in suffering without being an instance of it.

Verse 14 is a student's question of the most practical kind — by what light would one see the thing that is being described — and verse 15 refuses the terms of the question rather than answering it. The verse is quoted more than any other line in the Katha, and the Mundaka and the Shvetashvatara both take it over word for word.

The inverted tree is an old image and the Gita takes it over in its fifteenth chapter. What it encodes is a claim about the direction of dependence: the visible part, the part that grows and is cut and grows again, is downstream of a source that does not appear among the things it supports.

The terror of verse 2 is not a threat but a description of scale, and verse 3 turns the machinery of nature into obedience: what looks like the regularity of fire and sun is read as fear, which is the archaic way of saying that nothing in the series is self-moving. Verse 4 states the deadline the Kena also states. The work is to be done here, before the body goes.

Verse 5 grades the clarity of the vision available in four conditions, and it is the closest thing in the Upanishads to a scale of resolution: sharp as a reflection in a mirror, blurred as a dream, broken as a face seen in water, and in the world of Brahman as distinct as light is from shadow. Verses 7 and 8 repeat the ladder of the third chapter with one rung renamed.

The definition in verse 11 is guarded in a way that most definitions of yoga are not: the steady holding of the senses is called yoga, and in the same breath the text says that yoga arises and passes away. What is being described is a state that has to be maintained and that will lapse. Verse 12 states the minimum any account of it can contain, and the next verse takes that minimum as sufficient.

Verse 15 says etavat, this much, and stops, and what it stops after is a metaphor: the knots are the places where the sense of a separate self is tied to something. Verse 16 is the only piece of physiology in the Katha and the source of a long later literature; the Prashna and the Chandogya both repeat the count of a hundred and one channels.

The munja reed comes out of its sheath whole and clean, and the comparison is about the manner of the operation rather than its violence: steadily, and without tearing what it is drawn from. The last verse returns the reader to the boy, which is the structural point Nagler makes about the Katha: the interview that was dropped when the teaching began is picked up and closed, and the closing clause extends the result to whoever repeats the procedure.

Brihadaranyaka: the great forest

Brihad-aranyaka means of the great forest, and Nagler takes the name as a description of the reading. It is by far the longest of the Upanishads and the one most often quoted, and it sits inside the Shatapatha Brahmana of the White Yajur Veda, which makes it part of the largest ritual manual in the Vedic literature. Its six chapters are divided into forty-seven sections, and the sections are counted straight through here, so that the dialogue with Maitreyi, which editions number II.4, is section ten. Nothing in the text is arranged as an argument. Paths lead off in unpredictable directions, and what holds them together is one figure: Yajnavalkya, who wins a debate against the assembled learning of two kingdoms, answers a woman who has beaten him in public, and twice takes a thousand cows home.

One line from its third section has travelled further than anything else in the collection, because it is said at the beginning of ceremonies and because Easwaran prints it at the head of the Chandogya.

The context is a chant. A priest is about to sing, and these are the words he says under his breath first, and the text immediately explains them in its own flat way: the unreal is death, the real is the deathless, so the second half of each line says what the first half means. Nothing in the prayer asks for anything to be added. All three verbs ask to be taken from one place to another.

What is loved in anything loved

The dialogue that follows is the one Nagler calls the most poignant discussion in the wisdom of any tradition. Yajnavalkya is leaving home for the third stage of life, and is settling his property.

The exchange is a refusal and a correction in four sentences. Maitreyi is offered half of everything and asks one question about it, and the question is not whether the share is fair but whether the thing has the property she wants. Her husband agrees that it does not, and what he says next is the doctrine.

The list in verse 5 runs through husband, wife, sons, wealth, priesthood, nobility, the worlds, the gods, all beings and finally everything, and the same sentence is repeated each time with one word changed. The word Easwaran translates as for the sake of is kamaya, for love of; what the sentence denies is that anything is loved in its own right, and what it asserts is that the thing actually loved in every case is one and the same. The four verbs at the end — seen, heard, reflected on, meditated on — became the standard programme of Vedanta, and the last of them, nididhyasana, is the word for meditation the whole collection rests on.

The salt of section ten is not the salt of the Chandogya, though the two are often confused. In the Chandogya the point is that what cannot be seen can be tasted everywhere. Here the point is the dissolving: what goes into the water does not survive as a thing that could be lifted out, and Maitreyi understands the implication at once and objects to it, because what she has just been told is that there is no consciousness after death in the sense she meant. The reply is that nothing has been taken away.

The last clause is the most quoted sentence in the Upanishads and the hardest to answer. It is not a mystery offered for contemplation but a consequence: knowing has a structure with two ends, and the thing in question occupies one of them permanently. The same sentence closes the same dialogue when it is told a second time in the fourth chapter, and there it ends with the line that this much is deathlessness.

The honey

The section that follows the dialogue is the madhu-vidya, the honey doctrine, and it is the most systematic passage in the text. It is built out of one sentence repeated fourteen times.

