by Roopa Pai
The Upanishads are also often referred to as Vedanta (say ved-aan-ta), which translates to ‘end of the Vedas’ (veda + anta). They are the last section of the Vedas, which of course makes them Vedanta in a very literal way, but they are also the most difficult-to-grasp part, which is why they were always taught to students towards the end of their Vedic studies, once their minds had been well trained in a certain way of thinking. There is a third important reason they are called Vedanta – once you’ve absorbed the wisdom of the Upanishads, the rishis seem to be telling us, you will never need to return to the study of the Vedas again, because the Upanishads contain all their wisdom, and more, in them.
4. What does the word ‘Upanishad’ literally mean?
a. The smaller, or minor, Veda
b. Dialogues of the wise
c. Sitting close to, but at a lower level
d. Up and down (derived from the Hindi ‘upar-neeche’)
The right answer is (c) – once again!
(Ha! Bet you didn’t expect that googly – three c’s in succession! Also, if you answered (d) – ‘The word Upanishad means Up and Down – from the Hindi words ‘upar-neeche’, think again – Hindi/Hindustani developed as a language thousands of years after Sanskrit!)
The word Upanishad is a combination of three Sanskrit syllables – upa, which means to move closer to, or be close to; ni, which means ‘at a lower level’; and shad, which means ‘to sit’.
So ‘Upanishad’ literally translates to ‘sitting close to someone, at a lower level’. But what does it mean metaphorically? Think about it. We know that the Upanishads were never meant to be read; like the rest of the Vedas, they were meant to be heard (remember they were originally only communicated orally!). Even more than verses or words, they were sacred ‘sounds’. To be able to catch every nuance of the speaker’s voice and every teeny change in tone and emphasis, therefore, it made sense to sit close to him or her. Plus, the teachings of the Upanishads are often referred to as the ‘paramam guhyam’ – The Ultimate Mystery, The Secret of Secrets. They would be revealed only to the deserving, the ‘closest circle’.
What happens when you sit really close to the speaker, especially when that person is your teacher? Well, you are forced to concentrate – you cannot fidget, or text anyone, or sneak a look out of the window. Also, by the very act of shad – sitting down – you are making a commitment to yourself and the speaker; you are indicating that you are there to give him or her your full attention and are in no hurry to go anywhere. As for the ni, it is there to remind you that if you really want to learn what someone has agreed to teach you, it is important to humbly accept, for the duration of the lesson at least, that you are at a ‘lower level’ intellectually than he or she is.
So what the Upanishads teach us, by their very name, is a universal, eternal truth: if you approach learning with focus, dedication, humility, a receptive mind and respect for the teacher, there is very little chance that you will not move closer to understanding what is being taught. The best part is that, because the Upanishads are often structured as a dialogue between a teacher and a student, they also show us by example that the learning and teaching process works best when it is a two-way street. What you can take away from the most revered of our ancient texts is that it is not only OK, but essential, to question your teachers and parents when you don’t understand, or agree with, what they are teaching. See? You can totally leverage the Upanishads and their ‘universal, eternal truths’ to garner support for your cause – in the 21st century!
And that’s the First Big Deal about the Upanishads – although they were composed 3,500 years ago, when the world was a very, very different place (but human nature was very, very much the same), they teach us ways of being and thinking that we can use to live better, more fulfilling and more contented lives today.
Sure, there are parts in them that are too obscure for many of us to understand, too repetitive, or too irrelevant to our modern lives, but the fact that they also teach, encourage and celebrate the questioning of everything – including the holiest of holy cows, the idea of God – makes them pretty much ‘modern’, even scientific, in their approach to the world.
The Second Big Deal about them is that the ideas first expressed in the Upanishads have become the basis of what most Indians believe is the purpose of life, the meaning of death, and the nature of the entity called God. Their biggest influence has been on Hinduism, but they have also impacted the central ideas of other religions founded in India, such as Jainism, Buddhism and Sikhism. (And of course, the plot lines of our biggest religion, Bollywood.)
