SOURCE: Brereton, Joel. “The Upanishads.” In Approaches to the Asian Classics, edited by Wm. Theodore de Bary and Irene Bloom, pp. 115-35. New York: Columbia University Press, 1990.

[In the following essay, Brereton presents the five paradigms embodied in the teachings of the Upanishads, stating that these principles are used to construct wholeness out of the multiplicity of the world.]

The Upanishads are early texts of the Hindu tradition which set forth the foundations of the world and the true nature of the self. They are formally quite diverse, for they include narratives, dialogues, verses, and the teachings of ancient sages. The principal Upanishads, which were composed probably between 600 and 300 b.c.e., constitute the concluding portion of the Veda, the most ancient and conventionally the most fundamental scripture of Hinduism. According to most reckonings, there are fourteen Vedic Upanishads, and these can be assigned a relative chronology on the basis of their literary form and language. The oldest are in prose. Among them are the Brhad Āranyaka, Chāndogya, Kauṣītakī, Taittirīya, and Aitareya Upaniṣads. A second, generally later group of Upanishads were written in verse. These include the Kaṭha, Iśā, Munḍaka, and Śvetāśvatara Upaniṣads. Finally, the youngest are also in prose, but in a style which is closer to classical Sanskrit than to the more archaic language of the oldest Upanishads. These include the Maitrī and Mānḍūkya Upaniṣads. This division is only approximate, for individual Upanishads may contain material from different periods.

It is not quite accurate to say that the Upanishadic period ended with these texts. The term “Upanishad” became the designation of a genre rather than of specific texts, for works called Upanishads continued to be written through the Middle Ages and even into the early modern period. Tradition holds that there are 108 Upanishads—108 is a sacred number—but even more texts claim the status of Upanishads. These later Upanishads fall into different types which reflect the major developments in Hindu religious thought and practice. Some discuss topics and ideas introduced in the earlier Upanishads, others teach yoga and the renunciation of the world, and still others reflect sectarian worship of the classical Hindu deities. These Upanishads are significant, but none of them has had the enduring influence on Indic thought that the Vedic Upanishads have had. This essay, therefore, will be concerned entirely with the latter.

The Vedic Upanishads play a critical role in the history of Indic religion. Literarily, they are the last sections of the Brāhmanas, which are commentaries on the great public rites of the Vedic tradition. This literary position also reflects their historical place, for they are later than most of the Brāhmanas, and their thought developed out of the Brāhmanas. Historically, their period was one of transition, when the foundations of classical Hindu religion were established and archaic forms of Vedic religion were superseded. Therefore, many basic elements of Hindu religion were first clearly articulated in the Vedic Upanishads. These include the ideas of karma and rebirth; instructions concerning yoga, meditation, and asceticism; the concept of a self beyond the individual self; and the view that there is a single reality hidden by the multiple forms of the world.

The Upanishads are significant also because they continued to exercise a decisive role in Hindu religious history long after their composition. In fact, unlike the rest of the Veda, they still remain a major source of inspiration and authority within Hinduism. The most influential schools of Hindu religious thought are the schools of the Vedānta, a term that means “the end of the Veda.” They have that name because they understand the Upanishads, which are the last part of the Veda, to be the essence of Vedic teaching and the ultimate authority regarding the true nature of things. Of these schools, one has dominated both Indic and Western interpretation of the Upanishads. This school is the Advaita Vedānta, the “Non-dualist Vedānta,” which was established by a teacher named Śankara, who lived around 700 c.e. According to Śankara, the Upanishads teach that ultimately there exists one, and only one, indivisible reality. Hence the world and all its distinctions are less than fully real, and whatever reality they do possess derives from that one reality. Śankara must occasionally struggle hard to ground this view in the Upanishads, for although much of Upanishadic thought does stress the coherence and final unity of all things, it is not easily reduced to his or any other simple formula.

Other schools of the Vedānta differed profoundly with Śankara and with one another in their interpretations of the Upanishads. And these differences point to an important characteristic of the Upanishads. Like Western scriptures, they are not catechisms of direct answers to religious questions, which obviate the need for any further reflection. Rather, they stimulate thought and challenge interpretation. They have this character for several reasons. First, even individual Upanishads are far from systematic. They were composed by different people, living at different times and in different areas of northern India. Moreover, those who put the Upanishads into their final shape combined and even interwove various teachings. As a result, an argument may move in different directions even within one section of one Upanishad. Second, especially the older Upanishads used the language of symbols and concrete images rather than that of abstraction. Some symbols were traditional, but the Upanishadic sages also created new images and refashioned old ones, especially the symbols of the Vedic ritual. Such language gives Upanishadic diction the appeal of concrete narrative and the resonance of images, but it also opens them to very different interpretations. Thus, though the Upanishads are often understood philosophically, they call for not so much a systemization and specification of meaning as a reading which permits the associations and expansions of poetic discourse.

