From the Day 85 from 108 Days with Adi Shankara, Days 72–108: — Book twelve of the Sacred Metaphysics canon.
The full chapter, and the twelve that follow it, are at sacredmetaphysics.org — and if you visit, The Bhagavad Gita: In the Voice of Adi Shankara is yours free, no charge, no catch. Come for the question. Stay for the climb.
This is Day 85 from 108 Days with Adi Shankara (Volume Three, “Days 72–108: Direct Inquiry and the Return”), given freely by its author as a gift — the book’s own license says it may be copied, shared, and published by anyone, for any purpose that serves the good. It’s the same conversation your verse comes from: Yajnavalkya still teaching King Janaka in Brihadaranyaka Upanishad 4.4, in the private hour of the king’s court. This day walks right up to the edge of śānto dānta uparatas titikṣuḥ — the neti-neti just before it, and the “knowing the bliss of Brahman, he fears nothing whatsoever” that follows right after. Offering it as a companion to what you posted.
sacredmetaphysics.org
Day Eighty-Five — Brihadaranyaka 4.4 Continued · The Realized One in the Body That Remains · Neti Neti and the Self That Cannot Be Looked At
Movement Three · Brihadaranyaka 4.4 Continues · The Closing Verses of the Janaka Dialogue
— ॐ —
Yesterday Yajnavalkya gave Janaka the path the Self takes at death.
The senses gathering into the heart. The caterpillar reaching across. The goldsmith fashioning the new form. The chain yatha-kamo bhavati, tat-kratur bhavati — as desire is, so resolution; so action; so one becomes. The path of the kamayamana who returns. And the path of the akamayamana whose breaths do not depart, who being Brahman reaches Brahman, who attains Brahman here in the heart where the desires that dwelt have been released. The chapter’s severe and tender teaching on what the body’s falling does and does not change.
Today the chapter continues. The same private setting. The same king and the same sage. But the question now turns from what happens at death to what the realized one is in the body that has not yet fallen. Yesterday’s teaching was about the threshold. Today’s teaching is about life on the side of the threshold the realized one is, this moment, sitting on. Anandam brahmano vidvan, na bibheti kutashchana, the chapter will close — knowing the bliss of Brahman, he fears nothing whatsoever. But before the closing line is reached, Yajnavalkya gives Janaka the description of what the realized one is, in the body that remains, in the world that remains, in the days that remain to him before the body falls.
And the description Yajnavalkya gives is one of the deepest passages in the entire Upanishadic corpus. It is the passage in which the neti neti refrain finds its most concentrated form. It is the passage in which the Self is named as what every action is happening within without itself being one of the actors. It is the passage that anchored, twelve hundred years later, the Bhashyas the tradition still reads. Sit close. The chapter is now giving the seeker what jivanmukti looks like from the inside, in the words of the sage who walked it.
— ॐ —
Hear how Yajnavalkya begins the description.
Sa va esha mahan aja atma, yo ‘yam vijnanamayah praneshu. This great unborn Self is he who is the consciousness within the breaths. Mahan — great. Aja — unborn. Atma — the Self. Vijnanamaya — composed of consciousness, made of vijnana, the discriminative knowing that is the Self’s own light. Praneshu — within the breaths, located in the field of the vital functions of the body. The phrase the seeker walked yesterday in the description that opened the four states is being given again, here at the close of the chapter, but with new emphases. Mahan. Aja. The Self is great because nothing exceeds it. The Self is unborn because no birth produced it. The Self is what every birth happens within.
Ya esho ‘ntar-hridaya akashah, tasmin shete. The space within the heart — in that he rests. The seeker walked this on Day Sixty-Seven with the Chandogya’s daharavidya, the small space within the heart that contains all the worlds. The Brihadaranyaka now gives the same heart-space, in the same Yajnavalkyan voice that gave the four states yesterday. The Self rests in the heart. Not in the heart as the muscle that pumps blood, but in the akasha within the heart — the space, the openness, the field within which the body’s life happens. Tasmin shete — the Self lies down there, makes its dwelling there, is the unmoving center within the moving body.