Fourteen times the text names something — earth, water, fire, air, sun, space, moon, lightning, thunder, ether, law, truth, humanity, the Self — and says that it is the honey of all beings and that all beings are its honey, and then locates the same bright person in the thing and in the corresponding part of the body. The word madhu is honey in the plain sense and the figure is the one from beekeeping: what many flowers give becomes one substance, and the substance belongs to no flower. The doctrine is attributed to Dadhyanch, who is said to have taught it to the Ashvins at the cost of his head.

Neti neti

The formula that the tradition treats as the Upanishads' method appears twice and both times as a conclusion rather than a beginning.

Neti neti is two words, na iti, not so, said twice, and the doubling is not emphasis. The first denial refuses the description just given; the second refuses the refusal as a description. The passage in section nine has just offered a list of colours for the appearance of the person — a saffron robe, white wool, a scarlet beetle, a flame, a white lotus, a sudden flash of lightning — and it is those that the denial cancels. The list of negative properties in section twenty-one is the set that survives every such cancellation, and it is short: not graspable, not destructible, not attached, not bound, not shaken, not injured.

Gargi, and what holds the worlds

The third chapter is a public contest. King Janaka of Videha pens a thousand cows with ten gold coins tied between the horns of each and offers them to the most learned man present; Yajnavalkya tells his pupil to drive them home before the debate has begun, and then has to earn them. The questioners come in turn, and two of them are remembered. The first is Gargi, daughter of Vachaknu.

She continues upward through the worlds of the gandharvas, the sun, the moon, the stars, the gods, Indra, Prajapati and Brahma, and at the last step Yajnavalkya stops her with a threat that is also a rule of method: do not ask too much, Gargi, or your head will fall off; you are asking too much about a divinity about which one must not ask too much. She sits down. The exchange with Uddalaka that follows introduces the phrase the later tradition made a doctrine of, the inner controller.

The formula of section nineteen is repeated twenty-three times for twenty-three things, from the earth to the semen, and each time with the same four clauses: he is in it, it does not know him, it is his body, he controls it from within. The last sentence supplies the reason the list can be closed. Whatever else is in the series, the one who runs it is not an item that could be added to the series, because the position of knower is already occupied.

Then Gargi stands up a second time and says she has two questions, and that if he answers them nobody will beat him in argument about Brahman.

The second question is the first question asked once. Gargi has learned from being stopped, and instead of climbing she goes straight to the term that answers everything else and asks what answers that. The reply is the longest single description in the text and it is made entirely of negatives.

The negatives in verse 8 are not a refusal to answer. Each one removes a property that something woven on space would have to have, and the two clauses about eating remove the last relation left, since anything inside a chain of dependence either consumes something or is consumed. Verse 9 is the positive half and it is about regularity: what holds sun and moon apart and sends rivers in fixed directions is the same thing the negatives were about. Gargi's closing speech concedes for the whole assembly, and she does it by naming the prize, which is to get out with one's reputation.

The states of consciousness

The fourth chapter is a private conversation between Yajnavalkya and Janaka, and Yajnavalkya arrives resolved to say nothing and is trapped by a promise. It is the fullest account of waking, dream and sleep in the collection, and everything the later tradition says about the three states begins here.

The question is answered four times before it is answered properly, and the order is a subtraction. Take away the sun and there is the moon; take away the moon and there is fire; take away fire and there is speech, by which a man in the dark can still find his way to the person speaking; take away speech and something is still working. What the sequence establishes is not that the Self is a fifth lamp but that the series of lamps has a floor.

The phrase svayam jyotih, self-illumined, is the centre of the chapter. In waking the light comes from outside and in dream it does not, and the whole argument turns on that one observation, which anybody can make. Dreaming is used not because it is interesting but because it is the one ordinary state in which the equipment produces its own objects and its own light.

The inventory in verse 10 is the earliest list of its kind, and the word for what the dreamer does with chariots and roads is srijate, he emits or pours out. The verses in 11 and 13 are older than the prose around them, and the swan of verse 11 is the same bird the tradition puns on: hamsa, swan, read backwards is so'ham, I am he.

The fish is the image Nagler singles out, and the point of it is command rather than motion: the fish is at home in the whole river and is not a resident of either bank. The eagle is the opposite motion, and what returns it to the nest is exhaustion. The third image is the one the text calls its boldest, and the list that follows in verse 22 is what it costs. Every category a person can be described by is suspended, including the ones a society most wants kept — the thief, the outcaste, the killer of an unborn child — and the sentence does not say they are forgiven.

The last clause is the one the Taittiriya will turn into arithmetic. Everything anyone has ever enjoyed is a fraction taken off one quantity, and the fraction is what the word matram means: a measure, a part cut to size.

The two images of dying are placed one after the other and neither is dramatic. The cart is a description of sound; the fruit is a description of ripeness. Nothing cuts the stalk in the second image, and nothing is subtracted in the first.

