The Upaniṣads

What it is

A body of some two hundred Sanskrit texts, of which thirteen are conventionally treated as principal, forming the concluding layer of Vedic literature — which is why the philosophy built on them is called Vedānta, the end of the Vedas.

The name is usually parsed as upa-ni-ṣad, sitting down near — the posture of a student receiving teaching that is not given to everyone.

They mark a turn. Earlier Vedic literature is overwhelmingly concerned with sacrifice: how to perform it, what it accomplishes, what the formulas mean. The Upaniṣads turn inward and ask what the ritual signifies, and then largely leave it behind for a set of questions about the self, the ground of being, and what survives.

The vocabulary they introduce runs through everything afterwards: brahman, the ground of all that is; ātman, the innermost self; karma; saṃsāra; and mokṣa.

Where it came from

The oldest — the Bṛhadāraṇyaka and the Chāndogya — date to roughly 800–600 BCE and are pre-Buddhist. Later texts continue to be composed into the medieval period, so the corpus spans well over a thousand years and is not doctrinally uniform.

Karma and rebirth make their first clear appearance here. In the Bṛhadāraṇyaka, Yājñavalkya is asked in public what becomes of a person after death, and takes the questioner aside — the text notes this — before answering that one becomes good by good action and bad by bad. A doctrine that would organise Indian religious life for three millennia is introduced as something not said in front of a crowd.

How it is read

As dialogues, and the characters are the reason to read them rather than summaries of them.

Naciketas (Kaṭha) is a boy sent by his father in anger to Death. He waits three days at Yama's door, is granted three boons, and uses the last to ask what happens when a person dies. Yama tries to buy him off with wealth, sons and long life. The boy refuses them all and repeats the question.

Śvetaketu (Chāndogya) returns from twelve years of study pleased with himself, and his father demonstrates in a sequence of homely images — salt dissolved in water, the seed of a banyan — that he has learned nothing essential. Each ends: tat tvam asi, that thou art.

Maitreyī (Bṛhadāraṇyaka) is offered a settlement by Yājñavalkya as he prepares to renounce, and asks whether wealth would make her immortal. Told it would not, she replies: what should I do with that which will not make me immortal? What follows is one of the text's central passages — that a husband is not dear for the husband's sake but for the sake of the self, and so with wife, sons, wealth and all things.

Gārgī Vācaknavī (Bṛhadāraṇyaka) is a philosopher who interrogates Yājñavalkya in open assembly, pressing him question after question about what everything is woven upon, until he tells her that if she asks beyond a certain point her head will fall off. She stops, then returns with two more questions, and afterwards tells the assembled brahmins that none of them will defeat him.

Two women conducting philosophical argument at that level, recorded without apology, in a text from around the seventh century BCE, is worth noticing.

What we can and cannot say

We can say the route into European thought is remarkable and precisely documented.

Dārā Shukoh, eldest son of Shah Jahan and heir to the Mughal throne, was a Sufi-influenced scholar who believed Hindu and Islamic mysticism pointed the same way. In 1657 he had fifty Upaniṣads translated into Persian as Sirr-i-Akbar, the Greatest Secret.

Two years later his brother Aurangzeb defeated him, had him charged with apostasy, and executed him.

The Persian text survived. In 1801–02 Anquetil-Duperron rendered it into Latin — a translation of a translation, in awkward Latin. And Schopenhauer read that, and wrote that it had been the consolation of his life and would be the consolation of his death, and built Indian thought into German philosophy on the strength of it.

So the Upaniṣads reached the West through a Persian version commissioned by a prince who was killed for commissioning it, filtered through Latin, into the work of the philosopher who most shaped Nietzsche and Wagner. Almost nothing in the transmission was direct and it changed European thought anyway.

We can say the texts are not systematic and do not agree with each other. Extracting a single philosophy from them is the work of the Vedānta commentators, and they extracted three incompatible ones.

We cannot say the texts mean what any single school says they mean, and the schools' inability to agree after fifteen hundred years is the best evidence of that.

Further reading

• Patrick Olivelle's translation of the Early Upaniṣads (1998) — the scholarly standard.
• The Kaṭha and Bṛhadāraṇyaka, if you read two.
• Richard Davis or Wendy Doniger on the Dārā Shukoh transmission.