Brahman or the knowledge of it are no different among very powerful beings such as Vāmadeva or in the much less powerful men of today. But one may suspect that in men of today the fruit of the knowledge of brahman is uncertain.
—Śaṅkara, Bṛhadāraṇyakopaniṣadbhāṣya, 1.4.10
From the Ṛgveda to the Bhagavad Gītā a way of reasoning is developed that never acknowledges a single subject, but rather presupposes a dual subject. This is because the constitution of the mind is dual: consisting of a gaze that perceives (eats) the world and of a gaze that contemplates the gaze directed at the world. The first expression of this idea appears with the two birds in hymn 1.164 of the Ṛgveda: “Two birds, a couple of friends, are perched on the same tree. One of them eats the sweet berry of the pippal; the other, without eating, watches.” There is no more basic revelation than this. And the Ṛgveda presents it with the clarity of its enigmatic language. The dual constitution of the mind implies that two birds dwell perpetually within each of us: the Self, ātman, and the I, aham. Friends, alike, sitting on the tree at the same level, one might seem the double of the other. And so it is in the life of many, who never manage to distinguish between them. But, once their difference has been recognized, everything changes. Every moment becomes the superimposition of two perceptions that can add together, cancel each other out, multiply each other. When they multiply each other, according to the mysterious formula 1 × 1, thought springs forth. Even if, seen from outside, all remains the same. The answer seems still to be 1.
Ātman, the Self, is a discovery. How to attain it was the ultimate doctrine for the disciples who had studied and assimilated all the Vedas. No one attained it unless he was capable of considering what was going on in his own mind as an uninterrupted exchange between the I, aham, and the Self: similar and opposing powers, the one—aham—intrusive yet insubstantial, the other—ātman—supreme and untarnishable, yet difficult to coax out from its habitual hiding place. To reach it required constant work, and yet it was only a small part of the way the Self took to reveal itself. And then there was everything that appeared before the eyes: the world. And here another endless round of exchanges began that ended up entirely transforming the appearance of the outside world, to the point of making it become external by convention only. Meanwhile, in parallel, the inner world expanded and accommodated the essential parts of everything: worlds, gods, Vedas, the vital breaths. “Let him know this: ‘All the worlds I have placed within my Self, and my Self I have placed in all the worlds; all the gods I have placed within my Self, and my Self I have placed within all the gods; all the Vedas I have placed within my Self, and my Self I have placed within all the Vedas; all the vital breaths I have placed within my Self, and myself I have placed within all the vital breaths.’ For imperishable, in fact, are the worlds, imperishable the gods, imperishable the Vedas, imperishable the breaths, imperishable is all this: and in truth anyone who knows this passes from imperishable to imperishable, conquers recurring death and reaches the full measure of life.”
Relations between the Self, ātman, and the I, aham, are tortuous, fragile, ambiguous. And it couldn’t be otherwise. Everything goes back to the beginning, when there was only the Self, in the form of a “person,” puruṣa: “Looking around, he saw nothing other than his Self. And the first thing he said was: ‘I am.’ And so was born the name ‘I.’” It is the primal scene of consciousness, which reveals the precedence of a reflexive pronoun—ātman, one’s Self. Thinking about one’s self precedes thought. And thinking about one’s Self takes the form of a person, puruṣa: it has a physiognomy, an outline. This is immediately indicated with another pronoun: I, aham. In that moment a new entity appears, which has the name I and is superimposed point by point on the Self, from which it is born. From then on—until knowledge, veda, flashes forth—the I will be indistinguishable from the Self. They look like identical twins. They have the same outline, the same sense of omnipotence and centrality. After all, at the moment when the I appeared, there was still nothing else in the world. And so the first to fall into the delusion of the I was the Self. After the creatures were created, the Self, as a result of its many erotic metamorphoses, looked at the world and realized that it had created it. And it said: “Indeed I (aham) am creation,” already forgetting that this I was only the first of his creatures.
