Any book that's old piques my interest, especially if I find it on a friend's bookshelf. It seems like its worth is self-evident if people still read it all these years later. But, any book that is thousands of years old that people still read induces reverent fear in me, and throaty bass notes from monks come to mind. 

I want light to pour out of it when I crack the spine and a mysterious indoor wind to tussle my hair. Granted, the copy of the Upanishads that I read was published in 2007. But, the low estimate is that the texts inside are 2,500 years old, and I was shocked at how relevant they were to my life.

Going through the Upanishads was very fun and creatively inspiring, so I decided that I'm going to make a series picking them apart to get more people to read them. Actually, I originally wanted to cover the entire book in one post, but it started running long, and I'd covered only the first section, which is only 3 pages. I hadn't even touched on what the Upanishads are, so that's what this post is.

What Even are the Upanishads ?

It's safe to say that the Upanishads are old and all of the implications that has for us as people. They are stories and philosophical tidbits for orienting your interior world that are surprisingly straightforward. Obviously, their meaning is up for interpretation, but the symbolism and language are clear. The themes repeat themselves, and they add up to an arc that is clear as well:

"The Self is everywhere."

This could either be totally hollow or incredibly insightful depending on who is reading. If it does seem empty to you, plenty of great thinkers of the last one hundred years have proposed ways for thinking about the self in relation to the outside world that are strikingly similar to this message, without any of the baggage that a religious text might carry. More on these thinkers later. 

After all, the claim that "the Self is everywhere" is more of a metaphysical claim than a religious claim. But, philosophy and religion are different only in the west. In eastern traditions, they are the same.

So, the Upanishads are free from the endless definition of terms and dense writing that philosophy scares people off with. They can indulge in talking animals and humor. The Upanishads' philosophical aspects bring a real-world relevance that other religious texts can lack. Believing in anything isn't required, and there are no weird rules about when you can sell livestock (I'm looking at you, Old Testament!).

You know, if you think about it, in a way, you are this tree. 

What are the Upanishads as Documents?

When I really connect with a book, I like to search for others that inspired it. What at first seems like a solitary work by a lone author turns into a single point in a bigger web of ideas. Determining what web of ideas the Upanishads is connected to and just where it fits has introduced me to an intertextual labyrinth that makes me question whether reading would be more informative than anything short of a vision quest.

In the background research I did on the texts, which I admit was slim, I've found all sorts of fun mysteries, inconsistencies, and misdirects, that make its background anything but clear.

The Upanishads are a collection of different parts of the Vedas, which means "knowledge" in Sanskrit. The Vedas can refer to several things:

1 The Vedas - A four-part collection of texts from ancient India,

whose parts are the Rig Veda, the Yajurveda, the Samaveda, and the Atharvaveda,

which are composed of

(a) the Samhitas - Mantras and benedictions

(b) the Aranyakas - Descriptions of rituals

(c) the Brahmanas - Commentaries on rituals

(d) the Upanishads - Spiritual wisdom

2 The Vedas - The mantras within the Samhitas (a) above

3. The Vedas - The collection of texts (a) through (d) above

4. The Vedas - Probably other things I have not discovered yet.

For this project, I'm going to stick with the first definition of the Vedas I listed.

There are hundreds of Upanishads spread across the four Vedas, but the book I read contains the ten most important according to Shankara, a scholar and spiritual teacher who reintroduced the Vedas to India in the 8th century after their popularity had declined. The Upanishads are the most relevant texts in the Vedas to the lives of anyone who doesn't perform sacrificial rituals, I say with the utmost respect for those who do. 

Although there are a few Upanishads in the middle sections of the Vedas, most of the Upanishads are at the end of each of each text, which is why the Upanishads are often referred to as Vedanta, which literally means "end of the Vedas" in Sanskrit. In addition to their literal placement in the Vedas, referring to the Upanishads as Vedanta implies that they are the final word on the wisdom inside, kind of like a conclusion. 

Who Wrote the Upanishads ?

Before we get to who wrote the Upanishads and by extension the Vedas, we need a little historical background. In the Indian subcontinent, the Indus Valley civilization emerged in about 2600 BCE, making it one of the oldest civilizations we know about. The only older known civilizations were Mesopotamia and Egypt. Like both of these civilizations, the Indus Valley civilization emerged in a river valley.

Occasional flooding fertilized the surrounding earth with silt, but it also demanded technological innovation to protect people and houses from getting washed away. This innovation led to agricultural surpluses, which helped cities emerge that were not as dependent on growing food as they had been before. That is, they had more time to dedicate to other things.

Their civilization flourished until about 1900 BCE when a variety of environmental and internal pressures lead to collapse. The remaining peoples were later referred to as the Dasas. They developed into a cattle herding groups. They mixed with Indo-European speaking people called the Aryans (they had the name first) who had migrated from the north. The mixing of these two groups was the beginning of Indian civilization as we know it.

The Aryan's influence brought gods, ritual sacrifice, and nature worship to the Dasas' culture. Over the next 500 years, they settled farther east along the Ganges River, aided by the development of iron tools. But, tensions between the two groups heightened, and the Dasas were pushed farther south, and those who remained were absorbed into the Aryan societies.

A caste system developed, listed in descending order of importance:

Brahmin - Priests and Scholars

Kshatriya - Warriors and statesmen

Vaishya - Merchants and land owners

Shudra - Peasants and laborers (Dasas are here)

This caste system was closely tied to the idea of reincarnation: you deserved your place in life because of what you had done in your past life. Organizing the caste system this way shows the importance that their society placed on religion. It's notable that the highest place in society was not that of kings or warlords but of Brahmin. 

Even though everyone's place in society was fixed, they still thought that they were at the mercy of the gods they worshiped, who had to be appeased with ritual sacrifice. Brahmin were in charge of performing these rituals along with hymns and prayers for the Kshatriya. The information about their rituals and prayers was passed through oral tradition for years, but the Brahmin eventually wrote everything down, and we finally get the Vedas and therefore the Upanishads. That they wrote them further demonstrates the high status of the Brahmin. Writing would not be a common technology in the area for several centuries.

Why Read the Upanishads Today?

The popular notion is that we have dispensed with spirituality as a society. Sure, everyone knows a yogi who goes around saying "Namaste," but science and reason have talked us out of deifying the natural world, and the spiritual people that remain could hardly be said to be central to culture. That being said, I think the wisdom in the Upanishads is applicable to all people because the requirements to fulfill its central message are fundamental: the self and the outside world.

The Upanishads literally means "sitting down near an illumined teacher" in Sanskirt, and I can guarantee you I am not that. But, I have an avid readers' unauthorized degree in philosophy, and I'll be supplementing the interpretation of the Upanishads with more familiar ideas from popular thinkers from the last one hundred years, just in case the imagery in the Upanishads tests your logical sensibilities.

I'm very excited to get started, and I hope you'll join me for the ride.

Sources:

The Earth and Its Peoples: A Global History. Houghton Mifflin, 2005.

The Upanishads by Eknath Easwaran, 2007