Who they are

Maitreyi is defined by one refusal, and the Brihadaranyaka thinks it important enough to tell twice — once in its second chapter and again in its fourth, one of the very few passages the text repeats.

Her husband Yajnavalkya is about to leave the householder's life and wants his affairs settled. He has two wives, and the Upanishad is careful to distinguish them: Maitreyi, it says, was a brahmavadini, one who takes part in discourse on Brahman, while Katyayani had the knowledge that women commonly had. That is the text's own line, not a later gloss, and it cuts both ways. It records that a woman could be a full participant in this kind of conversation, and in the same breath it tells you plainly that most were not. Maitreyi is marked out as exceptional by a book that saw no reason to pretend otherwise.

Offered half of everything her husband owns, she asks whether it would make her immortal. Told it would not, she does not take the wealth anyway and ask afterwards. She sets the offer aside and asks for the teaching instead. The whole of her character is in the order of those two moves: she tests what is offered against what she actually wants, and when it fails the test she does not keep it as a consolation.

She is not, however, a passive recipient of what follows. When the teaching reaches its hardest point — that after departing there is no consciousness — she says plainly that she is bewildered. That admission is doing real work in the text. It is what makes Yajnavalkya restate the teaching in a form that can actually be understood, drawing the distinction between denying awareness and denying the two-part structure of knowing, which needs something standing outside itself to be known. The clearest passage in the exchange exists because she said she did not follow.

It is worth setting her beside Gargi, the other woman who questions Yajnavalkya in this Upanishad, because they are not the same kind of figure and the text does not blur them. Gargi presses him in public, in a contest, about what the world rests on. Maitreyi asks him at home, with nothing at stake but her own life, what is worth having. One is a philosopher's question about the ground of things; the other is a practical question about how to spend a life. They are answered in the same register, and the second telling of Maitreyi's conversation closes on neti, neti — not this, not this. The formula the Upanishad is most famous for is placed at the end of a reply to a woman who asked what wealth cannot buy.

Later tradition made a great deal of her, and some of what it says is hard to verify. What the Upanishad itself gives is enough: a woman who was offered a fortune, asked what it was for, and would not settle for an answer that stopped short of her question.

Key dialogues

• Yajnavalkya and Maitreyi

Questions to explore

• What does Maitreyi mean by refusing wealth that 'cannot make her immortal'?
• How does 'we love all things for the sake of the Self' answer her question?