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

॥ 6.4.7 ॥

When the wife will not yield

सा चेदस्मै न दद्यात्काममेनामवक्रिणीयात् । सा चेदस्मै नैव दद्यात्काममेनां यष्ट्या वा पाणिना वोपहत्यातिक्रामेत् । इन्द्रियेन ते यशसा यश आदद इति । अयशा एव भवति ॥

In transliteration

sā cedasmai na dadyātkāmamenāmavakriṇīyāt | sā cedasmai naiva dadyātkāmamenāṃ yaṣṭyā vā pāṇinā vopahatyātikrāmet | indriyena te yaśasā yaśa ādada iti | ayaśā eva bhavati ||

In English

If she will not yield to him, he may win her over with a gift. And if even then she will not yield, he may overcome her with a stick or with the hand and proceed, saying: with my vigor and repute I take away your repute. And she becomes bereft of repute.

In plain words

If the wife refuses him, he may buy her consent with a present; if she still refuses, he may overpower her with a stick or his hand and proceed, reciting that he takes away her repute by his own; and she is left without repute.

All mantras