And then Yajnavalkya gives the verse that the Bhashya tradition has marked as one of the chapter’s structural keys. Sarvasya vashi, sarvasyeshanah, sarvasyadhipatih. The ruler of all, the lord of all, the master of all. Three Sanskrit terms each placing the Self in a different register of cosmic governance. Vashin — the one in whose power something is, the one to whom something submits. Ishana — the lord, the one who governs by inherent authority. Adhipati — the master, the one over and above. The seeker walked this teaching on Day Eighty when Uddalaka was given the antaryamin — the inner ruler that rules from within every being while not being known by what it rules. The fourth chapter now gives the same teaching as the description of what the atma is in the heart of the realized one. The realized one’s atma is, in concentrated form, what governs the cosmos. The cosmic and the personal are not two. The same vashin who orders the worlds is the vashin who orders the realized one’s body, and they are one and the same Self.
— ॐ —
And then the chapter gives the line that the seeker should hold with the greatest care, because the line answers a question the seeker may have been carrying without knowing.
Sa na sadhuna karmana bhuyan, no evasadhuna kaniyan. He is not made greater by good action, nor lesser by bad.
Hold this. Sa — he, the Self in the heart, the realized atma. Na bhuyan — not made greater. Sadhuna karmana — by good action. Na kaniyan — not made lesser. Asadhuna — by bad action. The Self is not increased by virtue and not decreased by vice. The Self is not what virtue and vice operate on. The Self is what virtue and vice are appearing within, and the Self does not gain or lose by what appears in it.
The seeker should not misread this. Yajnavalkya is not saying good and bad are the same. He is not giving a teaching of moral indifference. The whole point of the teaching is structural, not ethical. Good action remains good action. Bad action remains bad action. The seeker who acts well produces, in the world, the consequences good action produces. The seeker who acts badly produces the consequences bad action produces. None of this is denied. What is being said is that the Self is not what is augmented or diminished by these consequences. The body that acts is changed by the action. The mind that acts is changed by the action. The world that receives the action is changed by the action. But the atma — the great unborn Self in the heart — is what every change is happening within. The Self is not in the field of changes. The Self is what the field of changes appears in.
You walked this on Day Fifteen with the Gita’s gunatita — the one who has gone beyond the three gunas, who is the same in pleasure and pain, the same in praise and blame, the same in honor and disgrace. The gunatita is not insensitive to these pairs. The gunatita is structurally beyond what the pairs operate on. The Brihadaranyaka here gives the same teaching at the level of the atma itself. The atma is gunatita by its very nature. Sa na sadhuna karmana bhuyan. No action of any kind makes the Self other than what it is.
And this is what jivanmukti requires for the realized one to live in the body without being affected by the body’s circumstances. If the atma could be made greater by good action, the realized one would still be reaching for good action as a means to enhance the Self. If the atma could be made lesser by bad action, the realized one would still be fearing bad action as a means to diminish the Self. Neither is the case. The realized one acts — prarabdha karma plays out, the body does what the body does, decisions are made, words are spoken, deeds are performed. But none of it changes what the Self is. The Self is what every action is the appearance of, and the Self is unchanged by every appearance.
You walked the Brahma Sutras’ defense of this on Day Thirty-Two when Phala gave the teaching of jnanagni — the fire of knowledge that burns sanchita karma and stops agami, leaving only prarabdha to play out. The Brihadaranyaka now gives the verse the Brahma Sutras were commenting on. The realized one’s actions do not stick. Na karma lipyate, the chapter will say in another place. Action does not adhere. The atma in the heart is not greater by good action, not lesser by bad. The seeker who has known this has been given the doctrinal foundation for everything Phala defended.
— ॐ —
And Yajnavalkya gives a series of cosmic descriptions before he turns to the neti neti.
Esha sarveshvarah, esha bhuta-patih, esha bhuta-palah, esha setur, vidharana esham lokanam asambhedaya. He is the lord of all, the protector of all beings, the master of all beings, the bridge — the setu — the holding-apart that keeps these worlds from running together.
