VI, 9

The Upanishads, Part 1 (SBE01), by Max Müller, [1879], at sacred-texts.com

NINTH KHANDA.

1. 'As the bees ¹, my son, make honey by collecting the juices of distant trees, and reduce the juice into one form,

2. 'And as these juices have no discrimination, so that they might say, I am the juice of this tree or that, in the same manner, my son, all these creatures, when they have become merged in the True (either in deep sleep or in death), know not that they are merged in the True.

3. 'Whatever these creatures are here, whether a lion, or a wolf, or a boar, or a worm, or a midge, or a gnat, or a musquito, that they become again and again.

4. 'Now that which is that subtile essence, in it all that exists has its self. It is the True. It is the Self, and thou, O Svetaketu, art it.'

'Please, Sir, inform me still more,' said the son.

'Be it so, my child,' the father replied.

Footnotes

101:1 At the beginning of each chapter the commentator supplies the question which the son is supposed to have asked his father. The first is: All creatures falling every day into deep sleep (sushupti) obtain thereby the Sat, the true being. How is it then that they do not know that they obtain the Sat every day?