Kena Upanishad

Swami Nirvikarananda

Introduction

We now commence the study of Kena Upanishad. In the traditional enumerations, this
Upanishad is placed second, the first being the Isha Upanishad, the study of which we
have completed earlier. This too is a short Upanishad; it has thirty five verses, divided
into four chapters.

The very title of this Upanishad is philosophically significant. Kena in Sanskrit implies a
question, and means by ‘by whom?’ Philosophy matures only when it becomes a critical
estimate of experience and all its assumptions; otherwise it remains dogmatic and
immature, or skeptical and over-mature. This Upanishad registers the appearance of
critical philosophy in India at a very early period in her long history.

The aim of this approach is to evaluate all knowledge and experience. The Upanishad
questions the truth and validity of our sense knowledge and of the knowledge gained by
the logically and scientifically disciplined mind. It considers this knowledge as knowledge
of the relative and not of the absolute. Even the knowledge of the disciplined mind,
which is science, is knowledge about shadows and not substance, being derived from
sense-data.

Is this the whole of knowledge, it asks, or is there something higher which is infinite and
absolute? Ordinary philosophy can give no answer to this question. The Kena Upanishad,
however, and other Upanishads also, give an answer. After assessing the nature and
scope of human knowledge as revealed through the senses and the mind, the Kena
Upanishad tells us that there is higher form of knowledge, a higher form of awareness, in
which knowledge and experience become one, and which transcends the transient and
relative. This is knowledge of the true Self of man which is also the Self of the universe.
As such, the Absolute and Infinite need not remain a matter of mere surmise or belief or
inference.

Realization of the infinite and immortal Self, the ‘Ātman’ or ‘Brahman’ as the Upanishads
term it, requires however, discipline and training. This very mind that is now in
thralldom to the senses, and as such is bound to the world of the finite and changing, can
be disciplined and trained in order to equip it for the realization of the truth of Brahman.
Indian philosophy therefore speaks of the mind in two aspects. In one aspect it is in
thralldom to the senses and in other it is free. This idea occurs again and again in Indian
spiritual literature. Says the Panchadasī (XI. 116):

Mind is said to be of two types: the pure and the impure. It is impure when it is subject
to the pressures of lust and pure when free from them.

The Pure Mind

The pure mind has the capacity to realize Brahman. Brahman is said to be
buddhigrāhyam atīndriyam – ‘grasped by the buddhi but beyond the senses,’ including
also the manas or the sense-bound mind. Pure manas is the same as pure buddhi which

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again is the same as pure Ātman says Sri Ramakrishna. This is the endeavour that
converts philosophy from a mere intellectual and academic pursuit into a spiritual
adventure, and religion from a socio-political discipline into a sādhanā for spiritual
experience, uniting both religion and philosophy into a high spiritual adventure to realize
truth and achieve the highest life excellence.

So then the question arises, how to make the mind pure? In every Indian spiritual treatise
this subject is discussed: How to release the mind or awareness from its sense-bound
finitude and restore it to its own true infinite expanse? The mind as it is now constituted
is conditioned by various sense-impressions which make it function in a finite way, which
make it express itself through finite moulds. In the Chandī or Devī Māhātmyam one of the
sacred books of India, we read (1. 47):

‘The jnāna or knowledge of all beings is conditioned by sense-moulds.’

Everyone, including the animals, has knowledge which comes through the doorways of the
senses. This knowledge trickles, as it were, through little bits of sense experience; but
whereas this knowledge is fragmentary and unorganized in animals, it is in some degree
organized and coherent in scientific man. We make a serious mistake, however, when we
think that this is the highest possible form of knowledge . All speculative philosophy
commits this same mistake. Limiting itself to sense-data, to the data of the waking state
only, it stultifies itself as philosophy by not taking all experience for its province of
study.

The Upanishads did not allow Indian philosophy to commit this mistake. They broadened
and deepened philosophy by taking for its data the all experience—the world of facts as
well as the world of values, the world revealed in all the three states of waking, dream,
and deep sleep—and by a critical examination of the human mind, its nature and
possibilities. They discovered that this mind, when trained and disciplined, revealed its
own higher dimensions and manifested newer powers of penetration. At a lower level, at
the psyche level these are called extra-sensory perceptions, where human knowledge
becomes freed from the limitations of the sensory apparatus. But even this is limited to
the world of the phenomenal, the realm of appearances. Its highest penetrating power is
manifested when it reveals the noumenon behind all phenomena, the imperishable reality
behind the world of perishable forms. This is parā vidyā, philosophy in the true sense of
term, according to the Upanishads (Mundaka Upanishad: 1.1.5.).

The Discipline of Mind in Science

In physics we are familiar with a similar physical phenomenon. Ordinary light is a

radiation of very little penetrating capacity. But, by increasing the wave frequency of the
radiation, science has developed radiation of greater penetrating capacities which can
penetrate deeper still.

This phenomenon of the physical world we find repeated in the mental world. The
average is untrained, undisciplined, and extremely dull in its operation; it stops at the
very surface of experience. It cannot penetrate the surface and proceed to the depths of
things. It cannot even raise the question whether there is anything behind the
appearance. Such is the raw human mind. Yet the same mind can be trained and
disciplined and penetrating in its power; this gives us the scientific mind which has
disciplined itself in the systemic inquiry and investigation into the universe of sensory

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experience. As a result of this discipline the mind gets the power to exercise control over
the sensory and motor apparatus of the human system which, formerly, was under the
direction of the sense-impressions and instinctual impulses. The trained mind disciplines
the imagination through reason and develops a capacity to check and evaluate those
impressions and impulses, and find out what they mean and where they lead. As a result
of this scientific training, the mind develops the ability to penetrate appearances and
discover the truth behind, the laws that control the appearances. This is the discipline of
human knowledge achieved in science.

If however, a scientist stops there and refuses to proceed further in the search for truth,
it is because he has forsaken his scientific spirit and become sterile and dogmatic. Why
should he stop there? If the mind can be trained to penetrate some appearances, by still
greater discipline it can be trained to penetrate the whole crust of appearances that
make up the universe of our daily experience, and penetrate to the noumenon behind all
phenomena, the changeless One behind the changeful many. This is the most fascinating
and intriguing, subject for the human mind; though baffled again and again, the mind
will return to it again and again. One may try to drag the mind away from such
fundamental questions; one may adopt philosophies of positivism and humanism and try
to direct the mind either to living a good life or to doing good to the world in his own
petty way; but it is only for a time.

Since the nineteenth century the philosophy of positivism has become popular as a
reaction against the irrational dogmas of religion and the inconclusive conclusions of
metaphysics. This philosophy registers the despair of the human mind arising from the
feeling that man can never know the ultimate truth. All metaphysics is moonshine, says
the positivism. Let us resort to the metaphysics, if we must, for the little exercise of the
intellect that it gives; but let us, while doing so, work to make the world a little better,
a little happier than it is. Why bother about the subject of the ultimate truth? The mind,
in spite of its rigorous discipline in science, is so constituted that ultimate truth is
beyond the grasp; so it is the part of wisdom not to waste time and energy on it.

This is the despair of the human mind that has gripped modern man. And yet man cannot
continue to live in this despair, in this defeatist attitude. As in mountain climbing, where
unclimbed peaks of a difficult mountain range pose a continuous challenge to the courage
and tenacity of the human spirit, and the tougher spirits continue their unwearying
assaults on the peaks until the last and highest peak is gained, so in the search for truth,
the challenge and lure of the ultimate truth will make the courageous among seekers
restless with longing to scale the highest peaks of knowledge and experience. Thus the
human mind cannot be put off; it is intrigued by anything that is hidden, by anything that
is mysterious. If one group of persons does not ask such questions, another will. If one
scientist does not investigate them, another scientist will. We see this actually happening
today in the world of science. There are some scientists today who would limit science
merely to its positivistic approach. But there are other scientists who try to take science
beyond this limit, lead it into the region of fundamental questions, such as nature of
truth, the critique of causality, the nature of reality, and the nature and scope of human
knowledge. These scientists may not achieve satisfactory answers to these questions, but
they are bold enough to ask them; and in this they are in the true tradition of science
and uphold its spirit of free and persistent inquiry into truth.  

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The Discipline of Mind in Vedānta

These are two types of scientists in the modern world; and it is a happy augury that
modern science, true to its spirit and tradition, is forging ahead in its fearless quest of
truth, a virtue which it shares with Vedānta. Vedānta experienced the lure of unclimbed
peaks of thought ages ago. It never admitted defeat, but marched on till the last peak
was conquered. Referring to this aspect of Vedānta, Professor Max Müller says ( Six
Systems of Indian Philosophy, pp. 182-83):

‘It is surely astounding that such a system as the Vedānta should have been slowly
elaborated by the indefatigable and intrepid thinkers of India thousands of years ago, a
system that even now makes us feel giddy, as in mounting the last steps of the swaying
spire of an ancient Gothic cathedral. None of our philosophers, not excepting Heraclitus,
Plato, Kant, or Hegel ventured to erect such a spire, never frightened by storms or
lightnings. Stone follows on stone in regular succession after once the first step has
been made, after once it has been clearly seen that in the beginning there can have
been but One, as there will be but One in the end, we call it Ātman or Brahman. ’

What was the driving force behind this bold venture of the Indian thinkers? A passion for
truth and a passion for human happiness and welfare. says Professor Max Müller ( Three
Lectures on Vedānta Philosophy, pp. 39-40):

‘I believe much of the excellency of the Ancient Sanskrit philosophers is due to their
having been undisturbed by the thought of there being a public to please or critics to
appease. They thought of nothing but the work they had determined to do; their one
idea was to make it as perfect as it could be made. There was no applause they valued
unless it came from their equals or their betters; publishers, editors, and logrollers did
not yet exist. Need we wonder then that their work was done as well as it could be
done, and that it had lasted for thousands of years?’

It is good for modern science to investigate the type of discipline that the Upanishadic
thinkers gave to their minds by which they climbed the highest peaks of thought, by
which they realized the changeless One behind the changing many. His single-minded
love of truth, his intellectual discipline, and his moral purity, helped the Upanishadic
thinker to evolve a new mind of high penetrating power out of his given mind. Freed from
its thralldom to the senses, which is but the legacy of man’s animal ancestry, and
rigorously disciplined in detachment and objectivity, which is the fruit of an all
embracing renunciation, and stimulated by the love of truth viewed as a focus of both
knowledge and value, the human mind, in the Upanishads, became the instrument of
human enlightenment; pure manas became pure buddhi which in turn yielded bodhi, full
illumination. This marks man’s achievement of Buddhahood.

How important for science is the need to protect and cherish this free and fearless
pursuit of truth becomes clear when we consider the various forces that tend to
deflect the scientific mind today from its main purpose of the purpose of truth.

First of all, there is the lure of pleasure which science offers through a highly efficient
technical civilization; the fruit of science may smother the root of science.

Secondly, there is the tendency to forsake the path of objectivity due to the pulls of
mutually hostile political ideologies.

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Thirdly, there is the sheer laziness of the human mind which makes it rest on its oars,
unwilling to continue an arduous journey. This gives birth to the dogmatic mood in
science.

In earlier centuries science had occasionally to adjust with religious dogmas; now it has
to adjust with political dogmas. And it has its own dogmas also to contend with. But no
dogma can kill the spirit of science.

The need of science today is to free its spirit from dogmas of all kinds, whether religious
or scientific, political or social. In this task modern science will receive the most helpful
stimulus from Vedānta. For Vedānta is not committed to any dogma; it is committed to
truth only and firmly believes in the power of truth to overcome half-truths and untruths.

— ‘Truth alone triumphs, not untruth’, is the watchword of the Upanishads (Mundaka
Upanishad: III. 1. 6)

This was the quest pursued by the great sages of India and they have left for posterity an
imperishable legacy. Ages have passed since the Upanishads were composed, but they
hold our attention and we study them even today when there is such an advancement of
intelligence and learning unparalleled in earlier ages. This can be explained only on the
basis of the Upanishads having plumbed the depths of experience and brought
information of vital importance for man both as to his own nature and as to the nature of
the universe. It is not merely the ideas that they convey to us that attract us but also the
rigorous methods which they employ and the dispassionate spirit pervades them. The
modern mind is at once attracted by the wonderfully critical approach adopted by the
Upanishdic sages, by which they closely studied the mind and its structure, its functions,
and its capacity, and fearlessly evaluated all knowledge and information conveyed by the
mind. They were determined to find out whether this mind could be made into a fit
instrument for their particular field of inquiry, the field of the knowledge of the Self, the
field of the subject of all experience, as different from the objects of all experience
which are studied by the positive sciences.  

In order to work in particular field, a workman fashions his tools according to his
requirements. A scientist or a philosopher does the same, but his tool is thought itself.
His mind and thought form the tool. When a student goes to a great scientist in order to
learn science from him, the teacher subjects him to the discipline of science — discipline
in truth, in detachment, in objectivity, and in precision. Varied and intricate is the
training given to the science student to enable him to develop the ability to tackle the
vast array of data before him and become an original scientific explorer himself.

Vedānta similarly, calls upon the spiritual seeker to subject himself to the type of
discipline relevant to this field.

— ‘The Ātman is certainly realized by the one-pointed minds of those who are capable of
seeing subtle truths, by minds which have been trained to grasp subtler and subtler
facts,’ says the Katha Upanishad (III. 12). When we enter the field of spiritual quest,
when we seek ultimate Reality, we need a still more discipline of the mind. If the
training of the mind for science is rigorous, its training for spiritual realization is much
more so, for says the Katha Upanishad (III. 14):

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 ‘That path is like the sharp edge of a razor, difficult to tread and hard to cross, so say
the sages.’

Therefore we require much more intensive training in moral purity, alertness, and
concentration. Without this training our search for spiritual truth will be vain. The mind
will be drawn away from the search by distractions, by desires, and by laziness. The
desire for name and fame may come, various other desires also may come to distract the
mind; but the spiritual seeker has to keep himself to the straight and narrow path, which
is compared to the walking on the edge of a razor. ‘For straight is the gate and narrow is
the way that leads to perfection,’ says Jesus Christ. This is the training that was
undergone by the great Indian sages and this is the training that we must undergo if we
wish to equip our minds for this spiritual field of investigation; by such training our minds
will develop that penetrative power which alone can help us pierce the veil that hides
the ultimate truth of Brahman from us.  

The Power of Discipline

In our daily life we see how things and forces acquire this penetrative power when
subjected to certain conditions. Even the most flimsy things of the physical world can be
given extraordinary strength or penetrative power if subjected to certain conditions. Air,
for example is considered to be a very insubstantial thing; but when put under pressure,
it will have high penetrative power; compressed air can cut into rocks. If air can be
disciplined into such a powerful instrument, why not the mind of man? The mind may be
very flimsy now; it may be weak and unstable; it may have no penetrating power; the
slightest obstacle coming into its way may make it recoil and lose initiative. But it need
not remain in this flimsy state. It can be strengthened by training. A single thread is so
weak that it can be broken by a slight pull. But combine that thread with many threads,
twist them together to make a rope, and it can control an elephant. This is the classical
example given in the scriptures to remind us that the mind can be trained in strength and
resilience, and given the capacity to penetrate into the heart of truth.

