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WorkYājñavalkya

Bṛhadāraṇyaka Upaniṣad

A debate at a king's court, a thousand cows as the prize, and a sage who defines the self only by saying what it is not.

by Yājñavalkya69 passages held

  • Sanskrit, the original language
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Original title
Bṛhadāraṇyaka Upaniṣad III–IV
Original language
Sanskrit

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Overview

King Janaka of Videha held a sacrifice with lavish gifts, and the brahmins of the Kuru and Pañcāla lands came to it. Wanting to know which of them was the most learned, he shut a thousand cows in a pen, with gold tied to their horns, and offered them to the best knower of Brahman, the ultimate reality. No one dared claim them until Yājñavalkya told his own pupil to drive the cows home, and the rest of the third book is the contest that followed. Questioner after questioner tries him, beginning with Aśvala, the king's own priest. Gārgī, a learned woman, presses him twice, and he warns her that if she asks beyond what may be asked her head will fall off. The last challenger, Śākalya, cannot answer the question Yājñavalkya finally puts to him, and his head shatters. These two books are the core of the Bṛhadāraṇyaka, "the great forest teaching", one of the oldest Upaniṣads, which scholars place around the seventh or sixth century BCE. In the fourth book Janaka becomes his pupil and asks what light a person has when sun, moon, fire and speech are gone. The answer is the self, which sees but cannot be seen and can be described only by negation, neti neti, "not this, not this". This book also holds that a person becomes what he does — one of the oldest statements of the doctrine of karma. Before leaving home to wander, Yājñavalkya offers to divide his property between his two wives, and Maitreyī asks whether wealth would make her immortal; he answers that a husband, a wife or a son is loved for the sake of the self. The text here is the Sanskrit of books three and four, without commentary. Śaṅkara, the founding teacher of Advaita Vedānta, wrote a commentary on the whole Upaniṣad. The historian of philosophy Ben-Ami Scharfstein counts Yājñavalkya among the earliest philosophers on record.

Key concepts

What kind of contest is the debate at Janaka's court?

It is a brahmodya, a formal contest of questions about Brahman, the ultimate reality, held at a royal sacrifice. Challengers put riddles about the ritual, the cosmos and the self, and whoever cannot answer falls silent and withdraws. The stakes are real: Gārgī calls on the others to admit that none of them will ever beat Yājñavalkya at this contest, and the one who refuses to stop, Śākalya, dies.

What are the eight graspers and the eight over-graspers?

They are Yājñavalkya's answer to Ārtabhāga about how a person is caught in the world. The graspers are eight powers: breath, speech, tongue, sight, hearing, mind, hands and skin; each is gripped by an over-grasper, its object. Sight is seized by forms, the hands by work, the mind by desire. The picture is of a person held from every side by what they perceive and want.

What is the imperishable, akṣara, that Gārgī is told about?

The imperishable is Yājñavalkya's name for what all the worlds are finally woven on. It is described only by negation: neither coarse nor fine, neither short nor long, without shadow, breath, eye or measure. Yet under its command sun and moon, heaven and earth, days, months and seasons are held apart, and rivers flow on their courses. It sees without being seen, and nothing else sees.

What is the 'third place', the dream state, in these chapters?

Dream is the place between this world and the next, from which a person sees both. There the self is its own light: no chariots or roads exist, yet it makes chariots and roads, joys and pools. Moving between waking and dreaming like a great fish swimming between two banks, it remains untouched by whatever it sees there.

Themes of the book

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

The Contest at Janaka's Court

Who among the learned actually knows Brahman, the ultimate reality, and what would count as proof? A prize of cows turns that question into a public trial where a wrong step can cost a head.

Each challenger brings the knowledge of his own craft: the king's priest asks about the sacrifice, others about the senses, death and the worlds. Yājñavalkya answers by carrying every question past its own terms, from the ritual to the powers of speech, sight and breath, and from thousands of gods down to one. Gārgī pushes furthest, to what all the worlds are woven on, and is given the imperishable, which has no size or quality yet holds sun and moon in place. Śākalya, who will not stop, is destroyed.

  • debate
  • knowledge
  • ritual
  • cosmology
  • breath
  • language
  • metaphysics

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The Seer Who Cannot Be Seen

What lets a person see, hear and know, and can that ever itself become something seen? If it cannot, the self is nowhere among the things anyone could point to.

Yājñavalkya's self is the knower behind every act of knowing: the inner ruler dwelling in earth, water and eye without their knowing it, the light a person still has when sun, moon, fire and speech have gone out. Dream shows its power, since there it makes chariots and roads out of nothing. Deep rest shows its peace, like lovers who know nothing outside or inside. Untouched by what it sees, it cannot be harmed, and so Janaka, once taught, is told he has reached fearlessness.

  • self
  • consciousness
  • perception
  • dreaming
  • nonduality
  • Brahman
  • heart
  • meditation
  • bliss
  • embodiment

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What You Do, You Become

If a person is made by what they do and want, what in them could outlast death? And is there any way out of that endless making?

Here karma receives one of its earliest statements: as a person acts, so they become, and at death the self moves on to another body as a caterpillar reaches for the next blade of grass. Yājñavalkya ties action to desire, and so the way out to the end of desire: whoever wants only the self does not depart at death but, being Brahman, goes to Brahman. Hence the knowers who drop the wish for sons, wealth and worlds, and Maitreyī, who learns that riches cannot buy immortality.

  • karma
  • desire
  • death
  • rebirth
  • immortality
  • liberation
  • renunciation
  • self-knowledge

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Within this work

passages held
69
distinct concepts
97
by passages held, corpus-wide
#586

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 22 pairings. 81 pairings reach beyond these concepts and are not drawn.
ConceptPaired conceptShared passages
consciousnessself6
consciousnessdeath4
cosmologyknowledge4
knowledgeself4
consciousnessknowledge3
cosmologyself3
deathself3
knowledgeliberation3
liberationself3
meditationperception3
consciousnessliberation2
consciousnessperception2
deathperception2
knowledgeperception2
consciousnesscosmology1
consciousnessmeditation1
cosmologydeath1
cosmologymeditation1
deathliberation1
deathmeditation1
knowledgemeditation1
liberationperception1

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.

  1. Bṛhadāraṇyaka Upaniṣad (Bṛhadāraṇyaka Upaniṣad III–IV) you are here SA
  2. Yājñavalkya Smṛti (Yājñavalkyasmṛti)

    A law book that borrows his name and authority, composed roughly a thousand years after the Upaniṣad in which he debates, and read for most of its history through Vijñāneśvara's commentary.

     SA
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