3. The concept of Brahma-vidyā

I went into these details of classification of vidyās not to bother the specialist or deter the proverbial general audience from reading on, but to bring home the following point: for Bādarāyaṇa, an Upaniṣadic meditation was (1) either symbolic and optional—related to a sacrificial element or independent—and resulting in an attainment other than Brahman; or (2) a meditation on Brahman proper. Once the first were properly identified and labeled, all the remaining Upaniṣadic meditations were classified as meditations on Brahman proper, because they result in attaining Brahman.

This was essentially a negative characterization, but in 4.1.3-4 it is combined with a positive one: a brahma-vidyā is a meditation on Brahman as one’s Self. “As the Self, because that is what they admit and teach; but, not as a symbol, because the symbol is not the Self.”^[1] The commentaries, naturally, diverge in understanding the precise ontological relationship that undergirds the identification of Brahman with the Self, but we need not bother with that.

It is sufficient to take what Nimbārka has to say on this:

“This is my Self” (Chāndogya Upaniṣad 3.14.3), thus the ancient admit. “This is your Self” (Bṛhad-Āraṇyaka Upaniṣad 3.4.1), that is how they instruct students. Therefore, the aspirant after liberation should meditate on the Supreme Self as one’s own Self. However, the Self is not to be intended in regard to a symbol, because the symbol is not the Self of the meditator.^[2]

There are, in other words, texts in the Upaniṣads that identify one’s Self with Brahman, and they constitute brahma-vidyā; there are texts that identify something else with Brahman or something else, such as the mind as Brahman or the udgītha as the sun, and they are not brahma-vidyā.

The negative characterization, however, was more basic, and that was to accommodate one Upaniṣadic vidyā which did not fit the Brahman-as-the-Self paradigm. That was the famed pañcāgni-vidyā or the knowledge of five fires from the Chāndogya Upaniṣad 5.3-10 and Bṛhad-Āraṇyaka Upaniṣad 6.2, the two textual loci which introduce the process of rebirth in the Vedic corpus. The pañcāgni-vidyā was somewhat of an oddball for the Brahma-Sūtra attributed to Bādarāyaṇa classification, because it does not relate two distinct things so that it could be a meditation of one thing as another. It was a depiction of saṃsāra, which was by some Vedāntins seen as a meditation on Brahman as an effect that is the world, but it promised the attainment of Brahman to those who know the process of rebirth through the same path which was associated with the common brahma-vidyās. Bādarāyaṇa, therefore, emphasized the “not as a symbol” principle: if a meditation is not symbolic and it promises the attainment of Brahman, it is a brahma-vidyā.^[3]

The attainment of Brahman was, in fact, “the higher instruction,” the constituent in virtue of which vidyā was a means of some human good: “From this [vidyā] there follows the attainment of a human good, because there is scriptural evidence to that account—thus Bādarāyaṇa.”^[4] The commentators have unanimously glossed the “higher instruction” as an instruction about the Supreme Self as opposed to the transmigrating enjoyer and ritual agent that the Mīmāṃsakas proposed as the domain of the Upaniṣads, and they have also unanimously selected the famous brahma-vid āpnoti param from the Taittirīya as the topical sentence of the human good referred to in the quoted sūtra. This gives us the occasion to tackle now the question of brahma-vidyā in some detail.

In terms of scriptural theology, brahma-vidyā is the textual ideality of a specific meditation on Brahman, to be reconstructed through combining the meditational details of its various iterations as well as some other elements common to all brahma-vidyās and to be applied optionally to the other brahma-vidyās in an outlined procedure, resulting eventually in the attainment of Brahman. We are already familiar with the combination of details, but let us see how all of it was supposed to work.

A representative list of prominent brahma-vidyās and their respective Upaniṣadic loci reconstructed from the Brahma-Sūtra attributed to Bādarāyaṇa commentaries would look like this:

-) Śāṇḍilya-vidyā in Chāndogya Upaniṣad 3.14 and ŚPB 10.3, with a few details in Bṛhad-Āraṇyaka Upaniṣad 5.6, the teaching of Śāṇḍilya about the innermost Self which is Brahman.

-) Bhūma-vidyā in Chāndogya Upaniṣad 7, the teaching of Sanat-kumāra to Nārada about Brahman that is plenitude (bhūman).

-) Sad-vidyā in Chāndogya Upaniṣad 6, the famous instruction of Uddālaka Āruṇi to his son Śvetaketu on how Being (sat) is everything, including the individual Self.

