Does Doing Good Require Knowing Good?
Socrates said virtue is knowledge. The Mundaka Upanishad agreed, then raised the bar.
Mundaka Upanishad vs Socrates and Aristotle. Two kinds of knowledge: lower (sciences) and higher (the imperishable). Only the higher transforms action.
Shaunaka Walks Up to Angiras
Somewhere in the forest belt of late Vedic north India, at a time when the Mundaka Upanishad was still a living oral teaching rather than a memorized text, a wealthy householder named Shaunaka left his estate and walked to the ashram of the rishi Angiras. He was not a beginner. The tradition calls him a mahashala, a 'great householder', a man with land, dependents, cattle, employees, and shelves of sacred texts he had memorized in boyhood. He came the formal way, carrying fuel-wood in his hands, the traditional gesture that signaled he was asking to be taught. He sat down on the ground in front of Angiras and asked one sentence. 'Kasmin nu bhagavo vijnate sarvam idam vijnatam bhavati?' Sir, by knowing what is all this known?
It is the question of a busy, accomplished man who has finally realized that he cannot learn reality item by item. He has mastered the lower sciences, all of them, and they have not touched the thing he actually wants to know. He is not asking for another technique. He is asking for the master key.
Angiras did not dismiss him and did not flatter him. In his answer, compressed into the next few verses of what would become the Mundaka Upanishad, he reorganized the entire field of human learning into two categories, and he placed the four Vedas themselves on the wrong side of the line. Centuries later, and half a world away, Socrates would teach in the Athenian agora that virtue is knowledge. Angiras would not have disagreed with that sentence. He would have asked Socrates to specify, carefully, which kind of knowledge Socrates had in mind, and which kind he did not.
Two Vidyas
'Two vidyas are to be known,' Angiras said. 'So say those who know Brahman. Para and apara, the higher and the lower.'