Here are some of those Big Ideas. How many have you heard of before?
1. Samsara or the Cycle of Rebirth: When you die, it’s only your body that dies. Your soul simply moves on and makes its home in another body. If you’ve been good in this life, you are born human again and can proceed further on your journey to ultimate happiness. If you haven’t been so good, you might just end up as some other creature in your next life (like, say, a cockroach) and have to work your way up the hierarchy of creatures, until you are human again and have the ability to choose to do the right thing, or not.
2. Karma or Action: No action is by itself right or wrong. But every action has a consequence, so think carefully before you act. Just because you seem to have escaped punishment for a bad action in the short term, don’t become complacent. Karma will return to bite you in the butt in ways you can’t even imagine. After all, it has loads and loads of time to make its move. (For more details, refer to point 1.)
3. Dharma or Potential: Depending on our innate disposition or nature, each of us has been assigned (or has chosen) a role to play in this lifetime – thinker, doer, leader, follower. That role takes on different shades as the play progresses – as you go from student to professional, child to parent, person-who-has-something-wonderful (health, money, power, fame, contentment) to person-who-does-not-have-it-any-more. It is our duty and responsibility to play our role to the best of our potential, in every phase, uncomplainingly, without hankering after someone else’s (seemingly bigger or better) role.
4. Moksha or Liberation: Human life is full of toil and trouble. The highest goal of human life,* the way to true and lasting happiness, lies in breaking free of samsara’s golden chains. If you are hardcore about performing your Dharma and doing good, thoughtful Karma in this lifetime, you may have a chance of getting there. After roughly two million more lifetimes of good behaviour. (Hey, no one said this gig was easy!)
* Moksha wasn’t the only life-goal recommended by the ancient Indian sages – there were three other equally important ones. (To find out what they were, go to page 152.)
The Third Big Deal about the Upanishads is the set of conclusions all that questioning and analysis threw up. Those conclusions are so wise, so secular and so liberal that it makes a lot of sense to revisit them today, at a time when the world seems more divided than ever before. Here are some of the main ones:
• The universe is not random. There is an underlying order and harmony, called rita, to everything around us (although that may be tough to believe when you are stuck in traffic at peak hour). Like clockwork, everything in the universe fulfils its duty according to the all-powerful ‘natural law’ – the sun rises and sets each day, seasons change, rain falls, the planets and stars move in their orbits, electrons spin and revolve around nuclei, things are born, and things die. Now, what is your excuse to not fulfil your duty?
• God is not Santa Claus. God is not making a list and checking it twice, to see if you’ve been naughty or nice – the good and bad things that happen to you are simply the result of the natural law of your own Karma. God does not demand from you worship, or that you flog or starve yourself to gain favour. God did not create you, as a mirror image or otherwise. God simply – hold your breath – IS you! Just as God is every other creature and tree and river and mountain in the world.
• The world is only as real as Netflix. Because all y
our organs of perception – eyes, ears, nose, mouth, skin – are turned towards, and consume, the world outside, and because that world is so bright and beautiful and tempting and demanding, you are tricked into believing that IT is the real thing, that it is the ONLY thing there is. When really, it is no more real than Netflix, a make-believe world your mind has created for its entertainment and then been sucked into.
• Your body is only a costume. Your form and shape of skeleton and flesh and everything in there are what you’ve chosen to wear for your role in this act of the long-running play called Life (or, more accurately, Lives). There will be other acts and costumes and roles. The person/entity you mean when you say ‘I’, is neither your costume nor your role but something far, far bigger, far, far better, and far, far more glorious than you can ever imagine. In the Upanishads, that indestructible, never-changing core of your being, the real You, is called the Atman (say aat-mun).