The most important requirement, then in the search for truth is this training and
disciplining of the mind, of the whole mind. Part of this training lies in what we may call
the secular field, the field of social and educational endeavour. Even in these fields it is
discipline that gives the mind greater energy and power.

It is the greatest misfortune that large numbers of people have not realized the
importance of self-discipline as an essential aspect of the educational and social
progress. They think that they can achieve greatness by leaving the mind to follow its
own whims or the dictates of the sense organs. The word ‘discipline’ is a bugbear to
many people. It only shows that we have not fully grasped the meaning of freedom. It is
the slave that resents all discipline; the free man welcomes all opportunities for self
discipline. Indiscipline is the way to make the mind weaker and weaker and make it unfit
either for life in the world or for life in God.

Greatness in any field is never achieved without tremendous inner discipline. Energy
disciplined is energy increased; and in the spiritual field, such increase is both in
quantity and quality. That is the nature of all energy, physical or non-physical. The
psychic energy in the human system can be raised to the highest level in quality and
quantity only through inner cultivation; there is no other way, say the Upanishads again
and again. The sooner our people realize this truth, the sooner our young people grasp

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the meaning of this vital idea, the better for them and better for the nation. Self-
discipline is the way to achieve strength of will, breadth of sympathy, loftiness of
character, and consequent all-round social and spiritual efficiency. It is like raising
bumper harvest through intensive farming with the help of scientific agriculture.

From Manliness to Godliness

This is the royal way to achieve greatness in the secular field, in the world of daily
endeavour. The same discipline, carried one step farther, takes us into the world of
spiritual aspiration and realization. We make a great blunder when we think that the
mind that is unfit for the world can be made fit for God. And yet this is a very common
mistake that we make. Again and again we find inefficiency masquerading as high piety.
And in spite of the clear and bold teaching of the Gitā that godliness is the fruition of
manliness and not its negation. Be a man first and then try to be saint, is the teaching
that we received from Swami Vivekananda. Manliness comes first and then come
godliness. Many of us, however, tried, and still try to be saints first. We put the cart
before the horse and loose both manhood and sainthood in the bargain. This wrong
method and its harmful fruits for the individual and the nation were pointed out to us by
our great seer, Swami Vivekananda, who also opened up to us the purifying,
strengthening, and unifying message of the Upanishads and the Gitā, he revealed to us
the nature and scope of an education, based on the infinite Self within every man and
woman which will lead to both manliness and godliness.

This great literature, the Upanishads and the Gitā — and the Gitā too is described as an
Upanishad — forms a single core of inspiration to lead us to higher and higher of life
expression and thus bring out the best in human life. And what is that best in human life?
It is infinite truth itself; and not merely truth, but also infinite beauty and goodness and
joy. The true Self in man is all these. And the Upanishads summon us to the joyous
adventure of the quest for this truth a converging life-endeavour.

‘Know thou That to be Brahman (the infinite Self of All), and not what people worship
here.’, as the Kena Upanishad will tell us in emphatic refrain (1. 5).

The mind is like a musical instrument which will produce good music only when properly
tuned. If the strings are too loose or too tight the best music cannot be produced. The
perfection of the human system, both mind and body, is to be sought for and struggled
for; and when it is achieved the music that will come out of it will be the music of truth,
knowledge, beauty, and bliss. This is the highest experience. Which is also the highest
knowledge, and the Upanishads want to give man a taste of this, here in this very life, as
the Kena Upanishad will tell us later (II, 5).

In order to understand the Upanishads and to profit from them it is necessary to reorient
one’s ideas of life and religion. It is no post-mortem excellence that the Upanishads
promise. Here and now, in this very body, with this very mind, man shall achieve the
highest truth and the highest life excellence. Here and now shall man cross the shoreless
ocean of delusion and grief, and after crossing it, he will bless his psycho-physical
organism for the invaluable service rendered by it, just as a sailor blesses the boat that
has carried him to a safe shore across the tumultuous ocean.

Thus we find that by appropriate training of body and mind we are able to achieve high
levels of truth and excellence. With a trained mind man achieves the joys of health and

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character, knowledge and beauty, culture and civilization; with trained mind he can also
rise above all relativity and achieve the delights of transcendental experience, the
lokottara, as the Buddhism puts it, that which is beyond the world of the senses and
sense-bound-mind.

The Search for the Highest

The Self is beyond the world of the senses; and yet it impinges upon us occasionally
through sense-experiences. ‘Intimations of immortality’, Wordsworth called them.
Perhaps we get an inkling of It, and at once it passes away. The intimation comes, but
the next moment it vanishes. But we are intrigued by it, for it is as enough to convince us
that a greater reality looms beyond the horizon of the senses and that we must carry our
pursuit there. It is like a cloud covering the sun. During the rainy season here, or winter
season in northern climates, we long to see the sun, but the clouds or fog hide it from
our view. Suddenly the clouds or fog part and the sun shines. But a moment later the
clouds or fog close in once again. But whether we see the sun or not, we know that it is
there. Our search for truth is just like this. Sometimes truth gives us a glimpse of itself
through our psycho-physical experience, through the daily events of our lives. Under the
pressure of our life in the world we soon forget and ignore these little intimations from
the beyond, but occasionally we stop and ask, Is it true? Is there a life beyond this
everyday sense life, something better, purer?

And so the search begins, the search for ultimate truth and spiritual experience. All
experience becomes subjected to scrutiny to discover a clue to the reality that lies
beyond. It is at this stage that man becomes a pilgrim and his life becomes a quest that
will lead him in due time to spiritual truth. He becomes a sādhaka. The true sādhaka is
the spiritual aspirant whose heart genuinely hungers for the transcendental pure life of
the spirit.

It is just this earnest mind, this spirit of seeking, that the Kena Upanishad expects of his
students. When one is established in this he has set his sail in the right direction. He
becomes what in Buddhism called shrotāpanna , one who has entered the current’. A
boat, for example, is in the Ganges on its way to the sea. If it loses its way and enters
the canals and ditches on the way, it may experience much movement but no progress.
But once it attains the centre of the river and enters the main current, it has nothing
more to fear. It will move steadily towards the sea. That is the position of a seeker who
is shrotāpanna. Having attained the main current of spiritual life, he goes forward step
by step and realizes the truth.

This sādhaka attitude must be pervasive of life itself. Whether we are at work, or in
leisure, in whatever situation we may be, the one constant factor will be that our hearts
are pursuing truth, that we are seeking the pure and deathless Self in and through all
experience. All other things then become merely incidental, the means of our
attainment, the fields of our training. The real quest is for none of these. The real quest
is for the infinite Truth, for the infinitely purest and best.

— ‘The infinite alone is happiness; the Infinite alone should be verily sought after,’ says
the Chhāndogya Upanishad (VII.23.1). In happiness and in misery, in success and in
failure, in every experience of life, we will then be in search of that which we feel is
there hidden somewhere in experience. This is the greatest adventure of the human
spirit. Entering on it, man becomes seized with a new zest in life, for a life lived for

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truth, and leaves far behind all possibilities of ennui and frustration characteristic of life
at the sense level. He becomes seized with a new restlessness, creative and constructive,
holy and pure.

All this the Upanishads express, and that in arresting language. What varied expressions
do the Upanishads adopt to impress upon the sādhaka the greatness and might of the
human spirit and its ability to rise to and stay in heights of spiritual experience and
realize the empire of delight of which it is born heir! The song of man’s true glory which
the Upanishads sing is incomparable in charm and power. Says Swami Vivekananda
(Lecture on ‘The Sages of India’, Complete Works, Vol. III, p. 253)

‘Beyond (waking) consciousness is where the bold search. Consciousness is bound by the
senses. Beyond that, beyond the senses men must go, in order to arrive at truths of the
spiritual world; and there are now even persons who succeed in going beyond the bounds
of the senses. These are called rshis (sages), because they come face to face with
spiritual truths.’

Chapter 1

In the Kena Upanishad we live in this atmosphere, the going beyond the senses, the
determined seeking for the Ātman, the eternal truth of all experience. Somewhere to
experience it is hidden, and the search is on. The body and the sense-organs which
common sense and some schools of philosophy take to be self-sufficient and final, are not
so. They point to a reality beyond themselves. With a view to knowing this, the student
puts a question to the teacher which forms the opening verse of this Upanishad:

1 ‘At whose desire and by whom impelled does the mind alight on its objects. By whom
impelled does the chief prana (vital force) prceed to its functions? By whom impelled do
men utter this speech? What deva (luminous being) directs the eyes and the ears? ’

The new-born baby gets information about his environing world through his sense organs.
At birth, he is surrounded by a world of things and persons which seem to him, in the
words of William James, ‘a buzzing booming confusion’. Out of this buzzing confusion the
child gradually develops knowledge by discriminating individual items, and the first thing
he discriminates is the sound, the presence of his mother. The mother stands apart from
the general confusion around. He gradually attains more and more knowledge and the
confusion acquires some clarity and order. Thus the child learns to understand the world,
to grasp it, to control it, to understand also himself, although only in a hazy way, and is
ultimately able to find his own way and independent of his mother. Then the child
undergoes still further training. He is educated. His knowledge of the world grows
clearer, though his knowledge of himself does not keep pace with it. It remains a mixture
of the self and the non-self, the later predominating. Perhaps he becomes a scientist and
discovers great scientific truths.

But his education can be carried still further; he can strive to understand his true self,
bereft of all non-self elements. This step makes him a spiritual seeker, a true student of
the science of the Self. Realizing his Self as birthless and deathless, pure and perfect, he
sees the same Self as the Self of the universe and thus of all existence. This, according to
the Upanishads, is, in brief, the picture of the growth and development of human
knowledge and realization in its various stages, from the child to the perfect man.

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The Kena Upanishad, as we have seen above, opens with a question from the student to
the teacher; and this question is asked by the higher reaches of modern neurology and
psychology today. Is there a principle of pure intelligence, uncompounded and free,
which directs the psychophysical organism of man?

Our daily experience tells us that all our knowledge comes through the gateways of
senses; and our minds organize it into coherent forms. Is the self of man only a passing
synthesis of all these non-self elements, or is it a pure principle of intelligence, without
whose presence behind, the mind and the sense-organs and the body become reduced to
dull dead entities unable to function?

The second verse gives us the teacher’s reply:

2 ‘It (the Ātman) is the ear of the ear, the mind of the mind, the speech of the speech,
the prāna of the prāna, and the eye of the eye. Wise men, separating the Ātman from
these (sense functions), rise out of sense-life and attain immortality.’

The teacher assures the student that his intimation is correct. That little intimation of
the immortal which had led the student to raise his question is true. Now he should make
this awareness clear and complete.

Explaining the enigmatic words of the teacher, Shankara comments in a luminous passage
(1.2)

‘There is a changeless reality at the innermost core of man, unborn , ageless, deathless,
and fearless, which is revealed to the intelligence of the wise, and which expresses itself
through the functions of the ear and other sense-organs, being the one source of all their
diverse energies.’

The teacher explains to the student that the power behind the various sense-organs is the
Ātman. As the intelligent and ageless subject behind the activities of the changeful mind,
senses and the ego it is the true self of man. It is not a mere concept or a statement, but
the very principle of the awareness which imparts meaning to all concepts and
statements. As the self, it is something that can be realized, and the way to realize it is
by carefully separating it from the conglomeration of senses and mind. The senses deal
with the mortal perishable things of the objective or not-self world; but the Ātman is the
eternal subject, immortal and changeless. To go beyond the mortal, from the not-Self to
the Self, requires extraordinary intelligence and courage, it requires high heroism. There
are virtues with which we are familiar in the world; for they alone ensure success in
achieving greatness in any sphere of life. But at their ordinary level they are not
adequate for the purposes of achieving Self-knowledge. Comments Shankara (1.2)

‘Without extraordinary intelligence, it is not possible, verily, to overcome the

identification of the Self with organs of hearing and so on.’

It is then that man realizes that he is not this body, not a mere bundle of sensations,
thoughts and emotions, but that he is divine. This knowledge does not come to us easily.
It requires penetrating discrimination, for which one needs penetrating intelligence along
with great moral courage and heroism.

10
The Upanishads set out clearly and precisely the exact steps which the human mind must
take in order to attain this knowledge. And they also clearly describe the dangers that lie
in the way of this quest, and ask the student to be armed with extreme alertness and
sincerity.

So here in the second verse, we have the teacher’s explanation: the wise man separates
the Ātman from the whole apparatus of the mind and body; he rises out of sense-life and
attains immortality through Self-realization.

The raw individual, as he is now, wrongly identifies the Ātman, the Self, with the body
and the senses; the more intelligent may identify the Ātman with mind or the ego. The
wise one alone knows that these are not all selves, including the ego, subject to change
and destruction, but that his Ātman is the immortal and fearless one. Says Shankara in his
Vivekachudamani (Verse 160):

‘The dull-witted man thinks he is only the body; the book-learned man identifies himself
with the mixture of body and soul. But the sage, possessed of realization through
discrimination, looks upon the eternal Ātman as the Self and thinks, ‘I am Brahman (The
Self of All).’

We find echo of this teaching in the second discourse which Buddha gave to his five
disciples in Sārnāth immediately after his own enlightenment. Stripping the Self of all its
unreal non-Self elements, Buddha said (Vinaya Pitaka, Mahāvagga, Khandaka 1, VI, 42-
46):

‘Again what think you Bhikkhus? Is the material form permanent (niccam) or
impermanent (a-niccam)?

‘Impermanent revered Sir.’

But that which is impermanent, is that suffering (dukkham) or happiness (sukham)?

‘Suffering revered Sir’

‘That then, which is impermanent, suffering, and by nature changeable (vi-parināma

dhammam), is it proper to regard it thus: This is mine, I am this, this is my Self (etam
mama, eso’ham asmi, eso me attā)?

‘No indeed, revered Sir.’

‘Is sensation permanent? …..Is perception permanent? Is predisposition permanent?.....

That, then, which is impermanent, suffering, and by nature changeable, is it proper to
regard it thus: This is mine, I am this, this is my Self?’

‘No indeed, revered Sir.’

‘And so, Bhikkhus, all material form, whether past, future or present, whether within us
or external, whether gross or subtle, low or high, far or near, is to be regarded with
right insight, as it really is (yathā bhūtam) , thus: This is not mine, I am not this, this is
not my Self….All sensation…. Gross or subtle, all perception….gross or subtle…..all

11
predisposition…low or high,…. all consciousness…far or near, is to be regarded with right
insight, as it really is, thus: This is not mine, I am not this, this is not my Self.

‘Regarding thus, O Bhikkhus an instructed Āryan (noble) disciple becomes indifferent to

(nibbindati) material form, becomes indifferent to sensation, becomes indifferent to
perception, becomes indifferent to consciousness. Becoming indifferent, he becomes
free from desire (vi rajjati); through non-desire he is liberated.’