-) Upakosala-vidyā in Chāndogya Upaniṣad 4.10-15, the teaching of Upakosala Kāmalāyana to Satyakāma Jābāla about the person in the sun and in the eye.

-) Ānandamaya-vidyā in Taittirīya Upaniṣad 2, otherwise also known simply as Brahma-vidyā, and discussing what became the essential positive nature of Brahman.

-) Vaiśvānara-vidyā in Chāndogya Upaniṣad 5.11-18 and Bṛhad-Āraṇyaka Upaniṣad 5.9, the teaching of the king Aśvapati to six householder Brahmins about the Self which is common to all.

-) Akṣara-vidyā in Bṛhad-Āraṇyaka Upaniṣad 3.8, Yājñavaklya’s teaching to Gārgī about the imperishable Brahman.

-) Dahara-vidyā in Chāndogya Upaniṣad 8.1-6, containing the teaching about the small space in the city of Brahman that is the heart.

-) Madhu-vidyā in Bṛhad-Āraṇyaka Upaniṣad 2.5, the teaching of Dadhyañc Ātharvaṇa to the two Aśvins about the brilliant immortal person within everything.

-) Pañcāgni-vidyā in Chāndogya Upaniṣad 5.3-10 and Bṛhad-Āraṇyaka Upaniṣad 6.2, delineating the process of rebirth.

We should note that Bādarāyaṇa does not treat these individually—even their names are culled from the commentarial corpus—but establishes the principles of unity of the separate vidyās, the optionality of the different brahma-vidyās, the possible aggregation of non-brahma-vidyās and different exceptions to these principles.^[5]

Now, it will not escape the attention even of the resident Upaniṣadic expert that this is a bit of a medley of texts and topics. Some work had to be done not only to standardize the individual vidyās, but to normalize them across the board as well, so that they all would be equal meditations that bring one to Brahman. A template brahma-vidyā had to be worked out to which they would all conform, yet keeping their individual details in virtue of which one of them could be practiced as per one’s preferences but the result would be the same in all cases.

First of all, they would all have to aim at the attaining of Brahman through the so-called deva-yāna or the course of the gods (on which more below).^[6] In fact, it was precisely because of the deva-yāna that the pañcāgni-vidyā, which does not even so much as mention Brahman as a counterpart to anything, made the brahma-vidyā cut: it promised those who know the secret of rebirth and meditate in the wilderness to ascend to the world of Brahman through the course of the gods.^[7] The course, on the other hand, was not mentioned, for instance, in the śāṇḍilya-vidyā, madhu-vidyā, vaiśvānara-vidyā, so there it had to be inserted. It could be inserted because there are direct statements from śruti and smṛti which associate knowing Brahman with ascending to Brahman via the divine path that are taken as generally applicable whenever someone is a knower of Brahman, for instance Bhagavad-Gītā 8.24. Thus, ascending through the course of the gods becomes a part of all brahma-vidyās. By the principle of reciprocity, knowing Brahman is inserted in the pañcāgni-vidyā: if someone ascends through the deva-yāna, surely, he must be a knower of Brahman.^[8]

A second thing to normalize was Brahman itself, and that was necessary to make sure that the object of meditation and the attained result were the same. A single conception of Brahman was to permeate the vidyās, and so the notion of Brahman had to be standardized through inserting Brahman’s “essential characteristics,” culled from a few texts where Brahman is defined. First to be inserted were Brahman’s positive characteristics, which Bādarāyaṇa calls “bliss and the rest.”^[9] This primarily referred to the well-known characterization of Brahman as Being, knowledge, limitless, Bliss, established on the basis of the Taittirīya (satyaṃ jñānam anantam brahma; ānando brahma).^[10] That was, in any case, natural, because the Taittirīya account provided the paradigmatic brahma-vidyā (called, in fact, simply brahma-vidyā), since it gave the paradigmatic injunction—brahma-vid āpnoti param—that justified all vidyā-upāsana as a means of human good, the essential definition of Brahman and most of the technical vocabulary (such as vidvān, one who has known Brahman, in effect the old term for what became jīvan-mukta.)

