The Commentary That Became Part of the Text

The Upanishad is rarely read alone. A verse commentary attributed to Gaudapada, in four chapters of which only the first follows the Upanishad verse by verse, is transmitted with it and is treated in the Advaita tradition as authoritative. Its later chapters leave the text behind and argue a position of their own: that nothing is ever really produced, that the appearance of a world arising is like the appearance of a snake in a rope or of a circle in a whirling firebrand, and that no origination takes place at all. That is the earliest systematic statement of non dualist Vedanta, and it is startling in its directness.

Later commentators, including the tradition's dominant one, wrote on the Upanishad and the verse commentary together, so the reception of the twelve verses is inseparable from the reading given them here. The relationship with Buddhist thought has been argued for over a century. The vocabulary, the imagery and several of the arguments have close Mahayana parallels, and scholars have proposed everything from direct borrowing to a shared philosophical environment in which both were arguing. The atlas records the resemblance as established and the explanation of it as contested, since the evidence supports the observation more securely than any account of what produced it.