WorkĀdi Śaṅkara

Aitareya Upanisad, with the Commentary of Sankaracarya

Ritualists said a man is cremated with his sacrificial vessels and so must tend the sacred fire until death; Śaṅkara answers them.

by Ādi Śaṅkara101 passages held

Sanskrit, the original language

Original title: Aitareya-Upaniṣad-bhāṣya
Original language: Sanskrit

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Overview

The ritualists Śaṅkara argues against in this commentary on the Aitareya Upanishad had scripture on their side. It tells a man to offer the fire sacrifice as long as he lives, it speaks of three debts he is born owing, and it says that at death he is burned together with his sacrificial vessels; so even someone who has come to know the self, they concluded, may not walk away from the household fire. His bhāṣya, or commentary, answers them at length in its introduction, before it reaches the Upanishad's first line. Knowledge that one's self is Brahman, the ultimate reality, leaves nothing for an act to achieve, he argues, and commands can bind only someone who still wants a result. The debts fall on the householder, not on someone who never entered household life, so a student may become a wandering renouncer directly. The setting invites the argument, for the Upanishad forms three chapters of the Aitareya Āraṇyaka, a ritual text of the Ṛgveda tradition whose earlier chapters teach meditations on breath. The Upanishad's own story is short. In the beginning the self alone existed; it made the worlds and a cosmic person, drew the gods out of that person's organs, and finally entered the human body through the crown of the head. The last of its three chapters names Brahman as consciousness, in which every living thing rests, whether born from an egg, a womb, moisture or a sprouting seed.

Key concepts

What are the three debts a person is born owing?

Scripture says a man is born owing three debts: to the sages, paid by studying the Veda, to the gods, paid by sacrifice, and to the ancestors, paid by fathering a son. The ritualists used them to keep everyone in household life. Śaṅkara answers that the debts fall on someone who has become a householder, not on a student who never entered that life.

What is prajñāna, the consciousness the Upanishad calls Brahman?

Prajñāna is awareness itself, what lets anything be seen, heard, thought or wanted. The Upanishad lists the mind's activities, perceiving, understanding, remembering, desiring, and calls them all names of this one consciousness. Śaṅkara reads its closing words, 'Brahman is consciousness', as the goal of the creation story: the self that entered the body is the same awareness in which all things rest.

What does it mean that the self 'entered' the body?

The Upanishad tells how the self, after making the body, split open the crown of the head and went in. Śaṅkara does not take this as a movement from outside to inside, since what is everywhere cannot travel. It means that the one self becomes knowable within the body as the awareness that sees and hears there, as if it had come in.

Who is the cosmic person in the creation story?

It is a giant figure the self shapes out of the waters at the start. From its mouth, nose, eyes and other organs come speech, breath and sight, and from these the gods of fire, wind and sun. The gods then seek a home and find it in the human body. The story ties each human power to a cosmic one.

What is a wandering renouncer?

A renouncer gives up home, family, property and the household fire to live as a homeless mendicant devoted to knowing the self. The ritualists held that a man may take this step only late in life, if at all. Śaṅkara argues in this commentary that someone who has turned from all desire for results may take it directly from student life.

Themes of the book

What this book returns to, gathered into themes and ordered by how much of the text each one occupies.

The Fire and the Renouncer

May someone who has come to know the self walk away from the household fire that scripture commands him to keep for life? The long introduction answers before a single line of the Upanishad is explained.

The ritualists had texts on their side: offer the fire sacrifice as long as you live, every man is born owing three debts, the dead are burned with their sacrificial vessels. Śaṅkara replies that knowledge of the self leaves nothing for an act to achieve, and that a command binds only someone who still wants its result. The debts fall on the householder, so a student who never married may become a wandering renouncer at once. Even the seer Vāmadeva, who knew the self in the womb, serves the argument.

renunciation
ritual action
ritual
scriptural authority
scriptural interpretation
karma
liberation
self-knowledge
knowledge
desire
scripture
action

Enter a dialogue

The Self That Entered the Body

What is the self that sees, hears and wants in each of us? A short creation story ends by answering that it is consciousness, and that consciousness is Brahman.

