Text · Vedic philosophical texts
Upanishads
/ˈupɐniʂɐd/
Also known as Upaniṣads, Upaniṣad, Upanisads, Upanishad, Principal Upanishads, Mukhya Upanishads
The latest layer of the Vedas: prose and verse dialogues in which the older sacrificial ritual turns into questions about how ritual, the cosmos and the person connect, answered with atman and brahman. The Muktika canon lists 108, of which a dozen or so principal ones are oldest, the Brihadaranyaka and Chandogya probably pre-Buddhist. With the Gita and the Brahmasutra they form the Prasthanatrayi that every Vedanta school must interpret, and a Mughal prince's Persian version carried them to Europe.
- Date
- -800–-300
- Function
- Text & inscription
- Confidence
- Mixed / layered
Worth knowing
Their teachings are credited to named sages such as Yajnavalkya and Uddalaka Aruni, and women, Maitreyi and Gargi among them, take part in the dialogues. The corpus never quite closed: four unknown Upanishads turned up in manuscripts in 1908, and new ones were still being composed in the early modern era.
There is no scholarly consensus on their dates, or even on which are pre- or post-Buddhist. Stephen Phillips places the principal Upanishads in 800–300 BCE; Patrick Olivelle puts the Brihadaranyaka and Chandogya in the 7th–6th centuries BCE; Johannes Bronkhorst argues the Brihadaranyaka may still have been in composition around the 2nd century BCE. The dates given here are for the principal Upanishads; the roughly 95 minor ones run to about the 15th century CE.
Connections (4)
- PrecursorRigveda
The Rigveda is a layered text: the core Samhita of hymns was followed by Brahmanas, Aranyakas and finally Upanishads, the most recent addition to the Vedas. Every Upanishad is attached to one of the four Vedas, and the principal ones mostly sit in the concluding parts of the Brahmanas and Aranyakas. Where the hymns praise the gods and serve the sacrifice, the Upanishads make that ritual allegorical and ask what connects it, the cosmos and the self.
- TransmissionDara Shikoh
The first Persian translations of the Upanishads were made under Akbar, and his great-grandson Dara Shukoh produced the Sirr-i-Akbar in 1656, fifty Upanishads rendered from Sanskrit into Persian. Anquetil-Duperron turned that Persian into Latin as the Oupnek'hat (1801–1802), the version Schopenhauer read and praised in The World as Will and Representation. Paul Deussen later complained that the Persian translators took great liberties, so Europe's first Upanishads were a Mughal prince's reading of them.
- Commented onAdi Shankaracharya
Adi Shankara wrote commentaries on eleven of the principal Upanishads and used four of their sentences, the mahavakyas, to establish the identity of atman and brahman, among them 'I am Brahman' from the Brihadaranyaka and 'That thou art' from the Chandogya. Ramanuja and Madhva answered him from the same texts, one with qualified non-dualism and the other with dualism, each claiming the Upanishads as his ground, which is how one corpus came to underwrite three rival schools.
- InfluencedBhagavad Gita
The Gita draws on the Upanishads and parallels many of their verses, and every chapter closes with the colophon 'in the Gita-Upanishads', which is why the word Gita is feminine, agreeing with upanishad. Patrick Olivelle counts the theistic verse Upanishads, the Katha, Isha and Shvetashvatara among them, as the earliest products of the tradition whose later literature includes the Gita. With the Brahmasutra the two form the Prasthanatrayi, the three sources every Vedanta school must interpret.
Sources
Wikipedia, "Upanishads". Patrick Olivelle, The Early Upanisads (1998); Patrick Olivelle, Upanisads (1996).
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