The Horse of the Worlds and the Self Beyond Hunger

From the non-being to true being, from the darkness to the Light, from death to Immortality.

The Bṛhadāraṇyaka, the Great Forest-Book, is the vastest of the Upanishads and, in Sri Aurobindo's phrase, "at once the most obscure and the profoundest of the Upanishads." It opens with neither a question nor a benediction. It opens with a horse, a sacrificial horse whose head is the dawn and whose body is the year, and it closes, six chapters later, upon a line of teachers handing on what they had received; and between the horse and the lineage stretches a forest in which the seers move as men at home. Kings question Brahmins and Brahmins are taught by kings; a wife asks for immortality and is answered; a sage who is asked how many gods there are reduces them, question by question, to One.

The tradition reads it in three parts, the chapters of the honey (madhu), of Yājñavalkya, and of the supplement (khila); we shall walk it by its six adhyāyas, and the figure below shows where its light gathers. Sri Aurobindo left his own work upon it unfinished. He rendered the opening sections into English, wrote a Foreword, and wrote a commentary upon the Horse alone; for the rest we have the sayings that stand as epigraphs to the chapters of The Life Divine and the passages scattered through his essays. This Gateway keeps to those words. The mantras in this edition are in Max Müller's English, with a few in Hume's; wherever Sri Aurobindo's own English is meant, it is set apart as a quotation with its page.

Sri Aurobindo’s writings on it · 2

The text · 435 passages

Translation by F. Max Müller, with R. E. Hume where noted, and Sri Aurobindo’s renderings wherever he made them.

The Horse of the Worlds and the Self Beyond Hunger

The text · 435 passages

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