While the complexity of Upanishadic language and literary history precludes any easy summary of their teaching, there is a broad theme that encompasses much of their thought. In general, each Upanishadic teaching creates an integrative vision, a view of the whole which draws together the separate elements of the world and of human experience and compresses them into a single form. To one who has this larger vision of things, the world is not a set of diverse and disorganized objects and living beings, but rather forms a totality with a distinct shape and character.

The Upanishads often create such an integrative vision by identifying a single, comprehensive and fundamental principle which shapes the world. One term by which the Upanishads designate that fundamental principle is “brahman.” For later followers of the Vedānta, the brahman has a particular definition and a specific character, but for the Upanishads, the brahman remains an open concept. It is simply the designation given to whatever principle or power a sage believes to lie behind the world and to make the world explicable. It is the reality sought by the householder who asks a sage: “Through knowing what, sir, does this whole world become known?” (Munḍaka Upaniṣad 1.13).

Such an aspiration for a total vision of things is not unique to the Upanishads or to India. One distinctive turn which the Upanishads give to this vision is their understanding that the fundamental principle of everything is also the core of each individual. The typical designation for that core is the ātman, the “self.” Thus, in Upanishadic terms, the brahman is discovered within the ātman, or conversely, the secret of one's self lies in the root of all existence.

Within this common approach, however, the Upanishads differ among themselves in the shape they give to that vision of totality and the means by which they create it. To clarify this vision of the Upanishads and to show their diversity, I will present five paradigms that these teachings follow. Each paradigm is a method or pattern through which the Upanishads construct a totality out of the multiplicity of the world. These five Upanishadic paradigms are: (1) the correlation of different aspects of reality to one another; (2) the emergence of the world from a single reality and its resolution back into it; (3) a hierarchy which leads ultimately to the foundation of all things; (4) a paradoxical coincidence of things which are ordinarily understood to exclude or oppose one another; and (5) a cycle which encompasses the processes of life and the world. These paradigms do not exhaust the variety of Upanishadic teachings, but collectively they suggest their range.

CORRELATION

One means of demonstrating unity behind apparent diversity is by displaying correspondences among things belonging to different domains. This was not a new technique in Indic thought, since already the Brāhmanas had made extensive use of the same paradigm. But while the Brāhmanas sought such correlations within the domain of the ritual and between the domains of the ritual and the outside world, the Upanishads search primarily for those that exist within and among the human and natural domains.

The Upanishads have several ways of identifying these correspondences. One is to link various parts of the world to a single, structured entity. That is, they take a symbol or set of symbols which is comprehensible and ordered, and then relate items from different domains to it. In this way, the symbol becomes a map. Just as one understands an unfamiliar territory by comparing various places and objects to areas on a map, so one comprehends the world by associating its parts to a known object. In the Upanishads, the ordering object or domain is normally something concrete. Thus in the opening of the Brhad Āranyaka Upaniṣad, the sacrificial horse is the image of the world. The passage begins: “Now, the head of the sacrificial horse is dawn; his eye, the sun; his breath, the wind; his open mouth, the fire which is common to all” (Brhad Āranyaka Upaniṣad 1.1.1). The passage thus identifies the head of the horse with the symbols of the main divisions of space. The sun represents the heaven; wind, the midspace between earth and heaven; and fire, the earth. It then goes on to equate other parts of the land and air with the body of the horse, the seas with the sacrificial vessels which stand on either side of the horse, and various living beings, from gods to humans, with the different names by which the horse is addressed in the ritual. The passage thus reduces the whole world to the form of the horse, and by doing so, it makes the world a single, comprehensible object. Therefore, those who reflect on the horse understand and embrace everything in their contemplation.

The use of a ritual object like the sacrificial horse in such a system of correlations is more typical of Brāhmanas than of Upanishads. For the latter, the most frequent correlation is between the macrocosm and the human body. That is, they equate the parts of the body to the constituents of the visible world, so that the whole world becomes the image of the human form. In this way, instead of appearing external and alien, the world becomes a familiar place and a place in which humans occupy a central position.

The Aitareya Upaniṣad, for example, opens with a narrative which tells how the world and the body became the twin images of one another. Although this narrative has the form of a creation story, it is better read not as describing the actual process of creation, but as establishing the connections that now exist within the world.