• You contain the universe. You are not minuscule or insignificant – you are luminous, magnificent, large enough to contain the universe! For there is only one Universal Energy, one Supreme Consciousness, that is inside (each of) us and around (all of) us. We may each call it by a different name – Shakti, Shoonya, Allah, Yahweh, Ahura Mazda, God – but that only reflects our own individual choices and tastes (hey, it’s a free country!). In the Upanishads, this supreme, all-pervading energy is called Brahman (say Bruhm-mun).
• You were not created by God, you ARE God. The point of your life as a human being is to realize that Atman is Brahman, i.e., You are God. No, seriously. Also, that everybody around you is God too. When you truly see this truth, and embrace it, when you realize that everyone – despite their different skin colours and ‘weird’ ways of speaking and eating and worship and whatnot – is just you in a different form, it is somewhat unlikely that you will insult them or despise them or want to destroy them (because by doing that, you are only insulting or despising or destroying yourself).
Instead, you will begin to revel in the fact that you can live so many different lives at the same time, that you can be man and woman and child and white and black and brown and Dutch and Eritrean and Peruvian and Kurd and Jew and Muslim and Parsi and vegetarian and non-vegetarian and Rafa Nadal and P.V. Sindhu and tree and river and dog and bird and anything or anyone else you want to be. You will make it the focus of your life to understand all those different versions of you, by making each of them your teacher. You will engage in conversations and interactions with them that are marked by humility, respect, gratitude and an open mind (just like the Upanishads have taught you). And you will learn from their mistakes, and rejoice in their successes, and share in their grief, and live their experiences, and become a finer, wiser person each day because of it.
In other words, you will move closer to becoming the God that you are.
HOW THE WEST WAS WON
Hint: It involved a Mughal prince, a French Indologist and a German philosopher
In their own land, the Upanishads have been known and revered for over 2,500 years. Their explosive, original ideas influenced Vardhamana Mahavira, who founded Jainism in the 6th century BCE, and Gautama Buddha, who founded Buddhism about a hundred years later.* When Buddhist missionaries travelled to far-flung parts of Asia, like Sri Lanka, Japan, China, Korea, Tibet, Mongolia and Bactria** to spread their religion in the 2nd century BCE and after, they took Upanishadic ideas like reincarnation and Moksha with them, making them popular in the Far East.
*There is some disagreement about this among scholars – while some say Upanishadic ideas influenced Jainism and Buddhism, others insist it was the Buddha’s ideas that influenced the Upanishadic sages. Until we can date the Upanishads accurately, this argument looks likely to continue. Most non-scholars, however, are simply happy to enjoy the wisdom of these ideas, wherever they originally came from.
** A historical region in Central Asia that today would cover parts of Afghanistan, Uzbekistan and Tajikistan.
But how – and when – did word of humankind’s oldest, and arguably among the most original philosophical ruminations get out to the western world? Thereby hangs a fascinating tale.
The year, so the story goes, was 1640. Prince Dara Shikoh, firstborn son and heir apparent of Mughal emperor Shah Jahan, was on holiday in Kashmir with his beloved wife Nadira Banu when he first heard of the ancient texts called the ‘Upanekhats’ (his word for the Upanishads).
Like his great-grandfather Akbar before him, Dara was a liberal who had always been fascinated by mysticism and spirituality, and believed that no matter what the name, there was only one God. Like Akbar, he would also devote a large part of his life to finding common ground between Hinduism and Islam.
Most excited to hear about this sacred literature that his Hindu subjects assured him was among the holiest of the holy, he convened a gathering of scholars from the great city of Banaras (now Varanasi) at his Delhi palace on the banks of the Yamuna, the Manzil-e-Nigambodh, and had them explain to him every possible meaning of the fifty or so Upanishads they had at their disposal. Over the next few years, he personally translated (so it is believed) all those 52 Upanekhats into Persian, finding several parallels between their teachings and those of the Quran, especially with respect to their ideas about the oneness of God. In fact, he became convinced by the end of it that the ‘hidden book’ of wisdom – the Kitab al-maknun – mentioned in the Quran was none other than the Upanishads.
