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

॥ 6.4.3 ॥

Union read as a sacrifice

तस्या वेदिरुपस्थः । लोमानि बर्हिश् । चर्माधिषवणे । समिद्धो मध्यतस्तौ मुष्कौ । स यावान् ह वै वाजपेयेन यजमानस्य लोको भवति तावानस्य लोको भवति । य एवं विद्वानधोपहासं चरत्यासां स्त्रीणां सुकृतं वृङ्क्ते । अथ य इदमविद्वानधोपहासं चरत्यास्य स्त्रियः सुकृतं वृञ्जते ॥

In transliteration

tasyā vedirupasthaḥ | lomāni barhiś | carmādhiṣavaṇe | samiddho madhyatastau muṣkau | sa yāvān ha vai vājapeyena yajamānasya loko bhavati tāvānasya loko bhavati | ya evaṃ vidvānadhopahāsaṃ caratyāsāṃ strīṇāṃ sukṛtaṃ vṛṅkte | atha ya idamavidvānadhopahāsaṃ caratyāsya striyaḥ sukṛtaṃ vṛñjate ||

In English

Her lap is the sacrificial altar; her hairs are the sacred grass; her skin is the soma press; the labia at the center are the kindled fire. As great as is the world won by one who performs the Vajapeya sacrifice, so great is the world of the man who, knowing this, approaches a woman in union; he draws to himself the merits of these women. But the man who approaches her in union without this knowledge, his own merits the women draw away.

In plain words

The woman's body is read as a whole sacrifice: her lap the altar, her hair the grass, her skin the soma press, her body's center the kindled fire. Union performed with this knowledge earns the same heaven as the great Vajapeya rite and gathers the women's merit to oneself; union performed in ignorance lets that merit drain away instead.

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