10 · Brihadaranyaka — The Great Forest

The Brihadaranyaka is the largest of the principal Upanishads — its name means “great forest,” and it lives up to it. It is also the oldest in many of its strata, and it is the one to which the others most often, knowingly or not, are responding. If the Chandogya is a temple complex, the Brihadaranyaka is a city. Whole schools of philosophy have been built from a single chapter of it; whole lifetimes of practice have been organised around a single one of its lines. What follows is the centre — the doors that any reader of the principal ten has to walk through at least once.

The Upanishad belongs to the Yajur Veda, and its opening — for those who have the patience for it — is one of the most striking passages of ritual symbolism in the early literature. The ashvamedha, the horse-sacrifice, is interpreted not as an outer rite but as the cosmos itself: the head of the sacrificial horse is the dawn, its eye is the sun, its breath the wind, its open mouth the sacrificial fire, the year is its body. The point — and it is a point the rest of the Upanishad will not stop making — is that the cosmos and the ritual are the same structure seen twice, and both, in the end, are the Self looking at itself. The early chapters lay this groundwork patiently; the great dialogues come later.

The dialogue every reader carries from the Brihadaranyaka is the conversation between the sage Yajnavalkya and his wife Maitreyi. It is in the second book, and again in the fourth — the Upanishad tells the same story twice, which is unusual, and in two slightly different forms, which is more unusual still; the second telling deepens the first. Yajnavalkya is preparing to leave the householder’s life and go into the forest. He calls Maitreyi to him to settle his property between her and his other wife, Katyayani. And Maitreyi — and this is what makes her one of the great figures of the Upanishads — asks the question that breaks the frame. If the whole earth, full of wealth, were mine — would I, by that, become immortal? And Yajnavalkya answers honestly. No. Such would be your life as that of people with possessions — there is no hope of immortality through wealth. And Maitreyi says the line: yenāhaṃ nāmṛtā syāṃ kim ahaṃ tena kuryām — what should I do with that by which I do not become immortal? Teach me, my lord, what you know.

What follows is one of the most exquisite teachings in the Upanishads. Not for the husband’s sake, Yajnavalkya says, is the husband dear, but for the sake of the Self the husband is dear. Not for the wife’s sake is the wife dear, but for the sake of the Self the wife is dear. Not for the sake of the sons are the sons dear, but for the sake of the Self the sons are dear. Not for the sake of wealth is wealth dear, but for the sake of the Self wealth is dear. Read the verse twice; it is misread on the first pass as cynicism. It is not. It is the most precise statement of the structure of love ever written. We love what we love because it is, in some hidden way, ours — and that ours, that I, is the Self. The teaching is not that the wife is unloved; it is that what is loved in the wife is the Self, the same Self that, in the husband, was doing the loving. The Self alone is to be seen, heard, thought of, meditated on, Maitreyi — by the seeing of the Self, all this is known. The teaching is intimate, it is given between husband and wife on the eve of a parting, and it has no sentimentality in it at all.

The Brihadaranyaka’s other great figure is the same Yajnavalkya in a very different setting — the court of King Janaka of Videha. Janaka holds a great sacrifice and offers a prize of a thousand cows, each with a measure of gold tied to its horns, to whichever brahmin in the assembly can prove himself the most learned. Yajnavalkya, before any question has been asked, tells his student: drive the cows home. There is uproar. The assembled brahmins challenge him in turn. One by one — Ashvala, Artabhaga, Bhujyu, Ushasta, Kahola, Uddalaka, and others — they put their questions, and one by one Yajnavalkya answers. At one point, an old brahmin named Shakalya pushes too far — Yajnavalkya, if you cannot answer this last question, your head will fall off — and Yajnavalkya, when his own question is turned back on Shakalya and Shakalya cannot answer, says quietly, your head falls off — and (the text tells us) it did. The chapter is long, and the questions become more and more pressing — how many gods are there? On what are all things woven, like warp and weft? Who is the seer not seen, the hearer not heard, the thinker not thought, the knower not known? And Yajnavalkya answers, each time, in the same direction. The thing you are looking for is the antaryamin, the inner ruler — the one who, dwelling in everything, is what the everything cannot see, because it is what is seeing.

The most repeated formula in this section is the one called neti neti, and it is the Brihadaranyaka’s most distinctive contribution to the philosophy of the absolute. When Yajnavalkya is asked, finally, what the Self is — atha ata ādeśo neti neti — now, therefore, the teaching is: not this, not this. The Self cannot be pointed to as any object, because every object you point to falls inside the awareness that is doing the pointing. So the teaching, properly, is by negation — not this, not this — not the body, not the mind, not the breath, not the senses, not whatever the next thing you might propose is. Every positive description would be a limitation; the teaching, to keep the Self unbounded, refuses every one. It is the cleanest method the Upanishads ever found for pointing at what cannot be pointed at, and the whole subsequent Advaita tradition leans on it.

The other great mahavakya the Upanishad gives — and which sits in counterpoise to the Chandogya’s tat tvam asi — is one of the boldest sentences in religious literature. It is uttered, in the first book, by the sage Vamadeva when he realised what he was. Ahaṃ Brahmāsmi. I am Brahman. Not I am close to Brahman. Not I am made by Brahman. I am Brahman. The Upanishad says of this verse — whoever, knowing this, knows “I am Brahman” — becomes all this; even the gods cannot prevent his becoming so, for he is their very Self. The four great sayings of the Upanishads are different angles on the same fact, and aham brahmasmi is the most direct of them — the one that does not need an interlocutor, the one the seer simply says.

And then there is the prayer the Brihadaranyaka places, almost casually, in its first book — the one we used as the epigraph of this guide, because there is no other line in the Upanishads that as gently summarises what they are for:

Asato mā sad gamaya, tamaso mā jyotir gamaya, mṛtyor mā amṛtaṃ gamaya.

From the unreal, lead me to the real. From darkness, lead me to the light. From death, lead me to the deathless.

It is recited every morning in countless homes still. Its three lines are the curriculum of the whole canon. The Upanishads, from one angle, do nothing but this — they lead, from the unreal of mistaking the body and the world for the whole story, to the real of the Self; from the darkness of taking the apparent for the actual, to the light of seeing what is; from the death of identifying with what dies, to the deathless that we are.

For an art of living, the Brihadaranyaka leaves you with three practices, one from each of its great teachings. From Maitreyi, take the habit of asking, when you love something, who is the one doing this loving — and what, really, is being loved? Not to extinguish the love, but to find its hidden centre. From the court of Janaka, take the neti neti — the next time you are tempted to identify with a thought, a mood, a wound, a triumph, name it and say, not this. You are not the thought; the thought arose in you. You are not the mood; the mood passed through you. Keep saying neti neti — and watch how much that you took to be you turns out to be only weather. And from Vamadeva, take the final sentence — aham brahmasmi. Do not assert it; that would be vanity. Let it surface, when it does, as the recognition that has been the silent presupposition of everything you have ever known. The Upanishads have brought you here. The forest opens onto the prairie. There is nowhere further to walk.