The Upanishads

The Upaniṣads sit at the philosophical end of the Vedic tradition. The earliest layers of the Vedic corpus (the four Saṃhitās of hymns and ritual formulae) date to roughly 1500–1000 BCE; the Brāhmaṇas and Āraṇyakas (ritual commentaries and forest-treatises) follow; the Upaniṣads emerge from the late Āraṇyaka layer and the centuries following, roughly 800–200 BCE. The oldest — the Bṛhadāraṇyaka and Chāndogya — are the longest and the most philosophically formative; the others develop and refine.

The principal Upaniṣads

The mukhya (principal) Upaniṣads — those [[adi-shankara|Śaṅkara]] commented on, treated as the canonical core — are usually given as ten or thirteen:

• Bṛhadāraṇyaka — the great forest treatise; the longest of the principal Upaniṣads; contains the famous neti, neti passage and the dialogues of Yājñavalkya.
• Chāndogya — of the Chāndogya tradition of Sāma-Vedic chant; contains the tat tvam asi teaching of Uddālaka Āruṇi to his son Śvetaketu.
• Aitareya — short; contains a developed cosmogonic vision.
• Taittirīya — contains the Pañcakośa doctrine (the five sheaths through which the ātman is veiled).
• Kauṣītaki — contains a developed contemplative cosmology.
• Kena — short; contains the agnigarbha (the absolute as the inner power that animates the elements).
• Kaṭha — contains the dialogue of Naciketas with Yama, the lord of death; a major contemplative-mythological text.
• Īśā — very short (eighteen verses); famously dense; reads in some lights almost as theological aphorism.
• Praśna — six questions answered by the sage Pippalāda; contains the developed doctrine of the prāṇas (vital airs).
• Muṇḍaka — distinguishes higher and lower knowledge; contains the famous image of two birds on the same tree (one eats the fruit, one watches in stillness).
• Māṇḍūkya — only twelve verses long; the deepest of the principal Upaniṣads; develops the doctrine of AUM and the four states of consciousness (waking, dreaming, deep sleep, turīya — the fourth, the witness).
• Śvetāśvatara — often included; theistic in tone, with developed devotion to a personal absolute.
• Maitrī — sometimes included; later than the others.

Central teachings

A few recurring threads across the principal Upaniṣads:

• Brahman — the absolute, the ground of being, that from which everything arises and to which everything returns. The Upaniṣads describe brahman both cataphatically (saccidānanda — being-consciousness-bliss) and apophatically (neti, neti — not this, not this).
• Ātman — the self; not the empirical personality (jīva), but the deeper witnessing presence beneath it. The Upaniṣads insist that the ātman is not what we ordinarily take ourselves to be.
• The [[eating-the-landscape|identity]] of brahman and ātman. The central Upaniṣadic recognition. Tat tvam asi — that thou art — is one of the four mahāvākyas (great sayings); the others: aham brahmāsmi (I am brahman), prajñānam brahma (consciousness is brahman), ayam ātmā brahma (this self is brahman). The teaching is the seed of [[vedanta|Vedānta]] and especially of Advaita.
• Liberation as recognition. The Upaniṣads do not generally describe liberation (mokṣa) as the production of a new state but as the recognition of what was already so. The bondage is misrecognition; the freedom is the dropping of the misrecognition.
• The contemplative practice. Across the texts, the means recommended include study with a qualified teacher, silent contemplation (dhyāna), the chanting of AUM, the patient working through of the layers of self and not-self.

On translations

• Patrick Olivelle. The Early Upaniṣads: Annotated Text and Translation. Oxford, 1998. The standard scholarly edition for the principal Upaniṣads.
• Patrick Olivelle. Upaniṣads. Oxford World’s Classics, 1996. Accessible translation of the principal Upaniṣads.
• Eknath Easwaran. The Upanishads. Nilgiri, 1987. Readable, accessible.
• Valerie Roebuck. The Upaniṣads. Penguin Classics, 2003. Recent scholarly translation.
• S. Radhakrishnan. The Principal Upaniṣads. Allen & Unwin, 1953. Classic English-language scholarly edition with commentary.
• Robert Hume. The Thirteen Principal Upanishads. Oxford, 1921 (revised). Public-domain classic translation.

See also

Auto-generated from this entry’s typed relations: frontmatter, grouped by relation type so the editorial signal isn’t flattened.

• Parallels: [[apophatic-theology]]
• Member of: [[book]]
• Part of: [[hinduism]] · [[vedanta]]

Sources

1. The Early Upaniṣads. Trans. Patrick Olivelle. Oxford, 1998. Source class: primary text / definitive scholarly translation.
2. Upaniṣads. Trans. Patrick Olivelle. Oxford World’s Classics, 1996. Source class: primary text / accessible translation.
3. The Principal Upaniṣads. Ed. & trans. S. Radhakrishnan. Allen & Unwin, 1953. Source class: primary text / classic scholarly edition.
4. Robert E. Hume. The Thirteen Principal Upanishads. Oxford, 1921. Source class: primary text / public-domain classic.

Lenses still to grow

• Yājñavalkya as a figure — the great Upaniṣadic sage of the Bṛhadāraṇyaka.
• The neti, neti passage as a piece of [[apophatic-theology|apophatic theology]].
• The Naciketas dialogue of the Kaṭha Upaniṣad — the encounter with Yama, lord of death.
• The Māṇḍūkya as the densest of the principal Upaniṣads; deserves separate treatment.
• AUM as a syllable and contemplative practice — own entry.
• The four mahāvākyas— each deserves separate treatment.
• Indo-Iranian context — the Upaniṣadic tradition in dialogue with the early Iranian religious traditions (Zoroastrianism’s Gathas).