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

॥ 6.4.9 ॥

A rite to win her love

स यामिच्छेत् कामयेत मेति तस्यामर्थं निष्ठाय मुखेन मुखं संधायोपस्थमस्या अभिमृश्य जपेत् अङ्गादङ्गात्संभवसि हृदयादधिजायसे । स त्वमङ्गकषायोऽसि दिग्धविद्धामिव मादयेमाममूं मयीति ॥

In transliteration

sa yāmicchet kāmayeta meti tasyāmarthaṃ niṣṭhāya mukhena mukhaṃ saṃdhāyopasthamasyā abhimṛśya japet aṅgādaṅgātsaṃbhavasi hṛdayādadhijāyase | sa tvamaṅgakaṣāyo'si digdhaviddhāmiva mādayemāmamūṃ mayīti ||

In English

The woman whom he should desire, wishing that she may love him, having joined with her, having set mouth to mouth, and having touched her lap, he should recite softly: you are born from every limb, you arise out of the heart; you are the very essence of the limbs. Madden this woman toward me as though she were struck by a poisoned arrow.

In plain words

Wishing a woman to love him, the man joins with her, sets mouth to mouth, touches her lap, and quietly recites: you are born of every limb, you spring from the heart, you are the distilled essence of the body; let this woman be drawn helplessly to me, as if pierced by a poisoned arrow.

All mantras