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.
Which is the Self
"Which is the Self?" "It is this conscious one among the vital breaths, the light within the heart, the person. Remaining the same, he wanders through both worlds. He seems to think, he seems to move. For becoming the dream, he crosses beyond this world and the forms of death."
Janaka asks which one exactly is this Self. Yajnavalkya answers: the conscious being (vijnanamaya) among the vital energies (pranas), the light inside the heart, the person himself. Staying one and the same, he travels through both worlds, this one and the next. He only seems to think and seems to stir, because he appears to take on the activity of the mind and senses. By becoming the dreamer he passes beyond this waking world and beyond the forms of death (the body and its powers that decay).
In the commentaries
Here Sankara identifies the Self under discussion as the infinite being seated in the midst of the organs, the self-effulgent light within the intellect. It seems to be the intellect, he says, only because it lends its own consciousness to the intellect, as the planet Rahu becomes visible only in the sun and moon, or as a clear crystal seems to take the colour of what lies beside it. It moves between the two worlds of waking and dream, and it seems to think and seems to tremble; yet the thinking and the trembling belong to the intellect that borrows its light, never to the witness, which remains unmoved.