Who Is the Knower Behind All Knowing?

Case studies

Pippalada and the Six Students

Six accomplished Vedic scholars arrive at Pippalada's forest hermitage carrying firewood. They are not novices. They already know the Vedas by heart. They have taught others. They have sat at other teachers' feet. And they have each arrived at a question that their prior learning has not been able to answer. The Upanishad names them: Kabandhi Kātyāyana, Bhārgava Vaidarbhi, Kauṣalya Āśvalāyana, Sauryāyaṇī Gārgya, Śaibya Satyakāma, Sukeśā Bhāradvāja. Pippalada does not immediately agree to teach. He tells them to stay with him for one year, performing tapas, living in disciplined restraint, holding their questions inside themselves without acting on them. Only after the year is complete does he take up the six questions one by one, in an order that moves from the external cosmos progressively inward. The sixth question, Sukesā's question about the Person of sixteen parts, is the climax of the sequence.

Read the year of silence as the real teaching. The answers Pippalada gives are already available in existing Vedic texts. What is not available in the texts is the capacity to hear the answers in a way that does not reduce them to more information. That capacity is what the year of tapas is cultivating. The six students are not being tested for endurance. They are being prepared so that when Pippalada finally speaks, his words can actually land rather than being absorbed into the existing mental furniture. The sequence of the six questions is also not accidental. The first question is cosmogony: where do creatures come from. It sends the questioner outward toward the widest horizon. The next four questions draw the questioner progressively inward: through the body, through the breath, through the states of consciousness, through the symbol Om and what meditation on Om reveals. By the time the sixth question is asked, the entire outward world has been traversed and the questioner has nowhere else to go but directly to the knower. That is when Pippalada gives the rivers and ocean answer. The Upanishad is teaching a method of sequencing. You cannot ask the sixth question well without having first asked the previous five.

After Pippalada finishes answering the sixth question, the six students prostrate to him and say: 'You are our father indeed, you who have taken us across to the further shore beyond ignorance.' The closing line of the Upanishad is one of gratitude and recognition. The text does not dwell on what the students did next, whether they returned to the world or stayed in the forest, whether they taught or kept silent. The Upanishad does not need to. The transformation has already happened in the receiving of the answers, and the rest of the story is whatever life the recognition goes on to produce. Pippalada disappears from the text the way Yama disappears from the Katha. The teacher has served his function. What remains is the student and the recognition.

The Prashna is teaching that the question of the knower is not a question that yields to more information. It is a question that yields only to a particular quality of attention that has to be cultivated before the answer becomes audible. This is the hardest part of the Upanishad to transmit to a modern reader, because the modern expectation is that any question worth asking should be answerable by reading the right book. The Prashna is saying, gently, that this question is not one of those. You can read the Prashna a hundred times and still not hear the answer. The year of tapas is not an ancient superstition the modern reader is allowed to skip. It is the minimum preparation without which the rivers and ocean image cannot do its work. The six students are a model. They came already learned. They still needed the year.

Modern education is structured almost entirely around the assumption that questions are answered by accumulating information. The Prashna's structure is a quiet correction. Some questions, the ones that matter most, are not answered by more information. They are answered by a different quality of attending, which cannot be transmitted through reading alone and which takes time to cultivate. Any modern seeker who has tried to figure out the question of consciousness by reading more papers, and noticed that the reading never quite lands the question, is in the position the Prashna's six students were in before they went to Pippalada. The Upanishad's suggestion is not to read less. It is to read with the kind of attention that can come only from the same inward turn the students were being prepared for.

The Prashna Upanishad is the shortest of the ten principal Upanishads commented on by Shankara, coming in at roughly four pages of Devanagari text. Despite its brevity, it is considered one of the most philosophically complete, precisely because its six question structure covers the full range of the inquiry from cosmogony to the inward turn in a deliberate sequence. Shankara's commentary treats it as one of the clearest sources for the Advaita position on the unobjectifiable nature of the Self.

Thomas Nagel's 'What Is It Like to Be a Bat?' (1974)

In October 1974, the philosophical journal The Philosophical Review published a fifteen page paper by the American philosopher Thomas Nagel. The paper was titled 'What Is It Like to Be a Bat?' Its central argument was deceptively simple. Nagel pointed out that a bat has a way of being in the world that no human has ever had. A bat navigates by echolocation. Its sensory world is structured around the reflection of its own high frequency cries. There is, Nagel insisted, something it is like to be a bat, from the inside. The bat is not merely a biological machine. It has an experience of its own life. And that experience, the inside of being a bat, is exactly what no amount of third person scientific knowledge can capture. You can know everything there is to know about bat neurons, bat wings, bat echolocation, bat sonar processing, and still not know what it is like, from the bat's own standpoint, to be a bat. The subjective character of experience, Nagel argued, is not reducible to any objective description of the physical system that has the experience. The gap is not a gap in our current knowledge. The gap is structural, built into the difference between the objective and the subjective.