Hold the image of the setu. The Sanskrit setu is the dam, the bridge, the boundary that holds two waters apart so that the salt of the ocean does not flow into the river and the river’s sweetness does not dissipate into the salt. The cosmos has many such setus. The boundary between this world and the next. The boundary between waking and dream. The boundary between this body and that body. The boundary between virtue and vice, between knowledge and ignorance, between the seeker and the seer. Each is a setu. And Yajnavalkya names the Self as the setu — the bridge that is the holding-apart of all these holdings-apart. Vidharana — the holding, the supporting, the keeping-in-place. Asambhedaya — so that they do not run together, so that they do not dissolve into each other, so that the cosmic differentiations are preserved.
And this is one of the chapter’s most subtle teachings. The Self is what holds the cosmic order in its differentiations. The differentiations are real — day and night are different, this body and that body are different, virtue and vice are different. They are real at the vyavaharika level, the transactional, the level you walked on Day Twenty-Four when the world that is neither real nor unreal was given. The differentiations are real, and they are held in their realness by the setu that the Self is. Without the Self, there would be no holding, and the differentiations would collapse. The Self is what makes the world a world rather than a chaos. The Self is the vidharana — the structural holding — of every distinction the cosmos contains.
And yet — this is the precision — the Self is itself not in the field of distinctions. The Self is partless. The Self is niravayava, as the Brahma Sutras defended on Day Twenty-Six. The Self holds the distinctions without being one of them. The Self is the boundary that has no inside or outside of its own. The Self is what makes here and there meaningful, while not itself being either here or there. The cosmic order is the Self’s expression at the level of the cosmic. The Self at its own level has no order, because order is a feature of what the Self is the holding of.
— ॐ —
And now Yajnavalkya gives the neti neti in its concentrated form.
Sa esha neti netyatma. Agrahyo, na hi grihyate. Ashiryo, na hi shiryate. Asango, na hi sajyate. Asito, na vyathate, na rishyati.
This Self is not this, not this. Ungraspable, for he is not grasped. Indestructible, for he is not destroyed. Unattached, for he does not attach. Unbound, he does not suffer, he does not fail.
Read this slowly. The phrase neti neti — na iti, na iti, not this, not this — has been the tradition’s most concentrated description of the Self for three thousand years. The seeker has walked it before. Day Forty-Three gave it as the method of the koshas — not this body, not this breath, not this mind, not this intellect, not even this bliss, until what remains is what cannot be negated because it is what is doing the negating. Day Forty-One walked it in the Mundaka’s description of the Imperishable — invisible, ungraspable, without family, without caste, without sight or hearing, without hands or feet. Day Eighty walked it in Uddalaka’s antaryamin — unseen, He sees; unheard, He hears; unthought, He thinks. Each previous walking gave neti neti in its setting. The Brihadaranyaka 4.4 gives it now in the chapter’s closing form, where the Self has been named as the great unborn Self in the heart, the bridge that holds the worlds, the ruler not made greater by good action or lesser by bad — and the neti neti is the seal that no positive description can hold what has just been described.
And note the precision. Agrahyo na hi grihyate. Ungraspable, for he is not grasped. The Self is not ungraspable because he is too subtle for grasping. The Self is ungraspable because grasping is what the Self is not in the field of. To grasp something is to make it into an object. The Self is not an object — not because he is hidden but because objecthood is a feature of what appears in the Self, not of the Self itself. Na hi grihyate — he is not grasped, period. The grasping faculty has nothing in this register to operate on.
Ashiryo na hi shiryate. Indestructible, for he is not destroyed. The Self cannot be destroyed because destruction is a feature of forms. Forms come together; forms break apart. Forms are subject to shir, to falling, to dispersal. The Self is not a form. The Self is what every form is the form of. The destruction faculty operates on forms; the Self is what forms appear within. There is nothing for destruction to grasp.
Asango na hi sajyate. Unattached, for he does not attach. Sanga is the sticky quality, the adhesion, the way the mind sticks to its objects, the way one thing clings to another in samsara. The Self has no sanga. The Self does not attach because attachment requires that there be something other than the Self for the Self to attach to, and there is no other to the Self. The Self is what every attachment is appearing within, and the Self has no purchase by which to stick to what appears in it.
