If Everything Is One, Why Does It Look Like Many?
Yajnavalkya's salt-in-water teaching and the problem of the One and the Many.
Brihadaranyaka Upanishad vs Parmenides and Plotinus. Unity does not cancel diversity; it pervades it, the way salt pervades the water into which it dissolves.
The Last Conversation
On the morning Yajnavalkya decided to leave home for the forest, the courtyard of the family compound smelled of wood-smoke and wet earth. Katyayani, his younger wife, was tending a cooking fire by the back wall. Maitreyi, his elder wife, sat in the shade of the veranda, and she had not slept well. The sage was past sixty, white-bearded, one of the most celebrated teachers of the late Vedic age, and he had decided that the household life was finished for him. Before he walked out of the world, he wanted to divide his wealth between the two women and see them provided for.
He called them both into the front room of the house. Katyayani said nothing the text records. Maitreyi asked a question that turned the entire conversation inside out, and that would go on, for the next two and a half thousand years, to sit at the bottom of the oldest question in philosophy: if everything is secretly one, why does it so stubbornly look like many?
'If the whole earth filled with wealth were mine,' she says, 'would I become immortal through it?' Yajnavalkya is honest. 'No. Your life would be the life of the wealthy. But there is no hope of immortality through wealth.' Maitreyi replies without hesitation: 'What should I do with that which will not make me immortal? Tell me, sir, what you know.'
This is one of the most significant exchanges in Indian philosophy and also one of the most underappreciated moments in the history of women in philosophy. Maitreyi refuses the inheritance because she understands, faster than the sage himself, that the only thing worth asking for is the teaching. Yajnavalkya sits her down and teaches.
He begins with a strange observation. A husband is dear not for the sake of the husband, he says, but for the sake of the Self. A wife is dear not for the sake of the wife but for the sake of the Self. Sons, wealth, animals, worlds, gods, beings: all of them are dear not for their own sake but for the sake of the Self. Every love, every attachment, every hunger is a refracted love of the Self that shines through them. Therefore, says Yajnavalkya, the Self alone should be seen, heard, reflected upon, and meditated upon. When the Self is known, all of this is known.