Madhu Kanda. Adhyaya 2, Brahmana 4. Yajnavalkya and Maitreyi: for the sake of the Self
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Each mantra is given four ways: the Sanskrit in its Devanagari script, the same sounds in Roman letters, an English translation set in our own voice, and then the line once more in plain words, for a first and unhurried reading.
Not every passage is opened to the same depth. A few central mantras carry the full cross-school commentary, where the schools are set side by side. The rest are kept here whole and faithful, set in their place but not expounded, so the book stays entire and nothing is dropped for being thought minor.
Where the schools read a line differently, the difference is kept open. None is crowned and none is corrected. Each is met on its own terms, and where they contradict, the contradiction is left standing for you to sit with.
The lump of salt
As a lump of salt cast into water dissolves into the very water, and there is nothing of it to take hold of again, yet from wherever one draws, it is salt, so is this great Being: without limit, without end, a single mass of pure consciousness. Rising out of these elements, it vanishes again into them. After departing, there is no separate knowing. So I say, said Yajnavalkya.
Imagine a lump of salt dropped into water: it dissolves entirely and cannot be picked out again, yet wherever you taste the water, it is salt. So is this great Being: boundless, endless, a single mass of pure consciousness (vijnana-ghana). It rises out of these elements and vanishes back into them. 'After departing, there is no separate knowing,' said Yajnavalkya. This is the hard saying that startles Maitreyi, and it is taken up in the verses that follow.
Where the schools meet, and where they part
The verse does not teach the Self's extinction. What it denies is a form of particular, object-bound consciousness, not the reality of the Self, which the parallel passage calls indestructible.
All three readings refuse the materialist conclusion Maitreyi fears, that consciousness simply ends at death.
What ceases is particular, dual cognition (visesa-vijnana), I-and-mine, which arises only from the Self's contact with body and organs conjured by ignorance. When ignorance dissolves, this ends as a reflection vanishes when its water is drawn off, while Pure Intelligence, the Self's very nature, remains unchanged. The salt dissolving wholly into the water, graspable nowhere yet salt throughout, is total non-difference: no separate individuality survives.
The released soul does not lose itself. Only empirical, manifold cognition ceases; the soul's knowledge of its own nature and of the Lord persists. Madhva rereads the very salt simile against merger: the salt reaches the ocean as its refuge, and many freed souls, like many grains of sand, are sustained by the ocean yet remain distinct grains, never becoming the ocean. They enjoy graded bliss under the Lord, similar to Him but never His equal.
Consciousness is the Self's essential, inseparable quality (dharma-bhuta-jnana). In bondage it is contracted by karma; in release it expands without limit. So no consciousness after departing is the removal of contracted, karma-bound object-cognition, not the loss of consciousness or of individuality. The Self is a mass of knowledge because knowing is its permanent nature.
When the salt dissolves, has the drop become the sea, or has a single grain come to rest in a sea that holds it and keeps it distinct? Advaita reads the loss of all separateness into the one Self; Dvaita and Visistadvaita read a self that reaches the Lord, sheds only its bound cognition, and abides, still itself. The words are the same; the reading divides liberation into identity or communion, and the contradiction is kept open.
Sankara says what ceases at liberation is:
- The Self
- The body alone
- Consciousness itself
- Particular, dual consciousness, the sense of I-and-mine
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Madhva rereads the lump of salt as:
- A grain of sand come to rest in the ocean, sustained yet distinct
- Salt losing all its flavor
- An illusion with no reality
- The drop becoming the sea
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The salt in the water
Drop a lump of salt into water and it is gone. Reach in and you cannot pick it out again. But taste the water anywhere, at the top, at the edge, at the bottom, and it is salt, every drop of it. So, Yajnavalkya says, is this great Being: boundless, without end, a single mass of awareness, risen out of the elements and vanishing back into them. And after departing, there is no separate knowing.
Maitreyi hears that last line and is frightened. You have bewildered me, she says; you have just told me there is no consciousness after death. It is the oldest fear, the one the materialist makes a doctrine of: that when the body goes, the light goes with it. Yajnavalkya does not soften it. He says, I have spoken nothing bewildering. What I said is enough, and more than enough, to understand.
What he means, in his own telling and in Sankara's, is that the salt has not stopped being; it has stopped being a lump. What ends is not awareness but the separateness of it, the I-here-tasting-that, the running tally of mine and not-mine that a body keeps. Pull the bound, divided knowing and what is left is not darkness. It is awareness with nothing left over to set against it.
And here the schools take the same lump of salt and read two destinies from it, and we keep both. For Advaita the salt is gone into the water, no grain to find, the separate self dissolved into the one Self it always was. For Madhva the salt has reached the ocean that holds it, one grain among countless grains, sustained forever by the Lord and never the ocean itself. For Ramanuja's school the soul's knowing, only narrowed by its long bondage, opens again to its full reach, and the self that knows abides, itself, in Him. We do not choose for you. We keep the salt, and both of its readings, in the one glass of water.
Has the drop become the sea, or come to rest in it, still a drop? Identity or communion: the words of the verse hold both, and we leave them holding both.
When you imagine being free, do you imagine becoming the whole, or coming home to it?
In the commentaries
This is the verse Sankara handles with the most care. The separate self that arises from the elements is the false individuality superimposed by ignorance through contact with body and organs; on knowledge it re-enters its cause, and the particular consciousness, I am this, this is mine, I am happy, ceases, just as the sun's reflection vanishes when the water is drawn off while the sun stands unchanged. What is denied is not consciousness but particular, divided, object-bound consciousness. The salt that dissolves and cannot be picked out, yet is salt in every drop, is the figure of a self become a seamless mass of awareness with no separate part to seize.