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Dromo's Den
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[Up] [Dromo's Den] Upanishads UPANISHAD,
(Skt. upanisad, a sitting down
beside, session, esoteric doctrine). The name of a class of Vedic works devoted
to theological and philosophical speculations on the nature of the world and
man. (For the relation of the Upanishads to the Aranyakas as well as to the
Veda, see BRAHMANISM; VEDA; VEDANTA.) All Hindu speculation presupposes the
theory of transmigration of souls. (See METEMPSYCHOSIS.) In the oldest Vedic
period the Hindu people took a joyous view of future life. Later, however, they
acquired the firm belief in karma (q.v.), which appears first in the Satapatha
Brahmana, and has since remained an axiom of Hindu thought. The theory of
transmigration is coupled in the Upanishads with the equally important theory of
the world soul and its presence in all living or organic beings. (See
PANTHEISM.) The human body is supposed to be pervaded by breaths, or atman,
which are the individual existence, or ego, and are in turn conceived as flowing
from a single atman, the universal ego. All the worlds are merely an emanation
of this universal ego. The notion of the atman is further coupled with that of
the brahma, "the sacred word, or universal holiness." (See BRAHMA.)
These two ideas, in time, are fused so that in the composite atman-brahma we
have two manifestations of the final all-power. Here the atman represents, as it
were, the physical aspect, while the brahma stands for the spiritual side of
universal life and the ultimate essence. The fundamental doctrine of the
Upanishads is the identity of the individual soul (atman) with the world soul
(atman-brahma). The formula "that art thou" (ta
tvantnasi) is the keynote of all Upanishad teaching. It is curious how this
doctrine is coupled with metempsychosis. Instead of rejoicing in the knowledge
of their own divine essence, the Hindus look upon their individual existence as
a condition of separation from the divine essence. The wandering of the soul
through the realms of death is the consequence of its separation from the brahma,
and salvation, the escape from the chain of successive deaths, can be attained
only by reunion with the brahma. The Hindus never sought to explain how the
individual souls were separated from the all-soul; they took this for granted.
Desire, or clinging to life, is the reason why this separation continues. The
only cure for desire is knowledge, or, perhaps better, recognition of the unity
of the ego with Brahma and the ever-present recognition of the divided condition
of everything finite. Thus the ultimate attainment for man is this recognition,
which is salvation through the penetrating knowledge of one's own divine nature,
which effaces the entire delusion of individual existence. The date of
the Upanishads is quite uncertain, but the earliest of them are hardly later
than 600 B.C., since their most important ideas appear in an advanced and
somewhat decayed state in the Buddhist writings. The older Upanishads are the
products of Vedic schools. The two most important, the Brhadāryaka
and the Chāndogya, belong
respectively to the White Yajur Veda and the Sama Veda; the Ātarēya,
Kāisītaki, Tāittirīya, Kāthaka,
and Māitrāyāniya or Manava belong to schools of the same names. The Kēna
and Talavakāra Upanishads also belong to the Sama Veda, the Isa
to the White Yajur Veda, the Svētāsvatara
and the Mahānārāyana to
the Black Yajur Veda. A large and indefinite number of Upanishads, of which the Mundaka, Prasna, and Māndūkya
are the most important, are counted as belonging to the Atharva Veda. The most
authoritative list counts 27, but later Upanishads are generally counted as
belonging to the Atharvan. A complete list of Upanishads is impossible, because
the term does not mean a closed canon, but rather an indefinitely extensible
type of literature which may be continued in the present or future. In 1876, 235
Upanishads were enumerated, including apocrypha, one of those actually a
Mohammedan treatise called Alla Upanisad.
The later Upanishads may be divided into five classes: (1) Pure Vedanta
Upanishads, which combine the Vedanta doctrines of the older texts without undue
development of the notions of Yōga
(concentration and abstraction from all mundane matters) or Samnyāsa
(asceticism); (2) Yoga Upanishads, which presuppose the Vedanta ideas, and in
addition advise mental concentration upon the sacred syllable (ōm
(q.v.); (3) Samnyāsa Upanishads, which recommend and describe a life of
asceticism as the practical way of attaining the purpose of the Upanishads; (4)
Siva Upanishads, which interpret the popular god Siva (q.v.) as a
personification of the atman; (5) Vishnu Upanishads, which interpret Vishnu
(q.v.), or one of his avatars (see AVATAR), as divine or human manifestations of
the atman. See Hinduism; INDIA, Religion; ETC. The New International Encyclopaedia, Vol. XXII (New York: Dodd, Mead & Co., 1920) 793-794. |