Nachiketa Waited Three Nights at Death's Door to Ask One Question. Death Offered Him Gold, Elephants and Maidens With Chariots to Drop It

A sacrifice ground in northern India, sometime before the Buddha, or after him

Nobody knows the year. The text gives no date and no king, only a scene: a Brahmin called Vajashravasa has vowed to give away all he possesses, and the fee-cows are being led past to the priests.

The Sanskrit opens: uśan ha vai vājaśravasaḥ sarvavedasaṃ dadau; tasya ha naciketā nāma putra āsa. Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan, in his 1953 edition: "Desirous (of the fruit of the Viśvajit sacrifice) Vājaśravasa, they say, gave away all that he possessed. He had a son by name Naciketas." (Katha Upanishad I.1.1, Radhakrishnan, The Principal Upanishads, p. 595)

As the cows go past, "faith entered into the heart of Nachiketas, who was still a boy". He looks at what his father is giving, "cows which have drunk water, eaten hay, given their milk and are barren", and thinks: "Unblessed, surely, are the worlds to which a man goes" by giving such gifts. (I.1.2–3, Müller, SBE XV, p. 1)

So he asks the question that sets the whole text going. sa hovāca pitaraṃ, tata kasmai māṃ dāsyasīti; dvitīyaṃ tṛtīyaṃ; taṃ hovāca, mṛtyave tvā dadāmīti. Radhakrishnan: "He said to his father, 'O Sire, to whom wilt thou give me?' For a second and a third time (he repeated). (When the father) said to him, 'Unto Death shall I give thee.'" (I.1.4, Radhakrishnan, p. 596)

If a father has vowed to give away everything, the son is part of everything. The boy is holding his father to his vow. The father, in anger, names the one recipient nobody can take a gift back from. "The father, having once said so, though in haste," Müller adds, "had to be true to his word."

And the boy goes.

At a glance

• Three nights. Nachiketa waits at Death's house "three nights without eating"; Death, returning, says "therefore choose now three boons" (trīn varān vṛṇīṣva). (Katha I.1.9, Sanskrit, Wikisource; Müller, SBE XV, p. 3)
• Three boons. A father no longer angry; the fire-sacrifice that leads to heaven; and "when a man is dead, some saying, he is; others, he is not. This I should like to know." (I.1.10, 13, 20, Müller, pp. 3–5)
• The bribe. "Sons and grandsons who shall live a hundred years, herds of cattle, elephants, gold, and horses", "the wide abode of the earth", "fair maidens with their chariots and musical instruments". (I.1.23–25, Müller, pp. 6–7)
• Six parts of the chariot. Self = rider, body = chariot, intellect = charioteer, mind = reins, senses = horses, sense-objects = roads. (I.3.3–4, Sanskrit; Müller, p. 12)
• Two verses the Gita reuses. Katha I.2.18–19 reappear as Gita 2.20 and 2.19, second halves identical, first halves reworded; Müller's footnote: "see Bhag. Gita II, 19, 20." (Müller, p. 11; Gita text, Wikisource)
• 1657, 1775, 1801, 1814. A Mughal prince's Persian translation of fifty Upanishads is finished in 1657; a copy reaches a French scholar in December 1775; his Latin is printed at Strasbourg in 1801–02; Schopenhauer reads it in 1814 and later calls it "the solace of my life". (Urs App, Schopenhauer-Jahrbuch 2012, pp. 65, 67, 71–73, 76, 81)

First, the words a beginner needs

Upanishad. Sanskrit texts at the end of the Vedas that stop describing rituals to ask what the ritual is for; usually explained as "sitting down near" a teacher. Over a hundred exist; a dozen or so are called "principal".

Katha (Kaṭha). A school of priests who preserved one recension of the Black (Krishna) Yajurveda, the Veda of sacrificial formulas. The Upanishad is named after them; it is not a word for "story".

Yama. The god of death, called here Mṛtyu, Death, and Vaivasvata, son of the sun. Not a devil: a householder with obligations, and a teacher.

Nachiketa (Naciketas). The boy. Radhakrishnan reads the name as "one who does not know, and therefore seeks to know". The text also calls him Gautama, his clan name.

Boon (vara). A gift a host owes a guest he has wronged. Once promised it cannot be withdrawn; that is the engine of the story.