In the beginning the self alone existed. It made the worlds and a cosmic person, drew the gods out of that person's organs, gave them hunger and thirst, and finally entered the human body through the crown of the head. Śaṅkara reads the tale as teaching, not chronicle: the self that enters is the one awareness behind every act of seeing, hearing and desiring. The last chapter states it plainly, naming Brahman as consciousness, in which every creature rests, whether born from egg, womb, moisture or seed.

creation
cosmology
divine creation
consciousness
embodiment
perception
self
selfhood
sense faculties
hunger
food
mind
cognition
nonduality

Enter a dialogue

Within this work

passages held: 101
distinct concepts: 118
by passages held, corpus-wide: #498

What this book thinks together

The wheel takes this book’s leading concepts and shows how often they come up together. The wider the band between two, the more of its passages speak of both. Among them, most often together: “liberation” and “self-knowledge”.

Concept co-occurrence, strongest first 8 concepts, joined by 18 pairings. 85 pairings reach beyond these concepts and are not drawn.
Concept	Paired concept	Shared passages
liberation	self-knowledge	13
consciousness	self	10
consciousness	perception	7
consciousness	embodiment	6
consciousness	self-knowledge	5
embodiment	self	5
brahman	consciousness	4
brahman	liberation	4
creation	self	4
perception	self	4
brahman	self-knowledge	3
perception	self-knowledge	3
brahman	self	2
creation	embodiment	2
embodiment	perception	2
brahman	creation	1
brahman	embodiment	1
liberation	self	1

Works held

The author's work in order, this book marked in place. Your-language title first, the original beneath it where the two differ; side chips show which full texts are held.

A Thousand Teachings (Upadeśasāhasrī)
The one treatise of his that is not a commentary and that scholars widely accept as his own: the place to see how he taught, not only what.
SA
Aitareya Upanisad, with the Commentary of Sankaracarya (Aitareya-Upaniṣad-bhāṣya) you are here SA
Brahmasūtra-bhāṣya
His principal work, a commentary on the most compressed of the texts he explained; both later schools of Advaita grew from commentaries on it.
EN
Brhadaranyaka Upanishad with the Commentary of Sankaracarya (Bṛhadāraṇyaka-Upaniṣad-bhāṣya)
Sureśvara, his pupil, wrote verse commentaries on two of Śaṅkara's Upanishad commentaries, this one and the Taittirīya; the Bṛhadāraṇyaka is by far the larger of the two.
SA
Īśa-Upaniṣad-bhāṣya
One of his shortest commentaries, in which the case against combining ritual and knowledge that the longer commentaries argue at length is made on a single disputed verse.
EN
Kaṭha-Upaniṣad-bhāṣya
The Kaṭha is a poem from the Black Yajurveda tradition, two chapters of three sections each; Śaṅkara's prose commentary follows it line by line.
SA
Māṇḍūkya-Upaniṣad-bhāṣya
A commentary on a commentary: Śaṅkara glosses both the Upanishad and the verses of Gauḍapāda, his teacher's teacher in the tradition, whose Kārikā scholars count as the earliest surviving systematic treatise of Advaita.
EN
Praśna-Upaniṣad-bhāṣya
A teaching dialogue from the Atharvaveda tradition, six questions put to one teacher, which Śaṅkara follows from the origin of living beings to the nature of the knower.
SA
Śrīmad Bhagavad Gītā Bhāṣya (Bhagavadgītā-bhāṣya)
One of the three commentaries on which Advaita rests, beside those on the Upanishads and the Brahma Sūtras, and the one in which Śaṅkara must draw a case for giving up action from a text that urges a warrior to fight.
EN
Taittiriya Upanisad with the Commentary of Sankaracarya (Taittirīya-Upaniṣad-bhāṣya)
The source of the five selves, or sheaths, that later Advaita manuals such as the Vivekacūḍāmaṇi teach at length; here Śaṅkara reads them in the Upanishad itself.
SA
Vivekacūḍāmaṇi
A teaching manual copied in many Advaita monasteries; tradition counts it as Śaṅkara's, and most modern scholars doubt it is his.
SA

— or open another of their works