[Advaita-l] Maitreyee Brahmana

[kuntimaddi sadananda]

PraNAms to all.
Maitreyee Brahmana – Occurs twice in Brihadaranyaka Upanishad wherehusband-sage Yagnavalkya teaches his wife Maitreyee. 

Shree Sankara provides abrilliant introduction to this chapter – he defines what a real science is. Theobjective sciences he dismisses are not absolutely real, since they exclude thesubject, I, in the very analysis of the total world. Science means knowledgederived from the word, scier, meaning ‘to know’. ‘Vid’ in Sanskrit also meansto know and veda means ‘knowledge’ –Vedanta meansultimate knowledge or absolute knowledge that involves the totality – both thesubject and the object. Hence Shankara says that which includes both the subjectand the object in total is the absolute science. 

This Upanishad also is well quoted. Here the husband says to the wife – Wifedoes not love her husband, what she loves is happiness that she gets when sheis associated with her husband. To be fair, he also says – husband does notlove his wife, what he loves is the happiness that she brings in. Similarlynobody loves anything in the world other than the happiness that they get fromthe objects. aatmanastu kaamaya sarvam priyam bhavati. Love for an object isnot for object sake, but for one’s own sake.
 Everyone is searching for only onething in life – that is absolute inexhaustible happiness – but searching in thewrong place. Shankara says Vedanta is an absolute science since it reveals whatone is searching for all the time, and cannot find anywhere. What one issearching for is what one is searching with – says a sage. That is the seekerhimself is the sought and therefore any seeking on the part of the seeker isgoing fail miserably, since in the very seeking one has resolved that thesought is not there where the seeker is. 

To understand this clearly and how tostop the very seeking, Yagnavalkya says in this Upanishad that one has to go ateacher since it involves very subtle science and involves the very subjectwhich cannot be objectified. Hence he says one has to listen to the teaching,then contemplate on the teaching and abide in that by constant contemplation onthe truth – shrotavyaH, mantavyaH, nidhidhyaasitavyaH. –tavyaH means one has todo – as there is no other way one can re-analyze and realize the truth that oneis happy as he is without any further seeking. We took this text in a two-daycamp at Chinmayam at Washington Regional Center, couple of years back.
 Hari Om!SadanandaThe url is given below:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ILY_pXkOyKk