***
The doctrine of I and Self, aham and ātman, like all Vedic doctrines, can neither be proved nor disproved. It can only be experienced: by each person, on himself. This doctrine may sound odd to those who think of their minds as clear-cut, solid objects, which at most are turned on and off, almost like switches, when sleep takes over or when they wake up. If, however, the mind operating in each person is not one single block, but is at least crossed by a fissure, varying in depth from moment to moment, between the one who is looking and another being, who gazes back at the one who is looking, then we begin to glimpse what lies behind the division between aham and ātman. But it is only a beginning. The words that form in the mind—and tend to create a self-contained fortress—must also realize they are facing another (nonlinguistic, perpetually active) part with which at any moment they may clash or amalgamate or become entwined (but these ways of relating are far more numerous and subtle).
The consequences of this realization are incalculable. And they do not necessarily lead along the Vedic path, with all its impressive apparatus of correspondences and connections. But they certainly lead to a realization that the unknown is much greater than had first been acknowledged. An unknown that is not just outside the mind, but inside it and perhaps vaster even than the unknown that lies outside. This realization could therefore be the basis on which thought begins to develop.
***
How do we explain why the figure that appears in the pupil of the eye has assumed such an importance? Because it is the only point on the surface of the human body that has a reflection, therefore the capacity not only to see, but to reflect what the eye sees in another form. And that form will be impalpable and minuscule, but will correspond, point for point, to the figure that the eye perceives in the outside world, so that even the being who dwells in the pupil will have a head, a body, legs and arms, just like the person who appears in the world in front of the eye. And that person will also have another eye, into which the eye of the onlooker will be reflected. This ensures a potentially perpetual and interminable communication of reflections. If that tiny figure were not there in the pupil, the human body would be a compact surface and would offer no glimpse of the other life that carries on in the sealed chamber of the mind.
***
Self-referentiality, this movement of thought that was enough for Gödel to break up the whole edifice of formal systems, beginning with arithmetic, appeared on the linguistic scene for the first time when the reflexive pronoun ātman, valid for all people, singular and plural, appeared as an entity, a noun, usually translated as “Self.” This happened in the Veda: first at the end of certain hymns—not the most ancient—from the Atharvaveda, then more frequently in the Brāhmaṇas, to the point where ātman became the ubiquitous hallmark of the Upaniṣads. Indian thought from then on revolved around this word, treating it in a whole variety of ways, from Buddha to Śaṅkara. Never allowing it, though, to lose its centrality. India begins and ends with something that was to become central in the West only at the beginning of the twentieth century, with the discovery of the paradoxes in set theory.
The Vedic ritualists certainly didn’t react like those Western thinkers who were appalled when they discovered those paradoxes, because they saw every claim to a coherent and consequential speculative structure fall to pieces. The Vedic ritualists, instead, seemed perversely attracted by paradoxes in general. In them they saw the very substance of enigmas. And enigmas formed the bedrock of what they expressed, in their hymns and in their commentaries on ritual. They were different ways of describing, formulating, illustrating, applying the same unknown quantity, which they called brahman.
***
There was a teacher, Sanatkumāra, and his pupil, Nārada. The teacher was a kṣatriya, a warrior, and his pupil a brahmin. Nārada was one day to become an ever-present *ṛṣi, *the one who most enjoyed involving himself in the affairs of others. A tireless talker. But before that he had been one of the many pupils who used to appear before his teacher with a burning ember. The teacher anticipated him, saying: “You come to me with that which you know.” Sanatkumāra evidently knew that Nārada was no ordinary pupil, but was already overburdened with learning. And this had to be corrected. “Tell me what you know,” asked the teacher, “I will tell you what goes beyond this.” Impudent irony, since “know” in Sanskrit is veda. And the pupil proudly and diligently displayed his knowledge: “The Ṛgveda, the Yajurveda, the Sāmaveda, fourthly the Atharvaveda, fifthly the ancient stories.” Everything so far followed the prescribed order. But the pupil wanted to excel, so he continued to list other knowledge he had acquired: “The Veda of the Vedas, the ritual for the ancestors, the computation of numbers, divination, the art of finding treasures [according to Olivelle, but Senart translates it as “knowledge of time”], dialogues, monologues, the science of the gods, the science of ritual, the science of the spirits, the science of government, the science of the celestial bodies, the science of snakes.” Worn out by his list, Nārada concluded: “Here, sir, is what I know.”
