Kaṭha Upaniṣad

The Kaṭha Upaniṣad is the most dramatic and best loved of the The Upaniṣads. Composed in verse, probably in the fifth to third centuries BCE, and belonging to the Kaṭha school of the Black Yajur Veda, it tells the story of Naciketas, a boy who is sent by his angry father to the house of Yama, the god of death, and who, granted three wishes, uses the third to ask what happens to a person after death. Death tries to bribe him with long life, wealth, kingdoms and beautiful women; Naciketas refuses them all; and Death, impressed, teaches him the knowledge of the immortal Self (ātman), “not born, nor does it die”. The Kaṭha contains some of the most famous images in Indian thought — the chariot of the self, the choice between the good and the pleasant, the inverted fig tree of the world, the path “sharp as a razor’s edge” — and its verses were taken up almost word for word by the The Bhagavad Gītā. Its call “Arise! Awake!” became the motto of Swami Vivekananda.

The story

The father’s sacrifice

The story begins with Vājaśravasa (also called Auddālaki Āruṇi or Gautama), who performs the viśvajit sacrifice, in which a man gives away all his possessions. But he gives away only old, worn-out cows — “they have drunk their water, eaten their grass, given their milk, and are barren”. His young son Naciketas, troubled by this hypocrisy, thinks: “Joyless are the worlds to which a man goes who gives such gifts.” He asks his father: “Father, to whom will you give me?” He asks a second time, and a third. His father, exasperated, shouts: “To Death I give you!” (1.1.4).

Naciketas, taking the words seriously — a father’s word must be kept — goes to the house of Death. Yama is away, and the boy waits three days and nights at his door without food. When Yama returns, his attendants warn him that a Brahmin guest has been neglected — a grave sin. To make amends, Death offers him three boons, one for each night (1.1.9).

The three boons

For his first boon, Naciketas asks that his father be calm and kindly, free of anger, and welcome him when he returns. Death grants it.

For his second, he asks to learn the fire sacrifice that leads to heaven, where there is no fear, no old age, no hunger or thirst. Death teaches it, and names it after him: the Nāciketa fire. He also gives him a necklace of many colours.

For his third, Naciketas asks the great question:

There is this doubt about a man who has died: some say “He exists”, others say “He does not exist”. I want to know this, taught by you. This is the third of my wishes. (1.1.20)

Death’s temptation

Death tries to refuse. “Even the gods of old had doubts about this; it is not easy to understand, so subtle is this matter. Choose another boon, Naciketas; do not press me; release me from this.” Naciketas insists: “No other teacher like you can be found, and no other boon equals this.”

Death then offers him everything else:

Choose sons and grandsons who will live a hundred years, cattle, elephants, gold and horses. Choose a vast domain of earth, and live as many autumns as you wish… Be king of the wide earth. I will make you the enjoyer of all your desires. Whatever desires are hard to win in the mortal world, ask for them all as you please — these lovely women with their chariots and musical instruments, such as men cannot obtain — be served by them, given by me. But do not ask about death, Naciketas. (1.1.23–25)

Naciketas replies with contempt:

These things last only till tomorrow, O Death, and they wear away the vigour of the senses. Even a whole life is short. Keep your chariots, keep your dances and songs. No man can be made happy by wealth. Shall we possess wealth when we have seen you? Shall we live as long as you rule?… This thing about which they doubt, O Death — what there is in the great passing — tell us that. This boon, which penetrates the mystery, Naciketas chooses no other. (1.1.26–29)

The good and the pleasant

Death, now satisfied that the boy is worthy, begins to teach. The first lesson concerns choice:

The good (śreyas) is one thing, the pleasant (preyas) another. Both, with different aims, bind a man. Good comes to him who chooses the good; he who chooses the pleasant misses his goal. Both the good and the pleasant come to a man; the wise man, examining them, distinguishes them. The wise chooses the good over the pleasant; the fool, for the sake of getting and keeping, chooses the pleasant. (1.2.1–2)

Death praises Naciketas for choosing the good, and describes those who choose otherwise: “Living in the midst of ignorance, thinking themselves wise and learned, fools go round and round, staggering, like the blind led by the blind” (1.2.5).

