8 · Aitareya — The Self Becoming the World

The Aitareya Upanishad is short — three chapters that together fit on a few pages — and its tone is unlike any other in the principal ten. It does not begin with a question, or a dialogue, or a prayer. It begins with an announcement, almost cosmic in scale, and lets the implications fall as they fall. Ātmā vā idam eka evāgra āsīt — the Self alone, verily, was this in the beginning. Read the sentence slowly. Not a god. Not some prior matter. The Self, and only the Self, was — and what we now call the world is what that Self, having wished to be many, became.

The first chapter is creation told from the Self’s side. The Self, the Upanishad says, looked out and thought, let me make worlds. So it made worlds — the upper waters, the heavens, the sky, the earth, the waters below — four regions, the body of a single great cosmos. Then, having made the worlds, it thought, let me bring forth the keepers of the worlds, and drew up from the waters a purusha, a person, on whom it brooded as a hen broods on an egg. From that brooded form broke open the mouth, and from the mouth came speech, and from speech fire; broke open the nostrils, and breath came forth, and from breath the wind; broke open the eyes, and sight, and from sight the sun; broke open the ears, and hearing, and from hearing the directions; and so through every organ — each opening revealing a sense, each sense giving birth to a god. The Upanishad is doing something striking: it is taking the Vedic pantheon and showing that the gods themselves came out of the openings in a single primordial body. Fire is the exteriorisation of speech. The sun is the exteriorisation of sight. The wind is the exteriorisation of breath. The cosmos and the senses are not two systems. They are one system seen from two sides — outside and inside — and the Self is what is looking out of both.

Then, having created the gods, the Self thought, let me make for them a place to dwell, and brought forth a body — the human body — and the gods of fire and sun and wind and the rest, having seen it, discussed which of them would enter and live there. Fire became speech and entered the mouth. The sun became sight and entered the eye. The wind became breath and entered the nostrils. Each god took its proper room. The Upanishad has now told you, in a few lines, what the relationship between cosmos and body is. Your senses are not your own. They are the gods that built the world, come to live in you. The microcosm is the macrocosm folded in. This is one of the founding intuitions of all later Indian thought, and the Aitareya is among the earliest places to state it cleanly.

The second chapter is shorter and more enigmatic. It treats the human being as something that is born three times. First, in the father — where the seed becomes the body the father will pass on. Second, in the mother — where the body is shaped, carried, brought into the world; the Upanishad treats this birth as the renewal of the father’s life in the son. And third, after death, when the person is born into another world — the birth that the Vedic ritual was, in one of its strands, meant to secure. The chapter is brief. It is making a single point: the person is more than the one life it visibly lives, and the continuity that runs through the three births is what the Upanishad will, in the next chapter, name.

The third chapter is the one for which the Upanishad is most remembered, and it is the one to which the great saying that comes from this text belongs. The seeker asks, who is this Self we revere? And the answer the Upanishad gives is a long enumeration of all the faculties the Self might be — the seeing, the hearing, the smelling, the tasting, the touching, the willing, the thinking, the remembering, the determining, the imagining, the breathing, the living. That, the Upanishad says, which sees, which hears, which knows — is one thing, and one only. The faculties are not separate selves; they are the single awareness moving through different openings. The text then gives the verse that became one of the four mahavakyas:

Prajñānaṃ brahma — Consciousness is Brahman.

Read the sentence carefully, because it is the most condensed claim in the Upanishads. Not the soul is Brahman, not the self is Brahman — consciousness, the faculty by which anything at all is known, the prior awareness in which every perception arises — that is Brahman. The Aitareya is locating the absolute in the most ordinary and most intimate place a person has. The thing you have been calling your ability to be aware is not yours, is not small, is not local. It is the same awareness that, at the beginning of the Upanishad, was the only thing that was — that wished to be many, and became.

The Upanishad ends with the seeker, having heard this, rising up from this world and reaching all desires in the world of heaven — becoming immortal. The conclusion is given in a sentence, because the text trusts that the recognition has done its work. He becomes immortal — amṛto bhavati — because what he has recognised himself as is what was already immortal. Nothing new was added.

For an art of living, the Aitareya gives you a different starting point from the other Upanishads. Most of them ask you to look past the world to find Brahman. The Aitareya asks you to look at the world and remember that it is Brahman looking. The fire on the stove, the wind through the window, the sun warming the floor, the eye that sees the page, the hand that turns it — all the same one, distributed. You are not separate from this distribution. You are one of the openings through which it sees itself. The text does not ask you to withdraw. It asks you to notice that the noticing was already the absolute, and that every act of perception is, when seen rightly, an act of self-recognition. Prajñānaṃ brahma. The awareness that is reading this sentence is what the Upanishad means.