In the beginning, there was only the self, the ātman. This self resolves to create. It first produces the basic form of the world, and then from the waters, it draws forth a being that the text calls the “person.” This person is egg-like, for it is without faculties of sense or action. Therefore the self next creates these faculties by bringing them forth from the person one by one. Then from these faculties, it extracts the characteristic product or activity of each one, and from these in turn, it brings forth a corresponding aspect of the world. Thus, from the mouth of the person comes speech and then fire; from its nostrils, breath and wind; from its eyes, sight and sun; from its ears, hearing and the four directions; from its skin, hair and plants; from its heart, thought and the moon; from its navel, inhalation and death; and from its penis, semen and water.

The associations which provide the basis for most of these correlations are not difficult. The one exception is the odd correlation of the navel, inhalation and death. On the one hand, the inhalation is drawn toward the navel, which connotes birth and life. But on the other, inhalation is linked with eating, which implies human physicality and therefore human mortality. Hence, inhalation also signifies death.

The creation of the human being follows in the next part of the narrative. The macrocosmic realities just created fall into the sea once again, back to their place of origins. This descent into the sea figuratively expresses the disorganization of these powers. They need an order, and to find it, they enter into the human form once again. Fire becomes speech and enters the mouth; wind becomes breath and enters the nostrils; the sun becomes sight and enters the eyes, and so on. The sequence exactly reverses the order of their creation. Thus, the elements of the world are created from the cosmic person, and then they return again to the human form in which all people share. Hence, the world mirrors the human body, and its parts correspond to human faculties.

Finally, at the end of the process, the self itself enters into the newly created human form. In this way, the self, which is the origin of all, becomes the self of each human being. Thus, as the body corresponds to the visible world, the self of the world coincides with the self of the individual. Both physically and spiritually, therefore, the human being is a perfect microcosm.

The correspondence between the microcosm and the macrocosm illustrates how the Upanishads fashion a vision of totality through correlation. This correspondence unifies the world in the form of the person, and therefore makes the world comprehensible as a whole. Furthermore, it also implies that the world and the power that controls it are not outside, bearing down upon and threatening the individual. Rather, because the parts of the world are equivalent to the parts of a person, humans include everything within themselves.

EMERGENCE AND RESOLUTION

The Upanishads also create a sense of the unity of all things through viewing creation as an emergence from a single reality and destruction as a return to that reality. The Munḍaka Upaniṣad provides some striking images of this process: “As a spider spins and gathers (its web), as plants grow upon the earth, as head and body hair (grow) from a living person, so everything here arises from the imperishable” (Munḍaka Upaniṣad 1.1.7). The image of the spider and its web is especially strong. The spider stands alone at the beginning, spins its web out of itself, and finally draws it back into itself. In the same way, the “imperishable” brahman emits the world from itself and ultimately reabsorbs it back into itself. Thus, the world is only the outward projection of the brahman.

One of the most influential realizations of this paradigm occurs in Chāndogya Upaniṣad 6. The chapter takes the form of a dialogue between a sage named Uddālaka and his arrogant son Śvetaketu. After studying the Vedas for twelve years, Śvetaketu comes home very proud of his achievement. His father then asks him if during his education, his teachers taught him that “by which what has been unheard becomes heard, what has been unthought becomes thought, what has been unknown becomes known” (Chāndogya Upaniṣad 6.1.3). To understand clay or copper, for example, means that one also knows the character of all clay and copper utensils, because their qualities will reflect the substance of their composition. In the same way, he asks, has Śvetaketu been taught the basic reality which comprises all things and through which the character of all things is known? Śvetaketu admits that he knows nothing of this, and Uddālaka begins his explanation of that reality.

In the beginning there was only being. From being then follows an evolution toward increasing materiality. Being, which is imperceptible, first gives rise to heat, which can be felt. Then heat gives rise to water, which can be felt and seen, and finally water gives rise to food, which can be felt, seen, and tasted. Food connotes full materiality. Uddālaka then confirms these relations by seeing their reflection in natural processes. Heat does produce water in humans, for when they are hot, they sweat, and rainwater does produce food. Similarly, human experience corroborates the reverse process, the resolution of each factor into the previous one. According to Uddālaka, people become thirsty when heat absorbs water and hungry when water absorbs food.

