The Essence of the Brihadaranyaka Upanishad : 6. - Swami Krishnananda.

 

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Wednesday, May 19, 2021. 06:38.PM.
1.Introduction - 6.
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------

The Upanishad promises us a freedom which is above the turmoil of all earthly existence. It can make us happy perennially under every condition, even after death—not merely in this life. In fact, the Upanishad assures us that death is not a bar, and not a fear. There is no such thing as death as we think of it. It is another kind of process which is intended for the chastening of the soul in its march towards a greater perfection; and perfection is what we ask for, not pleasure. This is what the Upanishads tell us, on which the Brihadaranyaka contemplates in vast detail.

To people who study this Upanishad at random, it may appear to be a hotch-potch of contents, as it incorporates diverse ideas, many thoughts, and several schools of thought are impregnated into the body of this scripture. But, in fact, it is so profound that to discover the sequence of thought present in it one requires some time and also some patience. There is a sequential development of thought of the Upanishad right from the beginning to the end. It is not an irrelevant jumble of various concepts of meditation or philosophical thought put into a single omnibus body. There is, really, no spiritual truth which is not contained in this Upanishad; it is a complete scripture by itself, and every other Upanishad repeats only what this has said in some way or the other. 

There is nothing new in any other Upanishad that is not found in the Brihadaranyaka. It is really ‘Brihadaranyaka’—a great forest of wisdom, a real ocean where you can find any kind of treasure, provided you are able to dive deep into it. If we can arrange all the thoughts of the Upanishad in some sequence, we shall find that the First Chapter of the Upanishad is actually the thesis of the whole Upanishad and the Second Chapter, to some extent, continues the same tradition, so that commentators are of the opinion that the First and the Second Chapters constitute what may be called the fundamental doctrine, of the Brihadaranyaka. This Section is also called the Madhu-kanda or the book dealing with the essence of the whole scripture.

The next two Chapters, the Third and the Fourth, are a logical development of this thought in a more polemical manner or philosophical way. These are thoughts which are not entirely new, but which have been already explained in a precise form in the first two Chapters, only now elaborated in a philosophical way in the next two Chapters, called the Yajnavalkya-kanda, or the Muni-kanda, as, sometimes, it is also called. So, we have in the first Four Chapters the entire philosophy in its basic sense—the thesis proclaimed in the first two Chapters and argued about in the next two Chapters.

The practical meditations which may be regarded as the natural outcome of this philosophical study are expounded in the Fifth Chapter. The Sixth Chapter is a very essential appendix to the whole body of the Upanishad, so that in these Six Chapters the entire objective of human life, the four Purusharthas, as we may say—Artha, Kama, Dharma and Moksha—all these aims of existence, are beautifully blended in their completeness and told as to how they stand in a mutual relation one to the other, how these objectives of life, Artha, Kama, Dharma and Moksha are four approaches necessarily incumbent upon every individual at some time or the other, in some degree or the other for the purpose of the highest integration which is Self-realisation or God-realisation.

End.