Yajnavalkya Kanda. Adhyaya 3, Brahmana 5. Kahola: the Self, and the call to renounce
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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 call to renounce
Then Kahola, the son of Kusitaka, asked him. Yajnavalkya, he said, explain to me that very Brahman which is immediate and direct, the Self that is within all. This is your Self, that is within all. Which is the Self that is within all, Yajnavalkya. It is the one that goes beyond hunger and thirst, beyond grief and delusion, beyond old age and death. Knowing this very Self, the knowers of Brahman rise above the desire for sons, the desire for wealth, and the desire for the worlds, and they walk as those who beg their bread. For the desire for sons is the desire for wealth, and the desire for wealth is the desire for the worlds; both alike are nothing but desire. Therefore let the knower of Brahman, having done with learning, wish to live as a child. Having done with both the child's simplicity and with learning, he becomes a silent sage. Having done with both silence and its opposite, he becomes a knower of Brahman. By what would that knower of Brahman be known. He is such as he is, by that through which he knows. Anything other than this is full of suffering. Then Kahola, the son of Kusitaka, fell silent.
Kahola, son of Kusitaka, asks Yajnavalkya to point out the Brahman that is not inferred but directly present, the Self seated within everything (sarvantara). Yajnavalkya answers: that very Self is what lies within all, and it is the one that passes beyond hunger and thirst, beyond grief (soka) and delusion (moha), beyond old age (jara) and death (mrtyu). Once a person truly knows this Self, the desire for sons, the desire for wealth, and the desire for worlds fall away, because these three are really one craving (esana) wearing three faces: wanting a son is wanting wealth, and wanting wealth is wanting the worlds you hope to win. Such a knower renounces and takes up the begging life (bhiksacarya). The path of renunciation runs in stages: first set aside book-learning (pandityam) and rest in a child's directness, free of self-display (balyam); then set aside both that simplicity and the learning and become a silent sage (muni, mauna); then set aside even silence and non-silence and simply be a knower of Brahman. There is nothing left by which to mark him out; he is what he is by the very Self through which all else is known. Everything other than this Self is shot through with suffering (artam). At that, Kahola asked no more.
In the commentaries
Sankara takes the mantra to establish that the innermost Self is Brahman itself, by its own nature untouched by hunger, thirst, grief, delusion, decay and death, as the sky is untouched by the clouds that seem to soil it; and that direct knowledge of this Self is what makes renunciation real, since the three desires for sons, wealth and worlds are at bottom a single craving for results lying outside the Self, so the knower drops them and the staged renunciation of learning, then childlike simplicity, then silence itself, until no outward mark remains and he abides as the knower of Brahman, all else being suffering.