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The meaning of each sheath is illuminated by a mantra, as cited above. |
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Each individually ordered sheath is placed within a larger ordering; each is said to be interior to the one before it on the list, and presumably is reached after one has encountered and passed through the preceding, exterior one. Only by tracing sheath-by-sheath that path which is marked by the five successive sheaths does the meditator gradually achieve insight into the structure of the person thus layered and, in a self-application and self-appropriation of the sheaths as applicable to the meditator's own self, attains to the self of bliss and knowledge of Brahman. |
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Yet, though thus complex, rich in meaning(s), and already internally interpreted by the intervening mantras, Taittiriya 2.16a does not formally fix its meaning(s); in particular, it does not fix the status of the fifth sheath in relation to Brahman, whether Brahman is the sheath of bliss, or still beyond it. |
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Before turning to the process by which the Advaita goes about determining the relationship between that fifth sheath and Brahman, let us conclude this brief consideration of the upanisads. In part, we may simply acknowledge that the early upanisads are presystematic and do not complete the process they begin with their highlighting of certain teachings and debates in specified narrative forms; they present without making a definitive choice a number of possibilities as to how to build a more systematic knowledge. But even apart from this unfinished redaction, the Chandogya and other early upanisads do not, and do not wish to, present us with complete systematic presentations, versions of knowledge which require only the assent of their readers or only a scrutiny in terms of the accuracy of the correspondence between texts and their announced referents. Upanisadic forms of knowledge-as-arrangement require the active engagement of the student, the imaginative reproduction of the proposed structures and a subsequent interior |
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