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Prashna Upanishad · Anchored at PrU 1.2, PrU 2.4.
Six learned seekers bring firewood to the sage Pippalada. 'Live here one more year in tapas and faith, then ask.' Their first questions are about life itself.
The Prashna Upanishad, the Upanishad of Questions, opens with six men walking to a teacher's hermitage, each with firewood in his hands. They were not beginners. The text names them with care — Sukesha Bharadvaja, Shaibya Satyakama, Sauryayani Gargya, Kausalya Ashvalayana, Bhargava Vaidarbhi and Kabandhi Katyayana — and says they were already devoted to Brahman and searching for the highest. They had come to the sage Pippalada because they believed he would tell them all of it. The fuel was the old sign of a pupil: wood for the teacher's sacred fire, and with it an offer of service.
Pippalada did not answer them. Live here one more year, he said, in tapas, the heat of self-discipline, in brahmacharya, the restrained life of a student, and in faith. Then ask what you wish, and if we know, we will tell you everything. The teacher marks the edge of his own knowledge before anyone has asked him anything, and that "if we know" returns, in another form, at the very end of the book.
When the year was over, Kabandhi asked first, and he asked the oldest question there is: from where are creatures born? Pippalada answered with a story of making. Prajapati, the lord of creatures, longed for offspring. He practised tapas, and from that inner heat he brought forth a pair, rayi and prana. Rayi is matter, what is fed upon; prana is life, breath, what feeds. These two together, he thought, will make creatures for me in many forms. The sun is prana and the moon is rayi; everything that has a shape is rayi.
After that the pair turns up wherever Pippalada looks. The year is Prajapati, and it has two roads. Those who live by rites and good works win the world of the moon, and they return; that southern road is the path of the ancestors, the road of rayi. Those who seek the Self by tapas, brahmacharya, faith and knowledge take the northern road to the sun, deathless and fearless, and from there they do not come back. The month is Prajapati: its dark half is matter, its bright half life. So are day and night, and so is food, from which comes seed, and from seed, creatures. Then Pippalada adds a condition. The pure world of Brahman belongs to those in whom there is no crookedness, no falsehood and no deceit.
Bhargava asked next. How many powers hold up this body, and which of them is the greatest? Pippalada told of a quarrel. Space, wind, fire, water and earth, speech and mind, eye and ear, boasted that they held the body up. Then prana, the chief breath, spoke. Do not be deluded, it said; I divide myself five ways and hold this body up. They did not believe it. So prana, as if offended, began to rise out of the body — and as it rose, every other power was dragged up with it; when it settled, they all settled. The text takes its picture from the hive: when the bee-king rises, every bee rises, and when it comes to rest, they rest. Satisfied, the powers praised prana as fire and sun, rain-cloud and wind, and ended as children pray: guard us as a mother guards her sons.
Kausalya pressed further still. From where is this prana born? How does it come into the body, how does it divide itself, and how does it leave? You ask questions beyond questions, Pippalada told him, but you love Brahman, so I will answer. Prana is born of the Self. As a shadow falls from a person, so prana is cast from the Self, and it enters the body by the working of the mind. Once inside it rules like a king who tells his officers: you govern these villages, you govern those. It posts the down-breath, apana, in the lower organs, keeps itself in eye and ear, mouth and nose, and sets the middle breath, samana, at the centre to spread food through the body; the diffused breath, vyana, runs through the hundred and one channels of the heart. One breath, the up-breath, udana, rises through a single channel and at death leads a person on — by good deeds to a good world, by evil to an evil one, by both to the world of men again. Whatever a person's thought is at that hour, Pippalada says, with that thought he enters prana, and prana carries him to the world he has made.
The three answers climb toward a source. Creatures come from a pair that Prajapati brought forth; the body stands because prana stands in it; and prana, strong enough to empty the body of every other power, is only a shadow cast by the Self. Three seekers have asked. Three are still waiting, and their questions go further in — into sleep, into the syllable Om, and into the Person in whom all of this comes to rest.
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