9.2 — The Upanishads: The Turn Inward

Something changed around the eighth to sixth centuries BCE, and the Upanishads are the record of it.

The Vedas (9.1) are about obtaining things from powerful beings by correct ritual. The Upanishads are about what you are.

Same tradition, same texts formally, and a completely different question.

What they are

The word is usually broken as upa-ni-shad — "sitting down near" — the posture of a student beside a teacher, and the implication of something transmitted closely rather than proclaimed publicly.

There are over two hundred texts called Upanishads, and about thirteen are considered principal, the oldest being the Brihadaranyaka and the Chandogya, probably seventh century BCE or earlier.

They are not systematic. They are dialogues, arguments, riddles, stories and images, and they contradict each other, and the later systematic philosophy (9.8, 9.9) is largely the work of reconciling them.

Why the change happened

The same conditions that produced the Buddha a century or two later (6.1): new cities, new wealth, the old ritual order no longer answering, and an explosion of independent teachers.

And one specific dissatisfaction, which the texts state.

The ritual system had become enormous, expensive and technical, and its promise was a good afterlife obtained by correct procedure. The Upanishadic question is: and then what? Even a heavenly result obtained by ritual is temporary — you exhaust the merit and return.

So the question shifts from "how do I obtain a good outcome" to "is there anything that is not temporary."

The great sentences

Four statements, called the mahavakyas, great sayings, and each comes from a different Veda. They are the compressed form of the whole argument.

Prajnanam brahma — "consciousness is the ultimate reality."

Aham brahmasmi — "I am the ultimate reality."

Tat tvam asi — "you are that."

Ayam atma brahma — "this self is the ultimate reality."

All four are saying the same thing, and the thing is this: what you actually are and what everything actually is are not two things.

The two words

And the argument needs two terms, both of which are worth defining carefully.

Atman — the self. Not the personality, not the body, not the mind. What remains when everything that can be observed has been set aside (5.5's knower of the field is the same idea).

Brahman — the ultimate reality. From a root meaning to grow or to swell. That which is the ground of everything, from which everything arises, and which is not itself a thing among things.

And the claim is: atman is brahman.

The thing at the bottom of you and the thing at the bottom of everything are the same thing.

The teaching stories

And the texts make the argument through images rather than through logic, which is why they survive.

The salt in the water

A father, Uddalaka, teaching his son Shvetaketu, in the Chandogya Upanishad, and this is the passage where tat tvam asi appears.

He tells the boy to put a lump of salt in a bowl of water and come back in the morning.

In the morning he tells him to bring the salt. It is gone.

Taste the water at the edge. Salty. In the middle. Salty. At the other edge. Salty.

"You do not see it, and it is there. That subtle essence is what everything is made of. That is the truth. That is the self. And you are that."

The banyan seed

Same teacher, same conversation.

Bring me a fruit from that tree. Break it. What do you see? Small seeds.

Break one. What do you see? Nothing.

"From that nothing which you do not see, this great tree grows."

The two birds

From the Mundaka Upanishad, and it is the sharpest image in the whole corpus.

Two birds sit on the same tree. One eats the fruit. The other watches, and does not eat.

The eating bird is caught up — anxious about the fruit, grieving when it runs out. The watching bird is not.

And when the eating bird sees the other one, its grief goes.

5.5's field and knower, three centuries earlier, as a picture.

Neti neti

The method, from the Brihadaranyaka, and it is the tradition's most rigorous procedure.

Neti, neti — "not this, not this."

You cannot say what brahman is, because saying is describing, and describing means placing something among other things.

So the method is subtraction. Is it the body? Not this. The senses? Not this. The mind? Not this. Any thought or state you can observe? Not this.

And the answer is not "nothing." The answer is what remains when nothing observable is left, which cannot be named because naming would make it observable.

This is the same procedure the Buddha runs in 6.7 and arrives at the opposite conclusion, and the two traditions have been arguing about it ever since.

The teachers

And the texts are more socially interesting than their reputation suggests.

Yajnavalkya, the sharpest figure in the Brihadaranyaka, wins a public debate against a whole assembly and then has to face Gargi Vachaknavi, a woman who asks him a series of questions of increasing depth — on what everything is woven, and on what that is woven, and so on — until he tells her to stop or her head will fall off. She stops, and then asks two more, and he answers.

A woman is the hardest questioner in the oldest Upanishad.

Maitreyi, Yajnavalkya's wife, when he is leaving to become a renunciate and offering her half his property, asks whether the property would make her immortal. He says no. She says: then what use is it to me? And gets the teaching instead.

And Satyakama Jabala, a boy who wants to study and does not know his father's name; his mother tells him honestly that she does not know, as she served in many houses when she was young, and to say so. He tells the teacher exactly that, and the teacher accepts him — on the grounds that only a Brahmin would speak such truth.

A story in which honesty about an irregular birth is treated as the qualification, in the same corpus that elsewhere upholds hereditary rank. The tradition argues with itself constantly and this is where you can see it.

What the claim actually means

And the practical content, because "you are the ultimate reality" is easily reduced to nonsense.

It does not mean you personally are God, in the sense of your preferences and your history being cosmically important. The atman is precisely not the personality.

What it claims is that the sense of being a separate thing, looking out at a world of other things, is not the final account.

And the consequence the texts care about is ethical. From the Isha Upanishad: one who sees all beings in the self, and the self in all beings, does not shrink away from anything.

If the thing at the bottom of you and the thing at the bottom of everybody else are the same, then harm to another is not fundamentally different from harm to yourself, and compassion is not a virtue imposed from outside but an accurate perception.

That is the argument, and whether or not you accept the metaphysics, the ethical conclusion is the same one every tradition in this volume reaches by some route.

What to carry from this page

The question changed from "how do I get a good outcome" to "is there anything that is not temporary." That shift is what produced everything after it.

Two birds on the same tree, one eating and one watching, and the grief goes when the first sees the second.

Neti neti — subtract everything observable and attend to what does the observing. You can run this in two minutes.

And the ethical payoff: if you saw everything as one thing, compassion would not be a duty. It would be accuracy.

Next: 9.3 — the six systems, mapped, so that the four chapters after this one have somewhere to sit.