Desire and what comes of it

The caterpillar is the text's answer to the question of whether there is a gap, and the answer is no: the front end is on the next blade before the back end leaves this one. The goldsmith says the same about what the new shape is made of. The sentence in verse 5 is the one Easwaran puts at the front of his edition, and it is a chain of four terms in which each one is fixed by the one before it, which is what makes it a practical teaching rather than a doctrine of fate. The only term anybody has a grip on is the first.

The skin on the anthill is the last of the images and the most economical: what is left is not damaged, and it is not the animal. Janaka's response is to give away another thousand cows, which is the second of three times he pays, and the third time he offers the kingdom and himself with it.

Da

The last passage in Easwaran's selection is a fable about hearing, and it takes three lines.

Three groups are given the identical instruction and all three answers are accepted. What determines the meaning is not the teacher and not the sound but what the hearer is short of, and the fable is careful to make the gods, who have everything, the ones who need restraint. T. S. Eliot ended The Waste Land with the three words, and the thunder that says them there is the thunder of this passage.

Chandogya: the sacred song

The Chandogya belongs to the Sama Veda, the Veda that is sung, and its name comes from chandoga, the singer of the chanted portion, and behind that from chandas, song. Nagler's summary of its cosmology is that the world came out of the unchanging as a meaningful sound is uttered: not a big bang but a big OM. Its eight chapters hold a hundred and fifty-four sections, and as elsewhere here the sections are counted straight through, so that the sixth chapter, where Uddalaka teaches his son, runs from section ninety-eight to section a hundred and thirteen. Two principles run under the whole of it. One is rita, order or regularity, without which nothing could be learned from experience at all. The other is yajna, sacrifice, which Nagler glosses as the giving up of personal gain, and which is what a creature does that is living in accordance with the first.

The third chapter contains the text's own version of the honey doctrine and the sentence that Shankara built a system on.

The word rendered here as that from which one comes, into which one goes, by which one breathes is a single coined word, tajjalan, made of three fragments, and Shankara's comment unpacks it as those three clauses. The passage is called the wisdom of Shandilya and it is one long sentence: everything is Brahman, a person is what he resolves, therefore resolve accordingly. It is the same claim about desire that the Brihadaranyaka makes, set inside a cosmology instead of beside a deathbed.

Uddalaka and Shvetaketu

The sixth chapter is the most sustained argument in the Upanishads and the passage the tradition treats as its centre. A boy is sent away at twelve, studies for twelve years, and comes back pleased with himself.

The three illustrations of clay, gold and iron are the warrant for everything that follows, and they make an epistemological claim before they make a metaphysical one. Knowing one lump exhausts the class, because what distinguishes the pot from the plate is nama-rupa, name and shape, and the phrase Easwaran's Sanskrit uses for it, vacharambhanam, means a thing got hold of by speech. The father is not saying that pots are unreal. He is saying that a pot is not a second substance.

The rejection in verse 1 is the earliest philosophical disagreement recorded in the collection, and it is set out fairly: the rival position is stated in the rival's own words before it is refused. What replaces it is not a creator outside the world but a sequence of self-multiplications, and the verb at each step is aikshata, it looked or considered, which is why the chain is one of thought rather than of making.

The pun in verse 1 is the text's own and it is the reason the passage exists: svapiti, he sleeps, is heard as sva plus apita, gone to his own. The tethered bird that follows is the image Nagler calls the most poignant in the collection, and what it claims is that the mind's wandering is not free. It ends where it does not because it has chosen to but because the string has run out.

The sentence repeats nine times, once at the end of each illustration, and it is the first of the four great formulae. Easwaran is careful about the pronoun: the "you" is not the boy's personality but, in his phrase, the consciousness which makes the eye see and the mind think. What follows is the series of nine illustrations, each of which claims something different about the same identity.

Bees and rivers make the same point from opposite ends. The honey is a merger of things that were distinct and can no longer be told apart; the rivers merge into something that was there first, and the sentence that closes each is not that they have become one but that they do not know it. The teaching is about ignorance rather than about unity, which is why it can be taught at all.

The tree and the seed are placed together and they hold opposite ends of the same claim. The tree shows that life can be withdrawn by parts and that the part that withdraws is not the part that bleeds; the seed shows that what accounts for the whole tree is not a small thing but no thing that inspection finds. The instruction Uddalaka gives when the boy reports seeing nothing is not an argument. It is shraddhatsva, have faith, which in this text means take the next step and see.

The salt is the experiment the chapter is remembered for, and it is designed so that the failure comes first: the boy is made to look for the salt and not find it before he is told to taste. The blindfolded man is the answer to the obvious objection, which is why a teacher should be needed at all if the thing is everywhere. The teacher does two things in the story and only two: he takes off the bandage and says which way. The walking from village to village, asking at each, is left to the man.

Dying is described as a sequence of mergings, and what the sequence explains is a fact anyone at a deathbed has seen, that recognition fails at a definite point while the body has not stopped. The chapter ends with the boy understanding, which is not how most Upanishadic dialogues end. The two illustrations Easwaran leaves out of his selection are the fast and the ordeal of the heated axe, and the chapter as printed goes straight from the dying man to the closing line.