Atman (ātman). In ordinary Sanskrit simply "self", the reflexive pronoun. In the Upanishads, the name for whatever in a person is really the person: not body, breath or mind, but the one who has them.

Buddhi and manas. Both usually translated "mind". Manas receives and sorts sense-data and wanders; buddhi decides: intellect, judgment. The chariot depends on keeping them apart.

Shreyas and preyas. Śreyas, "the better"; preyas, "the dearer". Two paths Death says every person stands between.

Oupnek'hat. Anquetil-Duperron's Latin rendering (1801–02) of the Persian Sirr-i-Akbar; he glossed the title secretum tegendum, "the secret that must be kept".

The claim we are testing

The popular versions: "Nachiketa learned the secret of immortality from Yama." "The Katha's chariot is the oldest in the world, and Plato copied it." "Schopenhauer, Emerson and T.S. Eliot all drew on it." Layer by layer:

1. A boy given to Death waits three nights and is granted three boons, the third being what survives death. True for the frame, and older than the Upanishad: the Taittiriya Brahmana has the boy, the three nights and three boons, but its third boon is "the conquest of death again", answered by a fire rite, not the question of what survives. (Müller, Introduction, pp. xxi–xxii)
2. Death "reveals the secret of immortality". Partly. What Death teaches is a claim about the Self and a discipline for the mind; the text itself says the Self "cannot be gained by the Veda, nor by understanding, nor by much learning" (I.2.23).
3. The chariot is "the oldest in the world" and Plato borrowed it. Unsupported, and Müller said so in 1884. The Katha's date is disputed across centuries; the Phaedrus is placed around 370 BCE. Müller's footnote: Plato "did not borrow this simile from the Brahmans".
4. Schopenhauer, Emerson and Eliot drew on it. Schopenhauer: true, through Latin from Persian. Emerson: true, visible in "Brahma". Eliot: not shown by anything we could open. Somerset Maugham, whom nobody mentions, put a Katha verse on the title page of a bestseller.

The guest nobody fed

The boy arrives at Yama's house. Yama is away. For three nights the Brahmin boy sits at the door of Death and nobody brings him water. An unfed Brahmin guest is a disaster for the host, who loses "his hopes and expectations, his possessions, his righteousness, his sacred and his good deeds, and all his sons and cattle". (I.1.8, Müller, p. 2)

So Yama's first words on returning are an apology, and the apology carries a price:

tisro rātrīr yad avātsīr gṛhe me 'naśnan brahmann atithir namasyaḥ; namas te 'stu brahman, svasti me 'stu; tasmāt prati trīn varān vṛṇīṣva. Müller: "O Brahmana, as thou, a venerable guest, hast dwelt in my house three nights without eating, therefore choose now three boons. Hail to thee! and welfare to me!" (I.1.9, Sanskrit, Wikisource; Müller, p. 3)

The first boon. His father: "that Gautama, my father, be pacified, kind, and free from anger towards me; and that he may know me and greet me, when I shall have been dismissed by thee." Granted at once. (I.1.10–11, Müller, p. 3)

The second boon. The fire-sacrifice that leads to heaven, where "there is no fear; thou art not there, O Death". Death explains the bricks and adds a gift the boy did not ask for: "that fire-sacrifice shall be named after thee". In the Brahmana version this is the point of the legend: it explains the name of a ritual. (I.1.12–16, Müller, pp. 3–4; Introduction, p. xxiii)

The third boon. This is the one the Upanishad was written for.

yeyaṃ prete vicikitsā manuṣye 'stīty eke nāyam astīti caike; etad vidyām anuśiṣṭas tvayāhaṃ; varāṇām eṣa varas tṛtīyaḥ. Müller: "There is that doubt, when a man is dead, some saying, he is; others, he is not. This I should like to know, taught by thee; this is the third of my boons." (I.1.20, Sanskrit, Wikisource; Müller, p. 5)

What Death offered instead

Death does not want to answer: "On this point even the gods have doubted formerly; it is not easy to understand. That subject is subtle. Choose another boon, O Nachiketa, do not press me, and let me off that boon." (I.1.21, Müller, p. 5) The boy presses. Then Death makes an offer that reads like the inventory of a kingdom:

