The Upanishads
உபநிடதங்கள் उपनिषद्
Also Vedanta, The end of the Vedas.
Upanishad Sanskrit The oldest perhaps eighth to sixth century before the common era, the rest much later
What it is
The Upanishads are the philosophical layer at the end of the Vedas, and they are where Indian thought stops asking how to perform a sacrifice correctly and starts asking what a person is. They are dialogues: a student asks a teacher, a wife asks a husband, a boy asks death. The recurring claim is that the self in a person and the reality behind the universe are one thing, and the recurring method is to say what it is not until nothing is left to say. They are the basis of every school of Vedanta and have been argued over continuously for two and a half thousand years.
Its shape
Two hundred or so texts bear the name; ten to thirteen are the principal ones that the classical commentators treat as authoritative. Isha, Kena, Katha, Prashna, Mundaka, Mandukya, Taittiriya, Aitareya, Chandogya and Brihadaranyaka are the usual ten, with Svetasvatara, Kaushitaki and Maitri often added. The Brihadaranyaka and the Chandogya are the longest and oldest and are in prose; the Katha and the Svetasvatara are in verse. The Mandukya is twelve verses and is held by Advaita to contain everything.
What it argues about
These are not settled texts
They do not agree with each other, and the whole history of Vedanta is the attempt to make them. Sankara read them as teaching that the self and brahman are identical without qualification, and that plurality is appearance. Ramanuja read the same texts as teaching that the self is real and distinct and is the body of God. Madhva read them as teaching that the two are permanently separate. Each commentator had to explain away the passages that favoured the others, and did. That three mutually exclusive systems are all built on the same hundred or so sentences, by readers of enormous care, is the most instructive thing about the collection.
Episodes worth knowing
The boy who waited at death’s door
Nachiketa, given away to death by his father in a fit of temper, went and waited three days without food because Yama was out. Offered three boons for the discourtesy, he used the last to ask what becomes of a person after death. Yama refused, offered him wealth, sons, long life, elephants and horses instead, and pressed them on him. The boy refused everything. What Yama then told him is the Katha Upanishad, and the structure is the point: the teaching had to be refused everything else before it was given.
Nine thousand and the salt in water
Svetaketu returned from twelve years of study pleased with himself, and his father asked whether he had learnt that by which the unheard becomes heard. He had not. His father told him to put salt in water overnight, and in the morning asked him to find it; he could not, and it was there, and every sip tasted of it. Tat tvam asi, the father said, that thou art, and repeated it nine times through the chapter with a new illustration each time. It is the single most argued sentence in Indian philosophy and all three Vedanta schools read it differently.
Whose telling
There is no single text
- Sankara, eighth century
- Commented on ten, and his selection is effectively why those ten are the principal ones; his reading is non dual.
- Ramanuja, eleventh century
- Read them as qualified non dualism, the self real and distinct and dependent on God.
- Madhva, thirteenth century
- Read them as dualism, with the self and God permanently separate, and read tat tvam asi as atat tvam asi.
- Dara Shikoh, 1657
- Had fifty translated into Persian as the Sirr i Akbar; that translation reached Europe in Latin and is how Schopenhauer read them.
- Western reception
- Schopenhauer called the Latin Oupnekhat the consolation of his life, and through him and Emerson they entered European and American thought.
Where the regions differ
- Tamil
- Kerala
- Telugu
- Kannada
- North
- Maharashtra
- Bengal
- Punjab
- Assam
- Sri Lanka
- Nepal
- Gujarat
- Odisha
- Mithila
- Kashmir
- Tulu Nadu
- manipur
- rajasthan
- konkani
- sindhi
- jharkhand
- himalayan
- kodava
- North India
- Kashi and the northern mathas keep the recitation and the commentarial tradition, and the Dara Shikoh translation was made at Delhi.
- Tamil Nadu
- The Vedanta mathas and the Vaishnava tradition of Ramanuja, whose Sri Bhashya is the Visishtadvaita reading.
- Karnataka
- Sringeri for Advaita and Udupi for Madhva’s Dvaita, the two schools a few hundred kilometres apart and still arguing.
- Kerala
- Sankara was born at Kalady, and the Kerala tradition claims the Advaita line from there.
Connected to
Deities
Festivals
Temples
Related works