The Secret of the Katha Upanishad -34. Swami Krishnananda.

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Thursday 20, March 2025, 11:30.
Upanishads:
The Secret of the Katha Upanishad: 
Discourse No. 7-1.
Swami Krishnananda.
Post - 34.

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Discourse No. 7.1.

The problem of the Katha Upanishad may be regarded as what pertains to the enigma of life and death. The great question of life is also the great question of death. While life is a great mystery before us, death stares at us as a still greater mystery. Both these sides of the same coin of experience stand before us as an eternal query which sages and saints from time immemorial have been trying to confront and solve to the satisfaction of each individual seeker.

The Katha Upanishad is given to us by the Lord of Death in the context of the aspiration of Nachiketas who sought for eternal life. It is death that leads to life, as it were. 'Die to live', is the main theme of one of the songs of His Holiness Sri Swami Sivanandaji Maharaj. Unless you die to the self, you cannot live the life eternal. Unless you be reborn and be as children, you cannot enter the gates of heaven, said the Christ. All great men think alike. The Upanishad, which is given by Yama, the Lord of Death, is an attempt at the solution of a central mystery which is before us on one side as life in this world and on the other side as life hereafter. We make a distinction between the here and the hereafter. We are accustomed to differentiate between life and death. For us they are two different things altogether, without similarity of character. That is why we love life and dread death. The worst punishment that can be meted out to a person is to hang him, execute him or kill him. Nothing can be more miserable than the contemplation of impending death. Horror identified with experience is death itself, while life, we believe, is a flow of nectarine experience. Why is it that we fear death and love life? Because we neither know life nor death. Children's love for toys has no rationality behind it, though there is a good psychology which explains it. Our loves and hatreds are childish reactions to immediate stimuli from outside, and we need not take too seriously what our untutored mind speaks in the language of its own poor experience. 

The Upanishad is not here before us to pamper our urges in terms of sensory gratification. The Upanishad is the secret of life. The very word 'Upanishad' means a secret teaching of the innermost essence of existence. We hear that the Upanishad is the quintessence of the Vedas. While the Veda is knowledge, the Upanishad is the essence of knowledge. While knowledge may pertain to an object, the wisdom of the Upanishad is that which pertains to the eternal Subject, the ultimate Reality behind things. Such being the context and the content of the Upanishads in general, and of the Katha Upanishad in particular, it would do well for us to examine for a while the meaning that seems to be implied in the question of Nachiketas and the answer of the Lord of Death, Yama. What was it that Nachiketas wanted or asked for, and what was it that Yama bestowed upon him? What was the question and what was the answer? The question, evidently, was a very comprehensive encounter of human experience. It related to all levels of human knowledge—sensory, psychological and spiritual. The three fasts, the three questions, the three boons may be said to be relevant to the three kinds or levels of experience through which we pass as souls or individuals. Sense, reason and intuition; perception, cognition and experience; the senses, the mind and the Spirit, are the fundamental stages of experience. The questions of Nachiketas pertain to these levels of the quest of the human soul; and the answers given by Yama, the boons bestowed upon Nachiketas, are precisely the counterpart of these questions, the Universal answering the individual, God speaking to man, the Absolute entering into the relative, to solve the problems and the questions of life and death.

What is death? To us humans, mortal beings tethered to the experience of the body and the senses, death is the annihilation of all values. That is why we fear death. It is a negation of everything we hold as dear and near. All our pleasures are cut off. Our existence itself seems to be denied. It appears as if we are not going to be recognised any more. Everything is done for. All things are over. It is finished. That is death for us. But death itself is here the Teacher. If death were a negation of all things, you would learn no lesson from it. The greatest teacher of life is death itself. Life is the student, death is the tutor. We have a beautiful incident narrated by Kalidasa in his Raghuvamsa. There was a king called Aja, the father of Dasaratha. He had a very dear consort called Indumati. She died mysteriously by an accident, which was a death-like shock to the mind of king Aja. He wept and beat his breast, and cried before his Guru, Vasishtha. “Mighty sage! What a calamity has befallen me!” Vasishtha speaks very few words, and in the answer he gives to Aja, he says, “What is natural is death; it is life that is unnatural.” That we are alive is a mystery. That we die is not a marvel. That we are able to breathe is a wonder by itself. That we are subject to death is the naturalness of our personality. The whole of the Universe is death manifest, says Buddha, the great seer of our own historical times. The universe is death, as it were, because it is a procession of transitions, a movement, a perpetual transformation of constituents. Do you call it life?

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Continued

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