Regarding thus, man becomes immortal, amrtā bhavanti, says Kena Upanishad. In his first
discourse in Sārnāth Buddha spoke of his realization in identical language (Sutta Pitaka,
Majjhima Nikāya, Sutta 26)

‘Hear me Bhikkhus, the immortal has been gained by me. I teach, I show, the Dharma, if
you walk as I teach, you will ere long and in the present life learn fully for yourselves,
realize, and having attained, abide in the supreme fulfillment of the holy life.’

Here, then, we have the foundation of the most practical philosophy, the message of the
universal and practical spirituality. The knowledge of the Ātman, the knowledge that ‘I
am the pure and deathless Self’ is the on which we can raise a strong, steady and broad
character. This teaching has been given to mankind again and again by spiritual teachers.
Jesus gave his parable of the wise and foolish men who built their houses on the rock and
earth respectively. (Luke, vi. 48, 49).

The Gitā also develops its scheme of practical spirituality on the basis of this divine in
the heart of man and speaks of the man of steady wisdom—the stithaprajña—as the fruit
of that spirituality.

In the next two verses of the Upanishad, the third and fourth of the chapter one, the
teacher leads the student to a fuller understanding of the nature of the Ātman:

3 ‘The eye cannot approach It, neither speech, nor mind. We do not therefore know It,
nor do we know how to teach It.’

4 ‘It is different from what is known, and It is beyond what is unknown. Thus have we
heard from our predecessors who instructed us about It.’

How guarded is the language used by the teacher here! The experience of which this is a
report is difficult to communicate. Hence language has to be used with the greatest care.
Language in the market place is of one type and language in the laboratory is of quite a
different type. In the latter we need greater precision and brevity. And it is still more
exiting in the plane of spiritual experience.

Here the sage is trying o communicate to the student his profound experience. But he
finds it difficult to express this in words. So he simply says that ‘the eyes do not go
there’, and so on. The eyes, ears, speech, and mind are among the instruments by which
we gain experience and communicate it. They however, fail with respect to the Ātman.

The more rarefied the ideas, the more refined must be the language employed to express
them. But even the most purified, the most refined language fails to describe the Ātman.
So the sage adds, very simply, na vidmo, we do not know, na vijānīmo yathaitat
anushishyāt, nor do we know how to communicate It to you. The experience is so

12
transcendental that it leaves no tracks behind. Says Gaudapāda in his Māndukya Kārikā
(IV. 95):

‘They alone are said to be of great intellect (wisdom) who are farm in their conviction of
the Self, beyond causality and ever the same. This ordinary men cannot grasp.’

In his comment on the above verse, Shankara quotes the following verse from one of the
Smrtis:

‘Even the gods puzzled while trying to follow in the footsteps of those who leave no
track behind, of those who realize themselves in all beings and who are always devoted
to the welfare of all.’

Again and again the Upanishads speak of Brahman as the end of a trackless path, but they
do not leave us helpless. They assure us that difficult though It is to attain, It is not
unattainable. It is not easy to teach It in the way one teaches other subjects, but the
student can be helped and guided towards It. The first requirement is that the student of
this subject must be in a frame of mind somewhat different from that of the student of
all other subjects. Here is needed extreme alertness and the capacity to learn from
suggestive hints. In the earlier stages of education there is much talking and instruction
by the teacher; and this becomes less and less in the higher stages where student’s mind,
trained in alertness and thinking becomes capable of learning from hints and suggestion
from the teacher. This process reaches its highest consummation in communication of
spiritual knowledge. This finds vivid illustration in the episodes of teacher-student
communication of several Upanishads.

Here in this third verse of the chapter one of the Kena Upanishad, we find the sage
impressing upon the student that the knowledge he seeks cannot be given to him for the
asking. He has to get it for himself. ‘I am helpless to communicate to you in the
customary way’, says the teacher. ‘But I shall help you with a few hints.’ The Ātman says
the teacher in the next verse, (verse 4), anyadeva tat viditāt — ‘is other than everything
that is known.’ That is the difficulty. Viditā means ‘known’. Whatever is known through
the senses and the mind, this Ātman is entirely different from all such things. So all our
present knowledge will have to be turned aside. It has no value here. In this sphere, all
positive science becomes nescience. It merely brings us knowledge of the world of
change, of drshyam, of the objective world. It gives us knowledge about things that are
subject to the modification of birth, growth, decay and death. But the Ātman is none of
these. It is other than everything that is known.

On hearing this, our minds tend to conclude that the Ātman then, must be something
unknown and unknowable, if not entirely non-existent. So why search for It? The mind
naturally recoils from searching for something that is both unknown and unknowable. This
idea entered several modern western philosophies, especially that of Herbert Spencer,
after Kant had proved through his Critique of Pure Reason that the human mind had no
capacity to know the noumenon.

The Upanishads, however deal with this question rather differently. The Ātman, the
absolute and the infinite Reality, beyond the categories of speech and thought, is beyond
the categories of both known and the unknown. The Ātman is not unknown in this sense.
For it is known of all, because It is the Drk, the eternal Seer, the Self of all. It is not
known as a item of objective experience, but It is the Self of the knower himself, and, as

13
such, more known than any known object. For what is more known to me than my own
Self? And so the teacher gives the next hint that It is Aviditāt adhi, ‘more than (or
beyond) the unknown’, and adds:

Iti shushruma pūrveshām ye nah tat vyāchachakshire

‘Thus have we heard from our previous teachers who explained It to us.’

With what humility the sage speaks! He claims nothing for himself. Swami Vivekananda
often referred to this humility of the sages of India who wrote great books but never
claimed any originality for themselves. A modern writer, on the other hand, he said,
perhaps steals from others most of the things he writes, and then claims them all to be
his own.

But there is a further significance in this statement by the sage of the Kena Upanishad.
Since the Ātman cannot be perceived by the senses and the mind, the student must hear
about It from illumined souls. The sage has himself experienced It as his teacher had
done before him. By this assurance the student will be encouraged to enter upon the
path himself, grasping it by the few hints that he has been given. If Ātman is beyond
speech and thought, if It is anyadeva tat viditāt, other than everything that is known,
and also aviditāt adhi, more than the unknown, if It is beyond both known and unknown,
then what is It? And how are we to realize It? This is the question that the rest of the
first chapter attempts to answer.

The first four verses the Kena Upanishad told us about the nature of the Ātman and the
difficulty of Its comprehension. We have also referred the significance of this approach to
man’s search for ultimate reality. The mind first seeks for the meaning of existence in
the various objects in events of the external world. Unable to get conclusive answer from
this field, man later turns his attention to that profound mystery which lies within, his
own Self. The search for this mystery takes him beyond the world of relativity, the world
revealed by speech and thought, to the world of pure Being and pure Awareness, the
world of his true nature, the eternal non-dual Self.

This realization is the supreme achievement of the human genius; and it is the legacy
which the Upanishads have left for all humanity. The Kena Upanishad itself will tell us
about the glory of this realization a few verses later (II. 4)

Ātmanā vindate vīryam vidyayā vindate amrtam

‘Man achieves great energy through the Ātman, and immortality through Its realization.’

The Nature of Reality

We discussed the difficulty experienced by the teacher of the Upanishad in

communicating his realization of the Ātman. The language and the thought become
extremely rarefied. The teacher and the student hardly speak; they just indicate their
meaning in suggestive hints. In the transcendental realm of the Self, words assume their
true status as suggestive symbols, the fainter, the more suggestive. As in Vedānta, as in
the great scientific thought today, words are valued as symbols only. As one great
scientist has put it:

14
‘Words are but the counters of wise men; they do but reckon with them; but they are
money of fools.’

The third verse of the Kena Upanishad told us this Ātman is beyond speech, beyond the
sense of hearing, beyond the mind; and the Upanishad added in the fourth verse:

Anyadeva tat viditāt atho aviditāt adhi

‘It is other than all that is known, and It is also beyond the unknown.’

The statement conveys the philosophic seriousness of the Upanishadic mind. Commenting
on this, Shankara says:

‘Apart from the Ātman (one’s own Self), there cannot, verily be any other entity which,
can be other than both the known and unknown; and therefore Ātman is Brahman.’

The Spiritual Character of the Absolute

The realizationof the infinite dimension of the Self follows from the fact that it is other
than the known and the unknown. If the infinite Self is our true nature, then we are
essentially birthless and deathless and immortal. Death pertains to the body, to the sense
organs, to the mind, and to the ego. These essentially change and finally die; they are
not our Self, either singly or in combination. Our true form is infinite and immortal; this
is elucidated in many an Upanishadic dialogues between disciple and teacher. These
dialogues bear the impress of intimate communion between minds. They are not like the
discourses given by a learned lecturer to a class of listless students of philosophy in some
of our modern colleges. They bear the stamp of philosophical quest and spiritual
earnestness. The teaching they convey proceeds from spiritual realization and leads to
spiritual comprehension.

The Upanishad now proceeds to elucidate in refrain, in the fifth and subsequent five
verses of its first chapter, the infinite nature of the Self of man:

5 ‘What speech cannot reveal, but what reveals speech—know thou That alone as
Brahman, and not this (anything objective)that people worship here.’

6 ‘What mind does not comprehend, but what comprehends the mind— know thou That
alone as Brahman, and not this that people worship here.’

7 ‘What sight fails to see, but what sees sight— know thou That alone as Brahman, and
not this that people worship here.’

8 ‘What hearing fails to hear, but what hears hearing— know thou That alone as Brahman,
and not this that people worship here.’

9 ‘What smell does not reveal, but what reveals smell— know thou That alone as
Brahman, and not this that people worship here.’

Conceptual God versus True God

15
These five verses proclaim the spiritual character of the Absolute or the Brahman: It is
the Self of man, which his sense-organs and mind cannot reveal but which reveals the
sense-organs and the mind. These verses also stress the need to go beyond all idolatry in
order to be able to worship God in spirit and in truth. Vedānta treats as idolatry not only
the worship of stocks and stones, which Semitic monotheism condemns as heathen
superstition, but also the worship of the Semitic monotheistic personal God as well. For
that God is a concept and, as much an item of the objective universe as the heathen idols
are. Man creates his gods, including the monotheistic God. The only uncreated God is the
eternal Self in man; and that is the God that Vedānta proclaims. Says Swami Vivekananda
in his lecture on ‘The Real and Apparent Man’ (Complete Works, Vol. II.p. 279):

‘In worshipping God we have been always worshipping our hidden Self.’

The God proclaimed by man’s speech and thought is as much an idol as that fashioned by
his hands. Dissatisfied with these creations of human imagination, the Upanishads sought
for the immortal and eternal God in the soul of man and found Him in the ‘Ātman which
is immediate and direct and immortal Self of all’, as the Brhadāranyaka Upanishad
majestically expresses it (III. iv. 1). The Upanishads also discovered that, illumined by
the knowledge of this living God, all worship of idols becomes transformed into worship
of ideals, idols becoming mere symbols.

It is the philosophic comprehension that helped Vedānta to assume a sympathetic and

understanding view of all forms of idol worship. As Rg Veda put it (x. 164. 46): Ekam sat;
viprā vahudhā vadanti — ‘Truth is one; sages call it various names.’ It is equally the lack
of this philosophic comprehension that made the Semitic religions dogmatic, narrow, and
exclusive-minded, and made them condemn as superstition what they termed heathen
idolatry of every kind, that is all idolatry other than their own special brands. In the
words of the historian Toynbee (An Historian’s Approach to Religion, pp. 282-83):

‘It seems to be a matter of historical fact that, hitherto, the Judaic religions have been
considerably more exclusive-minded than the Indian religions have. In a chapter of the
world’s history in which adherents of living higher religions seem likely to enter into
much more intimate relations with one another than ever before, the spirit of the
Indian religions, blowing where it listeth, may perhaps help to winnow a traditional
Pharisaism out of Muslim, Christian, and Jewish hearts.’

The realization of the unity of Brahman and Ātman lies at the back of India’s charity and
comprehension in the world of religion; her long history has been marked by a pervasive
mood of acceptance of other forms of belief. This realization did not remain merely as a
spiritual idea but became the inspiration of saints and simple devotees as much as of
administrators and statesmen. It found brilliant expression in Sri Ramakrishna who
realized the universality of truth and the harmony of all religions. Man takes to a
particular symbol of God and worships it. He is devoted to it. He ignores everything else;
and he develops the feeling that that alone is true, that that alone is the way of
salvation. He thinks that he alone has the light and all others are in varying degrees of
darkness and he then prays to his God: ‘O Lord , give to all others the light that I
possess.’

This is how bigotry, narrowness, and in its train, persecution come into the world.
Opposed to it the Indian idea that the divine Light is in the heart of all; that men

16
approach It through the help of various symbols, and that the paths are many but the
goal is one. The Indian approach makes for tolerance, understanding, and peace.

India discovered long ago the truth of the limitation of the senses. The senses reveal so
little, though to an average man the senses and the mind are gateways of all available
knowledge. But this understanding grows, man begins to realize more and more the utter
incapacity of the senses to pierce appearances and give knowledge of truth. This
understanding has come to modern science in the twentieth century; it was not there in
the nineteenth century.

The teacher of the Kena Upanishad denies the power of the senses and the mind to reveal
the reality of the Self; for that reality is the power behind even them. Can a torchlight
help to reveal the sun? They perform their own limited functions with the nourishment
drawn from that infinite source. The last chapter of this Upanishad, as we shall see later,
expounds this truth through an interesting parable.

Tadeva brahma tvam viddhi nedam yadidam upāsate — ‘Know thou That alone as
Brahman, and not this that people worship here,’ says the Upanishad. This breaths the
deep concern of the Upanishad to remove all traces of materiality and objectivity from
conception of God, and to give him a living God in place of his anthropomorphic
conceptions. This is the eternal Self of man. In the light of the living God, the
anthropomorphic gods also become transformed into living gods and the different faiths
into tolerant co-operating units. Vedānta does not condemn or destroy any faith or form
of worship. Its aim is to illumine every faith and every worship with light of the one
living God of all religions. Says Swami Vivekananda (Complete Works, Vol. II, pp. 81-82)

‘What are these ideas of religion and God and searching for the hereafter? Why does
man look for a God? Why does man in every nation, in every state of society, want a
perfect ideal somewhere, either in man, in God, or elsewhere? Because that idea is
within you. It was your own heart beating and you did not know, you were mistaking it
for something external. It is the God within your Self that is propelling you to seek for
Him. After long searches here and there, in temples and in churches, in earths and in
heavens, at last you come back, completing the circle from where you started, to your
own soul and find that He, for whom you have been seeking all over the world, for
whom you have been weeping and praying in churches and temples, on whom you were
looking as the mystery of all mysteries shrouded in the clouds, is nearest of the near, is
your own Self, the reality of your life, body and soul. That is your own nature. Assert it,
manifest it. Not to become pure, you are pure already. You are not to be perfect, you
are that already. Nature is like that screen which is hiding the reality beyond. Every
good thought that you think or act upon, is simply tearing the veil, as it were, and the
purity, the infinity, the God behind, manifests itself more and more. This is the whole
history of man. Finer and finer becomes the veil, more and more light behind shines
forth, for it is its nature to shine. It cannot be known; in vain we try to know it. Were it
knowable, it would not be what it is, for it is the eternal subject. Knowledge is a
limitation, knowledge is objectifying. He is the eternal subject of everything, the
eternal witness in this universe, your own Self. Knowledge is as it were, a lower step, a
degeneration. We are that eternal subject already; how can we know it? It is the real
nature of every man and he is struggling to express it in various ways.’

