Praśna-Upaniṣad-bhāṣya

(lit.: Commentary on the Praśna Upaniṣad)

Six students, six questions to the sage Pippalāda, and Śaṅkara's case that the knower in a person is never born and never perishes.

by Ādi Śaṅkara137 passages held

Sanskrit, the original language

Original language: Sanskrit

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Overview

Some Buddhist thinkers held that consciousness is born and destroyed in every moment, taking the shape of a pot or whatever else it meets; others added that when this flow stops, nothing at all remains. Śaṅkara takes them on in his bhāṣya, or commentary, on the Praśna Upanishad, a short text of the Atharvaveda tradition. Praśna means question, and the Upanishad is built from six of them. Six students come to the sage Pippalāda, who makes them live with him for a year in austerity, chastity and faith before he will answer. The first asks where living beings come from, and the answer separates those who sacrifice, who reach the world of the moon and return to be born again, from those whose path leads beyond. The later questions ask which powers sustain the body, how breath arises, what sleeps and what dreams, and what meditation on the syllable Om attains. The last student admits that a prince once asked him about a person of sixteen parts and that he did not answer, rather than say something untrue. Śaṅkara stops to argue when he explains this person of sixteen parts, the self from which everything unfolds. On the Buddhist view, he objects, each act of knowing must itself be known by another, and the regress has no end; the knower has to be something that is never an object. The Sāṃkhya school fares no better: it calls agency an error laid on the self and yet makes the self a real enjoyer, and sets a real primal matter beside it. What knows, for Śaṅkara, is the one thing that never changes.

Key concepts

What is prāṇa, the vital breath?

Prāṇa is the life-force that keeps the body going, more than the air one breathes. The Upanishad shows it as the chief of the bodily powers: when speech, sight, hearing and mind boast of holding up the body, breath begins to leave and they are dragged along. It divides itself into five breaths with different tasks, as a king posts officers to different villages.

What are rayi and prāṇa in the first answer?

Asked where living beings come from, Pippalāda says the Lord of creatures made a pair: rayi, matter or food, and prāṇa, life. Everything that exists is formed from the two. The moon stands for rayi and the sun for prāṇa, and the year, the month and even day and night are divided between them. The pair explains the world before the later questions turn inward.

Who is the person of sixteen parts?

It is the self as the source from which a person's sixteen parts unfold: breath, faith, the elements, the senses, mind, food, strength, austerity, sacred verses, deeds, the worlds and name. The last question asks about it, and the answer is that the parts arise from the self and dissolve back into it, as rivers lose name and form in the ocean, leaving the self alone.

What are the two paths after death?

The first answer describes them. Those who perform sacrifices and good works go by the southern path to the world of the moon, enjoy the fruit of their deeds and return to be born again. Those who seek the self through austerity, chastity, faith and knowledge go by the northern path to the sun, from which there is no return.

What is the view that consciousness lasts only a moment?

It is the view of some thinkers Śaṅkara answers here: there is no lasting knower, only a stream of momentary awarenesses, each arising, taking the form of its object and vanishing. Some added that when the stream stops, nothing remains. Śaṅkara argues that each awareness would then need another to know it, without end, so there must be a knower that never passes.

Themes of the book

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

Six Questions to One Teacher

Where do living beings come from, what keeps a body alive, and what is awake while we sleep? Six students carry these questions to one sage, and his answers climb from the cosmos to the self.

Pippalāda answers only after the students have lived with him for a year of austerity, chastity and faith. The first answer divides those who sacrifice, who reach the world of the moon and return to birth, from those whose path leads beyond. Breath proves itself king of the senses when it rises to leave and they must follow. In dreamless sleep the senses gather into the mind like rays into the setting sun, and meditation on Om leads to the highest person. Śaṅkara follows every step as a ladder toward the knower.

vital breath
prana
cosmology
creation
body and cosmos
physiology
deep sleep
dreaming
om
meditation
rebirth
afterlife
sacrifice
ritual action
teacher-student relationship
truthfulness

Enter a dialogue

The Knower That Is Never Born

Is the awareness in us a flicker that lasts an instant, or something that never changes? Explaining the person of sixteen parts, the commentary stops the story to settle the question.

Some held that consciousness is born and destroyed in every moment, taking the shape of a pot or whatever it meets, and others that nothing at all remains when its flow stops. Śaṅkara objects that on their view each act of knowing must itself be known by another, and the regress has no end, so the knower has to be something that is never an object. The Sāṃkhya school fares no better, calling agency an error yet keeping the self a real enjoyer. What knows, for Śaṅkara, is the one thing that never changes.

consciousness
self
mind
knowledge
epistemology
ignorance
liberation
brahman
nonduality
dependence
agency
ultimate reality
perception
dissolution

Enter a dialogue

Within this work

passages held: 137
distinct concepts: 156
by passages held, corpus-wide: #440

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: “consciousness” and “self”.

Concept co-occurrence, strongest first 8 concepts, joined by 23 pairings. 87 pairings reach beyond these concepts and are not drawn.
Concept	Paired concept	Shared passages
consciousness	self	9
cosmology	vital breath	9
ignorance	self	6
mind	self	5
consciousness	knowledge	4
consciousness	mind	4
brahman	cosmology	3
knowledge	self	3
mind	vital breath	3
self	vital breath	3
brahman	ignorance	2
brahman	self	2
consciousness	ignorance	2
cosmology	knowledge	2
cosmology	mind	2
cosmology	self	2
ignorance	knowledge	2
ignorance	mind	2
knowledge	vital breath	2
brahman	knowledge	1
brahman	mind	1
consciousness	cosmology	1
knowledge	mind	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
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 you are here 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