Then, straight after, Nārada showed himself in a new aspect: no longer the faultless pupil, proud of his knowledge, but an anxious and bewildered young man, a prototype of the hapless student. He said: “I know nothing, sir, apart from liturgical formulas (mantras), I do not know the Self (ātman). But I have heard of it, sir, from others like you: ‘He who knows the Self goes beyond suffering.’ I, sir, am suffering. Sir, ferry me to the other bank of suffering.”
The immense Vedic expanse, brimful of gods and powers, was suddenly reduced to one narrow gap. The same that would attract the Buddha—and, one far-off day, Schopenhauer. The teacher came straight to the point and answered: “All you have listed are nothing more than nouns.” And this marked the beginning of a breathtaking passage. Using a recursive procedure, Sanatkumāra began a succession of interlinked thoughts that spanned worlds before returning right back to the beginning. For each power, he explained which power was even greater. “Speech indeed is more than nouns.” Puzzlement, at first. For that which speech knows (the Vedas and all the learning listed by Nārada) seems to be exactly the same as that which nouns make it possible to know. But here he was referring to the god Speech, Vāc, celebrated in the Ṛgveda as she who penetrates everything and to whom nothing can be denied: “The sky, earth, air, atmosphere, waters, incandescent energy, gods, men, animals, birds, plants and trees, all the beasts down to worms, insects and ants, the just and the unjust, true and false, good and bad, pleasant and unpleasant.” Speech is more powerful than nouns to exactly this extent.
Here a comparison is made with “mind,” manas, which is the next power. Now it will be Speech that gives way. Manas, in its turn, is not the last word, but if anything the first. For manas is a generic, all-embracing word. More powerful than manas will be some of its modalities. How to dismantle and reassemble the mind has never been taught with such precision as in the Upaniṣads. Manas therefore yields to a further power, which is saṃkalpa, “intention,” “plan.” It is the word used by the sacrificer when he declares that he has decided (has planned) to celebrate a sacrifice. Saṃkalpa is more than mind since it is what sets mind in action. Saṃkalpa is the first impulse that leads to the deployment of that which is. And here Sanatkumāra, with supreme subtlety, drew this category out of its narrow psychological context, making it fill the cosmos. Once the mind is set in motion, not only are words spoken, not only are words fixed in writing, but “sky and earth are founded on intention”—and, following them, the rest of the world, right down to food and life. A sudden, acrobatic, overwhelming passage. An exemplary Vedic gesture.
The saṃkalpa, however, is just a first sign of the sharpening of the mind. Something else still has to be revealed. “Awareness (citta) is more than intention.” Another important threshold, which certain translations fail to notice. Senart translates citta as “raison” (reason), Olivelle as “thought.” And yet citta is neither reason, which is misleading, nor thought, which is too broad. Citta is the word used for the act of becoming aware. And bringing to consciousness. In the end, it is the pure fact of being conscious. The primacy of awareness over everything is the cornerstone of Vedic thought. If citta meant reason or general thought, Sanatkumāra’s line of argument would lose its meaning at the point where he says: “So, however much someone may know, if he is without awareness they will say of him: ‘He is not there.’ If he knew, if he were a sage, he would not be so lacking in awareness.” The ṛṣis, the first sages, are the masters of consciousness. Their function, more than any other, before any other, is to be watchful. And so they watch over the world and its dharma so that it comes to no harm. But they may only do so if, like the gods, they have perpetual wakefulness.