17
Chapter 2

In this second chapter of this Upanishad we are treated to a subtle communication of

spiritual truth from teacher to student. The teacher helps the disciple to capture the
right frame of mind with which to comprehend this extremely subtle truth of the Ātman.
The disciple tries earnestly and feels that he has comprehended the truth well; and he
expresses this to his teacher. But the teacher in order to remove the least flaw in his
understanding of so vital a truth, asks the student, in the very opening verse, to reassess
himself carefully:

1 ‘If you think that you know Brahman well, then you know little indeed; for the form of
Brahman that you see as conditioned in living beings is but a trifle. Therefore you should
enquire further about Brahman.’

(The disciple, after reflecting further and fully realizing Brahman, replied):

‘I think I have understood (Brahman).’

The teacher had a suspicion that the disciple had understood Brahman as the spiritual
presence in the vast objective manifold; and even in this, he felt, the disciple had not
grasped the infinite dimensions of that presence. Daharamevāpi nūnam tvam vettha
brahmano rūpam — ‘very little indeed of Brahman’s form have you known’, said the
teacher and continued: Atha nu te (brahman) mimāmsyām eva — ‘Therefore your
Brahman needs further investigation.’

The disciple took the hint and sat quietly and thought deeply about the implication of the
words of the teacher that Brahman is other than the known and beyond the unknown.
‘What can this profound truth be?’ In the depths of his meditation, the truth dawned on
the disciple’s pure mind and he exclaimed Manye viditam — ‘I think I know it.’

The cautious mood and the careful approach on the part of disciple and teacher bespeak
of the extreme subtlety of the subject. Easy and quick comprehension may turn out to be
wrong comprehension, as in the case of Virochana, whose discipleship together with Indra
under the teacher Prajāpati forms a fascinating section of the Chhāndogya Upanishad
(VIII. vii-xv).

Referring to this episode in his comment on this verse of the Kena Upanishad, Shankara
says:

‘It has been seen that when the teacher said: ‘The person that seen in the eye, this is
Ātman, this is the immortal and fearless Brahman.’ Virochana even though a scholar and
ruler of the asuras and son Prajāpati, on account of the blemish in his nature, and in
spite of non–comprehension of the teaching understood the opposite of what was taught,
namely, that the body was the Ātman. Similarly Indra, the ruler of the devas, not
comprehending the teaching at his first, second, and third attempts, grasped the truth of
Brahman at the fourth attempt from the initial exposition itself as a consequence of the
destruction of the blemish in his nature.’

It is a matter of daily experience in education that some students stumble many times in
trying to understand even an ordinary subject. The capacity to grasp also varies from

18
student to student. To quote Shankara’s interesting remarks on this point from the same
commentary:

‘Even in the world, from among a group of students listening to a teacher, some students
grasp correctly, some wrongly, some just the opposite, while some fail to grasp anything
at all; (If this is so in the worldly sphere), what to speak of the difficulty in
comprehending the truth of the Ātman which transcends the senses?

Cautiousness of Statement

The student said: manye viditam—‘I think I know It.’ What was the content of his
realization? We have it in the next verse (II. 2) in the words of the student himself:

2 ‘I do not think I know It well; nor do I think that I do not know It; I know too. He
amongst us know It who knows that It is other than the unknown and known,’

In his commentary on this verse, Shankara brings out the power of spiritual conviction
behind the words of the student:

‘The teacher had said: “It is other than the known and beyond the unknown.” On the
strength of the spiritual tradition embodied in that saying and on the strength also of
rational conviction and personal experience, the student roared (like a lion) thus
demonstrating his firm conviction in the knowledge of Brahman.’

Naham manye suvedeti — ‘I do not think I know It well.’ This kind of knowing—Suveda—
can apply only to things objective. But Brahman is the eternal subject. And therefore the
second negation: no na vedeti—‘But not that I do not know It.’ How can the student say
that he does not know It when he has realized It as his own Self? What he has achieved is
not mediate knowledge but knowledge immediate and direct, like the recognition of
one’s name; and so he adds: veda cha—‘I know too.’

Says Shankara in his Vivekachudāmani (Verse 532):

‘The awareness “I am Mr. Devadatta” is independent of external circumstances; similar

is the case with the realization of a knower of Brahman that he is Brahman.’

Questioned by the teacher, the student in the Kena Upanishad clarifies himself in the
second half of the verse: ‘He amongst us knows It who knows that It is other than the
unknown and the known.’

And in the verse (II.3) the Upanishad itself clarifies the student’s statement:

3 ‘He knows It, who knows (conceives) It not; and he knows It not, who (conceives) It. To
the man of true knowledge, It is the “unknown”, while to the ignorant It is the “known.”
’

A concept of the idea of Brahman is not Brahman. When a man thinks he knows Brahman,
he has formed only a concept of It; He does not know Brahman truly. On the other hand,
He who truly knows Brahman, knows that he cannot know It through his sense-organs and
mind. In the words of the Ashtāvakra Samhitā (XII. 7)

19
 ‘Thinking on the unthinkable One, one betakes oneself only to a form of thought.
Therefore giving up that thought, thus verily do I abide.’

Sri Ramakrishna explains this truth through a parable (The Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna,
1947 edition, Ramakrishna Math, Madras 4. p.28):

‘A man had two sons. The father sent them to a preceptor to learn the knowledge of
Brahman. After a few years they returned from their preceptor’s house and bowed low
before their father. Wanting to measure the depth of their knowledge of Brahman, he
first questioned the older of the two boys. “My child,” he said, “You have studied all the
scriptures. Now tell me what is the nature of Brahman?” The boy began to explain
Brahman by reciting various texts from the Vedas. The father did not say anything. Then
he asked the younger son the same question. But the boy remained silent and stood with
eyes cast down. No words escaped his lips. The father was pleased and said to him: “My
child, you have understood a little of Brahman. What It cannot be expressed in words.” ’

The greatest among the mystics of East and West have referred to this inadequacy of
human language to communicate the deepest spiritual experience. The thought of Jacob
Boehme, a great European mystic who was an unlearned shoe-maker, and of Eckhart, the
scholarly saint, also of Europe, bears close kinship to the thoughts of the Upanishads.
Says Boehme (Quoted by Evelyn Underhill: The Mystics of the Church, p.217):

‘I can but stammer of great mysteries like child that is beginning to speak; so very little
can the earthly tongue express of that which the Spirit comprehends.’

Says Eckhart:

‘ “Thou shalt apprehend God without image, without semblance, and without means”—
but for me, to know God thus, without means, I must be very He and He very me.’

Even great masters of language have felt a profound humility before the deep mystery of
experience. Sings the English poet Tennyson in his Memoriam (54):

Behold, we know not anything;

I can but trust that good shall fall
At last—far off—at last to all,
And every winter change to spring.
So runs my dream: but what am I?
An infant crying in the night:
An infant crying for the light:
And with no language but a cry.

The Nature of Brahman-Realization

If Brahman is entirely unknown to the knowing ones — avijnātam vijānatām — then what
is the difference between the knowing one and the ignorant one? Therefore it cannot be
that Brahman is entirely unknown to the knowing one. In what way, then, does he know
Brahman? The next verse, verse four of chapter two, gives the answer to the question in
one of the most profound utterances of all the Upanishads.

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4 ‘Indeed, he attains immortality, who realizes It in and through every bodha (pulsation
of every knowledge and awareness). Through the Ātman he obtains strength and vigour,
and through (Its) knowledge, immortality.’

Pratibodhaviditam means bodham bodham pratividitam — known through every mental

act. The Ātman is pure Awareness is the unchangeable witness of all mental states,
whether waking, dreaming, or in dreamless sleep. Shankara’s comment in this verse is
illuminating:

He is the Ātman to whom all mental modification are objects of awareness, who knows
all mental states, who is the seer of all mental states, who himself is of the nature of
pure Awareness, whose reflection is perceived by mental states in and through mental
states as indistinguishable from them, there being no other means of knowing Him.’

The Ātman is the light of pure Awareness which lights up every act of knowledge and
awareness of the mind. It follows accordingly that every mental modification reveals the
light of the Ātman, reveals the light that lights up the modification. Hence the Ātman is
pratibodhaviditam — ‘known through every pulsation of awareness and knowledge.’ As
expressed by Shankara in his Vivekachudamani (Verse 217):

‘That which clearly manifests Itself in the waking, dream, and dreamless sleep states,
which is inwardly perceived in the mind, in various forms, as an unbroken series of “I”
impressions; which is the witness of the ego, buddhi (intellect), etc. which are of diverse
forms and modifications; and which shines as the eternal existence-knowledge-bliss
Absolute, know thou this Ātman, thy own Self, within thy heart.’

The continuity of the Indian Spiritual Tradition

Spirituality, according to the Upanishads, is as much a communicable and verifiable truth

as any physical scientific truth. The behaviour of liquids, solids, and gases under high
temperatures or low, under high pressure or low, is scientific truth arrived at by
experiment, and open to verification by any competent individual. This Ātman, the divine
nature of man, and Its realization, which this Upanishad expounds through a dialog
between a realized teacher and his earnest student, is truth similarly established by
spiritual experiment, and verified by countless spiritual experiments in subsequent
stages. As in physical science, so in religion, we do not live on the plane of guessing or
surmise but on the plane of verified and verifiable truth. This dialogue between teacher
and student discloses the last stages of the journey of man to spiritual centre of his being
which is also the spiritual centre of all existence. The summit of that experience is the
truth expressed in the equation: Ātman is Brahman. That experience makes the fortunate
ones who achieve it universal in vision and sympathy.

The Kena Upanishad dialogue is not the account of a final and closed revelation which we
are asked to accept in faith. On the contrary, it is a revelation open to re-creation in his
own life by every man and woman; it has found verification in scores of spiritual
experimenters in subsequent ages, of whom the most glorious and outstanding was
Buddha. It found its latest verification in Sri Ramakrishna in the 19th century. The
account of his Advaita sādhana under guidance of his teacher, Totapuri, throws a flood of
light on this Kena Upanishad dialogue and reveals the livingness and unbroken continuity
of the Upanishadic spiritual tradition.

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 Totapuri and Sri Ramakrishna

By about the end of 1865, when he was twenty-nine years old, Sri Ramakrishna had
finished his ten years-long sādhanās based on the path of bhakti or devotion in which the
devotee looks upon God as a Person and as the Other. He had been blessed with
innumerable visions and other spiritual experiences. Endowed with the highest purity and
renunciation, his mind had attained an extraordinary moral and spiritual sensitivity which
made it plunge into a divine mood at the slightest spiritual suggestion. Absorbed in one
of these moods, Sri Ramakrishna was one day sitting in a corner of the open portico at
the bathing ghat of the Dakshineswar temple on the sacred river; the Gangā. Just then a
wandering monk, by name Totapuri, alighted from a boat at the steps of the ghat, and
walked up to the portico. As soon as his eyes fell on Sri Ramakrishna, he felt an instant
attraction for this young man and felt a conviction in his heart of hearts that he was far
out of the ordinary.

Totapuri himself was out of the ordinary. Hailing from Punjab and entering the monastic
life in his boyhood, he was endowed with a robust physique and an iron will; and he had a
fascination for the impersonal God, the non-dual Brahman. After forty years of
unremitting spiritual practice, performed on the banks of sacred Narmada river in Central
India, he obtained the fruit of this path of the Advaita Vedānta, the experience of
Nirvikalpa Samādhi, the impersonal unconditioned state which Shankara describes thus in
three glorious verses in his Vivekachūdāmani (408-410) (in some editions (409-411)) :

‘The wise one realizes in his heart in samadhi, the infinite Brahman, which is an
ineffable Something, of the nature of eternal Knowledge and absolute Bliss, which has no
exemplar, which transcends all limitations, is ever free and without activity, which is like
the limitless sky, invisible and absolute.’

‘The wise one realizes in his heart in samadhi, the infinite Brahman, which is devoid of
touch of cause and effect, which is the Reality beyond all imagination, which is
homogeneous, matchless, beyond the reach of logical proofs, (but) proved by the
experience of the wise as recorded in the Vedāntic spiritual tradition, and ever familiar
to man as the basis of his of his self awareness.’

‘The wise one realizes in his heart in samadhi, the infinite Brahman, which is undecaying
and immortal, the Reality which is the negation of all negations, which resembles the
ocean when the waves have subsided all the modifications of the gunas (nature’s modes),
and which is eternal, pacified, and One.’

Having achieved the blessed experience, Totapuri wandered from place to place without
any aim or purpose of his own, but fulfilling inscrutable divine purposes. The
incomparable strength and freedom behind that wandering is difficult to gauge by
ordinary minds. We get a glimpse of it in Buddha’s inspiring charge to the enlightened
soul (Khaggavisana Sutta, Sutta Nipata, Khuddaka Nikaya, Sutta Pitaka) :

Go forward without a path!

Fearing nothing, caring for nothing,
Wander alone, like the rhinoceros!
Even as the lion not trembling at noises,
Even as the lotus-leaf unstained by the water,
Do thou wander alone, like the rhinoceros!

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Realizing Brahman as the one Reality, and looking upon the world as an appearance,
Totapuri spent his life under the canopy of the heaven, alike in storm and sunshine,
maintaining himself on alms. His wanderings took him to many a holy place in India,
including Gangāsagar in Bengal, where holy Gangā meets the sea. It was on his return
journey from there that he went to the Dakshineswar temple which, thanks to the piety,
generosity, and broad-mindedness of its founder, Rani Rasmani, was then drawing holy
men, ordinary and extraordinary, from all creeds and sects. Some of these, like Jatādhārī
and Bhairavī Brāhmanī, had already met Sri Ramakrishna and guided him to realization
through their respective spiritual paths of the bhakti school. Totapuri represented an
altogether different path of the impersonal God, the path blazoned by the sages of the
Upanishads and the great Buddha.

As soon as Totapuri’s eyes fell on Sri Ramakrishna he recognized in him a fit aspirant for
the path of the unconditioned and impersonal Brahman. He asked Sri Ramakrishna
whether he would like to learn Vedānta. He told him ‘You seem to be an advanced seeker
after truth. Would you like to be initiated in the path of Advaita realization?’ Sri
Ramakrishna felt a divine urge within to agree. Under Totapuri’s directions, Sri
Ramakrishna performed the various ceremonies preliminary to the grand ceremony of
sanyāsa — total renunciation of the world. One day, about two hours before dawn, both
repaired to a small hut in a sequestered spot, not far from Sri Ramakrishna’s room.
Totapuri administered to Sri Ramakrishna the traditional monastic vows of complete
renunciation of all the pleasures of life, both earthly and heavenly, and the holy vow to
dedicate all one’s mind and heart to the highest truth of non-dual Brahman, and to be a
source of fearlessness to all beings. And in the stillness of that early dawn, the teacher
and the disciple re-enacted the momentous drama of tangible spiritual communication
which has so often been enacted in India before. Prostrating himself before his teacher,
Sri Ramakrishna then took his seat to receive instruction from Totapuri in the philosophy
of Brahman.