Narada asks for something else

The seventh chapter begins with the longest list of studies in Sanskrit literature and the shortest verdict on it.

The list is meant to be complete: it runs from the four Vedas to snake-charming, and Narada's complaint is not that he has learned the wrong things but that he has learned everything there is and it did not do the one thing he needed. Sanatkumara's reply is four words in Sanskrit. What follows in the original is a ladder of sixteen steps, each transcending the last, from speech to mind to will and up to happiness; Easwaran prints the bottom and the top of it and leaves the rungs out.

The word bhuman, here rendered as the vast, is defined not by size but by the absence of a second thing, and the definition is turned into a test in verse 43: whatever is still had alongside something else is the small. The two words in the last line, svaraj and anyaraj, self-ruled and ruled-by-another, are political terms, and the chapter ends by making the whole ladder a question of which of the two one is.

The last sentence is the one the tradition quotes as the bridge between diet and liberation, and the word for food, ahara, means what is taken in generally rather than what is eaten. What follows from purity is not virtue but smriti, memory, and what memory does is untie the knots the Katha also names.

The city of Brahman, and Indra's hundred and one years

The passage is about size and it makes a claim that reverses the obvious one. The space inside the heart is not a small copy of the space outside; the two are said to be equal in extent, and it is the outer one that is being measured against the inner. The rest of the chapter gives the consequences: what is inside cannot age with the body that contains it, and what one finds there is not less than what one lost.

The announcement travels, and two students come to hear it: Indra on behalf of the gods and Virochana on behalf of the anti-gods. They arrive with firewood in their hands, which is how a student presents himself, and they stay thirty-two years before anything is said to them.

The test in the pan of water is a trap and the teacher says so out loud after the students have gone. Virochana leaves satisfied because the answer confirms what he came in with, and the doctrine he takes home is that the body is what is to be served. The text then gives the etymology in its own way: people are called godless when they are without faith, and it is they who dress corpses in fine clothes.

Each of Indra's three objections is his own and each is exact. The reflection fails because it shares every defect of the body; the dreamer fails because it suffers; dreamless sleep fails because there is nobody there to whom the state belongs. Prajapati's reply each time is that Indra is thinking correctly, and the reward for thinking correctly is another term of study.

The fourth teaching is not a new object but the removal of one assumption from the third, and the assumption is that the Self has a body. The last comparison is the plainest statement of instrument in the collection: the ox is harnessed to the cart and is not a part of it, and what the passage says about the senses is that they are the harness and not the driver.

Shvetashvatara: the faces of God

The Shvetashvatara belongs to the Taittiriya school of the Black Yajur Veda and is named after a family rather than a doctrine; the name means one who has a white horse, and the tradition reads it as one whose senses are pure, taking the horse for the senses as the Katha does. It is entirely in verse, it uses the vocabulary of classical Sankhya, and it addresses a personal God — first under the Vedic names Rudra and Isha, then by the name Shiva. All three marks make it late. It begins with a list of questions that has no parallel in the collection.

Seven candidate causes are named in verse 2 and all seven are rejected, including the two that the surrounding philosophies were built on, svabhava, a thing's own nature, and kala, time. The reason given is the same for each: a cause that is itself part of the series cannot account for the series, and the self, being subject to pleasure and pain, is inside it too. The term the sages are said to have seen, devatmashakti, is one compound of three words, and the translator Tyagisananda read the three as independently meaningful, giving the god of religion, the self of philosophy and the energy of science. Easwaran follows him. Other translators read one word.

The firesticks are the text's instruction and they are a piece of technology. A Vedic fire was started by twirling an upper stick in a socket cut in a lower one, and the work was hard enough that the priest was permitted to change places with his wife when tired. The word for the practice, abhyasa, is the same word the Gita uses for what makes any discipline work, and what the comparison insists on is the labour. The fire is already in the wood and no amount of that fact lights it.

Verse 8 is where the text changes register. It is a first-person report, not a doctrine: veda aham, I have known, and the last line refuses every alternative road. The adjective in verse 11 is shiva, kindly, and by this point in the text the tradition takes it as a name; Deussen and others hold that the word is still an adjective and that the personal name arrives later. What is not in dispute is the direction of travel. The nine-gated city of verse 18 is the Katha's eleven-gated one with the two openings at the crown and the navel left out.

The two birds are a verse of the Rig Veda that both this text and the Mundaka take over unchanged, and the second verse is the one that does the work. Nothing happens to the tree and nothing happens to the fruit. What changes is that the eater notices the other bird, and the grief he is described as feeling is called anisha, without power, which is the same word the first chapter used of the self that could not be the cause. Verse 10 supplies the term the later tradition took from this text above all others: maya is nature considered as a display, and the one who displays it is the lord. Nagler's gloss, which Easwaran uses throughout, is that the appearance in question is not the world but the separateness.

