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Brihadaranyaka Upanishad · Anchored at BU 2.4.5, BU 2.4.12, BU 4.5.15.
Yajnavalkya is leaving for the forest and offers Maitreyi her share of his wealth. She asks whether wealth can make her immortal, is told it cannot, and asks for what can instead.
Yajnavalkya was preparing to leave the householder's life for the forest, and wanted his affairs settled before he went. He had two wives, Maitreyi and Katyayani, and the Upanishad distinguishes them: in the second of its two tellings of this scene it calls Maitreyi a brahmavadini, one who takes part in discourse on Brahman. He called her and said he was going forth, and would divide what he had between her and Katyayani.
Maitreyi turned the moment from inheritance into instruction with a single question. If the whole earth filled with wealth were mine, she asked, would it make me immortal? No, he said. Your life would be like the lives of those who have plenty; there is no hope of immortality through wealth. Then what should I do with what cannot make me immortal, she said. Tell me instead what you know.
And so, glad, he taught her. It is not for the sake of the husband that the husband is dear, he said, but for the sake of the Self. Not for the sake of the wife is the wife dear, but for the sake of the Self. So with sons, with wealth, with the gods, with all beings, with everything: what is loved is loved for the sake of the Self that loves through us. The Self is what is to be seen, heard, reflected upon and deeply contemplated. Knowing it, all this is known.
That last sentence is more than a flourish. Seen, heard, reflected on, contemplated. The last three of those became the standard method of later Vedanta, in that order: hearing the teaching, thinking it through until it stops being someone else's claim, and only then dwelling on it long enough for it to change how things appear — with the first verb, seeing, naming what the other three are for. The instruction to Maitreyi is not "believe this." It is a sequence of things to do.
Then he reaches for an image. As a lump of salt thrown into water dissolves and cannot be picked out again, Yajnavalkya says, yet whichever part of the water you take up tastes of salt — so this great Being has no inside and no outside; it is a single mass of awareness. And he adds a line that has been argued over ever since: arising out of these elements, one vanishes into them again, and after departing there is no consciousness.
Maitreyi is bewildered, and says so. Here is the part of the exchange that shows what kind of teacher he is: he does not tell her she has misunderstood. He says nothing bewildering has been said, and then explains what he meant. Where there is duality, one sees another, hears another, knows another. But where everything has become one's own Self — by what would one see, and whom? By what would one know, and whom? By what could one know the knower? What he denies is not awareness but the two-part structure of knowing, which needs something standing outside to be known.
The Brihadaranyaka thinks well enough of this conversation to tell it twice — once in its second chapter and again in its fourth. It is one of the few passages the text gives in two places. The second telling closes on the formula the Upanishad is most famous for: neti, neti, not this, not this. The Self is not this and not this; ungraspable, for it is not grasped; undecaying; unattached. That placement matters. Neti, neti is not a separate doctrine filed elsewhere in the book; the text puts it at the end of the answer to Maitreyi's question about immortality — the reply to a woman who had asked what wealth cannot buy.
This Upanishad records two women questioning Yajnavalkya, and it is worth noticing how differently they do it. Gargi presses him in public, in a contest, with a chain of questions about what the world rests on. Maitreyi asks him at home, with nothing at stake but her own life, what is worth having. Both are answered in the same register: what they are reaching for is the ground of everything, and it can be pointed at but not held.
What Maitreyi is remembered for is not an argument she won. It is a refusal: offered half of everything her husband owned, she asked what any of it was for, and would not settle for an answer that stopped short of the question she had actually asked.
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