To quote the words of Swami Saradananda one of the direct disciples of Sri Ramakrishna
(Sri Ramakrishna, the Great Master, 1952 Edition, Ramakrishna Math, Madras, pp. 254-
55):

‘He (Totapuri) said to the Master: “The Brahman, the one substance which alone is
eternally pure, eternally awakened, unlimited by time, space and causation, is absolutely
real. Through Māyā, which makes the impossible possible, It causes, by virtue of its
influence, to seem (sic) that It is divided into names and forms. Brahman is never really
so. For at the time of samādhi, not even a drop, so to speak, of time and space, and
name and form, produced by Māyā is perceived. Whatever, therefore, within the bounds
of name and form can never be absolutely real. Shun it at a good distance. Break the firm
cage of name and form with the overpowering strength of a lion and come out of it. Dive
deep into the reality of the Self existing in yourself. Be one with It with the help of
samādhi. You will then see universe, consisting of name and form, vanish as it were into
the void; you will see the consciousness of the little “I” merge in that of the immense
“I”, where it ceases to function; and you will have the immediate knowledge of the
indivisible Existence-Knowledge-Bliss as yourself. The Brhadāranyaka Upanishad (II. iv.
14) says: ‘The consciousness, with the help of which a person sees another, knows
another, or hears another, is little or limited; whatever is limited is worthless; for the
supreme bliss is not there; but the knowledge established in which a person becomes
devoid of the consciousness of seeing another, knowing another, and hearing another, is
the immense or the unlimited one. With the help of that knowledge, one gets identified

23
with the supreme bliss. What mind or intellect is able to know that which exists as
Knower in the hearts of all?” ’

After instructing his disciple thus in the central ideas of the jnāna path of Vedānta,
Totapuri exhorted Sri Ramakrishna to fix his mind on the unconditioned Brahman. This
part of the momentous story is best told in the words of Sri Ramakrishna himself ( Life of
Sri Ramakrishna, Sixth Edition, pp. 189-90):

‘After the initiation, Nangta, “the naked one” (this was the appellation which Sri
Ramakrishna, out of respect, invariably used for his guru, who being a monk of the Nāgā
Order, generally went about naked) began to teach me the various conclusions of the
Advaita Vedānta and asked me to withdraw the mind completely from all objects and
dive into the Ātman. But in spite of my all attempts I could not cross the realm of name
and form and bring my mind to the unconditioned state. I had no difficulty in
withdrawing the mind from all other objects except one, the all too familiar form of the
blissful Mother—radiant and of the essence of pure Consciousness—which appeared before
me as a living form. Again and again I tried to concentrate my mind on the Advaita
teachings, but every time the Mother’s form stood in my way. In despair I said to the
“the naked one”, “It is hopeless”. I cannot raise my mind to the unconditioned state and
come face to face with the Ātman.” He grew exited and sharply said “What?” You can’t
do it. But you have to.” He cast his eyes around and finding a piece of glass he took it up
and pressing the point between my eyebrows said, “Concentrate the mind on this point.”
Then with a stern determination I again sat to meditate, and as soon as the gracious form
of the Divine Mother appeared before me. I used my discrimination as a sword and with it
severed it in two. There remained no more obstruction to my mind, which at once soared
beyond the relative plane, and I lost myself in samādhi.’

Sri Ramakrishna passed into the unconditioned state of the nirvikalpa samādhi; the body
became motionless. He had realized Brahman, become one with Brahman, beyond all
speech and thought.

Totapuri sat for a long time silently watching his disciple. Finding him still motionless, he
left the hut, locking the door from outside lest anyone should intrude without his
knowledge; he remained outside awaiting the disciple’s call from within to open the
door. The day passed, night came, a second and a third day and a night also passed, and
still there was no call. Totapuri was astonished. He opened the door and entered the
room. He was speechless with wonder to see Sri Ramakrishna in the very same position in
which he had left him. The face was calm, serene, and radiant. In breathless amazement
he examined the disciples heart and respiration and touched again and again the disciples
almost corpse like body. There was no sign of consciousness. He cried in bewilderment at
the miracle of this young man achieving in a single day this highest realization of
nirvikalpa samādhi which had taken him forty years of hard practice to realize.

Totapuri immediately took steps to bring the mind of his disciple down to the world of
phenomena. The little room rang with the holy mantra — Hari Om — uttered in a solemn
tone by the teacher. Little by little Sri Ramakrishna’s mind came to an awareness of the
outer world; and as he opened his eyes, he saw his teacher looking at him with
tenderness and admiration. The disciple reverently prostrated himself before the teacher
who in turn locked him in warm embrace.

 The Fruit of Wisdom Is Strength

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‘Through Ātman man obtains real strength, and through knowledge immortality; Ātmana
vindyate vīryam vidyayā vindate amrtam, said verse four of the second chapter of the
Kena Upanishad. Strength is the product of man’s knowing himself. A little self-
knowledge has enabled man to control animals physically stronger than himself. Man
possessed of self-knowledge control men bereft of it. Ordinary self-knowledge can be
used to control and exploit others; but self-knowledge proceeding from the Ātman, the
one Self in all, confers universality of outlook and sympathy, as the next verse of the
Upanishad will tell us. This Ātman is the infinite reservoir of all strength and energy. Its
manifestation is what we achieve through proper education. A well-developed character
manifests more of this innate strength and energy than an ill-developed character. There
is the quality of innateness and inalienability in the strength derived from all forms of
character as different from that derived from wealth and power and other external
possessions. Hence character is the most dependable source of strength and energy.
External possessions, on the other hand, can confer only limited strength and limited
fearlessness. Of all character, a spiritual character a character that draws nourishment
from the Ātman within manifests the greatest strength; for it overcomes death itself.
Commenting on this passage, Shankara says:

‘The strength proceeding from wealth, friends, magic incantations, drugs, austerity, and
mind-control cannot overcome death; because it is the product of things which are
themselves transitory. The strength proceeding from the knowledge of the Ātman, on the
contrary, is attained through the Ātman only and not through something else. Thus the
strength arising from the knowledge of the Ātman, being self-attained, can alone
overcome death, it being self-attained and not mediated by some other thing.’

Being the source of supreme strength, this knowledge confers also immortality. The
knowledge that “I am the Ātman” is also the knowledge that “I am immortal.”

The nature of this realization of immortality forms the theme of the fifth and last verse
of this second chapter which we shall discuss next.

In the last discussion the Kena-Upanishad expounded to us the nature of the highest
spiritual experience which is so rarely obtained because it lies beyond the senses and the
mind.

The Upanishad told us, in its own enigmatic language, that the profound truth of the
Ātman, our immortal divine nature, is unknown to those who know but known to those
who do not know. But if this truth is so transcendent and so extremely subtle, how are
we to grasp it, to profit by it?

The Upanishad in the fourth verse of the chapter two assured us that the Ātman, though
it transcends the mind and the senses, has yet left its impress, its footprints, so to say,
on the world of experience, especially on the mind and the senses.

Pratibodhaviditam matam amrtatatvam hi vindate — ‘Indeed, he attains immortality who

realizes the Ātman in and through every pulsation of knowledge and awareness.’

Footprints of the Ātman on the Sands of Experience

25
The movements of the mind reveal the presence of the Ātman behind. Says the
Brhadāranyaka Upanishad (I. iv. 7):

‘Of all these, this Self alone should be realized; One knows all these through It. Just as
one may get at (an animal) through its footprints, (so may one get the Self through Its
footprints on the sands of experience).’

Commenting on the above passage Shankara says:

‘How again, is This (Self) to be attained? It is thus replied: Just as, in the world, one
may get back a missing animal that is wanted by seeking it through its foot, “foot” here
means the ground with the print left by a cow etc.’

The Kena Upanishad further told us that this realization is the source of infinite strength:
Ātmanā vindate vīryam vidyayā vindate amrtam — ‘Man attains energy and vigour
through the Ātman, and immortality through the knowledge of It.’

Change and death belong to the body, the senses and the mind, to all things in our
personality that are composite. But the Ātman is a simple and not a compound. Hence it
is deathless. We become immortal when we become truly ourselves, when we know our
true nature.

Scholarship versus Spirituality

This Vidyā or knowledge is not the knowledge that we usually acquire through books or
through the study of nature. That cannot confer immortality, as it deals with the
perishable and the changeable and with things external to ourselves. This knowledge on
the other hand has reference to the unchangeable in experience, it is knowledge of the
Self, ātmajnāna, and not of the non-Self. It is beyond sense-knowledge, it is beyond the
known and unknown’, which are two categories of knowledge at the sense level,
anyadeva tat viditāt atho aviditāt adhi.

When a man understands this, he will consider the enormous fund of scholarship hitherto
gathered to be so much lumber in his head; he will then wish for nothing more than to
get rid of this mental weight, this learned ignorance, and strive for true knowledge.
When young Ramakrishna was pressed by his loving elder brother to go to school, he gave
reply characteristic of this mood and temper (Life of Ramakrishna, p. 50):

‘Brother, what shall I do with a mere bread winning education? I would rather acquire
that wisdom which will illumine my heart and, getting which one is satisfied forever.’

When Swami Vivekananda, then young Narendra about to appear for his law examination,
experienced this tremendous thirst for spiritual realization, the following interesting
conversation took place between him and his master, Sri Ramakrishna ( The Gospel of Sri
Ramakrishna, p. 925):

‘Master to Narendra smiling): “Won’t you continue your studies?” ’

‘Narendra (looking at the Master and M): “I shall feel greatly relieved if I find a medicine
that will make me forget all I have studied.” ’

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Says the Ashtāvakra Samhitā (XVI. 1 and 11):

‘My child, you may often speak on various scriptures or hear them. Even then you cannot
be established in the Self unless you forget all.’

‘Let even Hara (Shiva), Hari (Vishnu), or the lotus-born (Brahmā) be your instructor;
even then you cannot be established in the Self unless you forget all.’

The enormous energies proceeding from the personalities of the great spiritual teachers
of mankind like Buddha, Jesus, Ramakrishna, and Vivekananda have their source in this
immortal divine Self. All knowledge is power; but Self-knowledge is power par
excellence.

Realization Here and Now

Having thus expounded the glory and excellence of this knowledge the Upanishad now
proceeds to tell us, in the fifth and last verse of chapter two, that this realization is to
be achieved here and now, in this very life, and not in a post-mortem heaven:

5 ‘For one who realizes It here (in the world) there is true life. For one who does not so
realize It, great is the loss. Discovering the Ātman in every single being, the wise-ones
dying to this world (of sense-experience), become immortal.’

This is a great pronouncement of Vedānta. Truth is to be realized iha—here and now, in

this very life. This emphasis is valid only if truth is our very nature, our very birthright.
Truth is the very Self of man, declares Vedānta. True life for man begins only when he
turns his energies in the direction of the deathless Ātman within. It becomes fully
achieved when the Ātman is realized. The Upanishad summons man to this realization so
that he may experience true life before his body falls away. But if he neglects it and
misses it in this life, great shall be his loss. What other gain by way of wealth and power
and pleasure in the world, or the ephemeral delights in heaven, can compensate for this
loss? Asks Jesus (Mark, VIII. 36-7)

‘For what shall it profit a man if he shall gain the whole world and lose his own soul? Or
what shall a man give in exchange for his soul?’

The life of the senses is finite and trivial. All exclusively secular education has reference
to this finite level of existence. That education is healthy and creative when it leads man
to the search for this infinite existence, to the search for the true life; otherwise, it ends
in sharpening man’s sense appetites and in an endless round of the trivial and the finite,
which Vedānta characterizes as the stagnation of samsāra. And Vedānta finds the tragedy
of life in man’s confining himself, through spiritual blindness, to the finite and the
trivial, in spite of his being born heir to the vast and infinite.

What must be the dimension of that awareness which lifts man from the finite and trivial
and gives him an insight into the vast and the infinite! This movement from the finite to
the infinite is also the movement from the false life to the true; it is also the passing
from mortality to immortality. All moral and spiritual life expresses this passion for and
movement towards the infinite, the immortal. The human heart is never satisfied with
the small, with the finite; it ever seeks the great, the infinite. In the words of the
Chhāndogya Upanishad (VII. xxiii. 1)

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 ‘That which is infinite is verily happiness, there is no happiness in the small, (in the
finite; the great (the Infinite) alone is happiness, the Infinite alone should verily be
sought after.’

Universality of Vision

The transcendence of the limited ego and the liberation of the universal man is what is
sought to be achieved by the scientific and moral discipline of detachment. The
individual is not destroyed by the practice of detachment, but grows into largeness and
fullness. Says J.B.S. Haldane in his book Possible Worlds:

‘I notice that when I think logically and scientifically or act morally my thoughts and
actions cease to be characteristic of myself and are those of intelligent or moral being in
the same position. In fact, I am already identifying my mind with an absolute or
unconditioned mind.

‘Only in so far as I do this can I see any probability of my survival, and the more I do so
the less I am interested in my private affairs and the less desire do I feel for personal
immortality.’

It is this growth and development of the human awareness, which has been nourished
earlier by scientific and ethical discipline, that Vedanta consummate in the spiritual
realization of universality in this very life. Says Swami Vivekananda in his lecture on
‘Practical Vedanta’ (Complete Works, Vol. II. p. 331)

‘The Vedāntic idea is not the destruction of the individual, but its real preservation. We
cannot prove the individual by any other means but by referring to the universal, by
proving that this individual is really the universal. If we think of the individual as
separate from everything else in the universe, it cannot stand a minute. Such a thing
never existed.’

Where shall man seek for the Infinite and the immortal? Within himself say the
Upanishads, within himself, says also Jesus. The Infinite is his true nature; that is his true
dimension. The Self of man is eternally pure, awakened and free, says Vedanta. In the
firm language of the Chhandogya Upanishad (VI. xiv. 3)

‘Everything in this universe has this subtle (infinite) Reality for its Self; That is the True;
That is the Ātman; and That thou art.’

The Evolutionary Vision

Vedānta views the entire evolutionary process as progressive evolution of structure and
form and greater and greater manifestation of the Infinite Self within. It is evolution of
matter and manifestation of spirit. The first emergence of living organisms is marked by
the appearance of a rudimentary form of awareness. This awareness grows in richness
and variety as we move up the evolutionary ladder. The evolution of the nervous system
discloses a progressive development of awareness in depth and range, and a consequent
increase in the grip of the organism on its environment.

This awareness achieves a new and significant dimension with the appearances of man on
the evolutionary scene. The field of awareness of all other organism is, largely, the

28
external environment, and to a small extent, the interior of their bodies as well. Man
alone has awareness of the self along with awareness of the not-self. Self- awareness,
which nature achieved through the evolution of the human organism, is a new dimension
of awareness containing tremendous implications both for nature and for man. A
rudimentary form of self-awareness enabled the earliest man to establish his dominance
over the entire animal kingdom. Neurologists speak of the emergence, in the earliest
man, of the faculty of imagination—the power of retaining ideas in the mind and viewing
them. This power is absent in the highest of the sub-human species.

