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

॥ 6.4.22 ॥

Born in the tenth month

हिरण्मयी अरणी याभ्यां निर्मन्थतामश्विनौ । तं ते गर्भं हवामहे दशमे मासि सूतये । यथाग्निगर्भा पृथिवी यथा द्यौरैन्द्रेण गर्भिणी । वायुर्दिशां यथा गर्भ एवं गर्भं दधामि तेऽसाविति ॥

In transliteration

hiraṇmayī araṇī yābhyāṃ nirmanthatāmaśvinau | taṃ te garbhaṃ havāmahe daśame māsi sūtaye | yathāgnigarbhā pṛthivī yathā dyauraindreṇa garbhiṇī | vāyurdiśāṃ yathā garbha evaṃ garbhaṃ dadhāmi te'sāviti ||

In English

Golden are the two fire sticks with which the Asvins churn out the flame; that embryo of yours we call forth, to be brought to birth in the tenth month. As the earth holds fire within her as her embryo, as the sky is pregnant with Indra, as the wind is the embryo of the quarters, so do I place this embryo in you, so-and-so.

In plain words

With the words: golden are the two fire sticks the Asvins churn fire from, we call forth your embryo to be born in the tenth month; just as the earth carries fire within her, the sky carries Indra, and the wind is the unborn of the directions, so I place this embryo in you.

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