The figure in verse 20 is an impossibility used as a measure: sorrow will end without this knowledge on the day the sky can be rolled up like a hide. The last verse of the text is the one Shankara quoted most from it, and it is the earliest place in the collection where bhakti, love, is named as the condition of understanding — and named twice, once for God and once for the teacher, in the same measure.

Mundaka: the two knowledges

The Mundaka belongs to the Atharva Veda. Its name is from munda, shaved, which may point to an order of ascetics for whom it was meant, or, as the commentary prefers, to those shorn of attachment to what is not the Self. Its six sections are counted straight through here. It is the most quoted of the Upanishads in modern India, because four of its words were made the motto of the republic, and it is the most balanced in construction: a lineage, a question, a distinction, a cosmogony, a method, a result.

The list of the lower knowledge is everything the Vedic schools taught, and it is put in second place by the text that is itself part of it. The words are para and apara, beyond and not beyond, and the distinction is not between religious and secular learning. The four Vedas are on the lower side. What is on the higher side is defined only by what it reaches, which is why Nagler prefers to call it realization rather than knowledge.

The three comparisons in verse 7 are chosen for one property. Nothing outside is used in any of them: the spider's thread is the spider, the plant is the earth, the hair is the man. The clause about drawing in is not decoration either, since the same act runs in both directions and no separate destruction is needed. The words denied in verse 6, gotra and varna, are the two social categories by which people place one another, and the denial reads as metaphysics and as something else at the same time.

Verse 7 is the harshest sentence in the collection about the religion the collection is attached to. The eighteen are the sixteen priests of the great sacrifice with the patron and his wife, and the word for what they are is plava, a raft or float, with adridha, not firm, beside it. Verse 12 states the reason in one clause that is also a rule of logic: nasty akritah kritena, what is not made is not obtained by what is made, and no quantity of works alters the kind of thing works produce.

The image is given twice and the terms move. In the first version the archer holds a bow made of scripture and shoots devotion at God. In the second the bow is OM, the arrow is the person doing the shooting, and the instruction is not to hit the target but to become it. The word in the first version is aupanishadam, of the upanishads, which the commentary takes to mean any text of mystical truth rather than a named book.

The four words of verse 6 are on the seal of the Indian republic, and what is usually cut from the quotation is the second half, which says what the winning consists of: a road, and people walking on it. The word for untruth is anritam, which carries the sense of being out of the rhythm, rita, of things. Gandhi's use of the verse turned on the older sense of sat: it means the true, the real and the good at once, so that what is false is also what does not exist, and what does not exist cannot win.

Verse 64.3 is the Katha's verse, word for word, and it is the clearest case in the collection of a line that belongs to no one text. The rivers in verse 8 are the same rivers the Chandogya used, but the point is different: there the fish was that the rivers do not know, here that what is lost is nama-rupa, name and shape, which is exactly the pair the Chandogya's clay and gold had already identified as the only thing distinguishing one pot from another.

Mandukya: consciousness and its phases

The Mandukya is the shortest of the principal Upanishads, twelve sentences of prose, and Shankara said that if one could study only one, it should be this. Its second sentence carries one of the four great formulae, ayam atma brahma, this Self is Brahman. It belongs to the Atharva Veda, like the other texts that centre their teaching on OM. Its name probably comes from manduka, frog, as the Taittiriya's comes from a bird, though it may simply have been the name of the sage. It was and is held to be the hardest of them to construe accurately, and it acquired the most consequential commentary in the tradition: Gaudapada, the teacher of Shankara's teacher, wrote two hundred and fifteen verses on it, the earliest exposition of Vedanta that survives, and one that argues its case on intellectual grounds without leaning on scriptural authority.

The word rendered as quarters is pada, foot, and the expression is literally that the Self is four-footed. It is used of the cosmos as well, which is said to have stood on the four feet of Brahman at the beginning of a cycle and now to totter on one. The text then walks through the four in order.

The seven limbs and nineteen mouths are one of the standard tallies of the organs of action and perception. Vaishvanara is made of vishva, all, and nara, man; Shankara reads it as the one who leads all men to their enjoyments. Taijasa is from tejas, a word for the splendour of awareness that can also mean sexual energy. Prajna is from jna, to know, with an intensifying prefix. What is striking about the sixth sentence is that the third state is suddenly described as a being rather than a state — lord, knower, inner controller — and the reason Nagler gives is that of the three states available before illumination, deep sleep is the one in which the Self is closest to what it is. The mind and body do rest in it, as sleep research finds, but the sleeper is not aware of the rest.

The seventh sentence is the centre of the text and it is written entirely in denials. Six of them are about knowing and rule out every position on the map that the first three quarters have just laid down: it is not inward knowing, not outward knowing, not both at once, not the undifferentiated mass of knowing that deep sleep is, not knowing and not its absence. Six more deny it every handle by which anything is usually taken hold of — sight, transaction, grasp, mark, thought, reference. Only then do three positive words arrive, and they are shanta, shiva, advaita: quiet, kindly, without a second. Turiya means the fourth and nothing more; Nagler is explicit that it is not a fourth state of consciousness alongside the others but consciousness itself, and that the ordinal records only the order in which one arrives.