Says the neurologist W. Grey Walter in his book The Living Brain (p. 2)

‘Thus the mechanisms of the brain reveal a deep physiological division between man and
ape….If the title of soul be given to the higher functions in question, it must be
admitted that the other animals have only a glimmer of the light that so shines before
men….The nearest creature to us, the chimpanzee, cannot retain an image long enough
to reflect on it, however clever it may be in learning tricks or getting food that is
placed beyond its natural reach. Unable to rehearse the possible consequences of
different responses to a stimulus, without any faculty of planning, the apes and other
animals cannot learn to control their feelings, first step towards independence of
environment and eventual control of it. The activity of the animal brain is not checked
to allow time for the choice of one among several possible responses, but only for the
one reflex or conditioned response to emerge. The monkey’s brain is still in thrall of its
senses. Senito ergo sum might be the first reflection of a slightly inebriated ape, as it is
often the last of alcoholic man; so near an yet so far apart, even then are they.

‘The brain of lion, tiger, rhinoceros and other powerful animals also lacks the
mechanism of imagination, or we should not be here to discuss the matter. They cannot
envisage changes in their environment, so they have never sought to alter it in all their
efforts to retain leadership of their habitat.’

Man alone achieved this power of imaging ideas; and this power was not in him an
isolated phenomenon. Within the increased area of the cortex of the ancestral organ,
man evolved a mechanism capable of a series of new processes: observation, memory,
comparison, evaluation, selection, and judgment. And in achieving these, he achieved
two things:

Firstly, discovery of the path leading to the processing of raw experience into knowledge,
of knowledge into power, and of power into control and manipulation of the environment
constituted by the not-self of experience.

Secondly, a faint awareness of the reality of himself as the subject, as the self behind
the fleeting images, and the discovery of the road leading inward to the total
comprehension of this new dimension of reality, with its increasing liberation of moral
and spiritual values in his life and action and behaviour.

Man’s steady advance on these two fronts constitutes the story of civilization and
culture; it constitutes also the story of the march of evolution at the post-human stage.
With the emergence, on the evolutionary scene, of the mind of man, disciplined in the
knowledge of the not-self and the self in varying degrees, nature yields, in increasing
measure, to one of her own products, the control and manipulation of the evolutionary
process.

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From Knowledge to Wisdom

In spite of his rudimentary self-knowledge which gave him control over the animal world,
the earliest man remained an animal in appetites and behaviour. A little more of this
self-knowledge, gained through the reflection in the context of social experience, helped
to increase his control over himself and to humanize him. This process, ever in operation
in human civilization and socio-political organizations, has led up to the man in the
modern age, with his almost total control over the not-self environment through an
efficient technology, with his global sweep in socio-cultural interests and contacts, and
with his yearning for the universal and human. Yet the disparity between his control over
himself and his control over external nature, between his moral efficiency and his
technical efficiency, confronts him with the most serious problem that his evolution has
so far posed. This is thwarting the realization of his heart’s yearning for the universal and
human. Neglected and unsolved, this problem may make him the only possible destroyer
of his civilization and of the fruits of evolution as well. In the meantime, he is destined
to move from one tension to another, from one sorrow to another. The only solution lies
in the deepening of his moral and spiritual awareness. Biological evolution achieved a
measure of this in the life of earliest man in his rudimentary knowledge of his own self.
Social evolution, guided by human intelligence, advanced this still further; a physical and
organic self separate from all others gave place to a social self, morally related to an
increasing number of other individuals. The dynamism of human evolution demands that
this education of man must continue till he rises from self-centeredness to self-
transcendence and from knowledge to wisdom. Says Bertrand Russell ( The Impact of
Science on Society, pp. 120-21)

‘We are in the middle of a race between human skill as to means and human folly as to
ends. Given sufficient folly as to ends, every increase in the skill required to achieve
them is to the bad. The human race has survived hitherto owing to ignorance and
incompetence, but knowledge and competence combined with folly, there can be no
certainty of survival. Knowledge is power, but it is power for evil just as much as for
good. It follows that, unless men increase in wisdom as much as in knowledge, increase
of knowledge will be increase in sorrow.’

The Spiritual Training of the Will

This increase in wisdom in what man achieves when he transcends his little separate self,
when he moves in the direction of his true Self, which is also the Self of all; the path to
this lies through increasing control over the senses and the mind, and through
discrimination between the real and the unreal, between the changeless One and
changing many. This is the highest education for man according to the Upanishads; it is
the education for him in what the Mundaka Upanishad (1.i.5) terms para vidyā, the
highest knowledge, wisdom, the realization of the imperishable One in the perishable
many.

This education should not be postponed, say the Upanishads; it should not be left to be
accomplished by nature’s slow evolutionary process. Nature accomplished the first stage
of this education in the rudimentary self-knowledge imparted to early man. She thus put
him among all her products on the road to full self-knowledge and self-fulfillment.
Modern man does not stand in need of another Nature’s care to the same extent as early
man did or the animal world still does. He has the intelligence and capacity to control
the processes of nature and society, and to use these to ensure human fulfillment

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everywhere. But his will is perverse; it seeks the ways of folly; it is his enemy; and it
will remain his enemy so long as it is in thralldom to animal nature and to the little ego
centered in that nature. It has to be turned in the direction of his divine nature within,
then alone will his intelligence and will and feeling fuse into a new value to emerge as
buddhi, wisdom. This is the sattvik-will, luminous and pure, according to the Gitā (XVIII.
33):

‘The will that controls the functions of the mind, the vital energies, and the sense-
organs, and turns their energies uniformly in the direction of the divine Self within, that
will O Partha, is the sattvik-will.’

The Direction of Human Evolution

Since this subject of the growth of man and his fulfillment is a common theme in Vedanta
and in modern biological thought, I can do no better than quote a significant passage
from Swami Vivekananda; though rather long, it is worth quoting in full in view of its
relevance. In a lecture on ‘The Powers of the Mind’ delivered in California in 1900, the
Swami said (Complete Works,Vol. II, pp. 18-19):

‘I shall tell you a theory which I will not argue now, but simply place before you the
conclusion. Each man in his childhood runs through the stages through which his race has
come up; only the race took thousands of years to do it, while the child takes a few
years. The child is first the old savage man—and he crushes a butterfly under his feet.
The child is at first like the primitive ancestors of his race. As he grows, he passes
through different stages until he reaches the development of his race. Only he does it
swiftly and quickly. Now, take the whole humanity as a race, or take the whole of the
animal creation, man and the lower animals, as one whole. There is an end towards
which the whole is moving. Let us call it perfection. Some men and women are born who
appreciates the whole progress of mankind. Instead of waiting and being reborn over
and over again for ages until the whole human race has attained to that perfection,
they, as it were rush through them in a few short years of their life. And we know that
we can hasten these processes, if we be true to ourselves. If a number of men, without
any culture, be left to live upon an island, and are given barely enough food, clothing,
and shelter, they will gradually go on and on, evolving higher and higher stages of
civilization. We know also that this growth can be hastened by additional means. We
help the growth of trees, do we not? Left to nature they would have grown, only they
would have taken a longer time; we help them to grow in a shorter time than they
would otherwise have taken. We are doing all the time the same thing, hastening the
growth of things by artificial means. Why cannot we hasten the growth of man? We can
do that as a race. Why are teachers sent to another countries? Because, by these means
we can hasten the growth of races. Now, can we not hasten the growth of individuals?
We can. Can we put a limit to the hastening?.....you have no reason to say that this
much a man can do and no more. Circumstances can hasten him wonderfully. Can there
be any limit then till you come to perfection?’

Referring to the corollary of this line of thought, he continued;

‘So, what comes of it?—That a perfect man, that is to say, the type of that is to come of
this race, perhaps millions of years hence, that man can come today. And this is that the
Yogis say, that all great incarnations and prophets are such men; that they reached

31
perfection in this one life. We have had such men at all periods of the world’s history
and at all times.’

And referring to his own master, Shri Ramakrishna, as an example of this achievement in
our own age, He said:

‘Quite recently, there was such a man who lived the life of whole human race and
reached the end—even in this life.’

And pleading for a scientific study of this spiritual growth of man so as to deepen the
sciences of anthropology and sociology, he said:

‘Even the hastening of the growth must be under laws. Suppose we can investigate these
laws and understand their secrets and apply them to our own needs, it follows that we
grow. We hasten our growth. We hasten our development, and we become perfect, even
in this life. This is the higher part of our life, and the science of the study of the mind
and its powers has this perfection as the real end. Helping others with money and other
material things, and teaching them how to go smoothly in their daily life, are mere
details.’

And adverting to the utility and urgency of this science of spirituality, and presenting the
Vedantic view of the uniqueness of man, he concluded:

‘The utility of this science is to bring out the perfect man, and not let him wait for ages,
just a plaything in the hands of the physical world, like a log of drift-wood carried from
wave to wave and tossing about in the ocean. This science wants you to be strong, to
take the work in your own hands, instead of leaving it in the hands of Nature, and get
beyond this little life. That is the great idea.’

The Dynamics of Human Evolution

This is the direction of human evolution according to Vedanta. The dynamics of evolution
at the human stage finds its true expression in the struggle to liberate the universal man
imbedded in individual man. Bereft of this spiritual direction, every human action and
struggle serves but to throw him deeper and deeper into the net of delusion of his
finitude, sharpen his animal appetites, and increase his tension and sorrow. In Vedanta
such a life is termed a life of samsāra, worldliness. It is a static life, in spite of all the
stir and movement which it may exhibit. As a stagnant pool is to a sheet of flowing
water, so stands this static life of samsāra in relation to the dynamic life of spirituality.
Such a spiritual life is unworldly, but it is not outside the world. Live in samsāra, says
Shri Ramakrishna, but allow not samsāra to get into you; a boat should be in water, but
water should not be in the boat. Samsāra itself becomes the field of struggle, the
Kurukshetra, for the transcendence of the ego, for this achievement by men of universal
awareness, brahmajnāna, says this great verse of the Kena Upanishad:

— ‘If man realizes It here, then there is true life for him.’

The Uniqueness of Men

It is not only his true life but it is also the highest human excellence and the acme of his
life fulfillment. Vedānta further adds that it is also the birthright of every human being

32
and the crown of the entire evolutionary process. Says the Shrimad-Bhagavatam (XI. ix.
28):

‘The Divine One, having projected (evolved) with his own inherent power various forms
such as trees, reptiles, cattle, birds, insects, and fish, was dissatisfied at heart with all
these; He then projected the human form endowed with the capacity to realize Brahman
(the universal divine Self of all), and became extremely pleased.’

This is how Vedānta speaks of the uniqueness of man; it is quite different from the
modern scientist’s view of man’ uniqueness, such as is expounded in a book like the The
Uniqueness of Man by Sir Julian Huxley. There Huxley says (p.27):

‘Those of man’s unique characteristics which may better be called psychological and
social than narrowly biological spring from one or other of three characteristics. The
first is his capacity for abstract and general thought: the second is the relative
unification of his mental processes, as against the much more rigid
compartmentalization of animal mind and behaviour: the third is the existence of social
units, such as tribes, nation, party, and church, with a continuity of their own, based on
organized tradition and culture.’

He says further (ibid, p. 29):

‘The trouble, indeed, is to find any human activities which are not unique. Even the
fundamental biological attributes such as eating, sleeping, and mating have been tricked
out by man with all kinds of unique frills and peculiarities.’

These are, undoubtedly, unique characteristics. But they belong, says Vedanta, to a field
of experience, namely, sense experience, which he shares with the animals. Even his
advanced thought is sense-bound. Huxely is aware of higher dimensions revealed by the
manifestations of man’s extra-sensory faculties, for he drops the following hint ( ibid, p.
31)

‘Man may thus be unique in more ways than he now suspects.’

Huxley is, unfortunately, not aware that man, in countries such as India, outside the
sphere of western development, went far beyond this stage of ‘suspicion’ and
systematically explored and developed a science of those higher dimensions of his
uniqueness.

The Upanishads view man both as actor in and spectator of the dreams of existence. He
transcends himself in the act of knowing himself. His supreme uniqueness lies in his
ability to realize it. He alone can solve the mystery of existence by transcending himself.
He alone has ego sense; and it is the supreme mark of his intelligence and courage that
he treats this mysterious value within himself, fugitive in itself but suggestive of hidden
depth, not as a final conclusion but as a initial datum, as a starting point for a
penetrating investigation into the mystery of its hidden depth; and he then discovers the
Ātman, the infinite and immortal Self, as his true nature, and as the true nature of all
beings.

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This is the uniqueness man, the uniqueness of his intelligence, that the Upanishads and
the Indian spiritual tradition proclaim. Sings the Shrīmad Bhāgavatam in words spoken by
Krshna, the God-man, to man, the spiritual seeker (XI. xxix. 22):

‘This is the intelligence of the intelligent and the wisdom of the wise—that they attain
Me(God), the True and the Immortal, by means of the unreal and mortal (the body and
the ego).’

Vedanta, however, considers the two dimensions of human excellence upheld by the
Upanishads and modern science as complementary and not contradictory.

This is clearly stated in the following similar verses which are also from the Shrīmad
Bhāgavatam (XI. vii. 19-21):

‘In the world, men are generally efficient in the investigation of the truth of nature; (and
through that) they uplift themselves by themselves from all sources of evil.’

‘For a human being, particularly, his guru or guide is verily, his own self; because he
achieves his welfare through the help of direct sense experience, and through inference
based on it.’

‘Wise men who have mastered the science and art of the spiritual life realize clearly,
within the human personality itself, Me (the universal Self of all) the unlimited source of
all the (limited psycho-physical) energies (of the individual)’

Vedanta considers that since man shares his sensuality with the animals, his distinctive
uniqueness is spirituality only. The urge to this spirituality alone makes him truly himself.
And so Vedānta would ever strive, out of compassion for man, to assimilate this urge in
him, to quote the Shrīmad Bhāgavatam again to get a touch of Vedantic concern for
man’s spiritual growth (XI. ix. 29):

‘Having obtained, at the end of many births, the human form which is difficult to obtain,
and through perishable, capable of conferring on man, should strive earnestly, before
death overtakes him, for spiritual freedom which is his highest excellence. Sensual
delights can be had in all other bodies; (hence the human body need not be dedicated to
them.)’

The Place of the Ego in the Strategy of Evolution

Modern physical and biological knowledge reveals to us the grand design of the linkages
in nature. Things and events are interlinked; nothing is absolutely separate and self-
sufficient. In the context of this grand design of nature, belief in a separate self-
sufficient ego becomes a delusion. And modern biology, along with Vedānta and
Buddhism and all higher spiritual thought, proclaims this truth of the insufficiency of the
ego. In the voluminous digest of the modern biological knowledge entitled The Science of
Life, produced by H.G. Wells, Julian Huxley, and G.P. Wells, the authors have discussed
in a moving passage this subject of man’s ego (pp. 1368-69):

‘Alone in the silence of the night and on a score of thoughtful occasions we have
demanded, can this self so vividly central to my universe, so greedily possessive of the
world, ever cease to be? Without it surely there is no world at all! And yet this

34
conscious self dies nightly when we sleep and we cannot trace the stages by which in its
beginnings it crept to an awareness of its own existence….

