Upanishads

• 1. Introduction

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  The Upanishads begin with a parody. In the Brihadaranyaka Upanishad, the oldest of these ancient Sanskrit texts, a procession of dogs chants in mockery of priests: "Om! Let's eat. Om! Let's drink." That single image captures the challenge at the heart of these writings: a direct, sometimes irreverent confrontation with centuries of sacred ritual. The Upanishads document the transition from the archaic ritualism of the Vedas into a world of philosophy, meditation, and inner knowledge. They ask what lies beneath the surface of sacrifice and ceremony, and what connects the self to the cosmos. The answers they offer would reshape Indian thought for thousands of years and eventually draw the attention of German philosophers, Austrian physicists, Irish poets, and American transcendentalists.

• 2. Origins and Authorship

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  Sarvapalli Radhakrishnan observed that almost all early Indian literature was anonymous, and the Upanishads are no exception. Most of their authors are unknown. The ancient Vedic texts from which the Upanishads grow were traditionally considered apauruseya, meaning "not of a man, superhuman" and "impersonal, authorless", as if the sacred knowledge had no human origin at all. The Vedic texts themselves describe how Rishis, or sages, created these writings after inspired creativity, the way a carpenter builds a chariot.

  Yet names do appear. Philosophical theories in the early Upanishads have been attributed to sages including Yajnavalkya, Uddalaka Aruni, Shvetaketu, Shandilya, Aitareya, Balaki, Pippalada, and Sanatkumara. Women, too, are part of the tradition. Maitreyi and Gargi both participate in dialogues and receive credit in the early texts. The Shvetashvatara Upanishad is one of the rare exceptions to the anonymous rule, naming sage Shvetashvatara in its closing credits as its author.

  Scholars believe that many of the early Upanishads were expanded and interpolated over time. Manuscripts of the same Upanishad discovered in different parts of South Asia differ from one another, and variations in meter, grammar, and structure suggest multiple hands across multiple generations.

• 3. When and Where

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  Indologist Patrick Olivelle was blunt about the limits of dating: any attempt at precision "closer than a few centuries is as stable as a house of cards." What scholars can say is that the two earliest Upanishads, the Brihadaranyaka and the Chandogya, are probably pre-Buddhist and may be placed in the 7th to 6th centuries BCE, give or take a century or so. Stephen Phillips places the full range of early or principal Upanishads between 800 and 300 BCE. The later Upanishads, numbering around 95, span from the late 1st-millennium BCE to as far as the mid-2nd-millennium CE.

  Geography narrows things only slightly. The early Upanishads are associated with a northern Indian region bounded by the upper Indus valley to the west, the lower Ganges to the east, the Himalayan foothills to the north, and the Vindhya mountain range to the south. Scholars are reasonably confident the principal Upanishads were produced at the geographical center of ancient Brahmanism, in the regions of Kuru-Panchala and Kosala-Videha. That territory covers modern Bihar, Nepal, Uttar Pradesh, Uttarakhand, Himachal Pradesh, Haryana, eastern Rajasthan, and northern Madhya Pradesh.

  Witzel identifies the activity of the Brihadaranyaka Upanishad as centered on Videha, whose king Janaka features prominently in its dialogues. In 1908, four previously unknown Upanishads were discovered in newly found manuscripts, named Bashkala, Chhagaleya, Arsheya, and Saunaka by Friedrich Schrader. Three of the four texts were incomplete and inconsistent, signs that they had been poorly maintained or corrupted over time.

• 4. The Attack on Ritual

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  The Kaushitaki Upanishad makes the turn explicit: external rituals such as the Agnihotram, offered morning and evening, must be replaced with inner Agnihotram, an inner ritual of introspection. "Not rituals, but knowledge should be one's pursuit."

  The Mundaka Upanishad goes further. It describes how people have been called upon, promised benefits for, scared into, and misled about performing sacrifices and pious works. The Mundaka then calls all of this foolish and frail: it is like blind men leading the blind, a mark of conceit and ignorance, as useless as the inert games of children.

  Yet the rejection was rarely absolute. The older Upanishads sometimes extended the work of the Aranyakas by turning ritual into allegory. The Brihadaranyaka reinterprets the ashvamedha, or horse-sacrifice, as a philosophical lesson. The text states that sacrificing a horse can give over-lordship of the earth, then pivots: spiritual autonomy, it argues, can only come by renouncing the entire universe, conceived in the image of that horse. The Vedic gods themselves undergo a similar transformation. Agni, Aditya, Indra, Rudra, and Vishnu become equated with the supreme, incorporeal Brahman-Atman. The one reality, or ekam sat, of the Vedas becomes, in the Upanishads, ekam eva advitiyam: "the one and only and sans a second."

