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.
Knowing the knower
Where there is duality, as it were, there one smells another, one sees another, one hears another, one speaks to another, one thinks of another, one knows another. But where all has become one's very Self, then with what would one smell whom, with what would one see whom, with what would one hear whom, with what would one speak to whom, with what would one think of whom, with what would one know whom? By what could one know That by which all this is known? By what, then, could the knower ever be known?
Where there seems to be duality, one smells, sees, hears, speaks to, thinks of, and knows another. But where everything has become one's very Self, then by what means, and whom, would one smell, see, hear, speak to, think of, or know? That by which all this is known, by what could it ever be known? By what, Maitreyi, could one know the knower itself?
Where the schools meet, and where they part
Knowing as we know things, a knower grasping a known through an instrument, cannot reach the ultimate Knower; the Self is not caught as one more object among objects.
Strict non-duality. Where all has become the Self there is no second thing, so no act of knowing arises; the knower cannot be objectified at all, as fire does not burn itself. The Self is the sole self-luminous Subject, and its unknowability as an object is the very mark of its being the one reality.
Read without collapsing the two. The supreme indweller is unknowable in His fullness even by released souls, and this very inexhaustibility is the joy of liberation: the soul forever knows the ever-greater Lord, knower and known remaining distinct.
Brahman is the inner Self, not an object grasped from outside, yet the freed soul, its consciousness now expanded, knows Brahman directly in communion. The verse marks that Brahman is no ordinary object of the senses or the bound intellect, not that knowing ceases or that subject and object collapse into bare identity.
Does by what would you know the knower close the door on all duality, leaving only the one Subject, or does it mark the Lord as the one Knower whom the freed soul knows forever without ever exhausting or becoming Him? The question the verse leaves is the question the schools answer differently.
By what would one know the knower points to the Self as:
- Unknowable because it does not exist
- The ever-present Subject, never an object of its own knowing
- A mystery only scholars can reach
- Knowable only through ritual
Show the answer
By what would you know the knower
Where there are two, Yajnavalkya says, one smells another, sees another, hears another, knows another. All our knowing has this shape: someone here, something there, and a bridge of sense or thought between them. It is how we know anything at all.
But where all has become one's very Self, he asks, by what would one smell, and whom; by what would one see, and whom; by what would one know, and whom? Pull away the two and the bridge has nothing left to span. And then the question that the dialogue ends on, and does not answer: that by which all this is known, by what could that ever be known? By what would you know the knower?
It is not a trick. The one who is looking can never turn around fast enough to catch itself as a thing, the way fire does not burn itself and an eye does not see itself seeing. Whatever you can hold up and examine is, by that very fact, not the one holding it. The verse walks you to the edge of that and stops, on purpose.
Sankara hears in it the end of all duality, the one Subject with no second. Madhva hears the Lord who is never finished being known, so that knowing Him is the endless joy of the freed. Ramanuja's school hears that Brahman is no object of the senses, though the soul set free knows Him face to face. Three hearings, kept side by side. The verse asks, and leaves the asking open, and that openness is its mercy.
The one by which all is known: the sole Subject with no second, or the Lord the freed soul knows without end and without becoming?
Can the one who is looking ever be a thing that you find?
In the commentaries
Every act of knowing, Sankara observes, needs a plurality: a knower, a known, an instrument. Where all has become the Self, these are gone, and no such act can arise. The knower can never be made the object of its own knowing, as fire does not burn itself. So the closing question is not a riddle to solve but the showing of the absolute Subject, self-luminous, never a thing among things: by what would you know the knower.