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Reading group: Yājñavalkya, Maitreyī and Gārgī in the Bṛhadāraṇyaka Upaniṣad

Thamarai Raman Fellow
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Personal identityIndianVedantaYājñavalkya#brihadaranyaka#gargi#maitreyi#upanishads
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Reading Śaiva Siddhānta on my own, I want to go back behind the schools to the text they all argue over. The Bṛhadāraṇyaka is the oldest and, for me, the most alive of the Upaniṣads, mostly because of Yājñavalkya and the two women who question him.

Translation: Patrick Olivelle's Upaniṣads (Oxford World's Classics), which has useful notes. Other translations welcome for comparison.

Plan (three sessions):

  1. Book 2, chapter 4. Yājñavalkya is leaving the household and offers to divide his property. Maitreyī asks whether wealth would make her immortal, and he teaches her that husband, wife, children and wealth are dear not for their own sake but for the sake of the self.
  2. Book 3. The great debate at King Janaka's court, including Gārgī's two rounds of questions.
  3. Book 4, chapters 3 to 5. The self as the light by which we see, dreaming and deep sleep, "not this, not this", and the retelling of the dialogue with Maitreyī.

Worth remembering as we read: these texts are centuries older than Vedānta as a school. Advaita, Viśiṣṭādvaita and Dvaita all claim them, and read them very differently.

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5 replies

  1. Arjun Iyer

    Fellow

    Session 1. The line that has stayed with me for forty years is near the end of the chapter: by what would one know the knower? Everything else can be known; the self that knows can't become one more object of knowing. Advaita builds on that. But I'll keep to Thamarai's rule and note that a Dvaitin would read the same passage as distinguishing the self from what it knows, not dissolving everything into it.

    Helpful · 1
  2. Nirmala Jayasekara

    Fellow

    Session 1, from a Buddhist reader. It's moving to read this knowing that the Buddha's teaching on not-self was probably formed in conversation with teachings like these. Scholars disagree about how direct the link is. But when the Buddha asks whether what is impermanent can be called "this is my self", I now hear Yājñavalkya on the other side of the conversation.

    Helpful · 2
  3. Thamarai Raman

    Fellow

    Session 2. Gārgī. My nine-year-old read over my shoulder and asked why she was allowed to ask questions when the men were losing. Fair question. In her second round she announces she will ask two questions like a warrior with two arrows, and Yājñavalkya answers with the imperishable on which space itself is woven. She then tells the assembly no one will beat him. It's the most dramatic moment in the text, and she controls it.

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  4. Harpreet Kaur Grewal

    Fellow

    Session 2, a Sikh reader's note, offered cautiously. Guru Nanak's teaching begins from the One too, so reading the Upaniṣads I keep finding familiar notes. But I've learned not to assume they're the same music: Sikh thought puts devotion, honest work and remembrance of the Name where Yājñavalkya puts knowledge. The same word "one" can carry very different lives.

  5. Govinda Prasad Upadhyaya

    Fellow

    Session 3. Book 4, chapter 3 is extraordinary: when the sun has set, and the moon, and the fire, and speech is silent, what light does a person have? The self is that light. Then deep sleep as the state in which the self is without desire, embraced by itself. And "not this, not this" (neti neti), which Advaitins read as stripping away every attribute. From my own Mīmāṃsā side, I'll only say this is where Vedānta stops being commentary and becomes a philosophy of its own.

    Helpful · 1