‘Personally may only be one of the Nature’s methods, a convenient provisional delusion
of considerable strategic value.’

And further (p. 1497):

‘The more intelligent and comprehensive man’s picture of the universe has become, the
more intolerable has become his concentration upon the individual life with its
inevitable final rejection.’

Again referring to man’s ethical and spiritual capacity for identification with and
participation in a greater reality, the authors conclude (p. 1497):

‘He escapes from his ego by this merger and acquires an impersonal immortality in the
association; his identity dissolving into the greater identity. This is the essence of much
religious mysticism, and it is remarkable how closely the biological analysis of
individuality brings us to the mystics. The individual, according to this second line of
thought, saves himself by losing himself. But in the mystical teaching he lose himself in
the Deity, and in the scientific interpretation of life he forgets himself as Tom, Dick, or
Harry, and discovers himself as Man. The Buddhist treatment of the same necessity is to
teach that individual life is a painful delusion from which men escape by conquest of
individual desire. Western mystic and Eastern Sage find a strong effect of endorsement
in Modern science and everyday teaching of practical morality. Both teach that self must
be subordinated, that self is a method and not an end.’

This is familiar language to students of the Upanishads and Buddhism mentioned earlier.
The subject of the unreality of the ego is the theme of second discourse delivered by
Buddha to his disciples at Sarnath (Varanasi) 2,500 years ago. Stripping the notion of
individuality of all its unreal elements, Buddha says (Vinaya Pitaka, Mahāvagga,
Khandaka, I vi):

‘Rūpam (Material form) is an-attā (not the Self); vedanā (sensation) is an-attā ….sannā
(perception) is an- attā …..; samkhārā (pre-disposition) is an- attā ….vinnānam
(consciousness) is an- attā.’

Then follows a dialogue between Buddha and his disciples. Stripping the Self of all its
unreal elements, Buddha said:

‘Again what think you Bhikkhus? Is the material form permanent ( niccam) or impermanent
(a-niccam)?’

‘Impermanent revered Sir.’

‘But that which is impermanent, is that suffering (dukkham) or happiness (sukham)?’

‘Suffering revered Sir.’

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‘That then, which is impermanent, suffering, and by nature changeable ( vi-parināma
dhammam), is it proper to regard it thus: This is mine, I am this, this is my Self (etam
mama, eso’ham asmi, eso me attā)?’

‘No indeed, revered Sir.’

‘Is sensation permanent? …..Is perception permanent? Is pre-disposition permanent?.....

That, then, which is impermanent, suffering, and by nature changeable, is it proper to
regard it thus: This is mine, I am this, this is my Self?’

‘No indeed, revered Sir.’

‘And so, Bhikkhus, all material form, whether past, future or present, whether within us
or external, whether gross or subtle, low or high, far or near, is to be regarded with right
insight, as it really is (yathā bhūtam) , thus: This is not mine, I am not this, this is not my
Self….All sensation…. gross or subtle, all perception….gross or subtle…..all pre-
disposition…low or high,…. all consciousness…far or near, is to be regarded with right
insight, as it really is, thus:

This is not mine, I am not this, this is not my Self.

‘Regarding them thus, O Bhikkhus an instructed Āryan (noble) disciple becomes

indifferent to (nibbindati) material form, becomes indifferent to sensation, becomes
indifferent to perception, becomes indifferent to consciousness. Becoming indifferent, he
becomes free from desire (vi rajjati); through non-desire he is liberated.’

This is the teaching of Buddha on the subject and it is also the teaching of the
Upanishads. And today the authors of The Science of Life tell us that the given
personality of man, centered round the ego, is but an assemblage of constantly vanishing
elements cannot be his true self. It is, at best, as they said, ‘one of the nature’s
methods, a convenient provisional delusion of considerable strategic value.’ And it needs
to be transcended. With this hint, the science of biology withdraws from the scene,
leaving the field to the science of spirituality.

To the question: ‘When I shall be free?’ Sri Ramakrishna gave the significant answer:
‘When I shall cease to be.’

The only transcendence of the ego which biological science can place before man for his
acceptance is either his total mergence in the species, yielding an experience of a
biological or genetic immortality, or his achievement of sort of cosmopolitan awareness
through a humanistic education by which he will learn to forget himself as ‘Tom, Dick, or
Harry and discover himself as Man,’

The philosophical insufficiency of this theory of mergence in nature, the prakrtilaya

conception of Indian thought, has been discussed and demonstrated by Shankara and
other Indian thinkers. They have also pointed out the pitfall of the fallacy of total
nihilism bordered on by any philosophy which upholds the unreality of the ego. Modern
biological and philosophical analysis must go deeper in the search for man’s sense of
individuality in order to this dangerous fallacy and discover his true dimension in the
universal Self. Neither his eternal sleep in nature nor his reduction into a soulless
nothingness, nor even the achievement of a cosmopolitan humanism, can satisfy man’s

36
rational urges or spiritual hungers. The limited ego may not be the final truth, but it is a
significant first datum; for it is the promise of something unlimited and eternal. Hence
the aptness of the statement that it is ‘a convenient provisional delusion of considerable
strategic value’. In what sense it is strategic?

A baby, till its birth, is part of the mother’s body. At birth it becomes a new organism
with a separate existence of its own. The first step in the education of the baby is the
development of its ego sense, the sense of individuality. The new-born child considers
itself as one of the items of the world around it. The education it receives after birth is
designed to give is an awareness of its own personality, of its own uniqueness among the
objects. This rudimentary subjective awareness of the baby develops, as it grows in its
powers and capacities, through the handling of objects and entities and persons around
it. The education given to the child is meant to strengthen his ego sense; he draws to
himself the energies and influences around him and grows into a distinct individual, an
identified person.

This is the first stage of ego’s strategic value, almost simultaneously begins the second
phase when, first, under external influences, and later, under his own conscious efforts,
the child becomes aware of his close relationship not only with things and objects but
also with other subjects like himself and learns to treat them as subjects, as would
himself like to be treated by them. This is social ethics, the recognition of the subject in
a social object, which sees the emergence of a moral personality in the child, in which
the idea of a totally separate individuality gives place to a personality with ever-
widening frontiers within the milieu of the psychic world of society around him. The old
limited individuality is transcended giving place to an expansive individuality and an
expansive awareness and love; through this process Nature’s strategy, now expressed
through the human personality itself, grows and finds its consummation in the spiritual
realization of the Universal, the Brahman, as Vedanta calls it, the eternal, pure,
enlightened Self of all. And this strategy and is final issue in the realization of this
universal Self forms the grand theme of verse five of chapter two of the Kena Upanishad
which we have been discussing so long.

The True Life for Man

Its realization here and now, iha, is the consummation of man’s education says the verse.
That is the true life for man; life at the level of the ego is only a shadow life. If man gets
stuck at this level, if he fails to treat it merely as ‘a convenient provisional delusion of
considerable strategic value’, and refuses to march onward to capture the sunlit heights
of true individuality, it will be to his great loss, mahatī vinashtih. What can be a greater
loss than to be condemned to live in a phantom shadow world when just behind him is
the true world of light and life, of which he is heir? What can be a greater loss than to be
a chained prisoner in a dark cave, handling all the time shadows thrown on the wall in
front by the light behind, as depicted in Plato’s famous allegory? No, that shall not be,
says the verse. There is the touch of concern and compassion for man in the temper and
tone of the verse. The Upanishad is deeply concerned to help man to find his true life,
life lived in the light of truth. And what is that truth?

Realizing the universal Self as his true nature, of which is own ego was but a projecting
tip he recognizes his oneness with every being: by this he becomes dhīra, the wise one,
one who has achieved the highest elevation of spirit; and by this rising above the given
world of the ego and the senses, the world which is subject to change and mortality, by

37
thus using it not as the final goal but only as a strategic base, he achieves immortality—
amrtā bhavanti; he achieves true life in which the shadows of death weave no patterns
unlike the false life of the ego which is but the darkness of spiritual blindness and also of
death, hazily lit up with a trace of the light of the eternal Self. This answers Bartrand
Russell’s demand, in the passage quoted earlier, for knowledge growing into wisdom:
Unless men increase in wisdom as much as in knowledge, increase of knowledge will be
increase of sorrow.

Immortality

By rising above the transient world of sense experience and the ego, man becomes
immortal says the verse. What is the nature of this immortality? Biology speaks of the
genetic immortality; individual organisms die; but the species continue to exist through
the genes. Psychology today hints at the possibility of the immortality of the soul in the
sense of survival after death. Several theologies hold to the idea of immortality as
continuity of the soul in higher spheres after death. Vedanta alone speaks of an
immortality which is realized in this very life; this is possible because freedom is the
nature of man. Whatever is conditioned is mortal, to be conditioned is to be bound by
space, time and cause; to be unconditioned is to be free from all these bonds. Whatever,
therefore, is free, in the sense of being unconditioned, is immortal. The body and the
ego, as the things of nature around, are all conditioned and mortal. The Ātman alone is
unconditioned, free, and therefore immortal. The Ātman alone is the true nature of man.
Man is essentially the nitya-suddha-buddha-mukta-swabhāva paramātman—the eternally
pure, awakened, and free Self, says Vedanta and adds that, this realization is the goal of
human life. The sages of the Upanishads achieved this realization and communicated it to
humanity for the first time. Says the Katha Upanishad (VI. 14)

‘When all the desires of the heart are overcome, this very mortal becomes immortal and
experiences Brahman, the universal Self, here, in this very life.’

After attaining enlightenment, Buddha gave expression to the content of that

enlightenment in the remark that the immortal had been gained by him. The message of
all spiritual religions is this message of the Immortal. Vedānta adds that it is to be
realized here and now, as this Kena Upanishad verse puts it: iha chedavedīt atha
satyamasti, and by realizing which man transcends this transient world of sense
experience, and realizes immortality: pretyāsmāt lokāt amrtā bhavanti.’

Commenting on this line Shankara says:

‘Dying, meaning, rising above, renouncing the world which is of the nature of spiritual
blindness, and characterized by the notion of “I” and “mine”; thus achieving the non-
dual state of unity of the universal Self, they become immortal; meaning thereby,
become, verily, Brahman.’

Brahman is the life and soul of the universe. The rest of the Upanishad will expound this
basic truth of Vedanta through a beautiful allegory which we shall study next.

Kena Upanishad gave us the profound message of Indian philosophical thought that truth
is not a matter of mere belief or intellectual formulation, but that it is something to be
realized by each individual. This is what converts the philosophical urge into a spiritual
passion. A man’s life will not become fruitful until he realizes the mystery that within

38
life itself. This idea of realizing truth runs through all Indian religious literature. Religion
is a matter of realization. Life grows, and this growth is mental as well as physical. In the
higher reaches of mental growth and development, life experiences the glow of truth
playing about itself; and at the summit of that development, truth pervades and
penetrates life through and through. This fact was communicated to us by in the famous
verse of the second chapter:

‘For one who realizes It here (in this world) there is true life. For one who does not so
realize It, great is the loss. Discovering the Ātman in every single being, the wise-ones
dying to this world (of sense-experience), become immortal.’

The Kena Upanishad, in its opening verses, had begun with the statement that the body,
the senses, the mind, and the ego are not self-sufficient entities but that they point out
to a supreme Reality beyond and above them—Brahman, the universal Self of all—by
whose energy they all live and function. By themselves, each one of them is but a zero,
in the words of Ramakrishna, and the zero becomes significant only when the figure one
is placed before it. The reality of this One behind the many was expounded to us by
several subsequent verses of the Upanishad. The Upanishad also enlightened us with the
truth that this one is a spiritual reality, being the innermost Self of all, and that the
realization connotes the achievement of universality of vision and sympathy. This is the
true Self of man. But in his state of ignorance, he mistakes the senses, the mind, the
intellect, or the ego, for his Self. This false notion, with its attendants evils, vanishes
with the dawn of true knowledge.

Chapter 3

A Fascinating Story

This Vedantic idea is now sought to be amplified by means of a fascinating story in the
last two chapters of the Upanishad—chapters three and four. The third chapter opens
with a reference to a mythical battle between the forces of evil and the forces of good,
between the forces of darkness and the forces of light—the asuras and the devas.

1 ‘The story goes that Brahman obtained a victory for the devas, though the victory was
due to Brahman, the devas became elated by it and thought: this victory is due to us
only; the glory belongs to us only.’

The devas, or gods, represent the forces of light, and the asuras, or demons, represent
the forces of darkness, in Indian mythology; they are eternal enemies. When the forces of
light are pressed hard by their enemies, Brahman the Light of lights intervenes to ensure
the victory of light over darkness, the victory of the spiritual man over the sensuous man.

Earlier while studying the Isha Upanishad, we learned in its verse three that he who
neglects Self-knowledge, and pursues only external things, falls into the dark world of
the asuras, the world of ignorance and delusion. Though representing the forces of light,
the devas are also not free from the clutches of ignorance and delusion. They take their
separate egos to be their real Self; but this delusion lies less thick on them than on the
asuras and so it can be lifted by a little spiritual help from outside. Among the gods, the
more prominent ones, namely, Agni, Vāyu, and Indra, who were the leaders, felt the
vanity of victory most. Comments Shankara on this verse (III. 1):

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 ‘Not knowing that this victory and glory belonged to God, the Inner Self of their own
selves, the all-knowing and all-powerful One who brings about for all beings the
conjunctions of their actions with the results of those actions, and who is moved by the
desire to ensure the welfare of the world, these devas thought, this victory and this glory
belong to us— we who are conditioned by the forms such as Agni, etc—ours alone is this
victory, ours alone is this glory; the fruit of victory is experienced by us, we who are
characterized by the attributes of the Agni form, Vāyu form, and the like; and not by the
God who is our inner Self.’

Man, in spite of his obvious limitations, thinks too much of his strength and glory, but all
this ends in death. If only he knew the One, the source of all strength, glory, and
excellence in men and nature, how blessed his life would be, and how fearless of death
he would become! Life is trivial if it does not overcome death in the knowledge of the
deathless Self, the one Self in all.

This is echoed by Shakespeare in his Measure for Measure (II. ii. 119-24)

But man, proud man,

Dress’d in a little brief authority—
Most ignorant of what he’s most assured,
His glassy essence—like an angry ape,
Plays such fantastic tricks before high heaven
As make the angels weep.

In moments of deep thoughtfulness, man feels within himself the presence of a power
greater than his given self. He then learns to feel humility and to experience an elevation
of spirit in that humility. His ‘unripe’ ego becomes the ‘ripe’ ego, in the words of Shri
Ramakishna; ‘I, but yet not I, but the Christ that liveth in me’ in the significant
utterance of St. Paul. Man then ceases from his erstwhile habit of stealing the glory that
belongs to God alone; he experiences the truth of the holy utterance: Gloria in excelsis.

