स वा एष महानज आत्माजरोऽमरोऽमृतोऽभयो ब्रह्म; अभयं वै ब्रह्म; अभयं हि वै ब्रह्म भवति य एवं वेद ॥ २५ ॥
इति चतुर्थं ब्राह्मणम् ॥sa vā eṣa mahānaja ātmājaro’maro’mṛto’bhayo brahma; abhayaṃ vai brahma; abhayaṃ hi vai brahma bhavati ya evaṃ veda || 25 ||
iti caturthaṃ brāhmaṇam ||25. That great, birthless Self is undecaying, immortal, undying, fearless and Brahman (infinite). Brahman is indeed fearless. He who knows It as such becomes the fearless Brahman.
Now the import of the whole Upaniṣad is being summed up in this paragraph, as much as to say that this is the gist of the entire Upaniṣad. That great, birthless Self is undecaying, i.e. It does not wear off; immortal, because It is undecaying. That which is born and decays also dies; but because It is indestructible on account of Its being birthless and undecaying, therefore It is undying. That is to say, since It is free from the three changes of condition—birth and so on, It is also free from the other three changes of condition and their effects—desire, work, delusion, etc., which are but forms of death. Hence also It is fearless: Since It is possessed of the preceding attributes, It is devoid of fear. Besides, fear is an effect of ignorance; by the negation of that effect as well as of the six changes of condition, it is understood that ignorance too is negated. What is the fearless Self that is possessed of the above-mentioned attributes? Brahman, i.e. vast, or infinite. Brahman is indeed fearless: It is a well-known fact. Therefore it is but proper to say that the Self endowed with the above attributes is Brahman.
He who knows It, the Self described above, as such, as the fearless Brahman, becomes the fearless Brahman. This is the purport of the whole Upaniṣad put in a nutshell. It is to bring home this purport that the ideas of projection, maintenance, dissolution, etc., as well as those of action, its factors and its results were superimposed on the Self. Again, by their negation—by the elimination of the superimposed attributes through a process of ‘Not this, not this’—the truth has been made known. Just as, in order to explain the nature of numbers from one up to a hundred thousand billions, a man superimposes them on certain lines (digits), calling one of them one, another ten, another hundred, yet another thousand, and so on,[31] and in so doing he only expounds the nature of numbers but he never says that the numbers are the lines; or just as, in order to teach the alphabet, he has recourse to a combination of leaf,[32] ink, lines, etc., and through them explains the nature of the letters, but he never says that the letters are the leaf, ink, lines, etc., similarly in this exposition the one entity, Brahman, has been inculcated through various means such as the projection (of the universe). Again, to eliminate the differences created by those hypothetical means, the truth has been summed up as ‘Not this, not this.’ In the end, that knowledge, further clariñed so as to be undifferentiated, together with its result, has been concluded in this paragraph.