Upanishads

The name is usually taken as "sitting down near", the posture of a pupil receiving teaching not meant for everyone. Each Upanishad is formally attached to one of the four Vedas and to a particular branch of its transmission, which is how such varied material came to sit inside a single revelation.

Thirteen are conventionally called principal or mukhya: Brihadaranyaka, Chandogya, Taittiriya, Aitareya, Kaushitaki, Kena, Katha, Isha, Mundaka, Prashna, Mandukya, Shvetashvatara and Maitri. They divide by form and age. The oldest are prose, and it shows, the Brihadaranyaka and the Chandogya are sprawling, argumentative, full of named disputants, court debates and men losing arguments in public. The verse Upanishads, Katha, Isha, Shvetashvatara and Mundaka among them, are later, tighter and more quotable, and they carry theistic material the prose texts lack: the Shvetashvatara in particular reads Rudra-Shiva as the supreme being.

Beyond the thirteen the tradition kept producing them. The Muktika, itself the last item on its own list, sets the number at 108 in a dialogue between Rama and Hanuman, and the manuscript traditions of that list are not identical. The later members are sectarian or specialist, Yoga Upanishads, Sannyasa Upanishads, Shaiva and Vaishnava and Shakta texts, and some are very late indeed. The Allah Upanishad, an Islamic-inflected text, appears to date from the Mughal period. The label was, in practice, a way of claiming Vedic authority for new teaching, which is why the count is open-ended and why the principal thirteen are treated separately.

The Upanishads do not abolish sacrifice, but they relocate the point of it. Ritual buys good worlds, and good worlds run out. What ends the cycle is knowledge.

The cycle itself gets its first clear statement here. Rebirth governed by act, karma as moral causation carrying over from life to life, appears in the Brihadaranyaka as something taught privately, almost reluctantly, as if new. From it follows samsara, the round of deaths and births, and moksha, release from it, and those three terms then organise almost everything in Indian religion afterwards, including Buddhist and Jain versions that reject Vedic authority outright.

The positive claim is identity. In the sixth book of the Chandogya, Uddalaka Aruni instructs his son Svetaketu through a sequence of homely demonstrations, salt dissolved in water, the sap in a tree, a banyan seed cut open, and closes each with the formula rendered "you are that", asserting that the finest essence of everything and the boy's own self are one thing. The Brihadaranyaka approaches from the other side, with Yajnavalkya defining the self only by denial, "not this, not this", because anything specified would be an object and the self is what does the specifying. The Katha stages the question as a boy named Naciketa extracting from Death himself the answer about what survives.

None of this is a system, and the schools that later built systems read the same sentences to opposite conclusions. Shankara took identity strictly and argued that plurality is finally unreal; Ramanuja read the same texts as describing a real world and real souls forming the body of a personal God; Madhva read them as asserting difference. All three wrote commentaries on the Upanishads, the Brahma Sutras and the Bhagavad Gita, the set known as the prasthanatrayi, because in Vedanta an argument is only legitimate if it can be shown to be exegesis.

The Upanishads entered European thought by an unlikely chain, and the chain matters because it shaped how the West first understood Indian religion.

Dara Shukoh, eldest son of Shah Jahan and heir apparent to the Mughal throne, gathered pandits at Varanasi and produced a Persian translation of some fifty Upanishads in 1657, titled Sirr-i-Akbar, the greatest secret. His premise was that the "hidden book" referred to in the Quran was this, and that Islam and the Vedanta taught one thing. Two years later he lost the war of succession to his brother Aurangzeb and was executed, with apostasy among the charges.

The Persian text survived him. Abraham Hyacinthe Anquetil-Duperron, who had already brought back the Avesta from India, worked from it and published a Latin rendering at Strasbourg in 1801-1802 under the title Oupnek'hat, a translation of a translation, syntactically Persian, studded with untranslated terms, and by modern standards barely usable.

Arthur Schopenhauer read it from 1814 onward and never stopped. He praised it in The World as Will and Representation and again in Parerga and Paralipomena, and left on record the remark that it had been the consolation of his life and would be of his death. Through Schopenhauer the Upanishads reached German idealism and, by other routes, Emerson and the American transcendentalists; Paul Deussen later produced serious German scholarship on them and became, not incidentally, a friend of Vivekananda. The nineteenth-century European habit of treating the Upanishads as the real Hinduism and everything else as decline traces largely to this line of transmission, a judgement Hindu reformers found useful and Hindu practice never reflected.