The Vedic or Classical Upaniṣads are sometimes called Vedānta or ‘End (anta) of the Veda’. The term occurs first after the end of the Vedic period, in the Muṇḍaka Upaniṣad (fourth to third centuries BCE?), when the Upaniṣads were looked upon as a separate group and it was felt that the ritualistic Veda had reached its ‘end’, the English word that is not only etymologically related to Sanskrit anta but has its same double connotation: the final portion of a thing, and also its goal, ultimate aim or destination. Not only aficionados of the Upaniṣads stress the latter meanings, they are the only ones that are acceptable because the composers of the Upaniṣads did not adopt a historical perspective. But the term Vedānta has an entirely different meaning also. It refers to a group of Indic philosophies that look at the Upaniṣads as their source of inspiration, not necessarily the only one. One of the earliest of these is the philosophy of Bhāskara who lived around 800 CE. Many of his works have been lost and he left no school. More or less contemporary with him is Śaṇkara, also a follower of the Upaniṣads, to whose theories Bhāskara made vitriolic references. But Śaṇkara eclipsed him and became the most famous philosopher of India. His Vedānta is called A-dvaita Vedānta because its position is ‘non-dual’. Another Vedānta is the Viśiṣṭādvaita Vedānta of Rāmānujā (twelfth century CE) who defends a ‘qualified non-dualism’, yet another is the Dvaita Vedānta of Madhvācārya (thirteenth century CE) who accepts dualism. And there are others.
I recommend that the reader make a distinction between these later philosophies, all of whom invoke the Upaniṣads, and the Upaniṣads themselves; and take care not to interpret the latter solely or too strictly in terms of them. All such interpretations are anachronistic.
The term upa-ni-ṣad is derived from sad-, ni and upa which mean ‘sit,’ ‘down’ and ‘close’ (as in upāṃśu: Seven: Yajurveda), respectively. Most modern scholars have interpreted its changing meanings as referring to mystical hidden connections. But these were already a favoured topic of the Brāhmaṇas and Āraṇyakas, referred to by the Sanskrit term bandhu, which was widely used. I accept the traditional interpretation: ‘sitting close (to the teacher)’ and therefore: secret (rahasya). It is a one-to-one relationship. There are several reasons for this interpretation. The Upaniṣads are full of stories of students looking for teachers. Sitting is venerable, auspicious even, a topic on which I shall expatiate in Chapter 13. Secrecy is the last remnant of the originally secret oral traditions of families and clans. There is one paradox: the Upaniṣads became the most famous part of the Vedas. Does it mean that if one keeps something secret, it will eventually become public? Given the obsession with exposing secrets (or scandals), the answer must be, yes.
The Upaniṣads are an open-ended class. There are more than a hundred of them. That includes the Saṃnyāsa Upaniṣads, a large group of so-called Minor Upaniṣads and the Allah Upaniṣad. If that Upaniṣad had been regarded as secret and had been canonized like the Classical Upaniṣads, it might not have been forgotten and could be invoked by Indians and Pakistanis, Muslims and Hindus, who are eager to improve relations.
We shall be confined to the Vedic or Classical Upaniṣads, a group of twelve or thirteen which are attached to Vedic schools as depicted on Table I.
The earliest are perhaps the Sāmaveda Upanisads which fit in the context of Chapter 6 for they are connected with chant and especially with OM. Their chronological layers continue to be discussed, but the most well known of them remains the Chāndogya Upaniṣad which may be assigned to the seventh or sixth century BCE and was composed in the Kuru-Pañcāla region. About equally old is the Bṛhad-Āraṇyaka Upaniṣad, the final sections of the Śatapatha Brāhmaṇa, largely composed much further east in Videha.
