Upanishads What is Heard
A broad category of Hindu sacred is texts known as Shruti - “What Is Heard.” These revered texts were known as the four Vedas; each begins a Samhita, used primarily in rituals and sacrifices. Eventually, the sacred sounds of the archaic Sanskrit hymns became more important than the meaning, and exact instructions for performing the rituals, called Brahmanas, along with some speculations about heir religious significance, the Aranyakas, were attached to the Samhitas and became components of the Vedas and, thus, Shruti. The latest stage in the development of Shruti came with texts known as the Upanishads. These compositions, also memorized and transmitted orally for many centuries, consist of explorations and elaborations of key themes in the Vedas.
European Interest in Indian Culture
• The beginnings of European scholarship on Indian culture came in the 18th century, when the British East India Company took over large portions of the Asian subcontinent, starting with Bengal in the northeast.
o Sir William Jones was a British civil servant in Bengal with an astonishing facility in languages. In 1786, Jones gave a lecture noting distinctive similarities among Greek, Latin, and Sanskrit, and he suggested that they were related as descendants of an earlier language that later scholars would call Indo-European. It was a startling hypothesis that turned out to be correct.
o Most European languages, along with Persian, Sanskrit, Bengali, and Hindi, belong to the Indo-European language family, which means that English is more closely related to Sanskrit than, say, Japanese is to Chinese. In Jones’s time, it also meant that studying the ancient texts of India might yield clues to the origins of European culture.
• In 1818, the German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer wrote, “I anticipate that the influence of Sanskrit literature will not be less profound than the revival of Greek in the fourteenth century,” and he asserted that the best way to understand his own philosophy was to start with the Upanishads. But not many Europeans had read them in 1818, much less the older Samhitas, which hadn’t yet been translated.
o The archaic language of the Samhitas was difficult, and most of the few manuscripts that were available were in poor condition.
o In addition, Henry Thomas Colebrooke, another British civil servant in Bengal and one of the few Europeans with enough Sanskrit to have dipped into the Samhitas, warned his colleagues that what they contained was not rewarding.
o A few excerpts of the Samhitas were published in the 1830s, but full translations would have to await the efforts of Müller and others in the late 19th century.
• By contrast, the Upanishads had long been important in Indian philosophy, and Europeans had a shortcut to them. In 1657, a Muslim Mughal prince in India named Dara Shikoh had produced a Persian translation of 50 Upanishads. A century later, in 1755, the French adventurer and scholar Abraham Anquetil Duperron came across two copies of the Persian version, which he translated into Latin and published in 1801.
• There was a German translation from Sanskrit in 1832, followed by an English rendition in 1853. Müller himself published a careful translation of 12 Upanishads as two volumes of his Sacred Books of the East series in 1879 and 1884. In his introduction, Müller defended the value of Asian scriptures while trying to temper the unreasonable enthusiasm of those who assumed they were full of ancient wisdom and eternal truths.
Overview of the Upanishads
• The first Upanishads date from about 700 B.C.E. There are generally thought to be 108 classic Upanishads, all composed within a 1,000-year period, but there are now more than 200 texts that are considered by at least some Hindus to be Upanishads.
In this collection, 12 or 13 Upanishads are regarded as the most important and authoritative.
• The Upanishads feature some sort of instruction, often a dialogue between a teacher and student or a debate or lecture; these pedagogical interactions sometimes include gods and women. The word “Upanishad” literally means “sitting by the side of”; thus, this is the sort of transmission of wisdom that eager students would have wanted to overhear.
• The earliest of the Upanishads are prose collections of miscellaneous materials, while the later principal Upanishads are verse compositions with a devotional focus. They are all suggestiveand exploratory rather than definitive about their ideas.
• Two Upanishads are considered to be the earliest, the Brihadaranyaka and Chandogya; they are the longest, as well.
The Brihadaranyaka Upanishad
• Book I of the Brihadaranyaka begins with a cosmic reinterpretation of the horse sacrifice, one of the most elaborate and prestigious rituals in ancient India, which could be undertaken only by a king.
o It is doubtful that this ritual was performed very often, but the Brihadaranyaka invites listeners to view it in metaphorical terms, as something to be meditated on rather than physically enacted. It begins with a chapter imagining the world as a sacrificial horse, in which dawn is the horse’s head; the sun, its eye; the wind, its breath; and so on.
o This sort of microcosmic/macrocosmic thinking is common in the Upanishads, where connections are drawn between something close at hand and the larger universe, though the microcosm is more often the worshipper’s own body.
o Some scholars have suggested that the main issue seems to be control; by learning to control one’s mind through meditation or one’s breathing and bodily positions (as in Yoga), humans can put themselves in harmony with the cosmos and gain power over things that otherwise would be beyond us, such as a good harvest, the gods, or life and death.
