1.008: THE PHILOSOPHY OF THE UPANIṢADS 1

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1.008: THE PHILOSOPHY OF THE UPANIṢADS 1

First revision: Apr.29, 2026
Last change: May 8, 2026

Searched, gathered, rearranged, translated, and compiled by Apirak Kanchanakongkha.

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CHAPTER IV

THE PHILOSOPHY OF THE UPANIṢADS

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Introduction—The fluid and indefinite character of the teaching of the Upaniṣads—Western students of the Upaniṣads—Date—Early Upaniṣads—The great thinkers of the age—The hymns of the Ṛg-Veda and the doctrine of the Upaniṣads compared—Emphasis on the monistic side of the hymns—The shifting of the center from the object to the subject—The pessimism of the Upaniṣads—The pessimistic implications of the conception of saṁsāra—Protest against the externalism of the Vedic religion—Subordination of the Vedic knowledge—The central problems of the Upaniṣads—Ultimate reality—The nature of Ātman distinguished from body, dream consciousness and empirical self— The different modes of consciousness, waking, dreaming, dreamless sleep and ecstasy—The influence of the Upaniṣad analysis of self on subsequent thought (The Translation will start from here.) —The approach to reality from the object side—Matter, life, consciousness, intelligence and ānanda— Śamkara and Rāmānuja on the status of ānanda—Brahman and Ātman-Tat tvam asi—The positive character of Brahman—Intellect and intuition—Brahman and the world—Creation—The doctrine of māyā-Deussen’s view examined—Degrees of reality—Are the Upaniṣads pantheistic?—The finite self—The ethics of the Upaniṣads—The nature of the ideal—The metaphysical warrant for an ethical theory—Moral life—Its general features—Asceticism—Intellectualism—Jñāna, Karma and Upāsana—Morality and religion—Beyond good and evil—The religion of the Upaniṣads—Different form—The highest state of freedom—The ambiguous accounts of it in the Upaniṣads—Evil—Suffering—Karma—Its value—The problem of freedom—Future life and immortality—Psychology of the Upaniṣads—Non-Vedāntic tendencies in the Upaniṣads-Sāṁkhya—Yoga—Nyāya—General estimate of the thought of the Upaniṣads—Transition to the epic period.
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THE UPANIṢADS

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The Upaniṣads¹ form the concluding portions of the Veda, and are therefore called the Veda-Anita, or the end of the Veda,
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^1. The word Upaniṣads comes from upa ni sad, “sitting down near.” It means “sitting down near” the teacher to receive instruction. It gradually came to mean what we receive from the teacher, a sort of secret doctrine or rahasyam. Sometimes it is made to mean what enables us to destroy error, and approach truth. Śaṁkara, in his introduction to the Taittirīya Upaniṣads, says: “Knowledge of Brahman is called Upaniṣad because in the case of those who devote themselves to it, the bonds of conception, birth, decay, etc., become unloosed, or because it destroys them altogether, or because it leads the pupil very near to Brahman, or because therein the highest God is seated.” See Pandit, March 1872, p. 254.
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a denomination which suggests that they contain the essence of the Vedic teaching. They are the foundations on which most of the later philosophies and religions of India rest. “There is no important form of Hindu thought, heterodox Buddhism included, which is not rooted in the Upaniṣads.”¹ Later systems of philosophy display an almost pathetic anxiety to accommodate their doctrines to the views of the Upaniṣads, even if they cannot father them all on them. Every revival of idealism in India has traced its ancestry to the teaching of the Upaniṣads. Their poetry and loftily idealism have not as yet lost their power to move the minds and sway the hearts of men. They contain the earliest records of Indian speculation. The hymns and the liturgical books of the Veda are concerned more with the religion and practice than the thought of the Aryans. We find in the Upaniṣads an advance on the Śaṁhita mythology, Brāhmaṇa hair-splitting, and even Āraṇyaka theology, though all these stages are to be met with. The authors of the Upaniṣads transform the past they handle, and the changes they effect in the Vedic religion indicate the boldness of the heart that beats only for freedom. The aim of the Upaniṣads is not so much to reach philosophical truth as to bring peace and freedom to the anxious human spirit. Tentative solutions of metaphysical questions are put forth in the form of dialogues and disputations, though the Upaniṣads are essentially the outpourings or poetic deliverances of philosophically tempered minds in the face of the facts of life. They express the restlessness and striving of the human mind to grasp the true nature of reality. Not being systematic philosophy, or the production of a single author, or even of the same age, they contain much that is inconsistent and unscientific;
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^1. Bloomfield: The Religion of the Veda, p. 51.
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but if that were all, we cannot justify the study of the Upaniṣads. They set forth fundamental conceptions which are sound and satisfactory, and these constitute the means by which their own innocent errors, which through exclusive emphasis have been exaggerated into fallacious philosophies, can be corrected. Notwithstanding the variety of authorship and the period of time covered by the composition of these half-poetical and half-philosophical treatises, there is a unity of purpose, a vivid sense of spiritual reality in them all, which become clear and distinct as we descend the stream of time. They reveal to us the wealth of the reflective religious mind of the times. In the domain of intuitive philosophy their achievement is a considerable one. Nothing that went before them for compass and power, for suggestiveness and satisfaction, can stand comparison with them. Their philosophy and religion have satisfied some of the greatest thinkers and intensely spiritual souls. We do not agree with Gough’s estimate that “there is little that is spiritual in all this,” or that “this empty intellectual conception, void of spirituality, is the highest form that the Indian mind is capable of.” Professor J.S. Mackenzie, with truer insight, say that “the earliest attempt at a constructive theory of the cosmos, and certainly one of the most interesting and remarkable, is that which is set forth in the Upaniṣads.”¹
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THE TEACHING OF THE UPANIṢADS

