By Ritambhara
The Brihadaranyaka Upanishad belongs to the Shukla Yajurveda and is the longest of the principal Upanishads. Its fifth chapter tells a short story about Prajapati and his three kinds of offspring, the gods, humans and asuras. Each group completes a period of study with him and then asks for instruction. He utters one syllable, “da”, to each, and each group hears a different command. The closing lines of section 5.2.3 turn this into the Brihadaranyaka thunder teaching.
tad etad evaiṣā daivī vāg anuvadati stanayitnur da da da iti dāmyata datta dayadhvam iti
tad etat trayaṃ śikṣed damaṃ dānaṃ dayām iti
“That very teaching the divine voice, the thunder, repeats as ‘da, da, da’: control yourselves, give, have compassion. Therefore one should learn these three, self-control, giving and compassion.”
What the passage claims
The gods hear dāmyata, from the root dam, to tame. Humans hear datta, from dā, to give. The asuras hear dayadhvam, from day, to feel pity. The word for the voice is stanayitnu, the thunder-cloud. The Upanishad places the instruction inside the weather itself. Every storm, on this reading, repeats the lesson of Prajapati to anyone who listens.
Shankara reads all three groups as human
Shankara’s commentary offers a second reading of the story. “There are no gods or Asuras other than men,” he writes in Swami Madhavananda’s translation. People who lack self-control but have many other good qualities are the gods. The particularly greedy are the men. The cruel, who injure others, are the asuras. Shankara concludes that Prajapati meant the advice for humans alone, so humans must practise all three. He adds that Prajapati “teaches us even to-day through the heavenly voice of the cloud.”
The thunder over India in 2025
India’s storms now deliver that voice with lethal force. The Centre for Science and Environment and Down To Earth recorded extreme weather on 331 of the first 334 days of 2025. Those events killed at least 4,419 people and hit about 17.4 million hectares of cropland, according to their December 2025 analysis. Lightning and thunderstorms alone killed 1,538 people. Kerala saw extreme weather on 26 days in October and November.
The Upanishad gives one syllable three meanings, and Shankara assigns every meaning to us. Self-control applies first to the appetite for fuel and goods that is warming the climate. Giving covers the money and labour owed to villages rebuilding after floods and storms. Compassion is owed to the families of those the storms have killed. A reader who hears the thunder and takes this passage seriously must practise all three, beginning with restraint.
