Gārgī Vācaknavī

Gārgī Vācaknavī appears in the Bṛhadāraṇyaka Upaniṣad as a learned woman who, in the great debate at the court of King Janaka of Videha, presses the sage Yājñavalkya with a sequence of probing questions about the ultimate ground of reality — 'on what is the world woven, warp and woof?' — driving the dialogue to the imperishable (akṣara) that underlies all things, until Yājñavalkya warns her not to question past the limit. Together with Maitreyī she is one of the celebrated women voices of the Upaniṣads. As with the other figures of these dialogues, she should be understood as a canonical frame-figure of the Upaniṣadic age rather than a person with a recoverable biography; the textual layers in which she appears are conventionally dated to the centuries before the Buddha.