Who they are

The Rig Veda's Indra is the god of the thunderbolt, the one who splits the mountain and releases the waters, the largest presence in the oldest hymns. The Chandogya's Indra is a student who has to be told four times, and who keeps having to go back and ask again. Both are the same name, and the distance between them is one of the quiet arguments the Upanishads make.

He arrives on an errand, not a quest. The gods have heard that Prajapati holds knowledge of a Self free of sorrow and death, and Indra is sent as their representative — the demons send Virochana on the same day for the same reason. He does his thirty-two years of studentship, receives the first answer, and starts for home carrying it. He is, at that point, indistinguishable from Virochana.

What separates them happens on the road. Indra thinks the answer through and finds it will not hold: if the Self is the body's reflection, then the Self is well-dressed when the body is well-dressed, blind when the body is blind, lame when it is lame, and gone when the body is gone. That is not what he was promised. Nothing external corrects him. He corrects himself, by taking the teaching seriously enough to test it, and then does the expensive thing — he turns around and asks for more, knowing what asking costs here. It costs another thirty-two years. He does it three more times. The stays are 32 years, then 32, then 32, and at the end only 5 — by then he needs less — which is where the text's total of a hundred and one years comes from.

That is his portrait: not brilliance, but the refusal to be satisfied, sustained past the point where most people would settle. Each answer he is given is genuinely better than the last — the waking body, then the dreamer who moves freely, then the sleeper in whom sorrow is absent — and he takes each one out, examines it, and finds what it cannot account for. The deep-sleep answer he rejects on grounds that are almost painfully modern: in that state, he says, one does not know oneself, and this is annihilation, not freedom. He would rather have a hard question than a comfortable answer.

The Kena Upanishad keeps the same character in a different scene. The gods, puffed up after a victory, meet a mysterious presence none of them can overcome, and Indra is the one who goes closest — and it is to him that Uma appears and says the thing they could not defeat was Brahman. The text then notes that Indra is held above the other gods for a plain reason: he came nearest, and he knew it first.

For a reader, the useful thing about Indra is that he is not the ideal student. He is proud, he is sent rather than drawn, and he is slow. He gets there anyway, because he goes back.

Key dialogues

• Indra, Virochana, and the True Self

Questions to explore

• Why is Indra unsatisfied with the answer that the Self is the body's reflection?
• What makes Indra's repeated return the mark of a real seeker?