Mandukya Upanishad

The text works by a double mapping and it is over almost before it starts. The self is described in four conditions: awake and turned outward, dreaming and turned inward, in deep sleep where there is no division and no desire, and then a fourth that is not a state alongside the others but what the other three are conditions of. The syllable Om is then divided into its three sounds and each is matched to one of the first three conditions, with the silence that follows the syllable corresponding to the fourth.

The economy of that is the point. Rather than argue for the identity of the self and the absolute, the text gives a procedure: attend to the syllable you already recite, notice that it has parts, notice that you have states, and see that the two analyses are one analysis. Nothing is asserted that the reader is not shown how to check. The fourth condition is deliberately underdescribed. The text names it by a number rather than by any quality, and characterises it mainly by negation, refusing every description that would turn it into a further item on the same list. That reticence is what later commentary had to work with, and it is a large part of why so much was built on so short a text: twelve verses that decline to say what the most important term means leave a great deal of room for an interpreter, and the tradition filled it.

The Upanishad is rarely read alone. A verse commentary attributed to Gaudapada, in four chapters of which only the first follows the Upanishad verse by verse, is transmitted with it and is treated in the Advaita tradition as authoritative. Its later chapters leave the text behind and argue a position of their own: that nothing is ever really produced, that the appearance of a world arising is like the appearance of a snake in a rope or of a circle in a whirling firebrand, and that no origination takes place at all. That is the earliest systematic statement of non dualist Vedanta, and it is startling in its directness.

Later commentators, including the tradition's dominant one, wrote on the Upanishad and the verse commentary together, so the reception of the twelve verses is inseparable from the reading given them here. The relationship with Buddhist thought has been argued for over a century. The vocabulary, the imagery and several of the arguments have close Mahayana parallels, and scholars have proposed everything from direct borrowing to a shared philosophical environment in which both were arguing. The atlas records the resemblance as established and the explanation of it as contested, since the evidence supports the observation more securely than any account of what produced it.