The second pass is the same ground taken in sound rather than in states. Each identification is justified by a pun on the sound's name, and the puns are not decoration: a is the first letter and waking the first experience, u is what lies between, m is the closure that ends the utterance, and a and u are pronounced from the throat outwards and seem to merge into m. The fourth sound is the one that is not a sound. What the arrangement offers, in Nagler's reading, is a way to climb the chain rather than only to describe it, since OM is also what is repeated, and the Mandukya's claim is that every such repetition in every tradition leads back to this one and then past it.

Kena: by whom?

The Kena belongs to the Sama Veda and used to be called by its school's name, Talavakara. Its present title is its first word, and the word is a question: by whom. Shankara is said to have written two commentaries on it. It has four chapters: the first two are verse and argue, the last two are prose and tell a story. Nagler's framing is that the Kena asks the question modern science reached late: not what the world is made of but who the investigator is, and how the instrument of knowing is supposed to turn round and know itself.

The answer is given before the argument, and it is given as a grammatical trick that is also the whole doctrine. Whatever the ear is to sound, something stands in that relation to the ear. Shankara's paraphrase of the opening question, which Nagler quotes, is sharper than the verse: by whose mere presence does that desire arise which moves the universe. The mind is on the list of senses because in this scheme it is one, and the chief one; the word translated as sense is indriya, a power or faculty.

The admission in verse 3 is unusual and it is made in the first person plural: we do not know, and we do not see how it would be taught. What follows is not a retraction but a change of method, since verse 4 places the thing outside both of the categories a question can use. It is not among the known and it is not among the not-yet-known either, which rules out the possibility that more looking would turn it up.

The refrain runs five times, once for speech, mind, eye, ear and breath, and it is the same sentence each time with one word changed. The point of the repetition is not emphasis but coverage: every channel by which anything is ever known is enumerated and then disqualified. The second half of each verse is the sharper half. Not this that people worship here: whatever is set up as an object of worship is by that act made an object, and so is not it. Nagler sets Meister Eckhart beside it, on the people who expect to see God the way they see a cow.

The second chapter is where the Kena gets its reputation for difficulty, and the difficulty is deliberate. The teacher's opening move is to take away the student's gain: if you think you know it well, you know very little. The student's reply is not modesty but an exact report — I do not know that I know and I do not know that I do not know — and the teacher's summary in verse 3 states the rule that generates both. The word in verse 4 is pratibodha-viditam, known in an awakening: not known as a conclusion but known in the act of knowing anything at all, which is the same claim the first chapter made from the other direction.

Verse 5 supplies the only urgency in the text, and it is temporal. Here, in this life, or the loss is great. The word for what the wise do, vichitya, means having sorted or discriminated, and the phrase repeats the word for beings twice, which is how the Sanskrit says one by one.

The third chapter is a story and the tone changes completely. The gods have won and are congratulating themselves. A presence appears that none of them can identify, and they send their strongest in turn. The word for the presence is yaksha, which means something wondrous and, later, a nature-spirit; the text gives it no shape, and what is tested is not strength but identification.

Each god is asked the same two questions in the same order, who are you and what can you do, and each answers with a name and a maximum. Fire says he can burn everything on earth; wind says he can carry everything away. The test that follows is the maximum applied to the smallest available object, and the failure is total in both cases.

Indra is treated differently and the difference is the point of the story. He is not given a straw, because the presence disappears before he reaches it, and what he finds in its place is a teacher. Nagler notes a joke in the sequence that is easy to miss: Agni reports back only that he failed to identify the being, not that he failed to burn a straw.

The three gods are ranked by proximity rather than by strength, and the ranking inverts the order of the story: the two who failed the test come out above the gods who were never sent, and the one who was not tested at all comes out first. What he got for going was not a victory but an explanation. Verse 4 gives the first of two examples, and it is chosen because a flash of lightning is over before it can be looked at.

The parable and the doctrine are the same statement. Fire cannot burn, wind cannot carry and the gods cannot win except by a power that is not theirs, and the gods who come nearest to the presence are the ones who found this out. The fourth chapter makes the transfer explicit by giving two examples at two scales: lightning, which flashes and is gone, and the blink of an eye, and then the mind, which seems to go towards its object and by which one remembers. Nagler sets Augustine's in ictu trepidantis aspectus, in the striking of a fleeting look, beside the second. The name given in verse 6, Tadvanam, is one of two Upanishadic names for God with almost no literal sense, explained as the all-pervading beloved, and the text ends by naming its own subject: the word rendered as spiritual wisdom in verse 7 is upanishad. The practical consequence Nagler draws is Gandhi's. Since we are not the doer of any of our acts, including the act of knowing, the victory of good is guaranteed but not by us, and the way to be an instrument of it is what Gandhi called making oneself zero.

