Taittiriya Upanishad

The three sections do not continue one another and were probably not composed together. The first is concerned with speech: the joining of sounds, the correct pronunciation of the recitation, meditations on the elements of language, and then, abruptly, the address given to a student who has finished his study. The second sets out the self as covered by a series of sheaths, from the one made of food outward through breath, mind and understanding to the one made of bliss, and attempts to measure bliss by multiplying a unit of human happiness through ranks of beings. The third tells a story.

The story is the best of the three. Bhrigu asks his father to teach him the absolute and is told to find it by austerity. He returns saying it is food, is sent back, returns saying breath, is sent back, and so on through mind and understanding until he arrives at bliss. The father never supplies the answer, only the method. Read together the sections move from the outward and technical to the inward and personal, and the tradition treats that progression as intentional, a curriculum in which correct speech comes before analysis of the self and analysis before the discovery a student makes for himself. Whether the sections were arranged to produce that effect or simply accumulated in that order is a separate question, and nothing in the text answers it. What is clear is that the arrangement has been read as meaningful for a very long time.

The passage at the close of the first section is among the most quoted in the whole Upanishadic corpus, and it is unusual because it is not metaphysics. A teacher tells a student who is leaving to speak the truth, to practise virtue, to neglect neither learning nor teaching, to treat mother, father, teacher and guest as one would treat a god, and to imitate only those of the teacher's own acts that are good, not the rest. It then adds an instruction on giving: give with faith, in plenty, with modesty, with fear, and with sympathy. Two features stand out. It licenses the student to judge the teacher, which is a remarkable thing to write into a formal address. And where conduct is uncertain, it says to observe how thoughtful people of good judgment behave in that situation and do likewise, which is guidance by example rather than by rule.

The passage has had a continuous public life of a kind almost nothing else in this literature has. It is used at convocation and graduation ceremonies in India, printed on certificates and recited in settings far removed from Vedic study, so that many people meet it as a spoken occasion marking the end of their education rather than as a text encountered on a page. That is close to its original function, which is a rare continuity for a passage of this age, and it is worth noticing that the words being used are still the ones addressed to a student leaving a teacher's house.