Self and ultimate reality › What would wealth fail to give you?

Imagine receiving enough money to remove every financial worry. Would that answer your fear of death? In the Brihadaranyaka Upanishad 2.4.1–3, Maitreyi asks a version of this question. Her husband, Yajnavalkya, is preparing to leave household life and proposes a settlement of property. She asks whether possessing a world full of wealth would make her immortal. He answers that wealth can provide the life of the wealthy, but cannot provide immortality. She then asks him to teach what he knows about the latter.

The dialogue separates two ambitions that can easily become confused: improving the conditions of a life and understanding what, if anything, escapes its limits. It does not deny that possessions have uses. It asks whether more possessions can deliver a fundamentally different kind of good. That question introduces several concerns of the principal Upanishads: selfhood, knowledge, desire, death, and the relation between a person and reality as a whole.

These texts do not present a single argument with one authorial voice. This chapter follows three particular investigations: Uddalaka's instruction of Svetaketu in the Chandogya, Yajnavalkya's conversation with Maitreyi in the Brihadaranyaka, and Nachiketas's encounter with Death in the Katha. Their differences matter as much as the connections among them.