The Praśna Upaniṣad (प्रश्नोपनिषद्) — literally "the Upanishad of Questions" — belongs to the Atharvaveda, specifically the Paippalāda tradition. The text takes a strikingly orderly form: six disciples approach the sage Pippalāda, each asks one question, and the teaching of the Upanishad consists of his six replies. The six questions move from cosmogony outward to detailed psychology and inward to the supreme syllable OM and the puruṣa who underlies all.
The Setting
The Upanishad opens with six seekers — Sukeśā, Saibya Satyakāma, Sauryāyaṇī Gārgya, Kausalya Aśvalāyana, Bhārgava Vaidarbhi, and Kabandhi Kātyāyana — approaching Pippalāda intent on knowing brahman. The sage tells them to spend one year with him in tapas, brahmacarya, and śraddhā before he will answer. After the year, they ask their questions and receive his teaching. The narrative pattern emphasizes that even formulated questions require preparation; one must earn the ability to hear an answer.
The Six Questions
The questions and the substance of Pippalada's replies are:
1. Whence are these creatures born? (Kabandhi)
replies with a cosmogonic account: Prajāpati desired offspring; he created the pair — rayi (matter) and prāṇa (life-breath) — from which all manifest beings issue. Rayi is the food, is the eater; from their pairing all forms arise. The teaching incidentally identifies the lunar year with the path of the ancestors (pitṛyāna) and the solar year with the path of the gods (devayāna) — two destinies post-mortem that the Chāndogya and Bṛhadāraṇyaka also describe.
2. How many powers sustain the body? (Bhargava)
The reply names the elemental gods that uphold the body: ether, air, fire, water, earth, and the senses with the mind. They quarreled over precedence — until prāṇa withdrew briefly, and the body began to fail. They acknowledged prana's primacy. The teaching makes the central life-principle without which the senses and elements cannot function.
3. Whence comes itself? (Kausalya)
describes the structure of the breath. arises from the ātman as a shadow from a person. It then differentiates into five prāṇas: prāṇa (in-breath), apāna (out-breath, downward), vyāna (diffused through the body), samāna (assimilation), and udāna (upward, especially at death). The body is described as having 101 nāḍīs (channels), each ramifying into a hundred more — anticipating the later yogic anatomy.
4. Who in this person sleeps and wakes? (Sauryayani Gargya)
The reply distinguishes three states. In waking, the senses are active in the world. In dreaming, they have withdrawn into the mind but the mind remains active, creating its own world. In deep dreamless sleep (suṣupti), even the mind has gathered into the ātman; all is one, and the sleeper enjoys pure bliss without object. This three-fold analysis prepares the way for the Māṇḍūkya Upaniṣad's fourth state, turīya.
5. What is gained by meditation on the syllable OM? (Saibya Satyakama)
OM, says , is both the para (higher) and the apara (lower) brahman. Meditation on its first mātrā (the sound A alone) gains the human world; on its first two (AU) gains the intermediate; on all three (AUM) leads to the highest world, brahman itself. The meditator who knows OM as one — gathered into a single sound — sees the puruṣa in the heart and becomes free. The teaching closely anticipates the Māṇḍūkya.
6. Where is the puruṣa with sixteen parts? (Sukesha)
This last and most extended question receives the most elaborate reply. The puruṣa with sixteen parts is the cosmic Person who manifests as the elements, the senses, the powers of life, and finally the inner self. describes how the sixteen parts emerge from the supreme puruṣa as rivers emerge from a great river — and how, in the knower's liberation, they return into him as those rivers return to the sea, losing their separate names. The famous closing simile:
यथा नद्यः स्यन्दमानाः समुद्रेऽस्तं गच्छन्ति नामरूपे विहाय । तथा विद्वान्नामरूपाद्विमुक्तः परात्परं पुरुषमुपैति दिव्यम् ॥
yathā nadyaḥ syandamānāḥ samudre'staṃ gacchanti nāmarūpe vihāya
tathā vidvān nāmarūpād vimuktaḥ parātparaṃ puruṣam upaiti divyam
"As flowing rivers, on reaching the ocean, vanish — abandoning name and form — so the wise, freed from name and form, attain the divine Person beyond the beyond."
Reception and Significance
The Prashna's question-and-answer form, its compact treatment of cosmogony, the doctrine of the breaths, the three states of consciousness, and the meditation on OM, make it function almost as a syllabus of Upanishadic concerns. Shankara wrote a major bhāṣya on it; later Vedanta commentators have continued to draw on its concise formulations. It belongs, with the Muṇḍaka and Māṇḍūkya, to the principal Upanishads of the Atharvaveda — three short texts that between them established much of the conceptual vocabulary later Hinduism would use to speak of mind, breath, sound, and liberation.