Man’s passage from spiritual blindness to illumination, and the concern of God, who is
the inner Self of all, to illumine the heart of man, form the theme of the eleven verses
that follow, beginning with verse two to the end of this chapter, chapter three:

2 ‘Brahman came to know this (their vanity); He verily appeared before them. But they
did not understand who that yaksha (adorable Spirit) was.’

The three gods were puzzled and inwardly afraid; they desired keenly to know who was
the yaksha confronting them. So they decided to depute one from among themselves to
interview Him; they chose Agni for the mission:

3 ‘They addressed Agni; “O Jātaveda, please find out who this yaksha is”; “Yes” said
Agni.’

So saying, he proceeded on his mission.

4 ‘He (Agni) hastened (to the yaksha). (The yaksha) asked him who he was; (Agni)
replied: “I am verily, Agni; I am also known as Jātaveda (near omniscient)”.’

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The undue stress on the ‘unripe’ ego is evident in the tone and content of Agni’s answer.
He not merely gave his name but in order to impress the visitor with the extraordinary
nature of his personality, he also mentioned his title—Jātaveda—by which he was well
known in the world.

The yaksha does not seem to have been much impressed judging from his next question:

5 ‘“What energy do you possess—you of such fame?” (asked the yaksha). I can burn
everything, whatever there on this earth,” (replied Agni).’

6 ‘The yaksha placed a straw before him (and said): “Burn this!” (Agni) approached it
with all speed; he was however, unable to burn it. So he withdrew from there (and
returned to the gods), saying, “I could not ascertain who the yaksha was.”’

Agni was crestfallen. The gods, however, decided to continue the investigation of the
strange phenomenon:

7 ‘Then they addressed Vāyu: “O Vāyu, please ascertain this, who this yaksha is.” “Yes”,
said Vāyu.’

8 ‘(Vāyu) hastened (to the yaksha). (The yaksha) asked him who he was; Vāyu replied: “I
am verily, Vāyu; I am also known as Mātarishvā (courser of the atmosphere)”.’

Vāyu did not lag behind Agni in self-esteem and self-importance. The yaksha however,
was equally unimpressed by his tall claim:

9 ‘“What energy do you possess—you of such fame?” (asked the yaksha). I can verily blow
away everything, whatever there on this earth,” replied Vāyu.’

1 ‘The yaksha placed a straw before him and said; “blow this away!” Vāyu approached it
with all speed; he was however, unable to blow it away. So he withdrew from there (and
returned to the gods) saying, “I could not ascertain who the yaksha was,” ’

The gods now decided to ask their leader, Indra, to solve the mystery:

11 ‘Then the gods addressed Indra: “O Maghavan, please ascertain who this yaksha is.”
“Yes,” said Indra, and hastened to the yaksha. But the yaksha disappeared from his
view.’

Indra was baffled. But his perplexity turned into amazement a moment later, as the next
and last verse, verse twelve, of this chapter tells us:

12 ‘And in that very spot he (Indra) beheld a woman, the wondrously effulgent Umā, the
daughter of the snow clad mountain, Himavat. And of her he asked, “Who could this
yaksha be?”’

The Grace of Knowledge

The three gods were defeated in their common mission; of them, Indra had not even the
privilege of conversing with the yaksha as Agni and Vāyu had. But all these had a spiritual
catharsis through this experience; their self-esteem and sense of egoistic self-sufficiency

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received a jolt. In this they became the recipients of the grace of the one living God who
dwells in the hearts of all as the Self of their selves. Shankara’s comment on verse 2
explains the motive that prompted Brahman to appear before the devas in the wondrous
form of the yaksha:

‘Brahman, verily, is the Thinker of all thought; He is the power behind the senses and
the mind of all beings. As such he knew the wrong notion in the minds of the devas. He
did not like the idea that the devas, like the asuras, should through self-esteem
proceeding from ignorance of their true Self, come to grief. And so desiring to bless the
devas by removing their self-esteem born of ignorance, and moved by compassion and the
desire to do some good to them, He, Brahman, appeared before them in a wondrous and
awe-inspiring form produced by the glory of His yoga power.’

At the approach of Indra the yaksha vanished; Indra was baffled; he was exercising his
mind to ascertain who the yaksha was. He was experiencing what in mysticism is called
‘the dark night of the soul.’ Unlike the other two gods, however, Indra did not accept
defeat and withdraw. He persisted in his search for knowledge and illumination. Seeing
this devotion to truth in the heart of Indra, spiritual Knowledge itself appeared before
Indra in the form of the goddess Umā is described as bahushobhamānā, extraordinarily
effulgent. Comments Shankara on this term (III. 12)

Chapter 4

‘Vidyā, spiritual knowledge, is the most luminous among all luminous things; it is thus
only that the qualification bahushobhamānā, extraordinarily effulgent, becomes
appropriate.’

This spiritual knowledge, personified as Umā Haimavati, now instructs Indra in the
eternal truth behind all that is perishable, men and things; and this forms the theme of
the following first six verses of the fourth and last chapter of this Upanishad:

1 ‘“That yaksha was Brahman,” said She. “It was through the victory of Brahman, indeed,
that you achieved this glory.” It was from that (from the words of Umā) that he (Indra)
understood that the yaksha was Brahman.

Indra saw Brahman and realized the truth of Brahman through the grace of spiritual
Knowledge in the form of Umā. The other two gods, Agni and Vāyu, also saw Brahman in
the form of the yaksha, and also conversed with Him, but they could not recognize who
He was. This they did later through their leader Indra:

2‘Therefore verily, these gods—Agni, Vāyu and Indra—excel the other gods; for they
approached the yaksha nearest; they were the first to know Him as Brahman.’

3 ‘And therefore indeed, Indra excels the other gods; for he approached the yaksha
nearest; He was the first to know Him as Brahman.’

 Unity of Macrocosm and Microcosm

Indian thought conceived an intimate unity between the macrocosm of nature and the
microcosm of the human body, between the ādhibhautika and the ādhyātmika aspects of
nature; the latter is an epitome of the former. The gods thus represent not only the

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forces of external nature mythically conceived, but also the sensory and the thought
forces within the body of man. The story in its ādhyātmika significance is an allegorical
presentation of the journey of man to God, his own innermost Self. Indra, Agni, and Vāyu
are personifications of the forces of nature. These forces, though appearing separate and
self-sufficient, are yet only different forms of one single cosmic force. Within the human
body, Agni represents the power of speech, Vāyu represents the power of thought, and
Indra stands for the Jīva or the individual soul.

The life of every man is a battle-ground between the forces of good and evil, between
the forces of light and darkness. The former tend to freedom of the soul, and the latter
to its bondage. To the question ‘What is life?’ asked by the Maharaja of Khetri, Swami
Vivekananda gave a significant answer (The Life of Swami Vivekananda, by his Eastern
and Western Disciples, Fourth Edition, p. 220):

‘Life is the unfoldment and development of a being under circumstances tending to press
it down.’

This unfoldment, at the human level, is a spiritual unfoldment, which is thwarted by the
predominance of man’s animal nature, the darkness of non-awareness. Man is man so
long as he struggles to overcome this nature and reach out from darkness to light. This
struggle between his lower and higher natures, is mythically presented in the Upanishad
as a war between devas and asuras, and projected to cosmic dimensions. This is an
important theme of a vast branch of Indian religious literature, namely the Purānas.
Knowledge of Brahman came to the devas only after they had achieved victory over the
asuras. This emphasizes the truth that the edifice of spiritual effort and realization can
be raised only on moral foundations. Moral life is itself the first manifestation of spiritual
life.

The success of the devas over the asuras was due not to the devas themselves as separate
limited cosmic forces, but to the one cosmic divine Force, Brahman, which informs and
sustains them all. Without the power of Brahman, they are but empty shells. The gods in
the story realized their emptiness and limitedness as individual separate entities and
their fullness and unlimitedness as Brahman.

Hints and Suggestions

The Upanishad in its first and second chapters had told us one of the central truths of the
Upanishads that speech and thought cannot grasp Brahman. The truth is allegorically
explained by this story. Agni the god of speech, representing the all sense-organs, and
Vāyu, the god of mind or thought, both failed to ascertain the identity of the yaksha.
Verses four to eight of the first chapter of this Upanishad had presented Brahman as that
which neither the sense-organs nor the mind can reveal but which reveals all the sense-
organs and the mind. It is their innermost reality and the one source of their power.
When speech and mind returned baffled, the Jīva, or soul, represented as Indra in the
story, took up the challenge. But the yaksha vanished from his presence. This is of great
significance; for Jīva and Brahman are not two different realities. Brahman is the true
nature of the Jīva; but the Jīva is not aware of this ever-present truth. This awakening
comes to it through the Grace of knowledge when the heart becomes pure; the
transcendence of the ego is the index of this purity. Indra achieved this through the
shock of the disappearance of the yaksha at his mere approach. The meekness and
humility born of it intensified his passion for the knowledge of Truth; and the Truth soon

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dawned on his pure mind. The words of Jesus: ‘Blessed are pure in heart for they shall
see God’ constitute an eternal spiritual truth. This dawning of the Grace of knowledge, in
the pure heart of Indra is allegorically presented as the vision of the extraordinarily
luminous Umā Haimavati and the instructions he received from Her. This goddess is the
embodiment of knowledge, and more especially of the knowledge of God, according to
Indian thought: Vidyāh samastāstava devi bhedāh — ‘All types of knowledge, O Goddess,
are different forms of Thee,’ sings the Devī Māhātmyam (XI. 6). In the path of bhakti or
devotion this Truth is represented as divine Grace through which alone, and not through
any effort on the part of the individual, the highest spiritual realization is achieved.

Leaving the story aside, the Upanishad now proceeds to indicate the nature of Brahman
through hints and suggestions which are extremely obscure due to brevity:

4 ‘This is the teaching regarding That (Brahman): It is like a flash of lightning; it is like a
wink of the eye; this is with reference to the ādihidaivatam (Its aspect as cosmic
manifestation).’

The revelation of Brahman in nature is of a momentary character; man can get only a
glimpse of Brahman by contemplating external nature; for external nature presents to
the human mind mostly the perishable crust of names and forms. In deep moments of
artistic or religious experience this crust is broken, revealing the beauty of the eternal
spiritual truth behind. But these glimpses are often momentary. This verse compares
them to the flash of lightning or the wink of an eye. Brahman’s appearance before the
gods was also like a flash of lightning. The Upanishad now proceeds, in verse five of its
fourth chapter, to describe Its manifestation in the inner world:

5 ‘Now Its description with reference to the adhyātma (Its aspect as manifested in man);
mind proceeds to Brahman in all speed, as it were; by his mind also, this Brahman is
remembered and imagined as always near.’

As verse five of chapter one of this Upanishad told us, Brahman is not revealed by the
mind but by Brahman does the mind itself reveal objects. Though the mind cannot reveal
Brahman, the mind has persistent desire to know Brahman; through thought, memory,
and imagination, the mind ever tries to move towards Brahman though baffled again and
again in the attempt. Through these acts of the mind, Brahman discloses in flashes Its
presence as the innermost Self of the man. Earlier, verse four of chapter two of this
Upanishad told us:

Pratibodhaviditam matam amrtatvam hi vindate — ‘Indeed, he attains immortality, who

realizes It in and through every pulsation of mind and awareness.’ To this Shankara adds
his comment: ‘And there is no other way to know Brahman.’ Brahman is
manahpratyayasamakālābhivyaktidharmī — ‘Brahman has the characteristic of disclosing
Itself simultaneously with every pulsation of the mind’, says Shankara in his comment on
the present verse (IV, 5).

The Upanishad proceeds now to describe Brahman as the adorable One (IV. 6):

6 ‘Brahman is well known by the name Tadvanam; so It is to be meditated upon as

Tadvanam, All beings love Him who knows Brahman as such.’

Shankara explains Tadvanam as;

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 ‘Brahman is well known by the name Tadvanam because It is the innermost Self of all
beings and therefore the most adorable, the most worshipful.’

Realization of Brahman as the innermost Self of all beings transforms the individual man
into the universal man; he becomes Brahman. Naturally he is then loved by all, just as
Brahman is so loved.

Ethical Basis of Spirituality

A dialogue between the teacher and student ensues (IV. 7):

7 ‘“Sir teach me Upanishad.” “The Upanishad has been imparted to you; we have, verily,
imparted to you the Upanishad relating to Brahman.”’

The student wants to know whether the whole subject of the knowledge of the Brahman
has been imparted to him. And the teacher affirms that it has been imparted.

The teacher now imparts to the student knowledge of the moral values which are the
indispensable means to the realization of Brahman. (IV. 8):

8 ‘Of the Upanishad, tapas (Concentration of the energies of the mind and the senses),
damah (self-restraint), and karma (dedicated work) form the support; the Vedas
(Knowledge) are its limbs; and Truth its abode.’

The Upanishad stresses the importance of moral character in the pursuit of spiritual
knowledge, for spirituality is not mere scholarship; it is being and becoming, in the words
of Swami Vivekananda; it is growth, development, realization. Spiritual knowledge unlike
scholarship does not arise in the mind of man so long as it is morally impure. As the
Prashna Upanishad expresses it (I. 16):

— ‘In whom there is no crookedness, no falsehood, and no deception.’

The struggle to overcome the animal impulses, the effort to release the mind from its
thralldom to the senses, the endeavour to forge a pure will possessed of the capacity to
turn the energies of body and mind in the direction of the divine Self within, this is what
makes spiritual life a heroic endeavour. The heroes of the Spirit are the greatest heroes
of the history. In them, the long travel of evolution achieves its consummation. Man the
brute becomes man the God.

 An Infinite Personality

The Upanishad now concludes with an eulogy of this consummation (IV. 9):

9 ‘One who realizes It (knowledge of Brahman) thus, destroys sin and is well established
in Brahman, the infinite, the blissful and the highest.’

Spiritual realization arises in the human heart when its sinful propensities are destroyed
by persistent endeavour. Says the Mahābhārata (12. 197. 8, Bhandarkar Oriental Research
Institute Edition):

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 ‘Spiritual realization arises in man when his sinful actions are exhausted; just as a man
sees himself in a clean mirror so does he realize the Ātman in his own self.’

That the sin referred to by the Upanishad has none of the sinister aspects associated with
it in the dogmatic Christianity is clear from the verse the Mahābhārata.

The Chhandogya Upanishad also, in its narration of Nārada’s spiritual education under the
illumined teacher Sanatkumāra, majestically proclaims this fact (VII. xxvi. 2):

‘When the impressions gathered by the sense-organs are pure, the minds become pure;
when the mind is pure, the memory (of one’s divine nature) becomes constant; when this
memory is attained, one becomes completely freed from all bondages.

‘To him (Nārada), whose impurities had been completely destroyed, the blessed
Sanatkumāra reveals (the Light) beyond the ocean of darkness (spiritual blindness).’

The attainment of Brahman is described in the last verse of the Kena Upaniahad as the
attainment by man of an infinite personality, of the highest excellence, and of the
fullness of bliss. No more hopeful message than this for man in the modern age, caught
up as he is in the meshes of finitude and triviality, but hankering earnestly for the
infinite and the universal.

śrī rāmakṛṣṇārpaṇamastu

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