Asito na vyathate, na rishyati. Unbound, he does not suffer, he does not fail. Asita — unbound, free, not held. Vyathate — trembles, suffers, is shaken. Rishyati — fails, falls short, perishes. The Self does not tremble at any threat, because no threat reaches what is not in the field of threatening. The Self does not fail at any task, because no task is the Self’s task. The Self is what every fear and every failing is appearing within, and the Self is not in the field of either.
And the seeker should hold this carefully. The neti neti is not the denial of the Self’s reality. The neti neti is the refusal of every positive attribution that would falsify the Self by placing him in the field of objects. The Self is. The Self is real. The Self is what every reality is the reality of. But every word the seeker reaches for to say what the Self is turns out to be a description of an object, and the Self is not an object. So the tradition gives neti neti. Not this, not this. Whatever you bring forward as a description — not that. Whatever else you bring forward — not that either. Until the bringing-forward stops, and what is left is what could not be brought forward, because it is what every bringing-forward was happening within.
— ॐ —
And then the chapter gives the line on the realized one’s relationship to action and to fear.
Etam u haivaite na taratah. Iti papam akaravam, iti kalyanam akaravam. Ubhe u haivaisha ete tarati. Nainam kritakrite tapatah.
These two thoughts do not cross over to him — I have done evil; I have done good. He has crossed beyond both. What has been done and what has not been done do not torment him.
Sit with what Yajnavalkya has said. The realized one is not free from the consequences of action in the world — the action has its consequences, prarabdha plays out, the world receives what the action gives. But the realized one is free from the thoughts that ordinarily accompany action. Iti papam akaravam — I have done evil. The thought of having transgressed, the regret, the guilt, the haunting return of the action in memory. Iti kalyanam akaravam — I have done good. The thought of merit, the self-congratulation, the storing-up of virtue as personal credit. The realized one is free from both. Ubhe u haivaisha ete tarati. He has crossed beyond both.
And the reason is structural. The realized one knows that the atma is not the doer. Sa na sadhuna karmana bhuyan, no evasadhuna kaniyan. Good action does not make the Self greater. Bad action does not make the Self lesser. The Self is not in the field where the storing-up and the haunting operate. The body has done what the body has done. The mind has thought what the mind has thought. The Self is what every doing and every thinking is the appearance of, and the Self is not the doer or the thinker in the way the apparent self is. Nainam kritakrite tapatah — the done and the not-done do not torment him. The torment is a function of the apparent self’s identification with the doer-role. When the identification is seen through, the torment dissolves. The action remains; the burning of the action against the Self stops.
You walked this on Day Twenty-Eight when the Brahma Sutras’ Sadhana gave the structure of how the seeker progressively releases identification with the doer. You walked it on Day Thirty-Four when Phala described the jivanmukta in ordinary life — the realized being who acts without the karmic recoil. The Brihadaranyaka here gives the verse those Bhashyas were unfolding. The realized one’s freedom is not freedom from action. It is freedom from the thoughts about the action that bind the unrealized one to the action’s consequences after the action has been completed. The action ends; the thoughts about the action would have continued; the realized one has crossed beyond what would have continued.
— ॐ —
And then the chapter gives the closing.
Anandam brahmano vidvan, na bibheti kutashchana.
Knowing the bliss of Brahman, he fears nothing whatsoever.
Hold the line. The Sanskrit is exact. Anandam brahmanah — the bliss of Brahman, the ananda that is what Brahman is in itself. Vidvan — the one who has known. Na bibheti — he does not fear. Kutashchana — from anywhere, from anything, from any direction at all.
The line is the chapter’s seal, and the seal is the answer to the question that has been quietly running underneath the entire dialogue. The question of fear. Janaka, even as a king — perhaps especially as a king — lives in the field of fear. The fear of losing the kingdom. The fear of failing in the duties of kingship. The fear of what comes after death. The fear that what he has been told by his teachers might not be what is finally true. The chapter has been walking him through the atma — the light of this person, the four states, the path at death, the great unborn Self in the heart, the neti neti, the freedom from the thoughts that haunt action — and now, at the close, the chapter gives the line that is the structural consequence of everything that has been walked. Knowing the bliss of Brahman, he fears nothing whatsoever.