A second set of characteristics of Brahman to be inserted universally in brahma-vidyās were Brahman’s negative characteristics taken explicitly from Yājñavalkya’s teachings to Gārgī:

That, Gārgī, is the imperishable, and Brahmins refer to it like this—it is neither coarse nor fine; it is neither short nor long; it has neither blood nor fat; it is without shadow or darkness; it is without air or space; it is without contact; it has no taste or smell; it is without sight or hearing; it is without speech or mind; it is without energy, breath or mouth; it is beyond measure; it has nothing within it or outside of it; it does not eat anything; and no one eats it.^[11]

Such insertion should prevent mistaking Brahman for any of the finite beings that are its perishable products.^[12] Both insertions were justified by an appeal to a principle given in the Mīmāṃsā-Sūtra attributed to Jaimini, which stipulates that all characteristics essential to a primary element in a ritual follow that primary wherever it may appear.^[13]

With these two additions, the concept of Brahman for the purposes of meditation would be complete, and other characteristics should be kept for the individual vidyās.^[14] Bādarāyaṇa was, however, particularly alarmed by the absence of those positive characteristics that were prefaced by “true,” such as having true desires and resolves that we saw in the 8^th Chāndogya, in Yājñavalkya’s teaching to Janaka. Yājñavalkya tied the achieving of liberation to giving up all desires, but Bādarāyaṇa wanted the true desires to be inserted in that meditation on the pretext of its being the same meditation as the one from the Chāndogya.^[15] We should note that for now, and I will have more to say about it later.

Conspicuously absent from this concept of Brahman is an emphasis on its causal role in relation to the world, which was so prominently placed at the very opening of the Brahma-Sūtra attributed to Bādarāyaṇa: “Brahman is that from which proceeds the creation, sustenance and dissolution of the world.”^[16] This absence is a real giveaway of what brahma-vidyā was about. Its aim was some attainment through self-assimilation. Through meditating on Brahman as one’s Self, one becomes Brahman in all respect, except for the ability to interfere with the creation of the world. So, Brahman’s agency in creation was not emphasized in the constructed meditational concept not because it was not deemed essential to Brahman’s nature, but because it was useless for the meditational aspiration. Of course, it would have been present in many vidyās that talk about it, but its role would have facilitated the correlation of the meditational counterparts, not Brahman’s role in creation. We will have more to say on this when we talk about the state of liberation.

So, once the different vidyās have thus been normalized, whatever is left as characteristics of Brahman in the individual vidyās is peculiar to them, not to be combined further. Thus, given that a brahma-vidyā correlates Brahman to the individual Self, its full-fledged formulation would have looked something like this:

(P)(R,S)Brahman which is Being, knowledge, bliss, infinite, imperishable and thus different from its products, is my (Q)Self. [BV]^[17]

The predicate notations would stand for elements which are peculiar to the specific brahma-vidyā. P and Q would express the specific correlation. For instance, in the Śāṇḍilya-vidyā the relation would be between Brahman that is “larger than the earth, larger than the intermediate region, larger than the sky, larger even than all these worlds put together,” and the Self “of mine that lies deep within my heart, smaller than a grain of rice or barley, smaller than a mustard seed, smaller even than a millet grain or a millet kernel.”^[18] R and S would signify features of Brahman characteristic to the individual vidyā, which could be of several types. Some would be considered specific characteristics of Brahman, but restricted to the vidyās where they are mentioned. Again, in the śāṇḍilya these would be “having true desires, true resolves, all actions, all smells and tastes” and the like. Other could be accidental properties that should facilitate concentration. For instance, in the brahma-vidyā of the Taittirīya Upaniṣad, Brahman whose essence is bliss is described as having a body “whose head is pleasure, right plank delight, left plank thrill and torso joy.”^[19] Because Brahman cannot be a compounded entity, these are not real properties, but are meant to facilitate concentration.^[20] There may be other details to work out in the individual vidyās, but the template would have looked something like that.

Because the attainment as their integral part in all of them is the same—Brahman through the deva-yāna—only one should be practiced by an individual practitioner: whereas the kāmya meditations which bring attainments of the same kind as ritual can be combined as one desires (samuccaya), the more the merrier, one brahma-vidyā would bring the same attainment as any other, and therefore they were theorized as options to one another (vikalpa).^[21]

Footnotes and references:

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[1]:

ātmeti tūpagachanti, grāhayanti ca. na pratīke, na hi saḥ. Brahma-Sūtra attributed to Bādarāyaṇa 4.1.3-4.