With each threshold it might be thought the last has been reached. If citta, awareness, is indeed fundamental, what power could be greater? The speculative machine now proceeds with ever more subtle distinctions. “Meditation (dhyāna) indeed is more than awareness.” The words already point to certain Buddhist harmonics: in Pali teachings, the word citta will become synonymous with “mind”; and dhyāna is a word of key significance for the Buddha. But here the grandiose Vedic perspective—cosmic rather than psychological—opens up once more: “The earth, in a certain way (iva), meditates; the atmosphere, in a certain way, meditates; the waters, in a certain way, meditate; gods and men, in a certain way, meditate; therefore those among men who reach greatness are, in a certain way, partaking of meditation.” The word iva, which marks entry into the indefinite and the casting off of the literal, is used for the earth as for gods and for men. All and everything meditates, in a certain way. And beyond meditation? “Discernment (vijñāna) is more than meditation.” Vijñāna: once again a term that will have an important role in Buddhism. To understand its particularity, we have to think of the discernment of spirits that would be practiced by Evagrius and the Desert Fathers—and, one day, by Ignatius of Loyola.
One might think that vijñāna is the last link in Sanatkumāra’s chain. But it is not. With a sudden change of tack it continues: “Strength (bala) is more than discernment. One man alone, with his strength, can make a hundred sages tremble.” The words here catch us by surprise and turn the game upside down. Just when we thought we were following an itinerarium mentis, we find the reappearance of simple strength. Strength as a simple physical quality. But it is enough. And straightaway, here opens up another series of powers that go further. There is no more mention of mind. Now it is “food,” anna; waters; “incandescent energy,” tejas; space. Having reached space, we might begin to lose track. What would there be beyond space? Another surprise: memory. With another unexpected move, he goes back into the mind. And beyond? Hope. And, stronger than hope, prāṇa, the “breath,” which here means life itself. Having reached life, finally there is a pause. And the teacher says to his pupil: “He who sees this, he who knows this, that person is an ativādin.” An ativādin is someone far beyond (ati), who cannot be reached with words.
Have we arrived at the end of the chain? No. Another more intricately linked chain begins. As if to strip the pupil of the illusion of having found an answer. The teacher continues: “The only one who wins with the word is he who wins with truth.” What follows is a further recursive procedure. Truth this time is surpassed by the discernment of thought (manas, which finally reappears). Thought surpassed by faith in the effectiveness of the rites, śraddhā. Faith by perfect practice. This is surpassed by sacrifice. Sacrifice by joy. Here once again, a surprise: “Only when you feel joy do you sacrifice. You must not sacrifice when you are prey to suffering. Sacrifice only when you feel joy. But you have to know joy.” By the time we have become accustomed to the succession of powers and there is still no end in sight, we suddenly find ourselves taken back to the starting point: the moment when the student Nārada appeared before the teacher and said: “I, sir, am suffering.” Now the opposite power finally appears: “joy,” sukha. A word very close in sound to śoka, “suffering.” The path has to be found from one to the other. The teacher continues, unflinchingly: “Joy is fullness. There is no joy in what is limited.” But where is that fullness, the pupil wants to know. “It is below, it is above, it is to the west, it is to the east, it is to the south, it is to the north, it is all of this.” Here once again we feel close to a final word. And it is exactly here that the sharpest psychological arrow strikes. The teacher continues. “But the same can be said of egoity [ahaṃkāra, the word that from now on will be used to describe what Western psychology calls “ego”]: the I is below, it is above, it is to the west, it is to the east, it is to the south, it is to the north, the I is all of this.” Once again, an irony: the imaginary supremacy of the I is the strongest obstacle to perception, simply because it is what most resembles the true final word: ātman, Self, which other masters had pointed out to Nārada, as if it were the way out of suffering. And the teacher, first of all, describes ātman in the same terms used for the I, placing it in all directions of space. But, as had already happened once with vāc, “speech,” in relation to nouns, something more can also be said about ātman. And it will be the decisive phrase: “He who sees like this, who thinks like this, who knows like this, who loves ātman, who plays with ātman, who copulates with ātman, whose happiness is in ātman, that man is supreme, he can have all he desires in all worlds.” Now the moment has come in which the chain could be followed in reverse. From life, power by power, down to the nouns, since “all of this follows from ātman.”