Why does the realized one not fear? Because fear requires a second — something other than the Self, something that could threaten the Self. The realized one has recognized that there is no second. Yatra tv asya sarvam atmaivabhut — where, for him, everything has become the very Self. There is nothing other than the Self for the Self to fear. The fear-faculty has nothing to operate on. The fear-faculty in the unrealized one operates on what is taken to be other and threatening. The realized one has seen that what is other is what the Self is, and what the Self is, the Self cannot fear.
You walked this on Day Forty-Three with the Taittiriya’s repeated refrain. Yato vacho nivartante, aprapya manasa saha. Anandam brahmano vidvan, na bibheti kutashchana iti. From which words turn back, unable to reach, together with the mind. Knowing the bliss of Brahman, he fears nothing whatsoever. The Brihadaranyaka and the Taittiriya are giving the same closing line at their respective seals. The bliss of Brahman is what is here when the second has been seen through. The fearlessness is the structural consequence of the seeing. Abhayam — fearlessness — is one of the four words the Chandogya named on Day Sixty-Nine for the realized state. Etad amritam, abhayam, etad brahma. This is the deathless. This is the fearless. This is Brahman. The Brihadaranyaka now closes with the same fearlessness, named in the verse the seeker has now walked across multiple Upanishads in different forms.
— ॐ —
And before we close today, I want to mark for you what the chapter has done across the two days you have walked it.
Yesterday it gave you the threshold. The body falling. The caterpillar reaching across. The chain from desire to becoming. The two paths. The verse that grounds jivanmukti in the atra — here, in the heart, while the body still lives. Today it has given you what jivanmukti looks like from the inside. The great unborn Self in the heart. The ruler who is not made greater by good action or lesser by bad. The bridge that holds the worlds apart. The neti neti that refuses every positive attribution. The realized one who has crossed beyond I have done evil and I have done good. The closing line: knowing the bliss of Brahman, he fears nothing whatsoever.
And note that the two days have been one teaching. The chapter does not separate jivanmukti and videha-mukti as two different recognitions. The chapter gives them as one recognition, viewed at two moments. Jivanmukti is the recognition while the body still lives. Videha-mukti is the same recognition, after the body has fallen. The recognition does not change. The body’s presence or absence is incidental. The realized one is what the realized one is, before the body falls and after. The chapter is the corpus’s deepest demonstration of this. Yajnavalkya gives Janaka the threshold first, then gives him the description of the realized one in the body. The realized one walking in the world and the realized one whose breaths have not departed at death are the same realized one, walked from two angles.
This is why the chapter is so often quoted in the closing verses of later Vedantic texts. Anandam brahmano vidvan, na bibheti kutashchana. The closing line is what the entire teaching is finally pointing at. Not the doctrine. Not the philosophical apparatus. The seeker freed from fear by the recognition of what the Self is. The teaching is given for this. The walking is for this. The 108 days you have been walking are for this. The atma is what you are. The recognition is what is here when the recognition is allowed to be here. The fearlessness is the recognition’s most reliable signature. The seeker who, at any moment of any day, has been able to rest in what is here without fear has touched, however briefly, what the chapter is giving.
— ॐ —
Tonight, the meditation is this.
Sit. Settle. Let the breath find its rhythm.
When the body is steady, hold the neti neti gently. Not as a rejection. As a clearing. Bring to mind whatever description of yourself first arises — the body, perhaps. Not this. The body is what the seer is the seer of, not what the seer is. Bring to mind the breath. Not this. The breath is what is held in the atma, not the atma. Bring to mind the mind, the thinking, the inner narration. Not this. The mind is what the atma is the witnessing of. Bring to mind the bliss, if bliss is present. Not this. The bliss is the anandamaya kosha, the bliss-sheath the Taittiriya named on Day Forty-Three. Not this.