[2]:

eṣa me ātmeti pūrve upagacchanti. eṣa te ātmeti ca śiṣyān upadiśanti. ato mumukṣuṇā parama-puruṣaḥ svasyātmatvena dhyeyaḥ. pratīke tv ātmānusandhānaṃ na kāryaṃ na sa upāsitur ātmā. Nimbārka’s Vedānta-Pārijāta-Saurabha commentary on the Brahma-Sūtra 4.1.3-4, p.1190, 4.

[3]:

See Brahma-Sūtra attributed to Bādarāyaṇa 4.3.14-15 and the commentaries thereon. Later Vedāntins reworked the pañcāgni-vidyā as a meditation on “one’s imperishable nature as having Brahman as its Self” (so Nimbārka, Śrīnivāsa, Rāmānuja), a meditation in which the object is not Brahman but the unchanging Self, but in which Brahman is eventually inserted.

[4]:

puruṣārtho ‘taḥ, śabdād, iti bādarāyaṇaḥ. Brahma-Sūtra attributed to Bādarāyaṇa 3.4.1.

[5]:

As I mentioned earlier, however, he does name one of the non-brahma-vidyās, puruṣa-vidyā, in 3.3.24, so it is inferable that by his time the corpus was already standardized in different vidyās.

[6]:

“The scholars of brahman who depart life by fire, by sunshine, by day, in the bright fortnight, and during the six months after the winter solstice go to brahman.” Translation van Buitenen 1981:103.

[7]:

Chāndogya Upaniṣad 5.10.1-2.

[8]:

See on this Brahma-Sūtra attributed to Bādarāyaṇa 3.3.31: aniyamaḥ, sarveṣām, avirodhaḥ, śabdānumānābhyām, “No restriction, [the course belongs to] all [meditations]; there is no contradiction, through the evidence of scripture and inference (smṛti).” The commentaries are quite unanimous, again.

[9]:

ānandādayaḥ pradhānasya, “Bliss and the rest of the principal.” Brahma-Sūtra attributed to Bādarāyaṇa 3.3.11. The commentaries are again mutually coherent.

[10]:

Taittirīya Upaniṣad 2.1 and 3.6.6.

[11]:

Bṛhad-Āraṇyaka Upaniṣad 3.8.8. Translation Olivelle 1998:91.

[12]:

This is based on Brahma-Sūtra attributed to Bādarāyaṇa 3.3.33: akṣara-diyāṃ tv avarodhaḥ sāmānya-tad-bhāvābhyām aupasada-vat tad uktam, “Inclusion of the notions of imperishable, because of generality and its being that, like in the case of the Upasad sacrifice, that has been said.” The commentaries are again remarkably on the same line.

[13]:

Mīmāṃsā-Sūtra attributed to Jaimini 3.3.9: guṇa-mukhya-vyatikrame tad-arthatvān mukhyena veda-saṃyogaḥ, “When the primary and the subsibiary diverge [belong to a different Veda], because it [the subsidiary] is for the purpose of that [the primary], the relation to the Veda is through the primary.”

[14]:

See Brahma-Sūtra attributed to Bādarāyaṇa 3.3.34.

[15]:

kāmādītaratra tatra cāyatanādibhyaḥ, “(True) desires (should be added) elsewhere, and those there (to be added here), because of (sameness of the) abode.” Brahma-Sūtra attributed to Bādarāyaṇa 3.3.38. The commentators are again in agreement, and Śaṅkara follows suit, before drawing the qualified/supreme Brahman distinction as he typically does when he has a problem with the straightforward meaning.

[16]:

Brahma-Sūtra attributed to Bādarāyaṇa 1.1.2.

[17]:

I should like to emphasize that this formulation is not meant to be a logical notation expressing a relation, but a template containing variables.

[18]:

Chāndogya Upaniṣad 3.14.3, translation Olivelle 1998:209, slightly modified.

[19]:

Taittirīya Upaniṣad 2.5.

[20]:

priya-śirastvādy-aprāptir upacayāpacayau hi bhede, “Non-obtainment (in the universal meditational concept of Brahman of qualities) such as ‘having pleasure as its head,’ because addition and subtraction (are possible) in (the context of) duality.” Brahma-Sūtra attributed to Bādarāyaṇa 3.3.12.

[21]:

vikalpo ‘viśiṣṭa-phalatvāt. kāmyās tu yathā-kāmaṃ samuccīyeran na vā pūrva-hetv-abhāvāt, “There is option, because the result is the same. But, the optional-volitional meditations may be combined or not promiscuously, because the previous reason does not obtain.” Brahma-Sūtra attributed to Bādarāyaṇa 3.3.57-8.