Bṛhadāraṇyaka Upaniṣadबृहदारण्यक उपनिषद्

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

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.

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

॥ 6.4.15 ॥

Rice in curd, for a learned son

अथ य इच्छेत् पुत्रो मे कपिलः पिङ्गलो जायेत द्वौ वेदावनुब्रुवीत सर्वमायुरियादिति दध्योदनं पाचयित्वा सर्पिष्मन्तमश्नीयाताम् । ईश्वरौ जनयितवै ॥

In transliteration

atha ya icchet putro me kapilaḥ piṅgalo jāyeta dvau vedāvanubruvīta sarvamāyuriyāditi dadhyodanaṃ pācayitvā sarpiṣmantamaśnīyātām | īśvarau janayitavai ||

In English

Now he who wishes that a tawny, brown-eyed son be born to him, that he study two Vedas and live out his full span of life, should have rice cooked in curd, and the two of them, with clarified butter, should eat it. Then they are able to beget such a son.

In plain words

A man who wants a tawny, brown-eyed son who will master two Vedas and live his full lifespan should have rice cooked in curd; he and his wife eat it with ghee, and then the two are able to conceive such a son.

All mantras