The two are similar in some respects; but the differences are remarkable in that they may have something to do with Buddhism, both with regard to contents and in terms of geography. The CU, with its emphasis on chanting, is more positive than the BĀU which emphasizes the via negativa, the negative path that culminates in the famous declaration neti neti, ‘it is not this, it is not that.’ That emphasis is a characteristic of Buddhism as we shall see in Chapter 16. It describes how the Buddha, born at the Himalayan foothills, close to the modern border between India and Nepal, made his way southward, crossing Videha until he reached the kingdom of Magadha with which we have been familiar since the map of Figure 2 where it is indicated by Mg. There is a historical gap of almost two centuries, but that large region of Videha is also where parts of the BĀU were composed. Is that negative path a characteristic of the eastern extremities of Vedic India? That thesis would be supported by geography and history for it would require a leap across at least one century during which the Taittirīya, Aitareya and Kauṣītaki Upaniṣads were composed. These five Upaniṣads, including CU (Chandogya Upaniṣad) and BĀU (Bṛhad-Āraṇyaka Upanisad) are almost certainly pre-Buddhist.
A striking feature of the early Upaniṣads is the tradition of public debates that took place at the court of a king. It is a step in the direction of what is nowadays called the public domain. Wandering sages, philosophers, women, naked ascetics, monks and others attended. Serious attention was paid to logical argumentation and who were the winners and losers. This feature earned the Upaniṣads the Greek or English label ‘philosophy’.
The majority of these works, composed orally in classical Sanskrit, represent the perspective of Brāhmaṇas or brahmans, as we may now call them, on the one hand; and kings, princes or chieftains, referred to as kṣatriya, on the other. Such kṣatriya–brāhmaṇa alliances, often assigned to an earlier period, may have started only by this time. It is not merely a political alliance between knowledge and power: it signals the emergence of rulers who became famous as intellectual leaders. It does not imply, of course, that a caste system of three or four existed. Jāti and varṇa keep their Vedic sense.
The Upaniṣadic renaissance is part of a deeper and wider ferment in culture and society. Its significance has been overrated, but there is no doubt that it presents one of the basic cognitive and intellectual junctures in human history, and in that sense a culmination of the Vedic period. Apart from their language, the great contributions of that period have little that is ‘Aryan’ or ‘Indo-Aryan’ about them. Though presented as such in our Vedic sources, they are not confined to brahmins and kṣatriyas. We have to look behind and beyond them to find out more about other participants and contributors and strengthen what we find with supplementary information from other sources, e.g., the contemporary Jaina and the later Buddhist.
I shall illustrate the procedure with the help of the claim I made that participants in the public included ‘wandering sages, philosophers, women, naked ascetics, monks and others’. The Upaniṣads refer mostly to the king and many brahmans as the active and creative participants in the debates. ‘Brahmans’ may be members of a class or, simply, learned men. Women participants are mentioned by name but there is no mention of ‘naked ascetics and monks’. Why did I include them? Because they were a common feature of the period. They included the adherents of earlier religions or sects such as the Jaina and Ājīvika, as well as the later Buddhists, the only ones who did not go about naked. All these non-Vedic groups refer to brahmans, are familiar with their doctrines and adapt, adopt or criticize them. The non-Vedic groups are not explicitly mentioned in the Upaniṣads, because they were not Vedic which the Upaniṣads were.
All these facts are likelihoods, as empirical facts are bound to be, but we can gain strong confirmation of them by looking at names. About 300 words that occur in the Rigveda are not Indo-Aryan or Indo-European and come from elsewhere (Chapter 1). Chapter 6 on Sāmaveda described how Rigvedic verse were set to melodies that belonged to an indigenous lineage that had long been settled and had its own language or languages. A closer look at the forest songs showed that some of the names in them are non-Indo-European and some have the structure of the reconstructed BMAC language as we have seen.
The Upaniṣadic descriptions of debates are similarly replete with names of sages that are non-Indo-European. Most important—because they refer to a more distant past—are names that occur in lineages at the end of some Upaniṣadic chapters. My impression of about sixty-five names at the end of the fourth chapter of the BĀU, starting with Pautimāṣya and ending with Brahman, is that almost half are non-Indo-European. Many look Indo-European but may not be. They may be Sanskritizations of non-Indo-European words like the term for brick in the BMAC language that became iṣṭakā, also discussed in Chapter 1. There is enough material for a book that could make a valuable contribution provided it is written by a linguist who knows Vedic, Indo-European and is familiar with the general characteristics of other language families in Asia.
