Who Is the Knower Behind All Knowing?

Pippalada's students asked six questions. Husserl spent a lifetime on the same one.

Prashna Upanishad vs Husserl and Nagel. The knower can be known, but only by turning inward.

Six Students, One Year of Silence

The Prashna Upanishad opens with an unusual scene. Six men arrive at the forest hermitage of the rishi Pippalada. They are not strangers to each other. They have already spent years studying the Vedas. They are grown, accomplished, respected in their own right. Yet they come to Pippalada's door carrying firewood in their hands, the traditional sign of a student approaching a teacher. The Upanishad names them carefully: Sukesā Bhāradvāja, Śaibya Satyakāma, Sauryāyaṇī Gārgya, Kauṣalya Āśvalāyana, Bhārgava Vaidarbhi, Kabandhi Kātyāyana. Each carries a question he has not been able to answer.

Pippalada does not answer them immediately. He tells them to stay with him for a year, to perform tapas, to live in brahmacarya (disciplined continence), to hold their questions inside them while their ordinary restlessness burns off. Only after the year is complete does he agree to take up the questions one by one. Six questions, six answers, six progressively deeper probes into the same mystery. The structure is deliberate. Each question presupposes the one before it. Each answer opens the ground for the next.

The first five questions work their way through the cosmos in a widening spiral. Kabandhi asks where creatures come from. Bhārgava asks which power in the body is the foundation of life. Kauṣalya asks about the nature of breath (prāṇa). Sauryāyaṇī asks about the three states of waking, dreaming, and deep sleep. Śaibya asks about the syllable Om and what meditation on Om accomplishes. Each answer is substantial on its own. Each draws the questioner further inward from the external cosmos into the internal cosmos and from the internal cosmos into the states of consciousness themselves. By the time Sukesā asks the sixth question, five rings of the inquiry have already been completed.

The Sixth Question

Sukesā does not open with his own question. He opens with a confession. Years ago, he says, a prince named Hiraṇyanābha of Kosala came to him and asked: 'Do you know the Person of sixteen parts?' And Sukesā, faced with a question he could not answer, did the one honest thing. He said he did not know. He did not guess. He did not construct a pleasing fiction. He sent the prince away and carried the question inside him until he could find someone who could answer it. Now, after a year of silence at Pippalada's hermitage, he asks the question at last.