The Questioners

One after another the brahmins came at him. Ārtabhāga asked about the graspers and the over-graspers, the senses that seize and the things that seize them in turn, and Yājñavalkya named them: the breath and smell, speech and name, the tongue and taste, the eye and form, the ear and sound, the mind and desire, the hands and work, the skin and touch. Since everything here is food for death, Ārtabhāga asked, what is the god whose food death is? Fire is death, Yājñavalkya said, and fire is food for water; so death itself is food for the waters. Whoever knows this, he said, overcomes death that comes again and again. When a man dies, Ārtabhāga asked, and his speech goes into fire, his breath into the wind, his eye into the sun, his mind into the moon, his ear into the quarters, his body into the earth, his self into space, the hairs of his body into the plants and of his head into the trees, his blood and seed into the waters, where is that man then? Take my hand, Ārtabhāga, my friend, Yājñavalkya said. We two alone will know this. This is not for a crowd. And the two went aside and talked, and what they spoke of was action: a man becomes good by good action and bad by bad. And Ārtabhāga fell silent.

Bhujyu told how, as students wandering in the land of the Madras, he and his companions had come to the house of Patañcala Kāpya, whose daughter was possessed by a gandharva, one of the musicians of heaven, and how they had asked the gandharva where the descendants of Parikṣit had gone. Now he asked Yājñavalkya the same. The gandharva told you, Yājñavalkya said, that they went where those go who have performed the horse sacrifice. And he told him where that is: beyond this world, and beyond the earth and the ocean that surround it, where the wind carries them. And Bhujyu fell silent. Uṣasta asked him to explain the Brahman that is directly seen and not hidden, the Self within all. That is your Self, which is within all, Yājñavalkya said. Uṣasta pressed him: You have only said it as one says, this is a cow, this is a horse. Explain it. Yājñavalkya said, You cannot see the seer of seeing, or hear the hearer of hearing, or think the thinker of thinking, or know the knower of knowing. That is your Self, which is within all. Everything else is sorrow. And Uṣasta fell silent.

Kahola asked him the same question, and Yājñavalkya said, It is that which goes beyond hunger and thirst, grief and delusion, old age and death. Knowing this Self, brahmins give up the desire for sons, the desire for wealth and the desire for worlds, and live on alms. For the desire for sons is the desire for wealth, and the desire for wealth is the desire for worlds; both are only desire. And Kahola fell silent.