Prashna: six questions

The Prashna belongs to the Atharva Veda and is the most orderly text in the collection. Six men come to the sage Pippalada, each with one question, and the six questions descend in order from the making of the world to the person in whom the world is made. The word prashna means question and is cognate with the German Frage.

The condition Pippalada sets is a year of living together before any question is asked, and the condition is not ceremonial: the questions are of a kind whose answers cannot be handed over. His reply to the first question names the pair the rest of the text works with, prana and rayi, which Nagler translates roughly as consciousness and matter, and identifies them with the sun and the moon.

The second question asks which of the powers supporting the body is the greatest, and the answer is given by an experiment rather than an argument. The powers quarrel; prana starts to leave; everything else has to leave with it; they believe him. The bees are the comparison, and the point of the comparison is that the queen does not command and is not obeyed — the swarm simply cannot stay without her. The shadow in the third answer is the sharpest image in the text, and Nagler notes that it puts the Self and its energy in the right order: the shadow is cast, and the caster does not move when the shadow does.

The fourth question is about sleep and the answer is the setting sun: the senses are not extinguished but withdrawn into one place, and the image supplies its own account of waking. The fifth question asks what a man gains by meditating on OM until death, and the answer refuses to make it one thing, since the syllable reaches both the lower Brahman and the higher and the meditator gets what he aimed at. The sixth question is asked by a man who was asked it himself and admitted he could not answer, which is the only such admission in the collection.

The sixteen parts are prana, faith, the five elements, the senses, mind, food, strength, austerity, mantra, work, the worlds and the name; the list is a catalogue of everything a person is made of, including the intangible items. What the last two verses do is dissolve the list. The rivers are the Mundaka's rivers and the wheel is the Brihadaranyaka's wheel, and this is one of the places where the collection can be seen quoting itself.

Taittiriya: the ascent to joy

The Taittiriya belongs to the Black Yajur Veda and is named after a bird, the partridge, which is probably onomatopoeia. It is almost all prose, and Shankara called it the essence of its tradition. It is divided into three vallis with thirty-one sections between them, counted straight through here. The first is about instruction, the second about what a person is made of, the third about a boy who keeps coming back to ask again.

This is the oldest convocation address on record and it is still read at Indian universities. It is a list of imperatives with no reasons attached, and the interesting part is the middle. The three qualifications on giving — shriya, hriya, bhiya — form a jingle that makes them easy to remember and hard to translate; they are roughly with modesty, with sympathy and with awe. The instruction that follows in the original tells the student what to do when he does not know what is right, and the answer is to find people who are careful, unharsh and not driven, and do what they do.

Five selves are described in the same five terms and each is said to be purna, filled, by the one inside it. The parts are a bird's: head, right wing, left wing, trunk, and a tail that is the pratishtha, the thing it rests on. Easwaran renders the wings as arms and the bird disappears in the English, which is why the figure here draws what the Sanskrit says. The later tradition gave the five their names — annamaya, pranamaya, manomaya, vijnanamaya, anandamaya — and called them koshas, sheaths; the text itself never uses the word. What the structure claims is that the body is not the outermost layer of a person but the outermost of five, and that each layer is a self to whoever is standing in it.

The calculation has eight steps and each multiplies by a hundred: human joy, then the joy of the human spirits, the ancestors, the gods born so, the gods by work, the gods, Indra, Brihaspati, Virat and Prajapati. What makes it an argument rather than a list is the clause repeated at every rung, that the same joy belongs to a man who has heard the teaching and is free from craving. The ladder is built in order to be stepped off, and the last section takes back the terms in which it was built, since what words turn back from cannot be at the top of a series.

Varuna never answers the question. He gives a test — find what things are born from, live by and return to — and then sends the boy away five times with the same one-line instruction. What the boy brings back each time is his own, and the five answers he brings are the five selves of the second valli in order: food, breath, mind, understanding, joy. The pedagogy is the point. The father possesses the answer throughout and refuses to say it, because the sequence is not information.

Four instructions about food close the text and they are all practical. Do not despise food; do not waste it; increase it, because the earth can yield more; and refuse it to nobody who comes. Nagler treats the third as the answer to the charge that this literature is world-denying, and the sentence is hard to read any other way: it is an instruction to raise the yield.

Aitareya: the unity of life

The Aitareya belongs to the Rig Veda and sits inside the Aitareya Aranyaka. It is the shortest of the principal texts after the Mandukya; its three chapters hold five sections, counted straight through here, and it tells the story of creation as a sequence of openings.

The word for what the Self does to the person, abhyatapat, is the verb of tapas and means brooded over or heated. Each opening produces two things at once, a faculty and the piece of the world that faculty deals with, so that the eye and the sun come into being in the same act. The order is anatomical from the top down, and the last two openings, the navel and the sex organ, produce the downward breath with death, and the seed with birth. The deities then enter the body by the doors they came out of; only the Self enters by a door that was never a sense, the opening at the crown, and the text says it found the three states of consciousness there.