Nagel is not a Vedantin. He is a secular analytic philosopher working at NYU, suspicious of both religious and mystical approaches to the mind. That is exactly what makes his argument useful to the Prashna's case. Nagel has arrived at the edge of the Upanishadic insight by following strict analytic reasoning, without any of the motivations the Upanishadic tradition is usually accused of projecting onto the problem. His conclusion is that the knower, the one for whom there is 'something it is like' to be having experience, cannot be made an object of third person description. This is the same structural point Yajnavalkya makes in the Brihadaranyaka when he says you cannot see the seer of seeing or know the knower of knowing. Nagel does not take the next step the Upanishads take, which is to turn inward and recognize that what cannot be made an object is not nothing, it is what you already are. But he does establish, with maximum philosophical rigor, that the next step has to be taken somehow. You cannot stay where modern science wants you to stay, which is in the third person view from nowhere. If you do, you will leave out exactly the thing you were trying to study.

Nagel's bat paper has been cited tens of thousands of times and is now one of the most influential papers in modern philosophy of mind. It is routinely taught in undergraduate philosophy courses and cited in neuroscience textbooks. Its argument has generated a substantial secondary literature, including responses from functionalists, physicalists, and eliminativists, none of which has succeeded in making the bat problem go away. David Chalmers, in 1995, generalized Nagel's point into what he called the hard problem of consciousness: the problem of explaining why any physical system should give rise to subjective experience at all. The hard problem is now the central challenge of the field. It is, structurally, the same problem Pippalada was answering for Sukesā twenty five centuries earlier, which is why the Upanishadic treatment of the question remains directly relevant even to readers who arrive at it through contemporary philosophy of mind.

Nagel matters for this lesson because his argument is entirely independent of the Upanishadic tradition and yet arrives at the same structural observation. Subjective experience is not reducible to objective description. The knower cannot be caught in the net of knowing. A reader who is skeptical of ancient texts, who finds the Prashna's sixteen parts and dissolving rivers too exotic to take seriously, can read Nagel's fifteen page paper instead and end up at exactly the same philosophical place. Once there, the reader has two options. Option one is to stay at the paper and treat the hard problem as a permanent puzzle that science will either solve or fail to solve in some distant future. Option two is to notice that the Upanishadic tradition has been describing the way past the puzzle for two and a half millennia, and that the way past it is not more philosophy but a disciplined inward turn. Nagel gives no guidance on which option to take. The Prashna gives detailed guidance and a specific method. That is not a coincidence. It is what traditions are for.

The modern reader who wants to understand what the Upanishads mean by the unobjectifiability of the knower can begin with Nagel's paper. It is short, secular, and rigorously argued, and it lands the reader in exactly the position from which the Prashna's sixth question becomes a live question rather than an ancient curiosity. The Upanishad then offers the continuation Nagel's argument does not. Read together, they are a natural pair: Nagel for the Western philosophical framing of the problem, the Prashna for the direction of the resolution. Neither alone is sufficient for a modern seeker. Together they turn out to be remarkably complete.

As of 2024, Nagel's 1974 paper has been cited approximately sixteen thousand times according to Google Scholar, and is routinely listed among the ten most influential papers in twentieth century philosophy of mind. Its central argument, that subjective experience is irreducible to third person description, has been accepted as at least a prima facie challenge by nearly every major position in the field, including positions that ultimately attempt to explain the challenge away.

Ramana Maharshi's 'Who Am I?' Self Inquiry

In 1896, a seventeen year old Tamil Brahmin boy named Venkataraman Iyer was sitting alone in an upstairs room of his uncle's house in Madurai when he suddenly became convinced, without any external cause, that he was about to die. Instead of panicking, the boy did something unusual. He lay down on the floor, stiffened his body as if dead, held his breath, and then asked himself: 'The body will die. But am I the body? If I am not the body, then what am I?' He stayed with the question. What he reported, decades later, was that the question had no verbal answer. What it had was a recognition. The body, he found, was an object. Objects appear and disappear. But the one who was watching the body was not itself an object. It did not appear and disappear. It was whatever was left when every object had been removed. The boy got up from the floor a different person. He left his family home a few weeks later, traveled alone to the sacred hill of Arunachala, and spent the rest of his life there as the sage later known to the world as Ramana Maharshi.

Ramana's entire teaching can be summarized in four words: 'Who am I?' He treated this question not as a philosophical puzzle to be argued but as a specific meditative practice. The practice is: whatever thought, feeling, or perception arises, ask who is aware of it. Then, instead of accepting any verbal answer, ask the same question of the awareness itself. Who is aware of the awareness? Keep asking until the questioning dissolves into the awareness that was always already there. Ramana called this method ātma vicāra, self inquiry, and he taught it to every visitor who came to him, whether they were Indian pandits or Western seekers or confused tourists passing through. The method is exactly the operational form of the Prashna's sixth question. Where Pippalada used the rivers and ocean image to point at the Person of sixteen parts, Ramana reduced the entire pointing to a single question that could be carried through any moment of the day. The method is the Upanishad turned into a portable practice.