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It is not easy to decide what the Upaniṣads teach. Modern students of the Upaniṣads read them in the light of this or that preconceived theory. Men are so little accustomed to trusting their own judgment that they take refuge in authority and tradition. Though these are safe enough guides for conduct and life, truth requires insight and judgment as well. A large mass of opinion inclines today to the view of Śaṁkara, who in his commentaries on the Upaniṣads,
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^1. E.R.E., vol. viii., p.597; see also Hume, The Thirteen Principal Upaniṣads, p. 2..
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the Bhagavad Gītā and the Vedānta Sūtras, has elaborated a highly subtle system of non-dualistic metaphysics. Another is equally vehement that Śaṁkara has not said the last word on the subject, and that a philosophy of love and devotion is the logical outcome of the teaching of the Upaniṣads. Different commentators, starting with particular beliefs, force their views into the Upaniṣads and strain their language so as to make it consistent with their own special doctrines. When disputes arise, all schools turn to the Upaniṣads. Thanks to the obscurity as well as the richness, the mystic haze as well as the suggestive quality of the Upaniṣads, the interpreters have been able to use them in the interests of their own religion and philosophy. The Upaniṣads had no set theory of philosophy or dogmatic scheme of theology to propound. They hint at the truth in life, but not as yet in science or philosophy. So numerous are their guesses at God, that almost anybody may seek in them what he wants and find what he seeks, and every school of dogmatics may congratulate itself on finding its own doctrine in the sayings of the Upaniṣads. In the history of thought, it has often happened that a philosophy has been victimized by a traditional interpretation that became established at an early date and has thereafter prevented critics and commentators from placing it in its proper perspective. The system of the Upaniṣads has not escaped this fate. Western interpreters have followed this or that commentator. Gough follows Śaṁkara’s interpretation. In his Preface to the Philosophy of the Upaniṣads, he writes: “The greatest expositor of the philosophy of the Upaniṣads is Śaṁkara or Śaṁkarācārya. The teaching of Śaṁkara himself is the natural and the legitimate interpretation of the philosophy of the Upaniṣads.”¹ Max Müller adopts the same standpoint. “We must remember that the orthodox view of the Vedānta is not what we should call evolution, but illusion. Evolution of the Brahmana or pariṇāma is heterodox; illusion or vivarta is orthodox Vedānta. ...To put it metaphorically, the world according to the orthodox Vedāntin does not proceed from Brahman as a tree from a germ,
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^1. P. viii
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But as a mirage from the rays of the sun.”¹ Deussen accepts the same view. We shall try to ascertain the meaning which the authors of the Upaniṣads intended, and not what later commentators attributed to them. The latter gives us an approximately close idea of how the Upaniṣads were interpreted in later times, but not necessarily a true insight into the philosophic synthesis which the ancient seekers had. But the problem is, do the thoughts of the Upaniṣads hang together? Could all of them be traced to certain commonly acknowledged principles about the general make-up of the world? We are not so bold as to answer this question in the affirmative. These writings contain too many hidden ideas, too many possible meanings, too rich a mine of fancies and conjectures, that we can easily understand how different systems can draw their inspiration from the same source. The Upaniṣads do not contain any philosophic synthesis as such, of the type of the system of Aristotle or of Kant or of Śaṁkara. They have consistency of intuition rather than of logic, and there are certain fundamental ideas which, so to say, form the first sketch of a philosophic system. Out of these ideas, a coherent and consistent doctrine might be developed. It is, however, difficult to be confident that one’s working up of elements which knew neither method nor arrangement is the correct one, on account of the obscurity of many passages. Yet with the higher ideals of philosophic exposition in view, we shall consider the Upaniṣad ideas of the universe and of man’s place in it.
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III

NUMBER AND DATE OF THE UPANIṢADS

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The Upaniṣads are generally accounted to be 108 in number, of which about ten are the chief, on which Śaṁkara has commented.
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^1. S.B.E., vol. xv., p. xxvii.
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