Who they are

Pippalada is the teacher at the centre of the Prashna Upanishad, the Upanishad of questions, and the text shows him almost entirely through the way he receives the people who come to him. Six seekers arrive together. Each is named with his family line, each is already devoted to Brahman, and each is already learned. They carry fuel in their hands, the old sign of a pupil asking to be taken in, and they expect, the text says, that he will tell them everything. He does not begin by telling them anything.

Instead he asks them to wait. Live here one more year, he says, in tapas, in brahmacharya and in shraddha — in disciplined effort, in the chaste life of a student, and in faith. Then ask what you wish. It is a striking way to receive six men who are not beginners. Pippalada seems to hold that a question needs a questioner made ready for its answer, and that readiness is built by living, not by more study. The year is not a hurdle for its own sake. It is the ground he wants laid under the questions before they are asked.

The second mark of his manner comes in the same breath. If we know, he adds, we will tell you all. A great teacher opens with a condition. At the close of the Upanishad, after all six have asked and been answered, he speaks of his knowledge once more: this much I know of the highest Brahman, and there is nothing beyond it. The sentence draws a boundary. It says where his knowing reaches. A teacher who will speak of the measure of what he knows is a teacher whose answers can be trusted, and the Prashna lets that restraint frame everything he says.

His name ties him to a wider tradition, and it should be stated with care. The Prashna belongs to the Atharvaveda, and one of the two recensions of the Atharvaveda that survive is called the Paippalada, a name formed from Pippalada. Tradition links that branch, or shakha, with this sage and places the Prashna within it, though the Upanishad itself says nothing of schools. The name is usually read as "eater of pippala", the fruit of the sacred fig — the same word the Mundaka, another Atharvaveda Upanishad, uses for the fruit one of its two birds eats.

His answers move in a single direction. They begin far out, with how creatures come to be, and travel inward through the powers of the body, the life-breath, waking and sleep, and the syllable Om, until the last answer finds the person within the body itself. It is the path of a teacher who leads from the world to the Self. The six pupils give him their verdict at the end. They worship him and call him their father, the one who carries them across ignorance to the farther shore. A father here, the commentators explain, is the one who gives a second birth, and the title is their choice, not the narrator's.

Key dialogues

• Six Seekers with Fuel in Hand
• Sleep, Om, and the Person of Sixteen Parts

Questions to explore

• Why does Pippalada ask six learned men to live a year with him before they question him?
• What does 'this much I know of the highest Brahman' show about him as a teacher?
• Why do his pupils call him the father who carries them across ignorance?