The story

Most Upanishad dialogues have a teacher and a pupil. The Shvetashvatara, which belongs to the Black Yajurveda and bears the name of the sage Shvetashvatara, opens instead with a circle of equals. Teachers of Brahman, brahmavadins, are talking among themselves, and the questions they put to one another are the largest questions there are. What is the cause? Is it Brahman? From where were we born? By what do we live? Where do we come to rest? And under whose rule do we pass through pleasure and pain, each in our appointed state?

They did not pretend the answer was obvious. The Upanishad lists the candidates that thoughtful people of their day put forward, and it is a list that still sounds modern. Should we think the cause is time? Or the inherent nature of things, the way fire is hot because it is fire? Or necessity, fixed law? Or chance? Or the elements? Or the womb, the source from which things are born? Or the person, the living individual? The teachers weighed them and found each wanting. Not one of them alone could be the cause. Nor could all of them taken together, the text says, because there is the self. Later commentators explain the step: a combination needs someone for whose sake it is made. Yet the self itself cannot be the cause either, for the self is not free. It is pushed about by the causes of pleasure and pain.

Argument had taken them as far as it could. So, the Upanishad says, they turned to meditation, dhyana-yoga, and in meditation they saw what argument had not shown: the power of God himself, devatmashakti, hidden by its own qualities. That is the one who presides over all those causes, from time to the self. The answer came as something seen, not as a point won.

What they saw, they describe in two crowded images. The world is a wheel, the wheel of Brahman, with one rim, three layers, sixteen ends, fifty spokes and twenty counter-spokes, bound by a single rope of many forms, running on three roads. It is a river too, with five streams, five sources and five waves, with whirlpools and floods of sorrow. The Upanishad packs these images with numbers, and they have kept commentators busy, but the point of both is simple: the world moves, and keeps moving, and does not stop to explain itself.

Inside that wheel is a swan, hamsa, the word the Upanishad uses for the soul. In this vast wheel of Brahman, it says, where all things live and all things come to rest, the swan wanders round and round, so long as it thinks of itself as separate from the one who drives the wheel. When it is favoured by him, it reaches immortality. The swan does not get off the wheel by flying harder. It is freed when it stops thinking of itself as apart from the mover.

The Upanishad then gives the riddle's three terms a shape. There is the enjoyer, the soul that tastes the world; there is the enjoyed, the world it tastes; and there is the mover, the Lord who rules both. All three, it says, are Brahman — this is Brahman in its threefold form, and when a person finds these three, there is nothing further to be known. By meditating on that one God, the text adds, by joining with him and coming to his nature, the whole display of the world falls away at last.

But how is that hidden power to be found? Here the images become homely. Fire lies hidden in a fire-stick. You cannot see its form, yet it has not gone anywhere, and with friction it can be drawn out again. So with the Self in the body, and the means is Om. Make your own body the lower fire-stick, the Upanishad says, and Om the upper one; work them together with the friction of meditation, and you will see God, hidden as the fire was hidden. Then come four more pictures: oil in sesame seeds, butter in curd, water in a dry riverbed, fire in the fire-sticks. Each one is there all along, and each one needs work to bring it out — pressing, churning, digging, rubbing. So the Self is found within oneself by one who seeks it with truth and with tapas, steady self-discipline.

The teachers began by asking what the cause of everything is. The chapter ends not with a theory but with a direction. The cause is not out among time and chance and the elements. It is hidden in the seeker the way butter is hidden in curd, and the chapter's last words say of it twice over: that is Brahman, the highest teaching of the Upanishads.

Figures and teachings in this dialogue

• Shvetashvatara
• Teaching: All This Is Brahman

Questions to explore

• Why are time, nature, necessity and chance not enough to explain the world?
• What did the sages see in meditation that argument could not show them?
• Oil in sesame, butter in curd, fire in wood. What does it take to bring the hidden Self out?