Two verses follow. The first seems to be a response to the Buddha in advance, since it names the three evils that appeared to him immediately before leaving his father’s house (substituting all-encompassing “pain,” duḥkha—another key Buddhist word—for old age): “He who sees, does not see death, nor illness, nor pain. He who sees, sees all, he attains everything everywhere.” The second verse is a numerical riddle, like those often found in the Ṛgveda. Finally it says that, with this chain of arguments, the master Sanatkumāra taught Nārada to “cross the darkness.” And the word mokṣa, “release,” rings out. There is no mention of any response from Nārada: he was at last practicing silence.
***
Sanatkumāra’s teachings to Nārada on ātman, in the Chāndogya Upaniṣad, is a recursive progression toward an indefinite point, ātman, which, once discovered, is found to encapsulate all preceding powers. The progression moves constantly forward, but there are crucial transitions: above all the transition from discursiveness to nondiscursiveness, at the point where “speech,” vāc, becomes subordinate to “mind,” manas. Then the beginning of a hierarchical separation of the mind (manas, citta, dhyāna, vijñāna), which seems to trace a preliminary outline of what will for centuries be the teachings of Buddhism. Finally the rejection of a linear progression, which instead turns out to be circular. Ātman is not reached from the peak of the mind (vijñāna), but from there we drop down into the undifferentiated outside world, into simple “strength,” bala, then returning into the mind with another sudden leap: the passage from “space,” ākāśa, to “memory,” smara. But the most delicate and risky transition comes toward the end, the penultimate step, when Sanatkumāra ventures to infer “fullness,” bhūman, from “joy,” sukha: “Joy is fullness.” Bhūman is above all a cosmic power. It is limitless. And from this limitlessness, which is both mental and cosmic, Sanatkumāra could hazard the final step and thrust the arrow of his thought into ātman. But here the final obstacle emerges: the I, aham. Because all the characteristics of limitless expansion which belong to “fullness” also belong to the I. Which is central to every world, a self-appointed sovereign, an unlimitable domain. And, above all, it is the most insidious imitation of Self. The I superimposes itself so perfectly on Self that it can conceal it. This, in fact, is what happened during the course of Western philosophy: it never worried about giving a name to the Self, but always chose the I as the point of observation, even if it was only called that much later on, with Kant. Before him, it was the unquestionable subject, the first person of Descartes’s Cogito. But for Sanatkumāra, the I is the most daunting obstacle, that which can forever deny access to the Self. If the search had not continued, it might have been supposed that it had reached its completion with the I. But how is the final step taken? Here, once again, we see Sanatkumāra’s subtlety. It is not a question of driving away, rejecting the I. That would be pointless—and contrary to the physiology of the psyche. It is a matter of following its movements and then adding others to it, which the I could not pretend to. Only if a new entity appears, which is the Self, ātman, can we speak of “he who loves the Self,” “whose happiness is in the Self.” This new being will no longer be the I, with its illusory supremacy, because its supremacy has been transferred to the Self, with which each individual plays and interacts. The point of arrival is a dual subject who is irreducible, unbalanced (the Self is infinite, the individual is any being whatsoever in this world), intermittent (the perception of the dual subject is not something there right from the start, but something to achieve, the hardest yet most efficacious achievement). This is why the master’s teaching is sought, this is why Sanatkumāra offered to tell Nārada “what goes beyond this.”
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At the age of twenty-four, after twelve years of study, Śvetaketu went back to his father, the teacher Uddālaka Āruṇi. He had studied all the Vedas, was “conceited, proud of his knowledge, arrogant.” Much like Nārada. Now he had to go beyond, guided by his father. The path is different each time. The introduction chosen by Uddālaka Āruṇi was extremely fast. It was just to let his son know that all he had learned was probably not of greatest importance. Then suddenly Uddālaka Āruṇi began to tell how the world was made, almost as if his son had never heard anything about it: “In the beginning, my child, there was nothing but being, one without a second. Some say: In the beginning, there was nothing but nonbeing, one without a second.” Similar words would be heard in Ionian Greece or at Elea. He continues by saying that this being “thought.” The being who thinks here is the one whom the Brāhmaṇas called Prajāpati. For Uddālaka Āruṇi it was enough to call him sat, the existent one. And those which were generated from him, from it, did not have the names of gods, but of elements: it was tejas, incandescent energy, and not Agni, who was a son; it was āpas, the waters, and not Vāc, who was a daughter; lastly anna, food. Compared with the Brāhmaṇas, everything became one step more abstract, though the doctrine remained identical.
