Yajnavalkya Kanda. Adhyaya 4, Brahmana 3. The self-luminous Self: waking, dream, and the light of man
New to these pages?
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.
Beyond all the sorrows of the heart
Here a father is no father, a mother no mother, the worlds no worlds, the gods no gods, the Vedas no Vedas. Here a thief is no thief, the slayer of an embryo no slayer, a Candala no Candala, a Paulkasa no Paulkasa, a wandering monk no monk, an ascetic no ascetic. He is followed neither by good nor by evil, for then he has crossed beyond all the sorrows of the heart.
In this deep-sleep state every distinction of the waking world falls away: father is not father, mother not mother, the worlds are no worlds, gods no gods, Vedas no Vedas; thief, embryo-slayer, outcaste, monk, ascetic, none of these labels holds. Good deeds do not follow him and evil deeds do not follow him, for in that state he has crossed beyond every grief of the heart (the intellect).
In the commentaries
Sankara takes this sweeping negation as showing that all relations, duties, castes, merits and sins belong only to the realm of ignorance and the body; the self in its own nature is untouched by every one of them and is already beyond all sorrow, which is the very mark of its freedom.