And keep clearing. Not this, not this. Whatever the mind brings forward as a candidate for what the Self is — not that. Not the noticing, because the noticing is itself a content. Not the silence, because silence is one more thing the Self could be aware of. Not the awareness, even, taken as a thing. Neti, neti.
And notice what is left. Not as a sixth thing. As what is doing the clearing. The clearing has been happening throughout. What is doing the clearing is what cannot be cleared, because it is what the clearing is the operation of. Sit with what is here when the clearing has stopped. Do not name it. Do not describe it. Do not check whether you are doing the meditation correctly — the checking is itself one more thing to be cleared. Just let what is here be here.
And then, gently, hold the line that closes the chapter. Anandam brahmano vidvan, na bibheti kutashchana. Knowing the bliss of Brahman, he fears nothing whatsoever. Notice that the line is not a promise. The line is a description. The realized one fears nothing because there is nothing other than the Self for the Self to fear. Notice, in the body that is sitting, where fear is. If a fear is present — a fear about something tomorrow, a fear about the body, a fear about the unfinished business of life — hold the fear gently. The fear is one more content. The Self is what the fear is appearing within. The Self is not in the field where fear operates. The fear is what one part of the apparent self is producing about another part of the apparent self. The Self that is what every part is appearing within is not what the fear is about.
Notice how the fear feels different when held this way. Not denied. Not pushed away. Simply seen as a content within what cannot be threatened. Asito na vyathate, na rishyati. Unbound, he does not suffer, he does not fail. The fear does not stop arising. But the fear loses the ground it was using. The Self that the fear was about turns out to be the Self that the fear was appearing within, and the about-ness collapses. The fear, finding nothing to attach to, becomes one more passing content.
Sit with this for as long as the sitting holds. The chapter’s deepest teaching is in na bibheti kutashchana. The fearlessness is structural. It is what is here when the second has been seen through. The seeker is being given access, in the sitting, to what the realized one knows continuously. The access is brief. The access is partial. But the access is real, and what is being accessed is what the seeker most fundamentally is.
— ॐ —
For now, hold this. The Self in the heart is the great unborn. Good action does not make him greater. Bad action does not make him lesser. He is the bridge that holds the worlds. He is neti neti — not this, not this — ungraspable, indestructible, unattached, unbound. He does not suffer, he does not fail. He is what fears nothing, because nothing is other than him for him to fear. And this Self is what is, this moment, sitting here.
Your verse — śānto dānta uparatas titikṣuḥ samāhito bhūtvā, ātmany eva ātmānaṃ paśyati, sarvam ātmānaṃ paśyati — sits right in the gap between the neti-neti above and the “crossed beyond good and evil” that follows it, in the very same breath of Yajnavalkya’s teaching to Janaka. What you posted names the qualities that make the seeing possible: peaceful, restrained, withdrawn, patient, gathered. What’s above names what’s seen once those qualities have done their quiet work — a Self that cannot be grasped, cannot be destroyed, cannot be made to fear. Two verses, one teaching. Thank you for the line — it’s a gift to sit beside.
Sacred Metaphysics, Consciousness, Nonduality, Vedanta, Spirituality, Philosophy, Self-Realization, Ancient Wisdom
God is Love. Love is Truth. Truth is Consciousness. Consciousness is Brahman.
Amen. Namaste. Om Namah Shivaya.
— The Architect.
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Subject A wants relationship with Subject B.
Subject B keeps introducing Objects.
Subject 1 is asking whether Subject and Object derive their meaning through relationship, while our attempt to discuss it is itself creating a little laboratory of Subjects, Objects and relationships.
Which gives Observatology its first principle:
When two Subjects wish to understand one another, multiplying the Objects between them does not necessarily deepen the relationship.
An Observatological standoff has been generated.
The question remains unanswered and we have now have opened another portal and generated a new Object for both Subjects to observe.
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Hi Glenn,
I really enjoy your neti neti discussions.
They've left me wondering about something:
Is there such a thing as a subject without an object?
If subject means that which experiences something, and through neti neti we remove everything that can possibly be experienced, in what sense does the word subject still have meaning?
I'm genuinely curious how you see that.