Uddālaka Āruṇi, like Sanatkumāra, would also resort to recursive progressions. But with impatience. And at the end he would refer sarcastically to the “grand lords and grand theologians” who gain pleasure from these teachings. His thinking pointed elsewhere, to three words—to introducing the Self, ātman, and saying immediately: “Tat tvam asi,” “This you are.” In its hastiness, Uddālaka Āruṇi’s reasoning is not particularly efficacious. On the other hand, the effect of the three final words is wonderful. Cogito ergo sum seems a meager, dry fruit in comparison.
The cosmogony that Uddālaka Āruṇi concisely described to his son revealed, in its pre-Parmenidean physiognomy, a new, modern conception, quite opposite to the doctrine that Śvetaketu had learned while studying the Ṛgveda. For it is said there: “In the primordial era of the gods, being was born from nonbeing.” This doctrine is found again in the Taittirīya Upaniṣad: “In the beginning this [the world] was nonbeing and from it was born being.” And in another passage of the Chāndogya Upaniṣad we read: “In the beginning all was nonbeing, this was being. Then it developed, it became an egg.”
This presupposes that sat and asat are to be translated as “being” or “nonbeing” (as does Renou). And nothing fundamentally changes if they are translated as “existent” and “nonexistent” (as does Olivelle). But to what extent do sat and asat correspond to “being” and “nonbeing,” words that carry the weight of the whole history of Western philosophy? Asat, more than a place for that which is not, might be the place for that which is not manifest. Deeply rooted in Indian thought is the certainty that most (three quarters) of what exists is hidden, unmanifest—and thus it is destined to remain. This is incompatible with the view of nonbeing intended by both Plato and the Sophists in their arguments. The specific difference, the unbridgeable gap between Greece and Vedic thought, could already be found in this word, the first word: sat.
The suspicion is confirmed and strengthened by a dark, vertiginous cosmogonic hymn in the Ṛgveda (10.129). This is how it starts, in Renou’s last translation: “Neither nonbeing existed then, nor being. / The space of the air did not exist, nor the firmament beyond. / What moved powerfully? Where? Under whose gaze? / Was it the water, unfathomably deep?” Sat and asat are not there, because “this universe was only an indistinct wave (apraketáṃ salilám).” But we cannot say that asat is not. Asat awaits only the “distinctive sign (praketa)” that separates it from sat. In all this, where “darkness was hidden by darkness,” we could say that something existed called the “One” (as in Plotinus, but here it is something neuter, which becomes masculine in other passages). Who or what is this One coming before the gods? Another hymn describes it: “To the navel of the unborn, the One is fixed, / he on whom rest all creatures.” But the One must also emerge from the indistinct, where “it breathed by its own impetus, without there being breath.” What power can move it? Tapas, “ardor.” “Then, by the power of Ardor, the One was born / empty and clad in emptiness.” These verses are enough to show the inadequacy of the long-used Christianized translations of tapas (penance, as favored by Eggeling, austerities, Kasteiung, ascèse). Ardor is the only power that can dissolve the dark fixity of the beginning—and let the first distinction emerge: the One. Which appears immediately to have a disconcerting nature: it is “empty,” ābhu, and “clad in emptiness.” Puzzled, Renou notes: “‘empty’ (ābhu) or conversely ‘potential’ (ābhū).” Karl Geldner suggests more casually that the word refers to the “great void” of “original chaos.” But there is no trace in the Ṛgveda of a concept of chaos as something that “gapes open,” as implied by the Greek chaíno. And ābhu, “empty,” appears in only one other instance in the 1028 hymns, to mean “empty-handed.” Renou’s perplexity is therefore justified. At the beginning of the Veda, however much we look, we find never a “void” but something “full,” pūrṇa, or a “superabundance,” bhūman: something that overflows and, by overflowing, makes the world exist, since every life implies a boundless source of surplus. That One “clad in emptiness” must therefore be considered one of the more obscure points of the hymn.
