Upanishad

The latest textual stratum in the Vedas,
the oldest and most authoritative Hindu
religious texts. The literal meaning of the
word upanishad is “to sit near [a
teacher],” but a better sense of its true
meaning would be “secret teaching.”
The Upanishads mark a clean break
from the immediately preceding Vedic
literature, the Brahmanas, in which the
essential concern was to lay out the
concrete procedures for performing
highly complex sacrificial rites. In contrast, the Upanishads were concerned
with more speculative and abstract
questions: the essential nature of the
cosmos, the essence of the human
being, and the relationship between
these two. The conclusion in the
Upanishads is that the essence of the
universe is an impersonal reality known
as Brahman, and that the essence of the
human being is called the “Self”
(atman). The fundamental insight and
essential teaching in the Upanishads
is the identity of Brahman and atman,
and thus of the macrocosm and the
microcosm. This identity is one of the
most fundamental Hindu religious ideas
and underlies religious thought up to
the present time.
The twelve or thirteen oldest upanishads are not a cohesive set but a series
of independent documents, although
the later ones were clearly influenced by
the earlier ones. The two oldest are the
Brhadaranyaka Upanishad and the
Chandogya Upanishad. Each is much
longer than all the others combined,
they are written in prose as a series of
dialogues between famous sages, the
Sanskrit language in them is clearly
more archaic, and their ideas are embryonic and undeveloped. Later upanishads—such as the Isha, Kena, Katha,
Prashna, and Mandukya—are much
shorter, are written in verse, and have
well-developed ideas. Some of these
introduce the notion of theism, but not
until the Shvetashvatara Upanishad is
the Supreme Being identified as a god,
in this case Rudra. For much of their
history, the Upanishads would have
been transmitted orally from master to
student; this makes it unlikely that these
texts were widely known because they
would have been secret and carefully
guarded teachings.
The Upanishads are important
because of the speculative questions
they ask and because many of their
teachings are fundamental assumptions
in Hindu religious life, even today: the
notion of an eternal Self that gives a
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Upanishad
being continuous identity; the idea of
reincarnation (samsara) commensurate
with one’s deeds; the concept that some
single unifying power lies behind the
world’s apparent diversity; and the conviction that this can be attained only
through individual realization, usually
described as a flash of mystic insight. As
texts carrying the religious authority of
the Vedas, the Upanishads were also
extremely important in the development of Hindu philosophical schools,
particularly Advaita Vedanta, which
shares this overriding emphasis on
inner realization. For information on the
Upanishads themselves, see Robert
Ernest Hume (trans.), Thirteen Principal
Upanisads, 1965. See also philosophy.