Who they are

Virochana is the only figure in this collection whose portrait is of a man who stopped. He is given exactly the same teacher, the same years of study, and the same words as Indra, and he leaves with a conclusion that will not survive contact with a mirror on a bad day. The Upanishad does not mock him for it. It simply follows him home and shows what the answer became.

He comes as the demons' representative, as Indra comes for the gods, and both dwell with Prajapati for thirty-two years — arriving, the text is careful to say, without having consulted each other. Told that the person seen in the eye is the Self, and sent to look at his reflection in water, he sees himself groomed and well-dressed and reports that he sees the Self entire, down to the hair and nails. Then he goes away satisfied — the text says with a satisfied heart — and that phrase is the whole tragedy. Nothing was hidden from him. He simply had no further question.

What he teaches at home is worth stating exactly, because it is coherent and it is not stupid. The self, he tells the demons, is the body; so the body is what one should serve and adorn, and by honouring it one gains this world and the next. It is a complete philosophy of life, cheerful in its way, and enormous numbers of people have lived by something close to it. The Chandogya adds a detail that lands like a closing door: this, it says, is why to this day the demons adorn the body of a dead person with perfume, garments and ornaments, and think they will win a world by it.

That is a polemical line and should be read as one. "Asura" here is not an ethnic claim or a species; it is the text naming a stance and giving it a face. The position being caricatured is the one that identifies a person with their body and their appearance, and the caricature is aimed at anyone holding it, which in practice means most of us on most days. Reading Virochana as somebody else — a demon, over there — is precisely how the passage stops working.

The comparison the text is building is not between a clever student and a foolish one. Indra receives the same false answer and accepts it just as readily; he only differs in what happens next. Virochana never re-examines. Indra does, once, on the road, and that single act of re-examination is the entire difference between the two lives the chapter goes on to describe.

So Virochana's use to a reader is diagnostic rather than moral. He is the standing question every teaching should be made to answer: not whether you understood it, but whether you are done with it.

Key dialogues

• Indra, Virochana, and the True Self

Questions to explore

• Why does Virochana stop at 'the Self is the body', and what does that cost him?
• How do Indra and Virochana, given the same words, end up so far apart?