Īśa-Upaniṣad-bhāṣya

(lit.: Commentary on the Īśa Upaniṣad)

Eighteen verses that urge both renunciation and a hundred years of ritual work, read by Śaṅkara as advice to two different kinds of people.

by Ādi Śaṅkara27 passages held

English, a translation held here, and your language

Original language: Sanskrit

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Overview

Two instructions that seem to pull apart stand at the head of the Īśa Upanishad, and Śaṅkara's bhāṣya, or commentary, sets out to reconcile them. The first verse says to see everything as covered by the Lord, to save oneself by renouncing and to covet no one's wealth; the second says to go on doing the prescribed works and to wish to live a hundred years. The Upanishad is eighteen verses long and forms the fortieth and last chapter of the Vājasaneyi Saṃhitā, the hymn collection of the White Yajurveda. That makes it the only Upanishad that belongs to the oldest layer of a Veda. The commentary opens by observing that these verses are not used in any ritual, because the self they describe is pure and actionless and nothing a rite could produce or improve. Śaṅkara resolves the two instructions by giving them to two kinds of people. The first verse is for those who know the self and renounce; the second is for those who cannot yet, and for them works remain. The harder passage comes later, where the Upanishad promises immortality to whoever pursues vidyā and avidyā together, words usually translated as knowledge and ignorance. Readers who held that knowledge and ritual should be combined took that verse as their proof, and Śaṅkara answers them at the end of the commentary. Here, he argues, vidyā means meditation on deities, not knowledge of the self, and the immortality it brings is only relative. Real knowledge cannot share a person with ignorance, any more than someone who has felt a fire's heat can go on thinking it cold.

Key concepts

What do vidyā and avidyā mean in the Īśa Upanishad?

Usually they mean knowledge and ignorance, but in the disputed verse Śaṅkara reads them differently. Vidyā there is meditation on deities and avidyā is ritual work, which is not knowledge of the self. Practised together they bring a relative immortality, a long stay in a divine world, not liberation. Knowledge of the self is a different thing that no practice can be added to.

What does it mean to veil all this in the Lord?

The first verse asks that whatever moves on earth be covered by the Lord. Śaṅkara takes the Lord to be one's own self, the sole reality, and the covering to be seeing the changing world as nothing but that self. Whoever sees this way has renounced already, and nothing is left to covet, since wealth belongs to no one.

Why can knowledge and ignorance not be combined in one person?

Because knowledge removes ignorance the moment it arises. Śaṅkara's example: once a man has felt the heat and light of a fire, he cannot go on believing that fire is cold or dark. In the same way, whoever knows the self as actionless cannot still take himself to be a doer in need of rites, so the two cannot be practised side by side.

What is the self like, according to this commentary?

It is pure, free of every fault, and actionless. Nothing can produce it, change it, bring it nearer or purify it, which is why, in Śaṅkara's opening remark, these verses have no use in any ritual: a rite works only on what it can make or improve. The self is also everywhere at once, moving and unmoving, far and near.

Themes of the book

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

Renounce, or Work a Hundred Years

How can one short scripture tell its hearers both to give everything up and to go on performing rites for a lifetime? The answer decides who, if anyone, may stop working.

Śaṅkara gives the first verse, which bids the hearer see all as veiled in the Lord and covet nothing, to those who know the self and renounce. The second, a hundred years of prescribed works, is for those who cannot yet. The fight comes at the end, over the verse promising immortality to whoever pursues vidyā and avidyā together, which advocates of combining knowledge and ritual took as proof. Vidyā there means meditation on deities, he replies, its immortality is only relative, and true knowledge cannot live beside ignorance.

karma
ignorance
nonduality
self-knowledge
meditation
renunciation
ritual action
ritual
self
liberation
deity meditation
immortality
wealth
desire

Enter a dialogue

Within this work

passages held: 27
distinct concepts: 52
by passages held, corpus-wide: #744

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: “karma” and “ritual”.

Concept co-occurrence, strongest first 8 concepts, joined by 21 pairings. 49 pairings reach beyond these concepts and are not drawn.
Concept	Paired concept	Shared passages
karma	ritual	4
ignorance	nonduality	3
ignorance	ritual action	3
ignorance	self-knowledge	3
karma	meditation	3
meditation	ritual	3
nonduality	renunciation	3
nonduality	self-knowledge	3
renunciation	self-knowledge	3
ignorance	karma	2
karma	self-knowledge	2
meditation	self-knowledge	2
ritual	self-knowledge	2
ritual action	self-knowledge	2
ignorance	ritual	1
karma	renunciation	1
karma	ritual action	1
meditation	renunciation	1
nonduality	ritual action	1
renunciation	ritual	1
renunciation	ritual action	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)
Three chapters of the Aitareya Āraṇyaka, a ritual text of the Ṛgveda tradition, that tell a creation story; for Śaṅkara its point is that Brahman is consciousness.
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 you are here 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