• 5. Atman, Brahman, and Maya

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  Atman carries "a wide range of lexical meanings, including 'breath', 'spirit', and 'body'." In the Upanishads it refers both to the concrete physical body and to an essence, a life-force, or ultimate reality. The Chandogya Upanishad characterizes the self in terms of the life force that animates all living beings, while the Brihadaranyaka characterizes Atman more in terms of consciousness than as a life-giving essence.

  Brahman, the other pole, is described as "beyond the reach of human perception and thought." It can mean a formulation of truth, or the ultimate essence of the cosmos, standing at either the summit or the foundation of all things. The central philosophical question running across all the Upanishads is the relationship between these two: Atman and Brahman. Older Upanishads tend to hold that Atman is part of Brahman but not identical to it. Younger Upanishads take a different position, arguing that Brahman and Atman are fully identical. The Brahmasutra by Badarayana, dated to around 100 BCE, attempted to synthesize these conflicting views. According to Koller, the Brahmasutras hold that at the deepest level, in the state of self-realization, Atman and Brahman are non-different.

  Maya, or illusion, joins this picture as the force that obscures true knowledge. Wendy Doniger clarifies what this means: to say the universe is Maya is not to say it is unreal, but that "it is not what it seems to be, that it is something constantly being made." Maya limits knowledge and diverts human beings from the blissful self-realization the Upanishads hold out as the goal of existence.

• 6. Vedanta's Diverging Schools

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  Ramanuja, born in 1017 CE, was the main proponent of Vishishtadvaita, a philosophy he described as grounded in the Upanishads. He interpreted their teachings as a body-soul theory: Brahman is the dweller in all things, yet also distinct and beyond them. Individual souls share the quality of Brahman, but remain quantitatively distinct from it. Where Adi Shankara, working in the 8th century CE, had argued for complete non-duality, Ramanuja offered qualified monism.

  Madhvacharya, who founded the Dvaita school in 1199 CE, pushed further into theism. He read the Upanishadic passages about the soul becoming one with Brahman as metaphors for entering, the way a drop enters an ocean, not for merging without remainder. In his reading, Brahman and Atman are different and separate realities. Madhvacharya also held that some souls are eternally doomed, a position sharply at odds with the Advaita and Vishishtadvaita schools, which both hold that all souls can reach liberation.

  Advaita itself, developed by Shankara from the earlier work of Gaudapada, draws four specific sentences from the Upanishads as its pillars. These Mahavakyas, or Great Sayings, include "Prajnanam brahma" from the Aitareya Upanishad, meaning "Consciousness is Brahman"; "Aham brahmasmi" from the Brihadaranyaka, meaning "I am Brahman"; "Tat tvam asi" from the Chandogya, meaning "That Thou art"; and "Ayamatma brahma" from the Mandukya, meaning "This Atman is Brahman." Shankara also left behind commentaries on eleven of the mukhya Upanishads.

• 7. Translations and Western Reach

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  Mughal Emperor Akbar's reign, from 1556 to 1586, produced the first translations of the Upanishads into Persian. His great-grandson, Dara Shukoh, extended that project in 1656 with a collection called Sirr-i-Akbar, translating 50 Upanishads from Sanskrit into Persian.

  French Orientalist Anquetil-Duperron received a manuscript of the Oupanekhat and translated the Persian version into Latin, publishing it in two volumes in 1801-1802 under the title Oupnek'hat. That Latin edition became the first introduction of Upanishadic thought to Western scholars, though Deussen noted that the Persian translators had taken great liberties with the original, sometimes changing its meaning. The first Sanskrit-to-English translation of the Aitareya Upanishad was made by Colebrooke in 1805, and Rammohun Roy produced the first English translation of the Kena Upanishad in 1816.

  Arthur Schopenhauer read the Latin translation and found in it a mirror of his own philosophy. He kept a copy of the Latin Oupnekhet by his side and wrote: "In the whole world there is no study so beneficial and so elevating as that of the Upanishads. It has been the solace of my life, it will be the solace of my death." His enthusiasm reached Austrian physicist Erwin Schrodinger, who wrote that "there is obviously only one alternative, namely the unification of minds or consciousnesses. Their multiplicity is only apparent, in truth there is only one mind. This is the doctrine of the Upanishads." The poet T. S. Eliot based the final portion of The Waste Land, published in 1922, on a verse from the Upanishads. Irish poet W. B. Yeats worked through the 1930s with the Indian-born teacher Shri Purohit Swami on their own translation, The Ten Principal Upanishads, published in 1938. It was the final work published by Yeats before his death less than a year later. English composer Gustav Holst kept the Upanishads with him for his entire life, among a small number of books he held permanently.