Maitreyī in One Ideas
the essentialsWhat use is wealth?
“If the whole earth filled with wealth were mine, would I become immortal by it?… What should I do with that by which I do not become immortal?”
Maitreyī is one of the two wives of the sage Yājñavalkya in the Bṛhadāraṇyaka Upaniṣad, where she is described as brahmavādinī, “one who discourses on Brahman”, in contrast to her co-wife Kātyāyanī, who had “a woman’s understanding”. Her single dialogue with her husband, told twice in the Upaniṣad (2.4 and 4.5), is one of the most beloved passages in Indian literature.
The dialogue
Yājñavalkya, about to leave the household life to become a wandering renunciant, tells Maitreyī that he wishes to divide his property between her and Kātyāyanī. Maitreyī answers:
“If, sir, this whole earth filled with wealth were mine, would I become immortal by it?” “No,” said Yājñavalkya. “Your life would be like the life of the rich. There is no hope of immortality through wealth.” Maitreyī said: “What should I do with that by which I do not become immortal? Tell me, sir, what you know.” (2.4.2–3)
Delighted — “You have always been dear to me, and now you say what is dear to me” — Yājñavalkya teaches her that “it is not for the love of the husband that a husband is dear, but for the love of the Self”, and so for wife, sons, wealth, gods and all beings; that the Self is to be seen, heard, reflected upon and meditated upon; and that when one becomes the Self, there is no duality left in which one could see, hear or know another: “By what should one know the knower?” When this teaching confuses her — “Here you have bewildered me, sir, by saying that after death there is no consciousness” — he answers that it is not bewildering: where there is duality, one sees another; where all has become the Self, by what and whom should one see?
Significance
Maitreyī’s question — what use is wealth that cannot give immortality? — distils the Upaniṣadic turn from worldly goods and ritual rewards to the knowledge of the Self. Later Hindu tradition honoured her as a woman philosopher (brahmavādinī), and in modern times she has been invoked both by feminists recovering women’s voices in early Indian thought and by economists: Amartya Sen opens Development as Freedom (1999) with her question, using it to argue that wealth matters only for the freedoms and lives it makes possible.
Curiosities
did you know?- Her question became a touchstone in Indian economics: Amartya Sen opens Development as Freedom (1999) with Maitreyī’s ‘What should I do with that by which I do not become immortal?’
Questions to Argue About
debate club →- Is anything worth having that cannot outlast you?
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