Yajnavalkya

Something happened once in the ashram of the sage Vaishampayana that no student of the Veda had ever been asked to do before or since: a young disciple knelt on the swept earth of the sacrificial ground and, at his own guru's command, brought up everything he had ever learned. Not as garbled words or forgotten lines, but as substance, as warm mouthfuls of the sacred Yajus itself, disgorged like offered grain. The disciple's name was Yajnavalkya. What came out of him took the visible form of food, and the other students of the hermitage, ravenous for that knowledge even in this humiliating form, turned themselves into tittiri birds and pecked it from the ground, swallowing verse after verse. Because birds had eaten it, that branch of the Yajurveda came to be called Taittiriya, and because it had passed a second time through mixed and lesser mouths, it was called Krishna, the dark Yajus. Yajnavalkya wiped his mouth, empty now of every mantra his guru had ever poured into him, and walked out of the ashram owning nothing.

What had provoked such fury in a teacher renowned for patience is remembered differently in different tellings, but the shape of it is constant. Vaishampayana had incurred the grave fault of brahmahatya, the killing of a kinsman, and needed his hundred pupils to share the burden of penance so that no single one of them would be crushed by it. Every disciple accepted his portion quietly. Yajnavalkya alone stepped forward and declared, with the confidence of a young man who has never yet been wrong, that he needed no one else, that he alone could carry his teacher's whole penance and finish it faster than all the others combined. He may have meant it as devotion. Vaishampayana heard it as contempt for every other Brahmin in the room, and his voice went cold. "Enough," he said, "of a student so full of himself that he despises wiser men than himself. Give back to me, at once, everything you have learned from me." And so the vomiting, and so the birds, and so a young man's first great lesson: that brilliance offered without humility curdles into insult, however innocent the heart behind it.

Yajnavalkya did not go looking for another human teacher. He resolved, standing outside the hermitage with nothing left of his learning, that he would never again place his understanding in the keeping of a mortal guru, and he turned instead toward the sun. What followed was tapasya of a fierce and singular kind, a young man petitioning Surya himself for knowledge that no earthly throat had given him and no earthly throat could ever again take back. Surya was moved by that devotion. He is said to have come to Yajnavalkya not in his blazing solar form but as Hayagriva, luminous and horse-headed, and to have poured into him the Yajus fresh and whole, not sung as before but rendered in a sharper, more direct prose, unmixed with the debris of Vaishampayana's lineage. Because it came from the vaji, the horse, this branch was called Vajasaneyi, and because it was clean, luminous, untouched by lesser mouths, it was called Shukla, the bright and white Yajurveda. Surya gave one thing more, a boon with teeth in it: whoever dared take up argument against Yajnavalkya from that day forward would not keep his head on his shoulders.

On the strength of that solar transmission, Yajnavalkya became the towering intellect of the kingdom of Videha, gathering and arranging the vast prose commentary known as the Shatapatha Brahmana, the Brahmana of a hundred paths, in the court of King Janaka at Mithila. Janaka was no ordinary patron. He was himself a seeker of unusual seriousness, a king who wanted philosophers around him the way other kings wanted generals, and Yajnavalkya became the philosopher no one else in that court could equal. It was in Janaka's hall that the boon Surya had given him was finally tested in the open, in the most famous single episode of his life.

Janaka arranged a great brahmayajna, an assembly for the contest of sacred learning, and had a thousand cows driven into the courtyard with their horns capped in gold, a prize for whichever Brahmin present could prove himself brahmishtha, the foremost knower of Brahman in the room. Yajnavalkya did not wait for the assembly to decide anything. He turned to his own pupil, a young man named Samashrava, and said simply, "Son, drive these cows home." The hall erupted. Who was this man to claim first place before anyone had even asked a question? Yajnavalkya's answer disarmed the fury without retreating an inch: "I bow to whoever among you is truly the foremost knower of Brahman. I only wanted the cows." It was somehow both entirely humble and entirely unbudging, and it meant that if anyone wished to keep him from the prize, they would have to come and take the knowledge away from him themselves.

