poornamada, poornamidam
poornaat poornamudachyate
poornasya poornamaadaaya
poornameevaavashishyate

This is the invocation of peace, and the opening one of Brihadaaranyaka Upanishad, one of the ten most significant of the Upanishads. The four-lined stanza is a marvelously condensed description of the nature of the wonder that is the ultimate.

And it means: This is perfect, that is perfect; the perfect emerges out of the perfect. Even after taking the perfect out of the perfect, that which remains is still perfect.

This mantra is not given to a crowd of many people. The style of the Upanishad is a conversation between two people – a seeker, puzzled by his own questions and a seer, who has all the answers in clear and confident terms. If we go deeper into the essence of the mantra, we can see that the seeker and the seer are not praying to anyone; but they express their amazement thinking about the great unity of the infinite expanse that is nature. The seer approaches the ultimate from various possibilities – permutations, combinations, reductions, observations and generalizations – and finds a stunning uniformity throughout in structure.

“No mathematical genius can find a more enlightened way than this of relating oneself with a certitude of truth. Whatever is put together in terms of Absolute truth can be taken apart without causing any violence to the eternal or perennial principle of truth based on which the temporary device is put together,” evaluates Guru Nitya Chaitanya Yati, prominent scholar and author of scores of noted works on philosophy. Modern researches and thinking into the nature of the subatomic and genetic nature of the organic and inorganic world underscores the vision of the poets of the upanishadic mantras who lived around three thousand years ago somewhere in the cool, peaceful and dense forests of India.