The Good, the Pleasant, and the Chariot

Yama's first teaching was this: two paths always appear before us in life, shreyas and preyas. Shreyas is what is truly good; preyas is what feels pleasant right now. Both pull at a person. The wise weigh the two and choose the good; the foolish, wanting comfort, choose the pleasant. 'Nachiketa, you have turned down the pleasant, so you are worthy of this knowledge.'

Then Yama answered Nachiketa's question. The Self is never born and never dies. It did not come from anything, and nothing came from it. It is unborn, eternal, everlasting; it is not killed when the body is killed. One who thinks 'I have killed' and one who thinks 'I am killed' both do not know the truth. The same idea returns, in almost the same words, in the Bhagavad Gita.

But how can this Self be known? Yama gave a beautiful example: the chariot. Know the Self as the master riding in the chariot, and the body as the chariot. The intellect is the charioteer and the mind is the reins. The senses (eyes, ears, tongue and the rest) are the horses, and the things of the world are the roads they run on.

Now imagine: if the charioteer (intellect) is asleep and the reins (mind) are slack, the horses (senses) will run wherever they like and the chariot will crash into a ditch. But if the charioteer is alert and holds the reins firmly, those same horses carry the chariot to its goal. So the senses are not bad; they simply need direction.

Yama called out: arise, awake, go to the great teachers and learn. The wise say this path is as sharp as a razor's edge, hard to walk. Swami Vivekananda later made this verse his favourite call to young people.

At the end, the Katha Upanishad says Nachiketa received this knowledge and the whole method of yoga from Yama, became free of all faults and of death, and attained Brahman. Anyone who comes to know their own Self in the same way becomes like him.