One by one they came. The priest Ashvala opened with questions about death and the rites that outrun it. Others followed, pressing him on the nature of the elements, on what happens to a man's faculties when he dies, on the thread that holds the visible and invisible worlds together, and each time Yajnavalkya answered without faltering, until the hall itself seemed to hold its breath before it dared send its next challenger. The most searching of them all was a woman, Gargi Vachaknavi, who twice rose to question him when the men around her had exhausted themselves. The first time she pressed him upward through the elements, asking what water is woven upon, and what is woven upon that, and what upon that, climbing through air and sky and sun and moon and the worlds of the gods until she reached the world of Brahma itself and asked what that, in turn, was woven upon. Yajnavalkya's voice changed. "Gargi," he said, "do not ask too much, or your head will fall from your body. You are asking about a divinity that must not be questioned beyond its measure." Gargi fell silent, but she was not finished. When her turn came again, she asked a subtler question still, about what pervades everything above the sky and beneath the earth, everything called past, present, and future, and Yajnavalkya answered with what is remembered as one of the most exalted passages in the whole Upanishad, describing the Imperishable, the Akshara, as that which sees without being seen, hears without being heard, thinks without being thought, knows without being known, the ground on which even space itself is woven. Gargi turned to the assembly and said that none of them would ever defeat this man in a contest about Brahman, and bowed out not in defeat but in recognition.

The last challenger did not know when to stop. Vidagdha Shakalya pressed on where wiser questioners had withdrawn, and Yajnavalkya finally turned the contest around, asking Shakalya a question he could not answer. Surya's old boon came due. Tradition remembers that Shakalya's head shattered where he stood, unable to bear the weight of a question he had insisted on asking. It is a hard image, and the texts that carry it clearly mean it less as violence and more as warning: that the deepest truths are not toys, that there is a point past which curiosity must become reverence or it becomes something that breaks the one who carries it carelessly.

After the hall had emptied of challengers, Janaka came to Yajnavalkya privately with a gentler question, and it drew out of him the teaching for which he is loved rather than merely admired. "What serves as the light for a man?" the king asked. "The sun, your majesty." "And when the sun has set?" "The moon." "And when the moon has set and the fire has gone out and even speech has fallen silent, what then is his light?" Yajnavalkya answered, "The Self, O king, is then his light. By the light of the Atman alone a man sits, moves about, does his work, and returns." It is a small exchange, four short questions and four short answers, and it carries the entire weight of what he had spent his life discovering: that every outer lamp can be extinguished, and something in a human being still goes on seeing.

The same teaching came to its fullest, tenderest expression at home, not in a royal hall but between husband and wife. Yajnavalkya had two wives, Katyayani, who lived contentedly in the ordinary joys of the household, and Maitreyi, who from her youth had wanted nothing but to understand. When Yajnavalkya, an old man now, decided the time had come to leave the householder's life for the forest and the life of a wandering renunciate, he sat down to divide his wealth between the two women. Maitreyi did not want her share. "If this whole earth, full of wealth, were mine," she asked him, "would I become immortal through it?" "No," Yajnavalkya told her, "your life would be like the life of the wealthy, nothing more. There is no hope of immortality through wealth." "Then what use is it to me," she said, "if it will not make me immortal? Whatever you know, my lord, tell that to me instead." Something in her question moved him more than anything the assembled scholars of Mithila had managed to ask. "You have always been dear to me," he said, "and now you have made yourself dearer still." He sat her down and gave her the teaching he had never once given away casually: that it is not the husband who is loved for the husband's own sake, nor the wife for the wife's own sake, nor wealth, nor children, nor any single thing in this world loved for its own sake, but that all of it is loved for the sake of the Self, the Atman, in which alone anything is found dear at all. The Self, he told her, must be heard of, reflected upon, and meditated upon, and only then is everything truly known.

It is this same rigor that Yajnavalkya turned, again and again, into the method his name is still identified with: neti neti, not this, not this, the refusal to let the mind rest in any object, any name, any form, any experience, mistaking it for the Self it is looking for. He would not let Brahman be captured in an image or a formula, and he would not let a seeker settle for a comfortable half-answer either, as poor Shakalya discovered too late. In later ages a code of right conduct and law, the Yajnavalkya Smriti, came to be recited under his name, carried forward by the same reputation for a mind that would not blur a hard question into a soft one. And Nabhadas' own tradition remembers him for something gentler still, that in the fullness of his life this same fierce debater became the voice through which the story of Rama was carried onward, reciting it to the sage Bharadwaj, who received it from Yajnavalkya's mouth in the great chain by which the tale is said to descend from Shiva to Parvati, from Kakabhushundi to Garuda, and at last into this world through a rishi who had once emptied himself of everything he knew and found, on the other side of that emptying, both the Self that needs no outer lamp and a story of the Lord fit to be sung to every generation after his own.

What makes Yajnavalkya worth sitting with, across all this distance of centuries, is not only the brilliance that could silence a hall of scholars or ask a question sharp enough to shatter a man's certainty. It is that the same man who could do that also knew exactly when brilliance was worthless, that no cleverness in the world would make Maitreyi immortal, that a boon powerful enough to break a rival's head could not by itself illuminate anything when the sun and moon and fire and speech had all gone dark. He spent a lifetime insisting that only one light never sets, and then, when the time came, he walked into the forest to go and sit in it.