Once he has established the fundamental evolution from being, Uddālaka then shows how everything, and especially human beings, are the products of the intermingling and segmentation of the three evolutes. In the body, for example, each of the evolutes divides into three: food becomes mind, flesh, and excrement; water becomes breath, blood, and urine; heat becomes speech, marrow, and bone. Thus, the human being is nothing but a composite of the three basic factors. Likewise, the continuous process of the emergence and resolution of the three evolutes is reflected in the process of dying. When people die, they first lose consciousness, but they still breathe. This is the reabsorption of food by water, for mind and consciousness derive from food, but breath comes from water. Then, when water returns to heat, the breath ceases, for water corresponds to breath. Even without the breath, however, the body remains warm, for heat still remains. Finally, as the heat and the life of the person dissipate into being, the body becomes cold and death becomes complete. In Uddālaka's vision, therefore, being is the ultimate, pervasive source of mind, body, and the world, and life continues through a constant process of movement out of and into being.

In the second half of his teaching, Uddālaka drives home its significance for Śvetaketu's self-understanding. In one section, he asks his son to bring him a fruit from the nyagrodha tree, one of the sacred fig trees of India. He tells him to cut it open to find the seed, and then to cut the seed open. When he does so, Śvetaketu finds the seeds in the fruit, but then he cannot find anything in the seed. Yet within that seed is an essence, says Uddālaka, and that invisible essence is the source of the life of the huge nyagrodha tree. “Believe me, my child,” he concludes, “that which is this finest essence—this whole world has that as its self. That is the real. That is the self. Thus are you, Śvetaketu” (Chāndogya Upaniṣad 6.12.3). Being is that essence, for being is the imperceptible source of all creation. This being is therefore the self of the nyagrodha, the self of the world, and the self of Śvetaketu.

Here again, as in the Aitareya Upaniṣad, the true self is not the individual self, but rather the identity that one shares with everything else. There is no true distinction among living beings, for they all emerge from being and retreat to it. All things, both animate and inanimate, are unified in being, because they are all the transformations of being. To understand the nature of being, therefore, is to have the knowledge that Uddālaka promised Śvetaketu, the knowledge that accounts for everything, the knowledge of the totality of things.

HIERARCHY

A third method of organizing experience is through constructing a hierarchy. That is to say, the Upanishadic sages set up a system of levels that shows which powers include other powers or which are dependent on which others. Ultimately, by moving toward progressively deeper levels, the sage identifies the fundamental principle on which everything else is established.

In one sense, this is the most characteristic technique of Upanishads, for it is from it that the Upanishads have their name. The word “upaniṣad,” though usually translated “secret teaching” or the like, originally meant the subordination of one thing to another. The purpose of arranging things in such a progression is finally to identify the dominant reality behind an object. In Chāndogya Upaniṣad 8.7-12, for example, the god Indra and the anti-god Virocana approach the creator deity, Prajāpati. They ask him the true nature of the self. Rather than giving them the real answer straightaway, Prajāpati first tells them that the true self is nothing but the self that one sees in a reflection. This answer satisfies Virocana: “So then, with tranquil heart Virocana went to the anti-gods. To them he declared this upaniṣad: ‘Oneself (ātman) is to be satisfied here. Oneself is to be served. He who satisfies his own self here, who serves himself—he gains both worlds, this one here and yonder (heavenly world)’” (Chāndogya Upaniṣad 8.8.4). Virocana's upaniṣad holds that the physical self is subordinate to no other self but is the true and fundamental self. However, to revere the physical self as ultimate is a very dangerous upaniṣad. As Indra and Virocana depart with this teaching, Prajāpati observes that whoever “will follow this upaniṣad, whether they be gods or anti-gods, will pass away” (Chāndogya Upaniṣad 8.8.4). They will perish, for they do not identify themselves with an immortal self but with a self that dies. This truth is finally recognized by Indra, who returns to Prajāpati for further instruction. Gradually, Prajāpati leads Indra into more profound definitions of the self until at last, after Indra has studied with him for 101 years, Prajāpati reveals to him the reality behind the physical self and the true foundation of the self.

The definition of the self which Indra and Virocana seek is one of the dominant concerns of Upanishads. And of all the Upanishadic teachers, the one most closely associated with the quest for the self is a sage named Yājnavalkya. Yājnavalkya appears in Brhad Āranyaka Upaniṣad 3-4, first in a verbal contest with other brahmins and then in dialogue with King Janaka of Videha. According to Yājnavalkya, the foundation of the self is the subject upon which all consciousness depends and all action is established. Because that true self is always the perceiving subject, it itself can never become an object of thought or perception: “You could not see the seer of seeing. You could not hear the hearer of hearing. You could not think the thinker of thinking. You could not know the knower of knowing” (Brhad Āranyaka Upaniṣad 3.4.2).