Ramana lived at Arunachala from 1896 until his death in 1950, rarely leaving and almost never traveling. His ashram at Tiruvannamalai became a destination for seekers from India and the West. Carl Jung, Somerset Maugham, Paul Brunton, and Arthur Osborne all visited or wrote about him. Brunton's book A Search in Secret India (1934) introduced Ramana to a Western audience and became a minor sensation. Ramana wrote very little himself. His recorded conversations, collected in books like Talks with Sri Ramana Maharshi, consist almost entirely of variations on the same theme: do not argue about the Self, inquire directly into who you are. Ramana's death in 1950 did not slow his influence. The ashram continues to function, the books continue to circulate, and the method of self inquiry has become one of the most widely practiced contemplative techniques in the modern spiritual world, adopted by teachers ranging from strict Advaitins to loose neo Vedanta popularizers.

Ramana is the living demonstration that the Prashna's sixth question can be asked and answered in the present tense, not in an ancient forest hermitage but in a hill town in twentieth century Tamil Nadu. His life is the Upanishadic claim under experimental conditions. A seventeen year old with no formal training turned the question inward, found what the Prashna said he would find, and spent fifty four years afterward pointing other people toward the same finding. He did not build a philosophical system. He did not argue with anyone. He simply answered every question with the same question, which was the question of who was asking. This is what it looks like when the Prashna's inward turn is taken all the way. The tradition is not an archive. It is a repeatable procedure, and Ramana is the twentieth century repetition.

For a modern seeker who finds the Prashna's ancient idiom difficult to enter, Ramana's method is the bridge. It uses the same language a modern person already speaks. It has been tested under modern conditions by thousands of practitioners. It does not require belief in any particular cosmology. It asks only for the willingness to hold a single question (who is aware of this) long enough for it to cease being a question and become a recognition. The Upanishadic tradition has been transmitting this method, in one form or another, for twenty five centuries. Ramana is the most accessible contemporary point of entry. The seeker who wants to know what the Prashna's sixth question actually feels like, rather than merely what it philosophically argues, can begin with a half hour of Ramana's self inquiry and have a better idea by the end of the half hour than by reading any amount of academic philosophy of mind.

Ramana Maharshi's recorded conversations at Sri Ramanasramam span roughly twenty five years and have been collected in multiple volumes totaling thousands of pages. His method of self inquiry is taught today by a wide range of teachers including Mooji, Gangaji, and Adyashanti, and a number of contemporary neuroscience researchers on meditation, including Richard Davidson and Sam Harris, have referenced it. The method's central move, turning attention back on the one attending, is structurally identical to what Husserl was trying to accomplish through the phenomenological epoché, but with a different sense of what counts as completion.

Historical context

c. 800 to 400 BCE (Prashna Upanishad) / 1900 to present (Husserl and Nagel)

The Prashna Upanishad belongs to the Atharva Veda and is one of the principal Upanishads commented on by Shankara. Its name means 'Question,' and the text is built around six questions asked by six students of the rishi Pippalada. The six questions are arranged in a deliberate widening and then narrowing spiral: creation, the foundation of life, the nature of prāṇa, the three states of consciousness, the syllable Om and its meditation, and finally the Person of sixteen parts. Each question sets up the next. By the time the sixth question arrives, the questioner has already been led from the external cosmos into the structure of consciousness itself. The Prashna is one of the most systematically architected Upanishads, and the sixth question is its culmination. Shankara's commentary on the Prashna treats it as one of the clearest statements of the Advaita position that the Self is not an object and cannot be known the way objects are known.

The dialogue form of the Prashna is not decorative. It is doing philosophical work. The fact that the questioners are already accomplished scholars, rather than beginners, is important. The Upanishad is showing that the question of the knower cannot be answered by more scholarship. It can only be answered by a particular turning inward that the scholars themselves had not made until they spent a year in silence with Pippalada. The year of tapas is the condition under which the sixth question can be heard. Without it, the rivers and ocean image is just another clever metaphor. With it, the image is a direct pointer to something the students can now recognize in themselves.

Reflection

• For thirty seconds, try to locate the one who is reading these words. Not the content of the reading. Not the body of the reader. The reader itself. What happens when you try? Does the attempt succeed, fail, or do something else altogether? What does the 'something else' suggest about where the knower is actually to be found?
• Pippalada did not answer his students for a year. He made them wait, perform tapas, and hold their questions in silence. Is there any question you have been carrying long enough and carefully enough that its answer could actually land? If not, what would it mean to start carrying one?
• Nagel argued that no objective description of a bat's brain could capture what it is like to be a bat. The Prashna says the same thing about you: no description from outside can capture the knower at the center of your knowing. If this is true, what does it change about how you spend your attention? What does it suggest about the limits of trying to know yourself through other people's descriptions of you?