Abstract
The presence of women in the philosophical scene of classical India is sporadic. The present paper focuses on an Upaniṣadic story highlighting the contribution of such a rare woman, namely the debate between Gārgī and Yājñavalkya at King Janaka’s court in chapter 3 of the Bṛhadāraṇyaka-Upaniṣad. I offer a close reading of the debate, drawing on Śaṅkara’s commentary, with the intention of spotlighting Gārgī’s voice, a single female voice in an all-male arena. My analysis is supplemented with a quick visit to Mahasweta Devi’s gut-wrenching story Draupadi (1997). My silence-silencing argument is this: Silence holds a central place in classical Indian philosophy, as the story under discussion illustrates. It is an expression of a dramatic transformation in which the human person “recovers” his/her innermost essence, the ātman, no longer identifying with worldly aspects of her/his being. But according to Mahasweta Devi and Daya Krishna, each in her and his distinct context, this beatific silence can turn into an act of brutal silencing. This is to say that in the name of spiritual quest, the here and now, the social dimension, is often “forgotten”. The twist is that what is seen from one perspective as a benevolent silence is from another perspective, a symptom of blindness to the world one lives in. For Mahasweta and Daya Krishna one’s visit, or recurrent visits to “realms beyond” are empty unless they have ethical impact upon one’s return to the now and here.
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Notes
Along similar lines, Yohanan Grinshpon writes that “in the course of the competition, Yājñavalkya finds out the answers to the challenging questions addressed to him. Thus, the story of Yājñavalkya is that of his self-transformation, from a person who initially does not know into a sage who does.” See Grinshpon’s paper “The Upaniṣadic Story and the Hidden Vidyā: Personality and Possession in the Bṛhadāraṇyakopaniṣad”, Journal of Indian Philosophy 26: 373–385 (1998); the quote is from p. 381.
See Anantanand Rambachan’s monograph Accomplishing the Accomplished: the Vedas as a Source of Valid Knowledge in Śaṅkara, Honolulu: University Of Hawaii Press (1991).
For a close reading of this intriguing debate, see chapter 3 of my book Sūtras, Stories and Yoga Philosophy: Narrative and Transfiguration (Routedge 2016), titled “Shankara in the King's Body: Knowing by Living Through”.
Apropos Yājñavalkya’s debate with Gārgī, we saw above, Śaṅkara argues that she is silenced since she uses the wrong pramāṇa in her attempt “to grasp” the Brahman. It can only be “grasped” through the scriptures, Śaṅkara suggests. His position sits well with the phrase aupaniṣadam puruṣam, “the self taught in the Upaniṣads”, here.
Classical commentators like Śaṅkara, and contemporary pandits like Joel Brereton highlight the connecting threads between the Upaniṣadic story and the same narrative as it is rendered in chapter 11 of the Śatapatha Brāhmaṇa, which according to Brereton serves as its “frame”. See Brereton’s paper “‘Why is a Sleeping Dog like the Vedic Sacrifice?’: The Structure of an Upaniṣadic Brahmodya”, in Michael Witzel (ed.) Inside the Texts, Beyond the Texts: New Approaches to the Study of the Vedas, pp. 1–14. Harvard Oriental Series Opera Minora vol. 2, Cambridge: Harvard University Press (1997). Śaṅkara’s addition in the present case draws on the corresponding Brāhmaṇa.
On the significance and meaning of head-shattering in our story and other texts (such as the Buddhist Ambaṭṭha Sutta), see also Steven Lindquist’s paper “Literary Lives and a Literal Death: Yājñavalkya, Śākalya, and an Upaniṣadic Death Sentence”, Journal of the American Academy of Religion 79.1: 33–57 (2011). Lindquist draws on Witzel (1987) and Insler (1989–1990), on the question whether the threat that the opponent’s head will fall off is literal (namely part of the sacrificial ritual that the brahmodya is a component of) or figurative. He further touches the centrality of death and deathlessness in Upaniṣadic chapter under discussion. The death of Śākalya is according to Lindquist a literary tool to emphasize this centrality, namely to call attention to what he sees as the crux of the story.
On the notion of akṣara see van J.A.B. Buitenen’s elaborate discussion in his paper “Akṣara”, Journal of the American Oriental Society 79.3 (1959): 176–187. Yājñavalkya’s use of the term, in his dialogue with Gārgī, is discussed on pages 182–183.
Here the title and the spirit of Gayatri Spivak’s seminal essay (Spivak 1993) “Can the Subaltern Speak?” come to mind.
For Mahasweta’s take on the Mahābhārata, see not just “Draupadi”, but also her collection After Kurukshetra: Three Stories, translated by Anjum Katyal, Calcutta and New Delhi: Seagull Books (2005).
I draw on Spivak’s introduction to Mahasweta’s Breast Stories trilogy, which she translated into English. This phrase is from p. ix.
http://spokensanskrit.de/index.php?beginning=0+&tinput=purusha&trans=Translate. Accessed 17 February 2017.
I draw for instance on Śaṅkara’s commentary of Chāndogya-Upaniṣad 6.16.3; here he writes that,
tasmāt vikārānṛtādhikṛta-jīvātma-vijñāna-nivartakam evedaṃ vākyaṃ tat tvam asīti siddhamiti (Therefore the conclusion arrived at is that this sentence, “tat tvam asi”, is the remover of the identification of the Self with the individual soul involved in change and unreality).
I quote from Chāndogyopaniṣad sānuvād Śāṅkarabhāṣyasahita, Gita Press, Gorakhpur, Code 582, p. 668; the translation is Swami Gambhirananda’s, from Chāndogya-Upaniṣad with the Commentary of Śaṅkarācārya, Kolkata: Advaita Ashrama, 1997, p. 502.
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Raveh, D. Silence or Silencing? Revisiting the Gārgī-Yājñavalkya Debate in Chapter 3 of the Bṛhadāraṇyaka-Upaniṣad . J. Indian Counc. Philos. Res. 35, 159–174 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s40961-017-0111-0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s40961-017-0111-0