• After the passage reinterpreting the horse sacrifice, the Brihadaranyaka moves to various stories of creation and discussions of how humans are connected to the gods and the natural world.
Two key terms here are brahman (ultimate reality) and atman (the self or soul). The great mystery to be realized is that atman is brahman. Our individuality is an illusion; at a deeper level, we are one with the universe.
• Book II follows with a dialogue in which a king teaches a Brahman priest about brahman.
o The king uses a concept that will reappear several times in the Upanishads, that there are four modes of consciousness: wakefulness (ordinary life), dreaming (which seems real but is an illusion), dreamless sleep (loss of one’s sense of self), and pure consciousness (beyond the other three, in which one merges with brahman).
o A later Upanishad analyzes the sacred syllable Om as comprised of three sounds, a, u, m each of which represents one of the first three modes of consciousness, and the silence that follows as a manifestation of brahman, the oneness of the universe.
• We next hear the story of the sage Yajnavalkya, who is asked by one of his wives to teach her the knowledge that leads to immorality. He explains that atman and brahman are identical; there is ultimately no difference between self and other.
• In Book III, Yajnavalkya debates eight teachers about the meaning of ritual, the number of gods, life and death, and brahman and atman. In Book IV, he discusses with a king several mistaken ideas about brahman, as well as what happens at the moment of death and reincarnation.
o The idea of reincarnation, or samsara, is a key concept in the Upanishads. People are reborn into better or worse human situations or even as animals, but not randomly. Our next lives are determined by our actions (karma), as judged against our duty or moral responsibilities (dharma).
o Those who can free themselves from desires, who understand that they are, in actuality, brahman, can escape rebirth and gain immortality by merging with the infinite.
• In Book V, Prajapati, the creator god, teaches his children, gods,humans, and demons, about brahman, speech, fire, and breath.
Perhaps most memorably, he teaches them “the divine voice that the thunder repeats”: DA DA DA, which is short for damyata, atta, dayadhvam, “Be self-controlled, give [to others], be compassionate.”
• Book VI includes an argument among the bodily functions about which is superior (breath wins), and another teacher/student dialogue, this time about different types of fire and reincarnation.
The Brihadaranyaka concludes with several rituals and spells for love, fertility, childbirth, and so on.
Other Upanishads and Their Influence
• The second early, lengthy Upanishad, the Chandogya, is famous for its recounting of a dialogue between a father and his son, in which the father teaches the absolute oneness of atman and brahman through a series of metaphors, how nectar from many flowers comes together in honey, water in many rivers comes together in the ocean, and so on. After each example, he concludes with the observation, “You are That.”
o The Brihadaranyaka and Chandogya Upanishads are key texts in Vedanta philosophy. “Vedanta” means “the end of the Vedas” and is a term used to describe the Upanishads as a whole, but it later became the name of the preeminent schoolof Indian philosophy that emphasized the underlying unity of the universe.
o The 8th-century philosopher Shankara argued that brahman is the only thing in existence, eternally and without attributes; everything else is an illusion. But later Upanishads were more devotional and seemed to discuss brahman in more personal terms, as if it could be identified with a god.
o Other Indian philosophers found support in the Upanishads for dualism (the idea that individual selves are dependent on brahman but not identical to it) and theism, in which liberation from reincarnation comes not from knowledge of ultimatereality but from devotion to a god or goddess who, in return, would save his or her followers.
• One of the most famous ofthe later Upanishads is the Katha, which tells the story of Nachiketa, a young boy who is granted three wishes by Yama, the god of death. Yama teaches the boy about reincarnation, atman and brahman, and the importance of meditation, self discipline, and Yoga.
• In the 19th century, German Idealists, English Romantics, and American Transcendentalists all found the Upanishads electrifying. Later, the great 20th-century poet T. S. Eliot titled one section of his poem The Waste Land “What the Thunder Said” and included the Sanskrit terms corresponding to DA DA DA from the Brihadaranyaka Upanishad.
• In 19th-century India, at a time when many were feeling the humiliation of British colonialism and imperialism, religious leaders looked to the Upanishads for inspiration as they developed what has been called Neo-Vedanta: the re-creation of Hinduismas a modern, unified, tolerant religion based on the ideals of nondualism, meditation, and Yoga.
• The Upanishads may or may not speak to your own religious sensibilities, but it’s hard not to empathize with the basic impulse behind them. In the Brihadaranyaka, we hear the plea: “Lead me from the unreal to the real! Lead me from darkness to light. Lead me from death to immortality!"