Notes on the Kaushitaki Upanishad

[endymions_bower]

The exchange between Pratardana and Indra in the Kaushitaki Upanishad has some pure henadological elements to it. Pratardana attempts to defer his own choice of a boon to Indra’s own choice, that is, he attempts to default to the cosmic good, as embodied in Indra’s will. But Indra forces him to recognize this choice of universality as itself still an existential choice of Pratardana’s own: “No one who chooses, chooses for another.” (This is similar to the statement in the Myth of Er about the independence of the Gods from the mortal’s choice of life.) 

 

Pratardana accedes, insofar as he acknowledges that he is choosing, not the universal, but Indra Himself, and the universal only as inhering in Indra. This in turn opens him to Indra’s trancendant truth value: “Indra did not swerve from the truth, for Indra is truth.” Indra expresses the truth of this very proposition, when he then states, “Know me only.” 

 

Indra then proceeds to draw a series of highly antinomian consequences from his supra-essential status in this respect, a virtual counter-intelligibility. The introduction of the prana doctrine thereafter has the character of building the world back up from elementary constituents. Indra’s role in this section seems mainly to be maieutic; he keeps Pratardana from moving too quickly, e.g., not to jump to the unity of objects over pranas before the hierarchical disposition of pranas has been properly accounted. In particular, the prana of consciousness as such is seen thus to assert itself over objectivity, because all objectivity is present to consciousness. 

 

When the manifold of Gods comes back into the picture (“from the pranas the Gods, from the Gods the worlds”), they are as posited within subjectivity, comprehensively mediated. This bold self-positioning of Indra relative to the rest of the Gods is foreshadowed by “Let man worship it [the prana of consciousness] alone as uktha,” which founds the cultic facticity in the living consciousness of worship, subjectivized in a certain sense. The reward is the consequent idealization of the self, henceforth immortal (“he departs together with all these”). 

 

Every part into which consciousness is thus divided is immediately present with its object (“its object, placed outside”). But this objectivity is accordingly phenomenological, it is led from its perceptual positing. The doctrine of prana runs throughout the essay; Indra’s role is to explicate the delicate relationship between prana and prajna, the nature of consciousness as prana, as vitality. “Let him know the speaker,” etc., because who better than a henad to talk about the prana-dimension (the ‘nature’, in a literal or naturalistic sense) of personhood? The doctrine sounds Protagorean, at first, but it is really more medical in character. 

 

“He does not increase by a good action, nor decrease by a bad action,” in which the Advaitin naturally finds a sign that Brahman is the actual referent, because this is the intention of the doctrine, though not its content. But the reading is strictly correct: “he makes him do a good deed”. The question thus is one of ultimate causal attribution, the Good as cause of the good deed. 

 

“He is the lord of the universe, and he is my self”--through identification with the self’s actual nature, identification with the self of Indra, and through this with the function of demiurgic power in the cosmos. One wonders, indeed, if it is not Indra’s close association with this function that leads to the understanding of ‘Indra’ as a cosmic role to be played by many actors. This is what comes of the full idealization of the henad’s personhood, the almost complete intellective assimilation of the supra-essential character of the God, as is demanded of the cosmic artisan or sovereign. We see this when the doctrine is resumed in 20. “To the very hairs and nails”--total intellectualization, formalization, of the contingencies of body, of history, by which sovereign authority is established: “as his people follow the master of the house”. 

 

“So long as Indra did not understand that self, the Asuras conquered him.” But this is counterfactual. Nevertheless, it posits a mere personhood subordinate to the doctrine, and to the map of being which it provides. But this has to be the basis for “pre-eminence among all Gods, sovereignty, supremacy,” lest this be arbitrary and utterly opaque to reason, a purely private pre-eminence that does not give its reasons.

In certain respects, of course, I am still back there at the beginning with Pratardana, loving Indra for whom He is, not what He is. However, there is no harm in the Upanishad’s procedure. For just as Aristotle does, the author uses the things we grasp implicitly about the nature of the God, to reason about the nature of being. It is only when the bond with the person of the God is cut, and a position of superiority assumed relative to so-called ‘mythical gods’, that the doctrine risks becoming a soulless pursuit.