"Choose sons and grandsons who shall live a hundred years, herds of cattle, elephants, gold, and horses. Choose the wide abode of the earth, and live thyself as many harvests as thou desirest. If you can think of any boon equal to that, choose wealth, and long life. Be (king), Nachiketa, on the wide earth. I make thee the enjoyer of all desires. Whatever desires are difficult to attain among mortals, ask for them according to thy wish; these fair maidens with their chariots and musical instruments, such are indeed not to be obtained by men, be waited on by them whom I give to thee, but do not ask me about dying." — Katha I.1.23–25, Müller, SBE XV, p. 6

The last line is the point: "but do not ask me about dying". The boy's refusal:

"These things last till tomorrow, O Death, for they wear out this vigour of all the senses. Even the whole of life is short. Keep thou thy horses, keep dance and song for thyself. No man can be made happy by wealth. Shall we possess wealth, when we see thee? Shall we live, as long as thou rulest?" — I.1.26–27, Müller, p. 7

Death's reaction, which opens the second valli, is not anger. It is respect. And it is where the teaching begins.

The fork in the road: shreyas and preyas

The second valli opens with a pair of words later Indian ethics keeps returning to.

anyac chreyo 'nyad utaiva preyas, te ubhe nānārthe puruṣaṃ sinītaḥ; tayoḥ śreya ādadānasya sādhu bhavati, hīyate 'rthād ya u preyo vṛṇīte. Müller: "The good is one thing, the pleasant another; these two, having different objects, chain a man. It is well with him who clings to the good; he who chooses the pleasant, misses his end." (I.2.1, Sanskrit, Wikisource; Müller, p. 8)

Both words are comparatives, "the better" and "the dearer". The text does not set pleasure against virtue as enemies; both arrive together, both pull, and a person has to compare: "The good and the pleasant approach man: the wise goes round about them and distinguishes them." (I.2.2) The word for the wise person is dhīra, which also means "steady".

Death then tells the boy he "has not gone into the road that leadeth to wealth, in which many men perish" (I.2.3), unlike "fools dwelling in darkness, wise in their own conceit", who go "round and round, staggering to and fro, like blind men led by the blind" (I.2.5).

Death tested the boy with the pleasant and the boy chose the better. Only now is he fit to hear the answer. The bribe was the entrance exam.

The verse the Gita borrowed

Before the chariot, Death answers the third question. It is not a description of heaven. It is a description of the Self.

na jāyate mriyate vā vipaścin, nāyaṃ kutaścin na babhūva kaścit; ajo nityaḥ śāśvato 'yaṃ purāṇo, na hanyate hanyamāne śarīre. Müller: "The knowing (Self) is not born, it dies not; it sprang from nothing, nothing sprang from it. The Ancient is unborn, eternal, everlasting; he is not killed, though the body is killed." (I.2.18, Sanskrit, Wikisource; Müller, pp. 10–11)

hantā cen manyate hantuṃ, hataś cen manyate hatam; ubhau tau na vijānīto, nāyaṃ hanti na hanyate. Müller: "If the killer thinks that he kills, if the killed thinks that he is killed, they do not understand; for this one does not kill, nor is that one killed." (I.2.19)

Now open the Bhagavad Gita at chapter 2, where Krishna is persuading Arjuna to fight. Verse 2.20: na jāyate mriyate vā kadācin, nāyaṃ bhūtvā bhavitā vā na bhūyaḥ; ajo nityaḥ śāśvato 'yaṃ purāṇo, na hanyate hanyamāne śarīre. Verse 2.19 ends ubhau tau na vijānīto nāyaṃ hanti na hanyate. (Bhagavad Gita 2.19–20, Sanskrit, Wikisource)

The second halves are identical; the first halves are rephrased. Müller footnoted it in 1884: "As to verses 18 and 19, see Bhag. Gita II, 19, 20." (Müller, p. 11, n. 1) The Gita is generally held to be the later text, and its own commentator Madhusudana Sarasvati calls the Katha's wording of 2.19 śrautaḥ pāṭhaḥ, "the Vedic reading": the Gita is quoting. (Gita 2.19, Madhusudana's commentary, Wikisource)

This is the answer to Nachiketa's question, and it is a strange one. He asked whether anything is left after death. Death replies: the thing that matters was never born, so it cannot die; it is "smaller than small, greater than great", "hidden in the heart" (I.2.20). Then the sentence that stops the Katha being a manual: "That Self cannot be gained by the Veda, nor by understanding, nor by much learning. He whom the Self chooses, by him the Self can be gained." (I.2.23)

The word for what is "not born" is ātman: in the first valli a pronoun, here the name of whoever has a body, a mind, a life, and is not any of them.

