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

॥ 6.4.13 ॥

Her three days apart

अथ यस्य जायामार्तवं विन्देत्त्र्यहं कंसे न पिबेत् । अहतवासाः । नैनां वृषलो न वृषल्यपहन्यात् । त्रिरात्रान्त आप्लुत्य व्रीहीनवघातयेत् ॥

In transliteration

atha yasya jāyāmārtavaṃ vindettryahaṃ kaṃse na pibet | ahatavāsāḥ | naināṃ vṛṣalo na vṛṣalyapahanyāt | trirātrānta āplutya vrīhīnavaghātayet ||

In English

Now when a man's wife has her monthly period, for three days she should not drink from a metal cup, nor wear washed clothes; neither a low man nor a low woman should touch her. At the end of the three nights, having bathed, she should have rice husked.

In plain words

When the wife is menstruating, for three days she should not drink from a metal cup, nor put on freshly washed clothes, and no low-born man or woman should touch her. After the three nights she bathes and has rice husked for the rites to come.

All mantras