kathopanishad-2-1-6-yaḥ pūrvaṃ

Commentary by Swami Krishnananda of the great Divine Life Society

Yaḥ pūrvaṁ tapaso jātam adbhyaḥ pūrvam ajāyata, guhām praviśya tiṣṭhantam yo bhūtebhir vyapaśyata: etad vai tat (2.1.6): Whoever knows this Great Being which originated from the tapas of Brahman, the Absolute, prior to the manifestation of the five elements—earth, water, fire, air and ether—and yet is embedded in the very five elements, knows the Truth. This Atman is above the body, and yet is birthing through the body. The body is the individualised symbol of the physical elements earth, water, fire, air and ether, and cosmically these elements represent the body of God Himself, the Viratsvarupa. This Virat, who has entered the five elements through the form of this universe, is the cause of all things that we call creation as we perceive it, but this Virat himself is the effect of a great tapas of concentration of the will of Brahman, the Absolute, we may say.

In the Upanishads there are statements repeatedly making out that Brahman concentrated itself; it performed tapas. What kind of tapas did Brahman perform? We do tapas by eating less, sleeping less, wearing little clothing, and not speaking much. Observing mauna, and so on, are the ways of our austerity, or tapas. But when Brahman performed tapas, what did Brahman do? Brahman’s tapas did not consist of not eating, not sleeping, not speaking, or wearing less clothes. These are not the ways of the tapas of the Supreme Being. Concentration of consciousness, the projection of the will in a given direction, and the embodying of the whole of oneself in the direction which this will has taken, that is real tapas, austerity; and in our case also that would be real austerity. Merely wearing frail fragments of cloth and not speaking and not eating, these are not adequate tapas. They are inadequate. Where the mind is not cooperating, the body cannot achieve anything. Our tapas consists in what the mind is doing, and not merely in what we do to the body. We may eat or not eat, that is a different matter; but what are we doing in the mind? We may not be eating anything, not even drinking water for a month, but we may be glutting through the mind, building castles in the air and vying over the pros and cons of all the blessed things in the world, with the mind never getting concentrated. So to the extent the mind concentrates, to that extent only are we in a state of tapas.

Brahman contemplated, concentrated itself, and did tapas in the form of the will to create the universe. The first manifestation is Virat, which came out of the tapas of Brahman and is prior to the five elements, yet it is involved in the five elements in the form of this vast cosmos. This Virat, so big, so great, so expansive, the effect of the very will and tapas of Brahman, is within us. The kingdom of God is within us. ‘Kingdom’ means ‘very big’. Such a vast area of suzerainty is within the little space of the heart of man.

Unfortunately, one knows this mystery of mysteries only through the five elements. The Virat is spreading itself everywhere in front of us as this glorious presentation of what we call creation, but we see only trees, we see twigs, we see bricks and stones, we see walls, we see rivers and mountains. Instead of seeing a person standing before us, we are seeing his skin, his hair, his bones and his sinews. This is the mistake that we make in the perception of the world. To see a person in front of us is different from seeing his limbs, as if the limbs constitute the person. The person is an enchantment, an attraction, a separate entity altogether. “I have gone and seen that person.” When we make statements of this kind, we do not mean that we have gone and seen a conglomeration of hands and feet and nose and eyes. This is not what we have seen. The person is different from the bodily limbs. Similar is this Virat that we are beholding in the form of this cosmos. We are seeing only the nose and the ears and the little things that we call the limbs of the world, whereas these are the manifestations of another thing, which is the Supreme Person, the Mahapurusha, the Purushottama of the Vedas, the Bhagavad Gita and the Upanishads. The great Reality is verily in front of us, and day and night we are actually hitting our heads against it but not knowing what has happened. “This verily is that. Nachiketas, I am giving you the answer,” says Yama.