The chariot, part by part

Then Death reaches for a picture. In the third valli, verses 3 to 9, a person is a chariot in motion. The two verses that set it up (quoted in full under "Read the actual document") are:

ātmānaṃ rathinaṃ viddhi, śarīraṃ ratham eva tu; buddhiṃ tu sārathiṃ viddhi, manaḥ pragraham eva ca. "Know the Self to be sitting in the chariot, the body to be the chariot, the intellect (buddhi) the charioteer, and the mind the reins." (I.3.3, Sanskrit, Wikisource; Müller, SBE XV, p. 12)

indriyāṇi hayān āhur, viṣayāṃs teṣu gocarān; ātmendriyamanoyuktaṃ bhoktety āhur manīṣiṇaḥ. "The senses they call the horses, the objects of the senses their roads." (I.3.4)

Take the parts one at a time, because the popular retelling usually gets two of them wrong.

The rider (rathin, "the one who has the chariot") is the Self, ātman. He does not drive; he is the one the vehicle exists to carry.

The chariot (ratha) is the body, śarīra.

The charioteer (sārathi) is buddhi, the intellect: the part the posters mislabel "mind".

The reins (pragraha) are manas, the mind in the narrower sense. Reins are in charge of nothing; they transmit.

The horses (haya) are the senses, indriya, with appetites of their own.

The roads (gocara, literally "cattle-range") are the sense-objects, viṣaya.

Verses 5–8 say what follows. One "whose mind (the reins) is never firmly held, his senses (horses) are unmanageable, like vicious horses of a charioteer" and "enters into the round of births"; one "whose mind is always firmly held" reaches "that place, from whence he is not born again". Then the summary:

vijñānasārathir yas tu, manaḥ pragrahavān naraḥ; so 'dhvanaḥ pāram āpnoti, tad viṣṇoḥ paramaṃ padam. Müller: "But he who has understanding for his charioteer, and who holds the reins of the mind, he reaches the end of his journey, and that is the highest place of Vishnu." (I.3.9)

Notice what the picture does not say. It does not call the senses evil; a chariot with no horses goes nowhere. It says the horses need a driver who can see. Notice also who is silent: the rider never speaks. In the Katha's psychology the Self does nothing; it is carried. Everything that goes wrong goes wrong in the driving.

Verses 10–11 stand the same parts up as a ladder: "Beyond the senses there are the objects, beyond the objects there is the mind, beyond the mind there is the intellect, the Great Self is beyond the intellect … Beyond the Person there is nothing." (I.3.10–11) The chariot was the same hierarchy lying on its side.

The razor's edge

Near the end of the third valli comes the line the twentieth century remembered.

uttiṣṭhata jāgrata, prāpya varān nibodhata; kṣurasya dhārā niśitā duratyayā, durgaṃ pathas tat kavayo vadanti. Müller: "Rise, awake! having obtained your boons, understand them! The sharp edge of a razor is difficult to pass over; thus the wise say the path (to the Self) is hard." (I.3.14, Sanskrit, Wikisource; Müller, pp. 13–14)

The first half is a command to a sleeping class. The second half gave the Katha its most famous English afterlife: W. Somerset Maugham's 1944 novel The Razor's Edge carries it as epigraph, "The sharp edge of a razor is difficult to pass over; thus the wise say the path to Salvation is hard".

The tree that grows upside down

The second chapter is teaching without story. Its last valli opens with an image as odd as the chariot is clear:

ūrdhvamūlo 'vākśākha eṣo 'śvatthaḥ sanātanaḥ; tad eva śukraṃ tad brahma, tad evāmṛtam ucyate; tasmiṃl lokāḥ śritāḥ sarve, tad u nātyeti kaścana. etad vai tat. Müller: "There is that ancient tree, whose roots grow upward and whose branches grow downward; that indeed is called the Bright, that is called Brahman, that alone is called the Immortal. All worlds are contained in it, and no one goes beyond. This is that." (II.6.1 in Müller's numbering, II.3.1 in the Wikisource text; Müller, p. 21)

