Upanishad

Upanishad, one of four genres of texts that together constitute each of the Vedas, the sacred scriptures of most Hindu traditions. Each of the four Vedas—the Rigveda, Yajurveda, Samaveda, and Atharvaveda—consists of a Samhita (a “collection” of hymns or sacred formulas); a liturgical prose exposition called a Brahmana; and two appendices to the Brahmana—an Aranyaka (“Book of the Wilderness”), which contains esoteric doctrines meant to be studied by the initiated in the forest or some other remote place, and an Upanishad, which speculates about the ontological connection between humanity and the cosmos. Because the Upanishads constitute the concluding portions of the Vedas, they are called vedanta (“the conclusion of the Vedas”), and they serve as the foundational texts in the theological discourses of many Hindu traditions that are also known as Vedanta. The Upanishads’ impact on later theological and religious expression and the abiding interest they have attracted are greater than that of any of the other Vedic texts.

The Upanishads became the subject of many commentaries and subcommentaries, and texts modeled after them and bearing the name “Upanishad” were composed through the centuries up to about 1400 ce to support a variety of theological positions. The earliest extant Upanishads date roughly from the middle of the 1st millennium bce. Western scholars have called them the first “philosophical treatises” of India, though they neither contain any systematic philosophical reflections nor present a unified doctrine. Indeed, the material they contain would not be considered philosophical in the modern, academic sense. For example, the Upanishads describe rites or performances designed to grant power or to obtain a particular kind of son or daughter.

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One Upanishadic concept had tremendous impact on subsequent Indian thought. Contrary to the assertion of early Western scholars, the Sanskrit term Upaniṣad did not originally mean “sitting around” or a “session” of students assembled around a teacher. Rather, it meant “connection” or “equivalence” and was used in reference to the homology between aspects of the human individual and celestial entities or forces that increasingly became primary features of Indian cosmology. Because this homology was considered at the time to be an esoteric doctrine, the title “Upanishad” also became associated during the middle of the 1st millennium bce with a genre of textual works claiming to reveal hidden teachings. The Upanishads present a vision of an interconnected universe with a single, unifying principle behind the apparent diversity in the cosmos, any articulation of which is called brahman. Within this context, the Upanishads teach that brahman resides in the atman, the unchanging core of the human individual. Many later Indian theologies viewed the equation of brahman with atman as the Upanishads’ core teaching.

Thirteen known Upanishads were composed from the middle of the 5th century through the 2nd century bce. The first five of these—Brihadaranyaka, Chandogya, Taittiriya, Aitareya, and Kaushitaki—were composed in prose interspersed with verse. The middle five—Kena, Katha, Isa, Svetasvatara, and Mundaka—were composed primarily in verse. The last three—Prasna, Mandukya, and Maitri—were composed in prose.