Yajnyawalkya
Ancient Indian Quest for Knowledge
Foreword
Upanishads,known as Vedanta, are the culmination of the ancient Vedic quest for the knowledge of Atman: the inner self. Yajnyawalkya, Janaka, Gargi, Shakalya, Artabhaga, Maitreyi, Katyayani; the major characters of this novel, belong to an Upanishad called Brihadaranyaka, which is known to be the longest and the oldest of all Upanishads. Though these characters owe their origin to Brihadaranyaka, there is a considerable departure in my treatment of them in this novel. Brihadaranyaka formed the ground from where I gathered the seed and transplanted it to grow in the modern soil, with the sensibility and the idiom which belongs to our time. However, at certain points, I have tried to reproduce the archaic tenor of the Sanskrit language to recreate the atmosphere of formal debates in ancient India.
I met the character of Yajnyawalkya in the pages of a Sanskrit text prescribed for study at the undergraduate level of college. The text contained a few excerpts from Brihadaranyaka. There was one more excerpt from another Sanskrit text called Yajnyawalkya Smruti, the authorship of which is conventionally attributed too Yajnyawalkya himself.
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