The power that appears immediately after ardor—and almost as its immediate consequence—is kāma, “desire.” An unparalleled definition is given for it: “Desire, which was the first seed of the mind.” And here Renou translates manas as “consciousness,” bending the text in a direction that is implicit in it, because the original form of the mind—or at least that most dear to the Vedic seers—was the pure act of being conscious. And this is the point in the hymn where the poet-seers, kaváyaḥ, the first human characters, appear, not just as witnesses but as participants: “Inquiring in their heart, the poets succeeded in discovering / by their reflection the link between nonbeing and being (sató bándhum ásati).”
They are words that challenge, some centuries in advance, the Parmenidean prohibition on conceiving a passage from nonbeing to being. And they do so using the most precious word: bandhu, “nexus,” “bond,” “tie.” Thought, for the ṛṣis, was itself none other than a way of ascertaining and establishing bandhus. This was the beginning, and the culmination. Thought could offer nothing else. And it was clear that the first of these bandhus had to be the one between asat and sat. Here, once again, if the two words asat and sat mean “unmanifest” and “manifest”—and not “nonbeing” and “being,” which are too Greek—then the formula seems far clearer: because the manifest must continually draw upon the unmanifest, in the same way that the leg of a wild goose, of the haṃsa that will one day become a swan, must stay immersed in the wave. Otherwise the circulation of life would stop.
But the bandhu described above was only the threshold of the riddle. The three verses that follow are a breathtaking progression of doubts and flashes that it would be pointless trying to explain. The only clear thing is that we are entering an area of questions that do not have—and perhaps cannot have—an answer. First of all, the bandhu found by the poets inquiring into their heart is a “rope stretched across.” Across what, we are not told. In fact, it is followed by the questions “What was below? What was above?” And immediately there is a reference to dark powers, which Renou has translated as follows, with evident perplexity: “Spontaneous impetus,” “Gift of self.” They are the last appearances of something that one might try to affirm. What follows is the boldest and most surprising declaration on the impotence of thought. An unparalleled example of sublime sarcasm: “Who knows, in fact, who could declare here / from where this secondary creation [visṛṣṭi, which presupposes the sṛṣṭi, “creation” before it] is born, from where it comes? / The gods [came] after, through the secondary creation of our [world]. / But who knows from where this emerged?” It is a compelling process, which makes the uncertainty even greater—and culminates in the last stanza: “This secondary creation, from where it emerged, / if it had been established or not, / he who oversees this [world] from the highest heavens, only he knows, or perhaps not even he.”
The Vedic seers were masters at raising the stakes, taking them beyond reach. Here the ṛṣi wanted to show how esoteric knowledge culminates in complete uncertainty. And that alone would have been a magnificent result. But for him that was not enough. The gods also had to be cloaked in the same uncertainty, as beings who were born too late, born also from the “secondary creation,” whose origin was unascertainable. The crucial step would be to extend the uncertainty—the suspicion of uncertainty and of ignorance—as far as the supreme, unnamed figure, “who oversees this [world]” from the highest point. No one had dared, no one would ever again dare, to deny the omniscience of this mysterious figure. But the ṛṣi does exactly that. Indeed, he leaves us in doubt using a more subtle cruelty, since, if he had claimed something with certainty about this figure, then he would already be going beyond what he was permitted to know. And so he suggests only the possibility of a supreme being, greater than the gods, who nevertheless may not know. And this is said as part of the Veda, which means Knowledge.
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What happens after death? Silence, indistinctness of the elements. Then a voice is heard: “Come, here I am, your ātman.” It is the divine Self, daiva ātmā, that speaks, it is that which has been constructed over a long time, laboriously, piece by piece, through the acts of sacrifice. It is another body that was waiting in the other world—and was meanwhile taking form, because “whatever oblation is sacrificed here, becomes his ātman in the other world.”