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Mandukya Upanishad · Anchored at MaU 2, MaU 7.
Om is all this. This Self is Brahman, and it has four quarters: waking, dream, deep sleep — and the Fourth, peaceful and non-dual, to be known.
The Mandukya Upanishad is the shortest of the principal Upanishads: twelve sentences of prose, belonging to the Atharva Veda. There is no story in it, no teacher and no pupil. It maps two things that turn out to be one: the sacred syllable Om, and the Self that sounds it.
It begins with the syllable. Om: this syllable is all this. An explanation follows. What has been, what is and what will be, all of it is Om. And whatever else lies beyond the three times, that too is Om.
The second sentence takes the step that gives the Mandukya its place in the tradition. All this is Brahman, it says. And then, as though turning to face the listener: this Self is Brahman, ayam atma brahma. The words are only three, and they close the distance between the greatest thing the Upanishads can name and the nearest. Brahman, the ground of all, is not somewhere else. It is this, the Self here. Later tradition counts these words among the four great sayings, the mahavakyas, one drawn from each Veda, and this is the saying of the Atharva.
Then the same sentence goes on: this Self has four quarters. The word is pada, a foot or a quarter, like the four feet on which a creature stands. The rest of the text is a walk through them.
The first quarter is waking. Its field is the waking state. It knows outward, it has seven limbs and nineteen mouths, and it enjoys what is gross, the solid and shared world of things. Its name is Vaishvanara, the one who belongs to all people.
The second quarter is dream. Its field is dreaming. It knows inward, it too has seven limbs and nineteen mouths, and it enjoys what is subtle, the world the mind builds from itself. Its name is Taijasa, the bright one.
The third quarter is deep sleep, and the text defines it with care. Where the sleeper desires nothing at all and sees no dream at all, that is deep sleep. Here the Self has become one. It is a single mass of awareness. It is made of bliss and enjoys bliss, and awareness is its mouth, its doorway. Its name is Prajna, the knower. The sixth sentence crowns it. This is the lord of all, the knower of all, the inner controller. This is the womb of all, the place where beings arise and the place where they return.
The text places this fullness in dreamless sleep, the state most people would call nothing. Every night, it suggests, each of us returns to an undivided ease, and every morning the world comes forth from it again.
Then comes the seventh sentence, the longest, toward which the whole text has been building. The Fourth, chaturtha, which later teachers call turiya, is not one more state beside the other three. The text describes it only by what it is not. It does not know inward, it does not know outward, and it does not know both ways. It is not a mass of knowing. It is not knowing, and it is not unknowing. It is unseen, beyond all dealings, beyond grasping, without marks, beyond thought and beyond naming. Its essence is the certainty of the one Self. In it the spread of the world falls still. It is peaceful, auspicious and without a second. That, the wise hold, is the Fourth. That is the Self. That is what is to be known.
Each of the first three quarters can be described by what it knows and enjoys. The Fourth cannot, because it is not one more knower with one more object. It is present, later teachers explain, through waking, dream and sleep alike, and so it cannot be any one of them.
The last five sentences return to the syllable. This same Self, taken as a syllable, is Om. Its quarters are the letters, and the letters are its quarters: A, U and M. A is waking Vaishvanara, the first letter, because it pervades and because it comes first. U is dreaming Taijasa, because it is raised up and because it stands between the two. M is sleeping Prajna, because it measures and because in it all things merge. To each the text attaches a promise; whoever knows the A, for one, obtains every desire.
And the Fourth has no letter. It is the measureless, amatra: beyond dealings, the stilling of the world, auspicious, without a second. So Om is the Self, the text ends. Whoever knows this enters the Self by the Self.
Later, the teacher Gaudapada composed a set of verses on the Mandukya, the Karika, which is the earliest surviving treatise of Advaita Vedanta, and the later commentator Shankara wrote on both. In the tradition of chanting, the silence that follows the M is heard as the Fourth: A opens, U rounds and carries, M closes on the lips, and then there is a stillness that is not one more sound but the ground every sound stood on. The Upanishad itself needs only twelve sentences to say all of it.
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