Literary Lives and a Literal Death: Yajñavalkya, Sakalya, and an Upanis.adic Death Sentence

One of the most popular stories found in the Upanis.ads centers around a debate between the ritualist and philosopher, Yajñavalkya, and a series of interlocutors about the nature of sacrifice, the self, and the cosmos. This story, from a textual–historical perspective, is unique in that the last interlocutor, Sakalya, is said to die by having his head shatter because he is unable to answer a question about the fundamen-tal nature of immortality. In this paper, I analyze the interrelationship of these two main characters and argue that this relationship is one key to not only understanding the portrayal of these characters, but also the larger import of this debate about immortality. I provide an intratextual rationale for the head-shattering conclusion and discuss how character and doctrine are fundamentally intertwined in this text. THE UPANIS.ADS ARE SOME of the most important texts from early India (ca. seventh-century BCE onwards), not only because of their role as root texts in later schools of Indian philosophy (darśanas), but also because of the popularity they have assumed in the general consciousness of many Hindus. Contrary to the emphasis on philosophy found in bot