In 1656, Dara Shikoh’s translation was published as the Sirr-e-Akbar (The Greatest Mystery), bringing upon his head the wrath of orthodox Muslims, chief among them his ambitious younger brother Muhiuddin, otherwise known as Prince Aurangzeb. A bitter battle for succession was brewing, and Aurangzeb saw his chance. In 1659, after having usurped the throne and declared himself Emperor, he denounced crown prince Dara as a heretic and had him beheaded.
Given that anything associated with Dara was now a hot potato, Sirr-e-Akbar should have by rights disappeared into the mists of history, never to be seen again. And that might have well happened, if it hadn’t been for Dara Shikoh’s personal physician, Monsieur Francois Bernier.
M. Bernier had got himself a ‘super-fast’ medical degree after an intensive three-month course in his home country in the 1650s. Unfortunately, that abbreviated degree did not allow him to practise on French territory, and so, a few years later, M. Bernier took off to the East to do what he really wanted to – travel. He reckoned he could also put his medical skills to use along the way, but never imagined he would end up where he did – as part of the team of royal physicians who attended the Mughal emperor himself!
When the good doctor went back to Paris in 1671, after also having served as Emperor Aurangzeb’s doctor for a dozen years, he carried a copy of Sirr-e-Akbar back with him. Hanging out with Dara Shikoh’s Sanskrit pandit had given Bernier himself a deep insight into the Upanishads, and he was very attached to the translation. Within Bernier’s own circles, the Upanishads thus became known.
From top: An amazing three-way connection: Mughal prince Dara Shikoh, French Indologist M. Anquetil–Duperron and German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer
But another hundred years would pass before M. Anquetil-Duperron, famous as the first ‘professional’ French Indologist and the person who introduced the Zoroastrian holy book, the Zend Avesta, to Europe, got his hands on a copy of Sirr-e-Akbar. Now, while Sanskrit wasn’t a language that people on the street, even in India, were fluent in, Persian was not only the official language of the Mughal court but also a language that many Europeans, including Anquetil-Duperron, spoke well. In 1775, he decided to retranslate Sirr-e-Akbar, first into French, and then into Latin.
Anquetil-Duperron’s Latin translation ‘Oupnek’hat or Upansichada’, when published in 1801, was the very first European-language translation of a ‘Hindu’ text, ever. In the spring of 1814, the translation came to the notice of the famous German philosopher, Arthur Schopenhauer, who was so taken with it that he repeatedly called it his favourit
e book of all time. What’s more, he declared that among the entire body of world literature, the Upanishads were the texts most worthy of being read.
Not everyone agrees with Schopenhauer’s interpretations of the Upanishads [but spare the poor man a thought – he was working with a (Latin) translation of a (French) translation of a (Persian) translation of a Sanskrit work!]. But he was so respected and his work had such a huge influence on other western philosophers, that after his exuberant pronouncements about them, there was a sudden and renewed interest in the Upanishads not just in Europe but back in India as well. Today, they occupy a pre-eminent place in literature as one of the world’s greatest philosophical works.
And all thanks to a curious, large-hearted, liberal-minded, questioning Muslim prince who knew in his heart that there was always common ground to be found between seemingly disparate peoples and cultures and ideas and religions, if only one made the effort to look.
PS: Dara Shikoh’s palace, the Manzil-e-Nigambodh, was called that because it stood close to the Nigambodh Ghat, Delhi’s oldest ghat for performing Hindu funeral rites. Believed to have been first set up by Pandava prince Yudhishthira himself, the ghat is also thought to be the spot where another landmark mythological event occurred. The story goes that the Vedas had been lost to humanity after Lord Brahma, believed to be their originator, was cursed by Yamuna, and lost his memory as a result. When, relenting, Yamuna returned the Vedas to her banks, she did so at the Nigambodh Ghat. A grateful Brahma took a dip in her holy waters, and wisdom was restored to the world.