Bṛhadāraṇyaka Upaniṣadबृहदारण्यक उपनिषद्

Khila Kanda. Adhyaya 6, Brahmana 4. Conception, birth, and the rites of begetting

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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.

Before you read

This is a frank and difficult passage, the rites surrounding union, conception, and the begetting of a child, set down in full with the candor of an ancient ritual that reads the act of generation as a sacrifice and surrounds it with prayers and blessings for the wished-for child. One of its lines, the seventh mantra, gives an instruction about a husband overcoming a wife's refusal, and it must be named for what it is: an instruction of coercion, of sexual violence against a woman. We condemn it without reserve. Nothing in Vedanta, in its own age or in ours, makes such an act anything but wrong, and we do not stand by this instruction in any degree. Scholars read these lines in more than one way, as the praise-language of an old rite rather than a literal command, as bearing the marks of a world long gone, and no living teacher treats them as a standing instruction. We keep the words on the record because a library that quietly erases its own hard pages tells a lie about the past, not because they hold one grain of authority we accept. What is shown here is shown to be seen and reckoned with, never to be obeyed.

Reveal this passage

॥ 6.4.10 ॥

The rite against conceiving

अथ यामिच्छेन्न गर्भं दधीतेति तस्यामर्थं निष्ठाय मुखेन मुखं संधायाभिप्राण्यापान्यात् । इन्द्रियेण ते रेतसा रेत आदद इति । अरेता एव भवति ॥

In transliteration

atha yāmicchenna garbhaṃ dadhīteti tasyāmarthaṃ niṣṭhāya mukhena mukhaṃ saṃdhāyābhiprāṇyāpānyāt | indriyeṇa te retasā reta ādada iti | aretā eva bhavati ||

In English

Now the woman whom he wishes should not conceive, having joined with her and set mouth to mouth, he should first breathe in and then breathe out, saying: with my vigor, with my seed, I take back the seed from you. And she becomes without seed.

In plain words

If he does not want her to conceive, he joins with her, sets mouth to mouth, breathes in and then out, and recites that he draws her seed back by his own vigor; and she is left without seed.

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