Mandukya Upanishad

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Māndūkya Upanishad is one of the shortest Upanishads, that form the speculative metaphysical parts of the Hindu texts, the Vedas. It belongs to the Atharva Veda. It devotes itself entirely to the explanation of the mystic syllable Aum. It is in prose, consisting of twelve sentences.

1 About the Upanishad
2 Commentary by Gaudapada
3 Explanation of Aum as in Mandukya Upanishad
4 Gaudapada’s thesis
5 Sources
6 External links

[edit] About the Upanishad

For the very reason that it explains the esoteric meaning of the fundamental syllable Aum of Hindu spiritual tradition, the Upanishad has been extolled greatly. The Muktikopanishad, which talks about all other Upanishads, says that if a person cannot afford to study all the hundred and more Upanishads, it will be enough to read just the Māndūkya Upanishad. According to Dr.S. Radhakrishnan, in this Upanishad we find the fundamental approach to the attainement of reality by the road of introversion and ascent from the sensible and changing, through the mind which dreams, through the soul which thinks, to the divine within but above the soul.

[edit] Commentary by Gaudapada

The first extant commentary on this Upanishad was written by Gaudapada, before the time of Adi Shankara. This commentary, called the Māndūkya-kārikā, is the earliest systematic exposition of the advaita point of view of Vedanta. Its importance can be gauged from the fact that when Shankara wrote his commentary on Māndūkya Upanishad, as he did for ten other Upanishads, he merged the Kārikā of Gaudapada with the Upanishad and wrote a commentary on the Kārikā also.

[edit] Explanation of Aum as in Mandukya Upanishad

[edit] Three mātrās

There are three mātrās in the word aum : ‘a’ as the ‘u’ in ‘but’; ‘u’ as the ‘u’ in ‘put’; and the ‘m’ in ‘balm’. The term mātrā is used for the upper limb of Nagari characters and a syllabic instant in prosody. Esoterically, the ‘a’ stands for the first stage of wakefulness, where we experience in our gross body the totality of external experiences through our mind and sense organs. The ‘u’ stands for the dream state of sleep in which mental experiences are available, though erratically, by the mind which is the only thing which is then awake, without the help of the external sense organs or the presence of the rationalising intellect.

[edit] Waking state and Dream state

The two kinds of experience, namely those of the waking state and those of the dream state, contradict each other, in the sense that a man may experience hunger in a dream though he has eaten in the waking state a few minutes earlier.

[edit] Deep sleep state

In the state of deep sleep, represented by the sound ‘m’, there is no consciousness of any experience; even the mind has gone to sleep. But still there is an awareness after the deep sleep is over that one has been sleeping. Māndūkya Upanishad says that in the state of deep sleep, the Atman which is always present, has been the witness to the sleep of the body and it is this source from which issues the memory of sleep.

[edit] Beyond the three states

It is the Atman which is also present beyond the three states of experience. The fourth state (turīya avasthā) (see turiya) corresponds to the silence that ensues after one has steadily pronounced aum. It is the state of no matra (amātrā). In that silence Consciousness alone is present; there is nothing else. Therefore there is nothing to be cognized or be conscious of. This is the substratum of even the other three states of experience. During the silence that follows the recitation of aum, one is advised to merge in that Consciousness, in fact, be that Consciousness. That Consciousness is the Atman. That is Brahman. To underscore the point that the ‘fourth state’ is not another ‘state’ of consciousness, but consciousness itself, turīya avasthā is simply called turīya (the fourth).

[edit] Gaudapada’s thesis

In his kārikā on the Upanishad, Gaudapada deals with all the outstanding problems of philosophy, such as perception, idealism, causality, truth, and reality. In turiya, he says the mind is not simply withdrawn from the objects but becomes one with Brahman, who is free from fear and who is all-round illumination. In both deep sleep and transcendental consciousness there is no consciousness of objects. But this objective consciousness is present in an unmanifested 'seed' form in deep sleep while it is completely transcended in the turīya. Specifically, if one identifies the amātrā state of silence with the turīya and meditates on it without intermission, one realizes one's self and 'there is no return for him to the sphere of empirical life', says Gaudapada.

[edit] Sources

Dr. S. Radhakrishnan. The Principal Upanishads. George Allen and Unwin. 1969
Eight Upanishads. Vol.2. With the commentary of Sankaracharya, Tr. By Swami Gambhirananda. Advaita Ashrama, Calcutta, 1990.
Swami Nikhilananda: Mandukyopanishad with Gaudapada’s Karika and Sankara’s Commentary. Shri Ramakrishna Ashrama, Mysore. Sixth edn. 1974
V. Krishnamurthy. Essentials of Hinduism. Narosa Publishing House, New Delhi. 1989
Swami Rama. Enlightenment Without God [commentary on Mandukya Upanishad]. Himalayan International Institute of Yoga Science and Philosophy, 1982.
Sri Aurobindo, The Upanishads [1]. Sri Aurobindo Ashram, Pondicherry. 1972.