Madhu-Vidya

Divine Life Society Publication: - Chapter 2 The Brihadaranyaka Upanishad by Swami Krishnananda

Knowledge of the Interconnectedness of things

The Knowledge of the interconnectedness of things, imparted by sage  Dadhyaṅṅ Ātharvaṇa is known as Madhu-Vidya. Usually, consciousness and object are regarded as exclusive of each other. The perceiver is conscious, and the object is what is experienced by consciousness. The two are categorized as two distinct characters in the field of experience. The object cannot be the subject and the subject cannot be the object; consciousness cannot be matter and matter cannot be consciousness. This is our usual notice of things and our practical experience, too. But the Madhu-Vidyā gives us a revolutionary idea in respect of what we usually regard as a field of the duality of subject and object.

Insight into the nature of things – subject and the object

The Madhu-Vidyā is an insight into the nature of things, which reveals that there are no such things as subjects or objects. They are only notional conclusions of individual subjects from their own particular points of view, the one regarding the other as the object, so that there is a vast world of objects to a single individual perceiver, and this is the case with every other perceiver, also. The fact of experience itself is a repudiation of the phenomenal notion that subjects are cut off from objects, as if the one has no connection with the other. If there has been a gulf of difference, unbridgeable, between the experiencing consciousness and the object outside, there would be no such thing as experience at all.

Adhyatma, Adhibhuta and Adhidaiva

The great revelation of the sage Dadhyaṅṅ Ātharvaṇa is that the Adhyātma and the Adhibhūta are linked together by the Adhidaiva, and a transcendent Divine Presence connects the phenomenal subject and the phenomenal object, through an invisible force, so that we have a universe of interrelated particulars, one entering the other, one merging into the other, one coalescing with the other like the waves in the ocean, and not the universe we see with our eyes, as a house divided against itself.

Madhu-Vidya

This experience is the revelation of the sage Dadhyaṅṅ a knowledge Madhu-Vidyā, which is supposed to have been imparted to Indra and to the Asvins, and to the other sages through them. The significance of the word 'Madhu' in the term, Madhu-Vidyā, is that everything is the 'essence' of everything. 'Madhu' is honey, which symbolizes the quintessential essence of everything. The basic reality of all things is called Madhu in this Vidyā. The essence of everything is, thus, the essence of everything else, also. Whatever is the basic quality, the reality, the fundamental being of anything, is also the fundamental being of everything else.

Correlativity of everything in the universality of being

There is no superior, qualitative excellence in any object or any subject. It is only a point of view that is called a subject, or an object. So, if the isolated points of view are lifted to a universal point of view, there would be neither subjects nor objects. In a universal expanse of experience, a particular aspect of the total reality is called an individual subject, to which everything else stands in the position of an object. But this is not a correct point of view, because it is an abstraction from the total.

So, the Madhu-Vidyā reveals to us the truth of the immanence of the Reality that is universal in every particular, so that there can neither be an ultimate cause nor an ultimate effect in a world of mutual dependence and correlativity of things. Madhu-Vidyā is the knowledge of the correlativity of the subject and the object in such a way that they merge one into the other, cancelling the subjectness and the objectness of each, embracing each other in a union of their particularities, and revealing their inner essence called the Madhu. This applies to everything that is outside in the world called Adhibhūta, everything that is inside called Adhyātma, and everything that is transcendent called Adhidaiva. So, from three points of view the sage describes the correlativity of everything in the universality of being.

Excerpts from:

Madhu-Vidya - Chapter 2 The Brihadaranyaka Upanishad by Swami Krishnananda

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