What Do You Owe to Others?

Yajnavalkya's radical claim: you love others because the same Self looks out of their eyes.

Brihadaranyaka Upanishad vs Kant and Levinas. The Other is not other. Ethics is grounded in recognition of the shared Self, not duty alone and not an infinite debt to alterity.

The Day Yajnavalkya Called His Wives

At some point in the late Vedic period, probably in the eighth or seventh century BCE, in the forested kingdom of Videha in what is now north Bihar, a sage named Yajnavalkya told his senior wife that he was leaving. He had spent most of his long life running a household, debating philosophers in King Janaka's court, and teaching students who walked in from across the Gangetic plain. Now, he said, he was renouncing the householder life altogether and going to the forest for good. Before leaving, he wanted to divide his wealth fairly between his two wives, Katyayani and Maitreyi. He called them both and made the offer.

Katyayani accepted. Maitreyi did not.

'Sir,' she said, in a sentence the Brihadaranyaka Upanishad preserves almost verbatim, 'if this whole earth filled with wealth were mine, would I become immortal through it?'

'No,' Yajnavalkya answered. 'Your life would be like the life of the rich. There is no hope of immortality through wealth.'

'Then what shall I do with that by which I do not become immortal?' she said. 'Sir, tell me instead what you know.'

Yajnavalkya looked at his wife and understood that the question she had put to him, at the moment of his leaving, was the largest question he had ever been asked. He sat her down. What he said to her next is the single most influential passage in Indian ethics, and it begins with a claim that sounds on a first hearing like the most extreme statement of self-love in world literature. A husband, he told her, is not dear to his wife for the sake of the husband. A wife is not dear to her husband for the sake of the wife. Sons are not dear for the sake of sons, wealth not dear for the sake of wealth, worlds not dear for the sake of worlds, gods not dear for the sake of gods, beings not dear for the sake of beings. All of these are dear for the sake of the Self. Every affection you have ever felt, he told her, is at its root a refracted love of the Self that is shining through the beloved.