By Ritambhara
Isha Upanishad verse 6 says that a person who sees all beings in the self, and the self in all beings, shrinks from none of them. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) reported in its 2023 Synthesis Report that 3.3 to 3.6 billion people live in contexts highly vulnerable to climate change. The Isha Upanishad forms the fortieth chapter of the Shukla Yajurveda.
yas tu sarvāṇi bhūtāny ātmany evānupaśyati
sarvabhūteṣu cātmānaṃ tato na vijugupsate (Isha Upanishad 6)
“One who sees all beings in the self alone, and the self in all beings, feels no revulsion by reason of that.”
What the verse claims
Isha Upanishad verse 6 describes two acts of seeing that complete each other. The verb anupaśyati, from the root paś, to see, names a seeing that grasps the unity of beings in the self. The verb vijugupsate is built on the root gup, to guard; its desiderative form means to shrink from or detest. Shankara reads bhūtāni, beings, as everything from the unmanifest down to immovable things, so plants and stones fall inside the verse.
Shankara on aversion and grief
Shankara gives the ground of the verse in his commentary. Revulsion arises only when a person sees something bad as separate from his own self. For one who sees the pure self as continuous through all things, no object remains that could provoke it. Verse 7 adds that delusion (moha) and grief (śoka) have no place for the knower who sees oneness. Shankara calls these two the seed of all desire and action. The text’s first verse, discussed in this column’s essay on limits to consumption, tells the reader to use the world without coveting it.
The verse and climate vulnerability
The IPCC’s 2023 Synthesis Report found that from 2010 to 2020, deaths from floods, droughts and storms were 15 times higher in highly vulnerable regions than in regions of very low vulnerability. The 3.3 to 3.6 billion highly vulnerable people equal 41 to 45 per cent of the eight billion people the United Nations said the world reached in November 2022. Carbon Brief’s analysis of the IPCC’s 2022 impacts report lists South Asia among the most vulnerable regions. This column’s essay on the Brihadaranyaka honey doctrine traced a related teaching of mutual dependence between beings and the earth.
Isha Upanishad verse 6 requires the seer to count every being within the self, which leaves aversion to any being without a ground. Read against the IPCC’s figures, the verse requires that a flood death in a distant district be weighed as a loss to oneself.
