Yājñavalkya is preparing to leave home — to become a wandering renunciant. He has two wives: Kātyāyanī, who understands only household matters, and Maitreyī, who is a philosopher.
He goes to Maitreyī to divide his property. He explains that she and Kātyāyanī will each receive a share. Maitreyī asks a single question: if the whole world full of wealth were mine, would it make me immortal? Yājñavalkya says: no. It would only give you the life of someone wealthy. Maitreyī says: then what would I do with wealth that cannot make me immortal? Tell me instead what you know.
Yājñavalkya sits back down. He says: you are dear to me, and you ask for what is dear to me. Listen. He then teaches her that the self — Ātman — is the ground of all love. You love your husband not for the sake of the husband, but for the sake of the self within him. You love your children not for their sake but for the self within them. The self is dearer than all beloved things — because it is the ground of all love.
Layer 3 — What it points toThe dialogue's philosophical structure is rigorous. Yājñavalkya makes a claim: ātmanastu kāmāya sarvaṃ priyaṃ bhavati — everything becomes dear for the sake of the self. He is not saying the self is selfish. He is saying the self — Ātman, which is Brahman — is the underlying ground of all value, all love, all dearness. When you love anyone or anything, the love is the self recognising itself in the beloved. This is why love for finite things is inherently incomplete — they are partial expressions of the infinite self, and the love that reaches through them is seeking its own ground.
The conclusion Yājñavalkya draws is the Upaniṣad's central epistemological claim: when all is Brahman, there is no longer a subject to perceive and an object to be perceived. There is no second thing. This is described not as a loss but as the dissolution of the very framework that creates lack and suffering.
Layer 3 — What it points toBṛhadāraṇyaka 2.4 is repeated almost verbatim in 4.5 — the second Yājñavalkya-Maitreyī dialogue, after Yājñavalkya's court debates. Scholars read this repetition as indicating either two source texts combined or a deliberate structural framing: the teaching that brackets Yājñavalkya's debates is the teaching on the self as the ground of love. The deepest statement is not the technical philosophical argument but this: whatever you love, you love the self within it. The instruction is to trace that love to its source. Śaṅkara in his bhāṣya takes the line vijñātāram are kena vijānīyāt (by what could you know the knower?) as the Upaniṣad's clearest statement of the subject-as-Brahman: the self cannot be an object of the self's knowing, because it is the knowing itself.
Layer 3 — What it points to