Kaṭha-Upaniṣad-bhāṣya

(lit.: Commentary on the Kaṭha Upaniṣad)

A boy sent to Death refuses every pleasure he is offered until Death tells him what survives dying; Śaṅkara reads the refusal as choosing knowledge over ritual.

by Ādi Śaṅkara171 passages held

Sanskrit, the original language

Original language: Sanskrit

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Overview

A father gives away all he owns in a sacrifice, and when his son keeps asking to whom he himself will be given, the father answers in anger: to Death. The boy, Naciketas, goes to the house of Yama, the god of death, and is granted three wishes, and his story frames the Kaṭha Upanishad, which Śaṅkara explains in this bhāṣya, or commentary. Before the story begins, Śaṅkara settles what the word upaniṣad names. It means the knowledge that loosens and destroys ignorance, he argues, and a book carries the name only because it teaches that knowledge. The first two wishes are granted at once: peace with the boy's father, and a fire ritual that leads to heaven. Śaṅkara reads them as ritual's whole reach. Commands to sacrifice can show the way to heaven, but heaven still lies inside the round of birth and death, and no rite can show what the self is. The third wish is to know whether a person exists after death. Yama tries to buy it off with long life, wealth and music, and Naciketas refuses each offer. Yama distinguishes the good from the pleasant, and Śaṅkara makes them knowledge and ignorance, two paths that cannot be followed together. When the Upanishad says this understanding is not reached by reasoning, he adds that a logician without scripture only builds what his own mind imagines, and that one reasoner can always posit something subtler than the last. Swami Gambhīrānanda's English translation appeared in the first volume of his Eight Upaniṣads, issued by the Advaita Ashrama in 1957.

Key concepts

What does the word 'upanishad' mean for Śaṅkara?

Before explaining the story, Śaṅkara argues that 'upanishad' names a kind of knowledge, not a book. He derives it from a verb meaning to loosen and destroy: the knowledge loosens the seeds of rebirth and destroys ignorance in those who take it up. A text is called an Upanishad only because it teaches that knowledge.

What is the difference between the good and the pleasant?

Death tells Naciketas that two things approach every person: the good, which leads to freedom, and the pleasant, which leads to satisfying wants. The wise choose the good, the foolish the pleasant. Śaṅkara identifies the good with knowledge of the self and the pleasant with the life of desire and ritual reward, two paths that lie far apart and run opposite ways.

What is the chariot image?

The Upanishad pictures the self as the one riding in a chariot. The body is the chariot, the intellect the charioteer, the mind the reins, the senses the horses and the objects of sense the roads. Whoever has an undisciplined mind is dragged off by the horses. The image shows a person as a chain of instruments, with the self as the rider who owns none of them.

Why does reasoning alone fail to reach the self, according to the commentary?

Because reasoning without scripture has no fixed starting point. Śaṅkara points out that each reasoner builds on what his own mind imagines, and someone cleverer can always posit a subtler principle and overturn the last. The self is not an object to be inferred, so knowledge of it comes from the teaching of scripture through a teacher, with reasoning used to remove doubts.

What is 'the unmanifest' in the Kaṭha Upanishad?

It is one rung in the Upanishad's ladder of what lies beyond what: beyond the senses are their objects, then the mind, the intellect, the great self, and then the unmanifest, the seed-state of the world before it takes form. Beyond that is the person, the self, and beyond the self there is nothing. Śaṅkara reads the ladder as a path of withdrawal inward.

Themes of the book

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

The Boy Death Could Not Buy

What is worth more than every pleasure a long life can hold? A boy sent to Death refuses them all for one answer, and the commentary makes his refusal the choice between knowledge and ritual.

Naciketas's first two wishes are granted at once: peace with his father and a fire ritual that leads to heaven. Śaṅkara reads them as the whole reach of ritual, since heaven still lies inside the round of birth and death. The third wish, to know whether a person exists after death, Yama tries to buy off with long life, wealth and music. When Death distinguishes the good from the pleasant, the commentary makes them knowledge and ignorance, two paths so opposed that no one can follow both.

desire
renunciation
ritual
rebirth
impermanence
pleasure
wealth
heaven
death
afterlife
immortality
highest good
discernment
karma

Enter a dialogue

A Self Beyond Argument

If the self is not reached by reasoning, how is it reached at all? Death's teaching sets a limit on argument, and the commentary has to argue for that limit without breaking it.

The self, the Upanishad says, is subtler than the subtlest, hidden behind senses made to face outward, and gained only by the one it chooses. Śaṅkara adds that a logician without scripture only builds what his own mind imagines, and that one reasoner can always posit something subtler than the last. Reasoning still has work: it serves scripture and a teacher, clearing doubts. The chariot image orders the person from the senses up through mind and intellect to the self, beyond which there is nothing.

self-knowledge
self
consciousness
knowledge
nonduality
brahman
meditation
reasoning
intellect
mind
sense restraint
spiritual instruction
teacher-student relationship
scriptural authority

Enter a dialogue

Within this work

passages held: 171
distinct concepts: 162
by passages held, corpus-wide: #385

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 27 pairings. 80 pairings reach beyond these concepts and are not drawn.
Concept	Paired concept	Shared passages
liberation	self-knowledge	18
ignorance	liberation	14
consciousness	self	13
brahman	liberation	10
brahman	consciousness	9
brahman	self	9
ignorance	self-knowledge	9
nonduality	self	9
nonduality	self-knowledge	8
brahman	self-knowledge	7
consciousness	self-knowledge	7
liberation	self	7
brahman	ritual	6
ignorance	self	6
liberation	ritual	6
brahman	nonduality	5
ignorance	nonduality	5
consciousness	nonduality	4
brahman	ignorance	3
liberation	nonduality	3
consciousness	liberation	2
ignorance	ritual	2
ritual	self	2
ritual	self-knowledge	2
consciousness	ignorance	1
consciousness	ritual	1
self	self-knowledge	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
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 you are here 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