The immortal Self

He then teaches the nature of the Self:

The knowing Self is not born, nor does it die. It has not come from anywhere, nor has it become anything. Unborn, eternal, everlasting, ancient, it is not killed when the body is killed. If the slayer thinks he slays, if the slain thinks he is slain, both do not understand: this one does not slay, nor is it slain. (1.2.18–19)

These verses reappear almost word for word in the Bhagavad Gītā (2.19–20), where Kṛṣṇa uses them to answer Arjuna’s grief.

The Self is “smaller than the small, greater than the great, hidden in the heart of every creature” (1.2.20). It “cannot be attained by instruction, nor by intellect, nor by much learning. It is attained by the one whom it chooses; to him the Self reveals its own nature” (1.2.23) — a verse later theistic schools read as a doctrine of grace.

The chariot

The Kaṭha’s most famous image appears in the third section:

Know the Self as the lord of the chariot, the body as the chariot. Know the intellect as the charioteer, and the mind as the reins. The senses, they say, are the horses; the objects of sense the paths they range over… He who lacks understanding, whose mind is never restrained, his senses are uncontrolled, like the vicious horses of a charioteer. But he who has understanding, whose mind is always restrained, his senses are under control, like the good horses of a charioteer… He reaches the end of the journey, the highest place of Viṣṇu. (1.3.3–9)

The image strikingly parallels the chariot of the soul in Plato’s Phaedrus, composed perhaps around the same time, where reason drives two horses, one noble and one unruly.

It is followed by a ladder of principles: beyond the senses are the objects, beyond the objects the mind, beyond the mind the intellect, beyond the intellect the “great self”, beyond that the “unmanifest”, beyond that the Person (puruṣa) — “beyond the Person there is nothing; that is the end, that is the final goal” (1.3.10–11). Scholars see here an early form of the Sāṃkhya hierarchy of principles.

And then the call:

uttiṣṭhata jāgrata prāpya varān nibodhata kṣurasya dhārā niśitā duratyayā durgaṃ pathas tat kavayo vadanti

Arise! Awake! Having reached the great ones, learn. Sharp as the edge of a razor, hard to cross — difficult is that path, the poets say. (1.3.14)

The second part

The second half of the Upaniṣad deepens the teaching. “The Self-existent pierced the openings of the senses outward; therefore one looks outward, not within. A certain wise man, seeking immortality, turned his eyes inward and saw the Self” (2.1.1). The Self is “the size of a thumb, dwelling in the middle of the body, lord of past and future… like a flame without smoke” (2.1.12–13). “As rain fallen on a mountain-top runs down the slopes in all directions, so he who sees differences among things runs after them” (2.1.14).

It gives the image of the inverted fig tree — “its roots above, its branches below, this eternal aśvattha tree: that is the pure, that is Brahman, that is called the immortal” (2.3.1) — which the Gītā (15.1) also takes up. It describes yoga: “When the five senses, together with the mind, are still, and the intellect does not stir — that, they say, is the highest state. This firm holding back of the senses is what they call yoga” (2.3.10–11) — one of the earliest uses of the word in its later sense. And it promises: “When all the desires that dwell in the heart are cast away, the mortal becomes immortal and attains Brahman here. When all the knots of the heart are cut here on earth, the mortal becomes immortal” (2.3.14–15).

The Upaniṣad ends: “Naciketas, having received this knowledge declared by Death, and the whole rule of yoga, attained Brahman and became free from passion and death. So will anyone else who knows the Self.”

Significance

The Kaṭha is the Upaniṣad of death, and perhaps the first great philosophical drama of facing mortality. Ādi Śaṅkara wrote a commentary on it; the Bhagavad Gītā borrows from it; it influenced Sāṃkhya and Yoga; and it has been loved in the West since the nineteenth century — Emerson’s poem “Brahma” (“If the red slayer think he slays, / Or if the slain think he is slain…”) paraphrases it, and Somerset Maugham took the title of The Razor’s Edge (1944) from its verse 1.3.14. See Naciketas at the House of Death.

In conversation

The good and the pleasant — śreyas and preyas — is the cleanest statement ever made of the choice every life faces. And when someone needs courage: “Arise, awake; the path is sharp as a razor’s edge.”