Chapter 2. The Upaniṣads and the central questions: karma, rebirth, and liberation¶

The previous chapter described the world before the Buddha's birth, with its Vedas, sacrifices, castes, populations moving east, and restless cities. The focus now narrows to thought itself. The central questions that occupied the Buddha throughout his life, concerning karma, rebirth, and liberation from rebirth, had already been posed before he was born. They had also received a powerful set of answers, principally in the Upaniṣads. To understand Buddhism's position, we first need to understand the questions and answers it had to address.

The Upaniṣads were both a prelude to Buddhism and one of its most important opponents. The Buddha adopted their questions but rejected their central answer.

1. What are the Upaniṣads?¶

An older explanation of upaniṣad interprets it as "sitting near," extended to mean a secret teaching given to a student sitting close to the teacher. The Upaniṣads form the last accumulated layer of Vedic literature, and so are also called "the end of the Veda" (vedānta).

Chronology is crucial. Otherwise, later material, sometimes itself influenced by Buddhism, can easily be mistaken for something that existed before the Buddha.¹ The book's position is that only the earliest prose Upaniṣads can securely be placed before him. The others either developed alongside Buddhism or postdate it.

"Upaniṣadic thought" in this chapter mainly refers to the first two groups, especially the Bṛhadāraṇyaka and Chāndogya. We must avoid reading later systems, such as Śaṅkara's Vedānta, back into early texts.

2. From sacrifice to knowledge¶

As the previous chapter explained, the cosmic efficacy attributed to sacrifice reached its peak in the Brāhmaṇa period. The Upaniṣadic change was a turn from performing sacrifice correctly to knowing the truth.

The change worked through internalization. External sacrificial rites were correlated with breath, consciousness, and self within the human body. The sacrificial fire was moved into the body, and the central concern shifted from events at the fire altar to what lay within the knowing subject. The path to liberation thus moved from "action," the karma of sacrifice, toward "knowledge" (jñāna), direct knowledge of the self and ultimate reality.²

The consequences were profound. Religion's center shifted from external performance to internal understanding, and later Indian theories of liberation inherited a basic direction. Liberation required some form of "seeing through." Buddhist wisdom, prajñā or insight, rejected the identity of brahman and ātman, but still developed within the pursuit of liberation through knowledge.

3. The central concepts of self (ātman) and brahman¶

The Upaniṣads center on two concepts and their relation.

• Self (ātman) is the permanent, unchanging self at the individual's deepest level. It is neither the body, the senses, nor changing thoughts, but the "knower" behind them all.
• Brahman is the ultimate reality of the universe and the basis of all things. The word shares a root with brāhmaṇa, the priestly caste, but differs in meaning. Throughout the book, "brahman" refers to ultimate reality and "Brahmin" to the caste.

The most startling Upaniṣadic step is to assert that the two are already one. The self deep within the individual is the brahman of the universe. Several famous statements express the equation:

A common misreading comes from later Advaita Vedānta. Scholars in that school, in Śaṅkara's tradition, collected such sentences into a set of "great sayings" (mahāvākya), assigning one to each Veda as the guiding statements of a complete system. In the book's judgment, that arrangement is late. In the early Upaniṣads, the sayings are scattered across different contexts and should not be read as doctrines fixed from the outset.³

As for what brahman or ātman actually "is," the Upaniṣads answer negatively. In the Bṛhadāraṇyaka, Yājñavalkya repeatedly points to it through "not this, not this" (neti neti). Anything that can be spoken of or made into an object is not it. It is the "knower" that can never be treated as an object.¹ Uddālaka uses images such as salt dissolved in water and the mingling of sap from different trees to explain how the one "being" (sat) pervades all things.

Before proceeding, a distinction is necessary. "Ineffable" here does not always mean the same thing as the ineffability that will recur in later chapters. Confusing its meanings is one of the commonest obstacles to reading Indian philosophy.

Ineffability can be divided into the following broad types:

The five types recur across Indian philosophical traditions, sometimes overlapping in the same object. Upaniṣadic brahman involves the first type because available words cannot readily encompass it. It also involves the second, because "existence" and "nonexistence" do not apply to it. The third type applies because brahman is itself the knowing subject and cannot be reduced to an object. The ineffability of nirvāṇa is mainly of the second type, with some of the fourth. Recognizing the differences helps in reading the disputes in later chapters. Schools that speak of "ineffability" often mean different things.

The "knower" is supported by an argument, beyond its role as a metaphor. Yājñavalkya reasons that anything of which one can be conscious has already become an "object" of consciousness and therefore cannot be its "subject." The body, feelings, thoughts, and even the thought "I am thinking" can all be "seen," so none can be the "seer." Once every observable layer is removed, only what cannot in principle be observed as an object qualifies as ātman. In the Bṛhadāraṇyaka, he says, "The knower cannot be known, because there is no second thing to know it."¹ The argument places ātman in an epistemologically transcendent position. It is no specific thing, but the condition under which any specific thing can be known, and cannot in principle be falsified by experience.

Buddhism later questioned the argument's presupposition instead of proposing another "true observer." Observing is itself a process, with no need for a separately existing and continuously unchanging "observer" to support it behind the scenes. The disagreement between Buddhism and the Upaniṣads begins with that presupposition.

The early Upaniṣads contain an internal tension over the relation between brahman and ātman. The texts do not always describe the two as having been one from the beginning. "You are that" appears to state direct identity. In context, however, other passages sound more like returning to brahman through practice. They presuppose separation at the start and convergence at the end, closer to "union" than to original "identity." The early texts do not address the tension systematically. Only later does Indian philosophy divide over it into major directions. Śaṅkara's nondualism holds that difference is an illusion caused by ignorance, since brahman and ātman have always been one. Rāmānuja's qualified nondualism treats individual selves as internal differentiations of brahman, with union a real relation rather than the dissolution of an illusion. Madhva's dualism holds that brahman and the self remain forever distinct. In the book's judgment, the early Upaniṣads support none of the later neatly organized systems, but their basic direction toward identifying brahman and ātman is clear.