The aśvattha is the pipal, the sacred fig; Müller's note describes it, loosely, as "the fig-tree which sends down its branches so that they strike root and form new stems, one tree growing into a complete forest", a habit that in fact belongs to its cousin the banyan. A tree with roots in the air and branches reaching down into the world is a universe whose source is above it and whose spreading is us. Müller cross-refers to "Bhag. Gita XV, 1–3", where the same tree becomes something to cut down. (Müller, p. 21, nn. 1–2)

The refrain etad vai tat, "this is that", closes verse after verse of the second chapter: the thing you are asking about is the thing doing the asking. The last verse but one sums up: "Nachiketa became free from passion and death, and obtained Brahman. Thus it will be with another also who knows thus what relates to the Self." (II.6.18, Müller)

Where and when the text was made

The text is usually assigned to the Black Yajurveda: in the Muktika list of 108 Upanishads "it stands first among the Upanishads of the Black Yajur-veda", Müller says, "probably because the legend of Nachiketas occurs in the Brahmana of the Taittiriya Yajur-veda", at III.1.8, though he adds that it is "generally, however, counted as one of the Atharvana Upanishads". (Müller, Introduction, p. xxi) Radhakrishnan writes that it "belongs to the Taittirīya school of the Yajur Veda". (Radhakrishnan, p. 593)

On the date, Müller is unusually honest: "we know so little of the time and the circumstances when these half-prose and half-metrical Upanishads were first put together, that I should hesitate" to sort old verses from new, though "when it was an Upanishad it consisted of six Vallis, neither more nor less". (Müller, Introduction, p. xxiii) Modern scholars give a spread from the fifth century BCE (King, Basham) to the last centuries BCE (Olivelle, as summarised on Wikipedia); Stephen Phillips places it before the earliest Buddhist canons on grounds of style and archaism. We did not open those editions and report the range only as a range.

The road to Europe: a prince, a Frenchman, a philosopher

Every step of the text's road west is documented.

Benares, 1656–57. Dara Shikoh, eldest son of Shah Jahan, "assembled in Benares a team of experts for the first ever translation of fifty Upanishads from Sanskrit into Persian". It was finished in 1657 as Sirr-i akbar, "the Great Secret", the translation "with much interwoven commentary". Two years later the prince "lost the succession struggles to the Mughal throne and was in 1659 murdered by his younger brother", Aurangzeb. (Urs App, Schopenhauer-Jahrbuch 2012, pp. 72–73, 75–76)

Oudh to Paris, December 1775. Abraham-Hyacinthe Anquetil-Duperron "received a manuscript of Prince Dara's Sirr-i akbar" in December 1775 "from his friend Le Gentil, the French envoy at Oudh". "For nine years, from 1776 to 1787, Anquetil toiled with few reference materials to help him, and on March 18 of 1787 he finished his word-for-word translation." The full French version was never printed; only four short Upanishads from it appeared in French, in 1787. (App, pp. 71, 76–77)

Strasbourg, 1801–02. Anquetil turned his French into Latin: two volumes, Oupnek'hat, id est, Secretum tegendum. The Katha is in it. Müller later called the Latin "so utterly unintelligible that it required the lynxlike perspicacity of an intrepid philosopher, such as Schopenhauer, to discover a thread through such a labyrinth". (App, p. 65, quoting Müller)

1814. The intrepid philosopher was Arthur Schopenhauer, then in his mid-twenties. In Parerga und Paralipomena §184 (1851) he told readers the Oupnek'hat "has been the solace of my life and will be the solace of my death"; his friend Gwinner reported that "before going to bed he not infrequently opened his Bible, the Oupnekhat, in order to perform his prayers". (App, pp. 65, 67, 69) App adds a caution: what Schopenhauer read was Latin from a Persian paraphrase thick with Sufi and Shankara-flavoured commentary; on one page App checked, only a single passage "stems from the Sanskrit Upanishad". (App, p. 71)

Concord, 1857. Emerson's "Brahma", printed in the Atlantic in November 1857, opens: "If the red slayer think he slays, / Or if the slain think he is slain, / They know not well the subtle ways / I keep, and pass, and turn again." That is Katha I.2.19, "if the killer thinks that he kills, if the killed thinks that he is killed, they do not understand", whether Emerson had it from the Upanishad or the Gita's copy.