The final sentence, prajnanam brahma, is one of the four great formulae. What gives it its force is the list it comes at the end of, which is deliberately mixed: gods and elements and livestock and things that do not move, sorted only by how they are born. The compound in the last line, prajnanetram, means having consciousness as its eye, or moved by consciousness, and both readings are defended. Nagler takes the formula as the explanation of two things at once, the unity of life and its sanctity, and notes that the text makes the same claim about a human being that the Cloud of Unknowing makes: nothing in nature stands above.

Four more, and what minor means

Easwaran closes with four short texts that do not belong to Shankara's list, and Nagler is careful about what that means: a minor Upanishad is one Shankara did not comment on or cite at length, not one that is minor in wisdom or in force. Some of them, he says, carry insights of the same size as the ones Shankara singled out, and often in the same style.

Four or five Upanishads have names ending in bindu, a drop, which marks them as distillations. The Amritabindu's first line is the one most often lifted out of the group — the mind is of two kinds, pure and impure, and it is the mind that frees or enslaves — and the text then reasons from the jar of air that does not change when the jar is moved and does not know when the jar is broken. The Paramahamsa takes its name from the great swan, a bird that can fly alone, and it says of its subject that he has no staff, no tuft and no sacred thread, which in the society the text was written in meant giving up the right to perform the rites at all. Nagler sets it beside the last chapter of the Dhammapada and, later, the poems of Kabir.

Since about 700 BC

Nobody knows when these texts were composed or by whom, and the sages did not care to leave names. The oldest layer is prose and the Brihadaranyaka and Chandogya belong to it; the Katha, the Isha and the Kena are verse and later; the Shvetashvatara is later still, and some texts bearing the name are medieval. Easwaran's own dating is loose to the point of being a gesture — he writes of five thousand years and of the dawn of time — and Nagler is more careful, noting that the Isha comes down as part of a Samhita, which would normally argue for high antiquity, except that the White Yajur Veda is itself relatively recent. The usual scholarly range for the principal texts runs from about the eighth or seventh century BC to a few centuries after, and no argument in the collection depends on the date.

The commentarial history is better documented than the compositional one. Gaudapada's verses on the Mandukya came first and argued the case on grounds independent of scripture. Shankara, early in the eighth century, wrote on ten of the Upanishads and in doing so gave them a secondary canonization; the list runs Isha, Kena, Katha, Prashna, Mundaka, Mandukya, Taittiriya, Aitareya, Chandogya, Brihadaranyaka, and a text's being called minor means only that it is not on that list. Nagler is careful to say that the list has been reshaped by various authorities and is not fixed. What Shankara built on the texts was a system, and when India's philosophers built systems on this foundation they found they had produced positions that disagreed with one another. Easwaran's response to that is Ramakrishna's: the systems are views from different vantage points, neither higher nor lower, and in practice they come to the same thing.

The Western history begins with Schopenhauer, who read the collection in a Latin translation of a Persian one and said the Upanishads had been the consolation of his life and would be the consolation of his death. He made two predictions. The first was that the barrier between East and West would fall and that his century's one advantage over the seventeenth would be its possession of these documents. The second, in the sentence usually cut from the quotation, was that they were "destined sooner or later to become the faith of the people". Nagler's verdict is that the old pessimist was wrong about the timing: two centuries came and went and brought neither the revolution nor much of the open-mindedness Schopenhauer himself had. Max Müller translated them, Yeats was drawn by the poetry, Huxley filed them under the perennial philosophy, and Easwaran arrived at them by accident in a college library and spent forty years with them.

Read straight through, the collection turns out to be less various than its reputation. The same verses recur in different texts — the two birds in the Mundaka and the Shvetashvatara, the sun that does not shine there in the Katha, the Mundaka and the Shvetashvatara, the line about the Self choosing whom it will in the Katha and the Mundaka — and the same half-dozen images do most of the work everywhere: the rivers reaching the sea, the salt in water, the spider and its thread, the wheel and its spokes, the two selves in one cave. What differs between the texts is temperament rather than doctrine. The Brihadaranyaka argues in public and enjoys it; the Chandogya teaches a boy at home; the Prashna answers questions in order; the Shvetashvatara prays.

What has held up is the method rather than the cosmology. The texts do not ask for belief; they describe a procedure and claim it is repeatable, and they say so in a tone that is neither indignant nor defensive — ignorance is its own punishment and wisdom its own reward. The psychology of attention they rest on has proved the most portable part: the claim that concentration can be trained, that trained concentration changes what is available to observation, and that the mind is better treated as an instrument than as the observer. What has been contested is everything that follows from the second step. That the states of consciousness are also strata; that there is a fourth which is not a state; that the observer who survives the withdrawal of body and mind is the same in everyone — these are claims about what is found, not about what is inferred, and the collection offers no way to check them from outside. Easwaran does not pretend otherwise. His argument for the texts is the one they make for themselves, which is that they are instructions, and that the only test of an instruction is to carry it out.