But everyone is aware that it is impossible to expound on it. Yajnaywakya who has been watching in silence all this while, comes forward, and defying all decorum, dares the audience to stop him as he directs his disciple to walk away with the coveted prize of a thousand cows, meant to be won by the scholar who could prove to the assembly that he knew 'Brahma', and was capable of explaining its nature to the assembly.
In all, by his acts, gestures, and language, Yajnyawalkya rose far above his time and sounded a note for a new age. Though a priest by vocation, he detested the vacuity of the shallow intellectualism of his time. It was intellectualism raised to the level of a dignified ritualism in the form of performances of ostentatious rites. Yajnyawalkya knew that those scholars who had gathered at the assembly could not go beyond rituals and dogmas to grasp the inner meaning of 'Brahma'.We see him making a mockery of their empty rhetoric as he cleverly silences them all, beating them on their own ground by his suave and apparently deep exposition of the subject at hand. His disdainful attitude to his fellow academia bears testimony to the rupture that divides his vocation from his deeper understanding of life and humanity.