Read the actual document

"Know the Self to be sitting in the chariot, the body to be the chariot, the intellect (buddhi) the charioteer, and the mind the reins. The senses they call the horses, the objects of the senses their roads. When he (the Highest Self) is in union with the body, the senses, and the mind, then wise people call him the Enjoyer. He who has no understanding and whose mind (the reins) is never firmly held, his senses (horses) are unmanageable, like vicious horses of a charioteer. But he who has understanding and whose mind is always firmly held, his senses are under control, like good horses of a charioteer." — Katha Upanishad I.3.3–6, translated by F. Max Müller, Sacred Books of the East vol. XV (Oxford, 1884), pp. 12–13

In plain words: a person is a vehicle with a passenger. The passenger is what you really are, and it does nothing except be carried. The vehicle is your body; its horses are your senses, which run toward whatever they want unless something holds them. What holds them is the reins, your wandering mind, and reins only work if someone grips them: your judgment. When judgment sleeps, the chariot goes into a ditch and the passenger goes round again into another body. When it is awake, the chariot reaches the end of the road.

The strongest case for the other side

The question here is interpretation, so the other side is the devotional and popular reading, and it has real strengths.

First, "Nachiketa learned the secret of immortality" is not invented. A wise man "who has repeated or heard the ancient story of Nachiketas told by Death, is magnified in the world of Brahman" (I.3.16), and the closing verse says Nachiketa "became free from passion and death". The Upanishad presents itself as saving; to read it as "only" psychology is to read it against its own claim.

Second, the chariot may not be the Katha's invention. Müller says "several passages are clearly taken over from other Upanishads", and the Rigveda had used chariot imagery for centuries. That weakens any claim, in either direction, about who had it first.

Third, on Plato. The resemblance is real: Elizabeth Schiltz has compared the two chariots and found "remarkable similarities". And Plato's picture is richer in one respect. His two horses differ: the right-hand horse "needs no touch of the whip, but is guided by word and admonition only", the other is "a crooked lumbering animal … hardly yielding to whip and spur" (Jowett, 253d–e), a conflict between higher and lower appetite that the Katha's row of identical horses lacks. ## What we could not prove

- That the chariot is "the oldest in the world". The text's date spans several centuries; the Phaedrus is placed around 370 BCE; the Rigveda's chariots are older than both. The working title's claim was dropped. - Whether Plato and the Katha are connected at all. Müller's footnote says Plato "did not borrow this simile from the Brahmans"; Schiltz, as summarised on Wikipedia, calls the similarities a source of "tantalizing historical and literary questions", not a borrowing. We opened neither a transmission account nor Schiltz's article. Two chariots, no documented road between them. - A T.S. Eliot echo. Four Quartets draws on the Gita, The Waste Land on the Brihadaranyaka. Nothing we opened ties either to the Katha, so the claim stays out. - Radhakrishnan's translation beyond I.1.4. The archive.org scan we could open is legible for the introduction and opening verses; its optical text collapses from the fifth verse on. We quote Müller for every later verse. - Which school the text belongs to. Müller gives the Black Yajurveda; Radhakrishnan writes "the Taittirīya school"; Kaṭha names a separate school of the same Veda. We report both and do not adjudicate. ## Why it still matters today

The chariot says, in one picture, what is still the working model of self-control: a person is a system, not one thing; the senses are not the enemy but need driving; the mind is not the driver but the reins; the real passenger is quieter than any of them. Every Indian who has heard "control your senses" has heard a one-line summary of I.3.5–6.

Shreyas and preyas are still the words, in the Gita, in Shankara, in a thousand school assemblies: not good against evil, but the better against the dearer, arriving together.

And the road the text travelled is a lesson of its own: a Mughal prince killed two years after commissioning it, a French scholar nine years on one manuscript, a German reading Latin that Müller called almost unreadable. The India that likes to say Schopenhauer loved the Upanishads should remember that the chain began with Dara Shikoh.

Verdict

The documents prove the story as it is told: a boy given to Death by an angry father, three nights unfed at the door, three boons, a bribe that ends "do not ask me about dying", and a refusal. They prove the chariot with six labelled parts and which is which: the intellect drives, the mind is the reins, the Self rides. They prove that two of Death's verses went into the Gita half-verse for half-verse. They prove the road to Europe, date by date, from Benares in 1657 to Schopenhauer's bedside.

They do not prove that the chariot is the oldest in the world, that Plato saw it, or that Eliot read it. The popular version adds those because they flatter. The text does not need them. A boy asked Death what happens when we die, and Death answered: the one who is asking was never born. Whether that is true is not a question documents can settle. That it is what the text says, is.