The Kena Upanishad

The second Upanishad of the Sama Veda is the Kena — short, sharp, and one of the most precise philosophical texts in the canon. It belongs to the Jaiminiya recension, the rarest of the three surviving Sama Vedic branches, and its position in that recension is distinctive: it sits inside the Jaiminiya Upanishad Brahmana, also called the Talavakara Brahmana, and is sometimes called the Talavakara Upanishad for that reason.

The Kena is short. Four chapters, the first two in verse and the last two in prose, the whole text running to about thirty-five verses. You can read it in a sitting and still not have finished thinking about its opening question. That question is the one we met when we visited the Kena in the Principal Upanishads guide:

Keneṣitaṃ patati preṣitaṃ manaḥ — kena prāṇaḥ prathamaḥ praiti yuktaḥ?

By whom impelled does the mind fly to its object? By whose command does the first breath go forth?

The Kena treats the most ordinary faculty — that you are seeing this page, that you can hear what is around you, that the mind is about to think the next thought — as the strange thing it actually is. There is a by-whom behind every perception, every motion of mind, every breath. The Upanishad’s whole project is to point at that by-whom.

Its answer, when it comes, is the verse the tradition has worn smooth with quotation:

Yan manasā na manute yenāhur mano matam | Tad eva brahma tvaṃ viddhi nedaṃ yad idam upāsate ||

That which the mind cannot think, but by which the mind thinks — know That to be Brahman, not this which people here worship.

The Kena’s central recognition is that Brahman is the very awareness in which any cognition takes place — and is therefore unreachable by cognition. You cannot turn the eye around to look at the eye. You cannot use the mind to grasp the mind. The thing that is doing the looking and the grasping is what the Upanishad is pointing at.

Then the Kena turns to story. The gods, having defeated the demons, began to believe the victory was theirs. A yaksha appeared before them — a strange presence — and the gods did not know what it was. Agni came forward boasting of his power; the yaksha placed a blade of grass before him and asked him to burn it. Agni could not. Vayu came forward boasting; he could not move the grass. Finally Indra came forward, and the yaksha vanished — and in its place appeared Uma, the daughter of the mountains, who told him: that was Brahman. By its victory you are glorying. The triumph was never yours. The Upanishad’s mythic answer to its own philosophical question. The gods of fire and wind, the most natural metaphors the Veda has for power, are shown to be borrowing their power from something they cannot even recognise.

What is the Kena doing in the Sama Veda specifically? The connection is partly textual — it sits embedded in a Sama Vedic Brahmana — but it is also tonal. The Sama Veda is the Veda that trusts sound, that trusts what cannot be said but only sung, that deploys stobhas as if to admit that meaning is not the only thing language can do. The Kena’s whole teaching — that the deepest reality cannot be grasped by mind, that the seer is what cannot be seen — has the same temperament. He who thinks he knows it, does not know, the Kena says. He who knows he does not know, knows. The Sama Veda’s chants are sung in the same conviction. The Udgatri’s melody is doing something the spoken word cannot do. The Kena is saying, more philosophically, the same thing.

A reader who has come through the Sama Veda’s chants will, on reaching the Kena, find that the Upanishad does not feel like a break with what came before. It feels like its quiet conclusion. The Veda has been singing about a fire, a god, a flowing juice; the Kena steps back and asks who has been doing the singing. And the answer it gives — that which the mind cannot think, but by which the mind thinks — is exactly the kind of answer a tradition that trusts stobhas would, in the end, arrive at.