4. Karma and rebirth as a "new" teaching¶

Karma and rebirth are often treated as the background of Indian thought, as though they had always been there. The texts present a more subtle picture.

In the Bṛhadāraṇyaka, when Yājñavalkya is asked what happens after death, he takes the questioner aside and teaches him "in private." People receive later results according to their deeds, or karma. Good karma leads to a good destination, and bad karma to a bad one. It is one of the earliest clear statements of karma and rebirth, and the text expressly presents it as a secret teaching.¹

Still more suggestive are the passages on the "five fires and two paths" in the Chāndogya and Bṛhadāraṇyaka. Knowledge of destinations after death is said to have belonged originally to Kṣatriyas and to have been unknown to Brahmins. A king, Pravāhaṇa, explicitly tells the Brahmin who comes for instruction that the teaching has never previously passed to the Brahmins.

Scholars have approached these passages from two different directions, both presented below. They are not directly opposed accounts. The first does not deny that karma may have originated outside the Vedas, but does not make the question of an internal or external origin its concern.

The book judges the texts' own presentation of karma and rebirth as "new and secret" teachings associated with Kṣatriyas to be a significant detail. It lends greater support to their absorption from outside the Brahmanical heartland than to their being a natural product of Vedic sacrifice. The judgment agrees with the previous chapter's attitude to "Greater Magadha." The hypothesis deserves serious consideration, while uncertainty remains. The target of the judgment is the widespread claim that karma is an internal extension of Vedic sacrifice, not Tull's own position. He does not deny that karma may have originated outside the Vedas.

The Upaniṣadic account of destinations after death is broadly as follows:

The return loop leads from rebirth back to death.

Only the "path of the gods" in the diagram provides an exit. All other routes return to rebirth. Knowledge, rather than sacrifice, supplies the key to the exit, which is where the change described in section 2 leads.

5. Liberation from rebirth through knowledge¶

Putting the previous sections together makes the Upaniṣadic account of liberation clear:

1. Beings undergo rebirth because of karma. The continuation of birth and death is suffering and must be transcended.
2. A permanent self (ātman) lies deep within the individual and is originally identical with the universe's brahman.
3. Rebirth is rooted in ignorance. Without knowing that truth, one mistakes the changing body and mind for the self.
4. Once "I am brahman" is truly known, ignorance is broken. One is no longer driven by karma and is freed from rebirth.

Knowledge (jñāna) is the key word in liberation. Sacrifice can at most produce a good next life within the cycle. Only direct knowledge of brahman and ātman provides complete release.

The Upaniṣads use deep sleep (suṣupti) as a particular starting point for describing direct knowledge. Both the Chāndogya and Bṛhadāraṇyaka say that in deep sleep consciousness ceases to make distinctions. There is neither pain nor pleasure, and no division between subject and object. They treat the state as evidence that the identity of brahman and ātman occurs every night, although it is forgotten upon waking. True liberation consists in remaining in direct knowledge free of distinctions while awake. The active route toward it is meditation (dhyāna). Upaniṣadic descriptions of meditation are not yet systematic. The later Sāṃkhya and Yoga traditions organize them into stages of practice from coarse to subtle.

During his training as a renunciant, the Buddha studied under Āḷāra Kālāma and Uddaka Rāmaputta in turn, learning the highest meditative attainments then available. Having reached them, he abandoned them and began afresh. His criticism was that even a state of complete meditative stillness, free of distinctions, remained conditioned and impermanent. On leaving meditation, one would return to the cycle of rebirth, so meditation itself could not constitute liberation. The Buddha retained meditation as a tool but completely changed the goal toward which it led. The discussion in 1.4 will examine the turning point. For now, its origin should be kept in view. He rejected the Upaniṣadic interpretation, also found in the later Yoga tradition, of meditative stillness as the abode of a permanent self identical with brahman.

6. What the Upaniṣads left to Buddhism¶

The Upaniṣads gave the Buddha a set of questions and a set of answers. He accepted the questions and rejected the answers.

What he inherited was the entire set of questions about karma, rebirth, and liberation; the basic idea that liberation depends on seeing through to the truth rather than sacrifice; and the diagnosis of ignorance as the root of rebirth.

What he rejected was the permanent, unchanging self (ātman) identical with brahman. His teaching of no-self (anātman/anattā) directly challenged that central answer. He retained rebirth and liberation while removing the unchanging subject within rebirth. How rebirth can occur without a permanent self would become a problem Buddhism had to answer for itself and debate for over a millennium. The book will return to it repeatedly.

Restraint is necessary here to avoid reading too much into the evidence. The book considers it more likely that the Buddha opposed notions of a permanent self widespread among renunciants and Brahmins of his time, without necessarily targeting the wording of the particular texts discussed above. Early Buddhist literature does not clearly show him naming a specific Upaniṣad.⁴ The evidence is insufficient to describe Buddhism as a point-by-point refutation of the Bṛhadāraṇyaka and Chāndogya.

The next chapter turns to the renunciant movement, including Jainism and varieties of fatalism, materialism, and skepticism. Compared with the Brahmanical sacrificial tradition, these schools were the Buddha's closer and more direct interlocutors.

Further reading¶

• Herman W. Tull. The Vedic Origins of Karma: Cosmos as Man in Ancient Indian Myth and Ritual. SUNY Series in Hindu Studies. Albany: SUNY Press, 1989.

References¶