Is There a Final Answer, or Is the Question Itself the Point?

Yajnavalkya fell silent. Socrates said he knew nothing. Wittgenstein pointed to the unsayable.

Yajnavalkya at King Janaka's court, a thousand cows with gold on their horns, and Gargi pressed to the edge of what words can hold. The Brihadaranyaka and Kena Upanishads end twenty-five lessons with a silence Socrates, Wittgenstein, and Ramana Maharshi all reach by their own routes.

Janaka's Cows

At the court of King Janaka of Videha, sometime in the eighth or seventh century BCE, a thousand cows are standing in the palace yard. Gold coins have been tied to their horns. King Janaka has summoned the greatest Vedic scholars of his kingdom to his court. The cows are the prize. Whichever of them is the most learned in Brahman will drive the herd home at the end of the day.

The hall is already restless when Yajnavalkya arrives. He is a senior Brahmin, already famous, already feared in debate. He looks around the assembly. Then he turns to his student and gives a short instruction: drive the cows back to our ashram.

The hall erupts. The cows have not been won yet. The contest has not even begun. One by one the other scholars rise to put him to the test. Aśvala will ask about ritual. Artabhāga will ask about death. Bhujyu will ask about the afterworld. Uṣasta will ask about the Self. Kahola will ask about the immortal. And Gārgī Vācaknavī, a woman philosopher of such staggering precision that the men around her have learned to pause before disputing with her, will rise from her seat and ask twice. The second time, her question will press Yājñavalkya so deep that he will warn her, in front of the whole court, that if she asks one more step beyond where she now stands, her head will fall off.

She will stop. Shakalya, who asks the question that follows hers, will not.

This lesson is the last in a twenty-five lesson course, and the question it has to ask is the one King Janaka's hall was built to ask. Is there a final answer at the end of all this questioning, or is the silence at the bottom of the conversation the real teaching? The Brihadaranyaka's answer, in one scene, is both at once. What follows is why Socrates and Wittgenstein, centuries later, would reach the same wall by their own routes, and why the Upanishadic walk through that wall was something neither of them quite made.