Other than language, there are social indications in the dialogues and debates of the Upaniṣads that demonstrate that their authors belonged to an open society in which people from different backgrounds came together. The crossing of boundaries started modestly. ‘Different backgrounds’ is perhaps an insufficient description of an important inclusion: that of women. I shall give two positive and one negative illustration, but the most important is the first because it points to the past: some of the lineages to which I just referred show that parts of the transmission were matrilineal (e.g., BĀU 6.5.1–3).
The other positive illustration does not apply to women in general but comes from Yājñavalkya who taught his greatest secret to his wife as we have seen at the outset of this book. He said to her: ‘The two of us are like two halves of a block’ (BĀU 1.4.3). But he meted out a different treatment to another woman, Gārgī, a descendant of Garga who composed a poem in the Rigveda, and was a great debater. She was called ‘Vācaknavī’, which means eloquent as well as loquacious and is also used for men. Gārgī asked Yājñavalkya a long series of questions starting with: ‘Since this world is woven back and forth on water, on what, then, is water woven back and forth?’ He answered ‘air’ whereupon Gārgī asked the same question with regard to the intermediate region—and so on it went with sun, moon, etc. Finally, Yājñavalkya says: ‘Don’t ask too many questions!’ Gārgī fell silent, but after a few more exchanges, turned to the audience: ‘Distinguished brahmins! You should consider yourself lucky if you escape from this man by merely paying him your respects. None of you will ever defeat him in a debate!’
The crossing of boundaries started modestly, as I mentioned, and the same applies to Vedas, Vedic schools and differences of age as at least one example illustrates. Once king Janaka wished to perform a large ritual. He corralled a thousand cows. To the horns of each cow, ten pieces of gold were tied. Brahmans from Kuru and Pañcāla flocked to his court and he addressed them: ‘Let the most learned man among you drive away these cows!’ No one moved. So Yājñavalkya, a White Yajurvedin, called his pupil: ‘Sāmaśravas! Son, drive these cows away!’ He did, the Brahmins were furious and murmured: ‘How dare he claim to be the most learned!’ Sāmaśravas, ‘Song Fame’, was obviously a strapping young Sāmavedin.
The crossing of the brahman class line is illustrated by the story of Satyakāma, ‘Truth Loving’ Jābāla. It is referred to several times in the CU and the BĀU and was obviously popular. ‘S.J.,’ as I shall call him, told his mother he wanted to become a Vedic student and asked for his lineage. His mother said:
Son, I don’t know what your lineage is. I was young when I had you. I was a maid then and had a lot of relationships. It is now impossible for me to say what your lineage is. But my name is Jabālā and your name is Satyakāma. So you should simply say that you are Satyakāma Jābāla.
S.J. went to a famous teacher and asked to be accepted as his student. The guru asked him for his lineage and S.J. repeated, word for word, what his mother had told him, adding at the end: ‘So I am Satyakāma Jābāla, Sir.’ The teacher said: ‘Who but a brahman could speak like that!’ and accepted him. Why did he do it? Because satyakāma means ‘lover of truth’. By accepting S.J., the teacher added fuel to two beliefs that imply each other: the belief that he accepted a brahman pupil and the belief of all brahmans that all brahmans always speak the truth—that is why they are wise men, not on account of birth.
It is clear that at the time of the Upaniṣads, the term ‘brahman’ was still a flexible term. It had neither genetic content, nor did it occupy a fixed place in a rigid system of classes let alone caste. It continued to be so in later times, not within the subcontinent, where the caste system hardened, but in different societies elsewhere. The brahmans of Southeast Asia had strong ties with the rulers, but were brahmans in a very loose sense.
The Upaniṣads as ‘sitting down close’ (Ten: Upaniṣads) of pupil and teacher were sometimes the outcome of a public debate where a famous thinker had been asked questions and dispensed answers. If the questioner was not satisfied with the answer, such a dialogue ensued.