That same self, however, is also the self of the world. Yājnavalkya calls it the “inner controller,” which sustains both the body and the world, but which neither the person nor the world knows (Brhad Āranyaka Upaniṣad 3.7). It is the “imperishable,” at whose command “the sun and the moon,” “heaven and earth,” and “moments, hours, days and nights, fortnights, months, seasons and years remain distinct,” and at whose command, “some rivers flow eastward, others westward” (Brhad Āranyaka Upaniṣad 3.8.9). The only way to understand this self is to strip it of any positive content: “This is described as ‘not this, not that’ (neti, neti). It is ungraspable, for it is never grasped. It is indestructible, for it is never destroyed. Without attachment, for it is not attached. Unbound, (yet) it is never unstable, never injured” (Brhad Āranyaka Upaniṣad 4.4.22). The end of this passage suggests the personal significance of this view of the self. To identify oneself with a self which stands above any recognizable object is to become invulnerable. Mind, body, emotions—all these are susceptible to pain and suffering. But all these can be made objects of knowing, and therefore there must be a knowing subject that is deeper and more fundamental than they. It is that unknowable, knowing subject which is the true self. Why then fear sickness, suffering, or death? These affect what the self perceives; they do not affect what the self is.

Even if the self cannot become an object of thought, it can still be experienced. To investigate the experience of the self, Yājnavalkya examines dreamless sleep, which for him is a state in which everything other than the self is forgotten. In this state, the self emerges alone and as it truly is. This state of the self in itself is one of complete fulfillment: “Now, this is that form of his which is beyond pleasure, in which evil is removed, which is free of fear” (Brhad Āranyaka Upaniṣad 4.3.21). For one who experiences the true self, there is nothing wanted and nothing lacking, and therefore neither yearning nor grief can trouble that person.

In this state, the self never loses consciousness, “for there is no complete loss of knowing for the knower, because (the knower) is indestructible” (Brhad Āranyaka Upaniṣad 4.3.30). However, because there is nothing to be perceived, that consciousness has no object. Yājnavalkya captures this aspect of the experience of the self through an analogy: “Just as a man, when embraced by his dear wife, knows nothing within or without, even so this embodied self, when embraced by the conscious self, knows nothing within or without” (Brhad Āranyaka Upaniṣad 4.3.21). As the moment of sexual climax attenuates the awareness of any object and the distinction between oneself and the other, so the self knows nothing outside of itself. One's own self (the “embodied self”) experiences only itself as the “conscious self,” the ultimate subject of all knowing.

However there is a problem in all of this. Yājnavalkya's analogies of deep sleep and sexual intercourse apparently contradict one another, since people normally experience deep sleep as a state of unconsciousness, not one of objectless consciousness. For this reason, other Upanishadic teachers followed Yājnavalkya in identifying the true self as the ultimate subject, but rejected his identification of the state of the self and the state of deep sleep. Recall that in the dialogue between Prajāpati and Indra (Chāndogya Upaniṣad 8), Indra rejected Prajāpati's first explanation of the true self as the bodily self. After further definitions of the self and after 96 years of study, Prajāpati tells Indra that the self is experienced in deep sleep. “Then with tranquil heart, (Indra) went forth. But even before reaching the gods, he saw this danger: ‘Obviously, now this (self) does not know itself, (does not know that) “This am I,” neither does it know (other) beings here. It becomes one gone to destruction. I see nothing useful in this’” (Chāndogya Upaniṣad 8.11.1). Indra finds the teaching inadequate because it suggests that when everything is removed from the self, only unconsciousness remains. So once more, Indra returns to Prajāpati, and after another five years, Prajāpati reveals to him the true self. Similarly, the Mānḍūkya Upaniṣad teaches that the self is experienced in a fourth state beyond waking, dreaming, and dreamless sleep. According to this text, that fourth state is not unconsciousness, but neither is it consciousness, at least not consciousness as it is normally understood. The state of the imperceptible self is unique and not identifiable with any other state.

These discussions of the self and of the experience of it are a reminder that the Upanishadic search for a definition of totality is not only an intellectual one. To be sure, the Upanishads seek the satisfaction of a comprehensive understanding of the world and the psychologically fulfilling identification with a deathless self beyond the individual self. But in addition, the Upanishadic views of self and the world also shape experiences in which the unknown self is directly realized. Some Upanishads make clear that the self is not something that can be taught, and that successful realization of self is not in the conscious control of the one seeking it: “This self cannot be attained by instruction, nor by intellect, nor by much learning. It can be attained only by the one whom it chooses. To him that self reveals its own form” (Kaṭha Upaniṣad 2.23, Munḍaka Upaniṣad 3.2.3). According to these texts, the knowledge of the self comes as if it were a revelation that breaks in upon the mind, and not as something intellectually achieved.

Yet within the Upanishads, there are attempts to devise methods of reaching the self. The Śvetāśvatara Upaniṣad, one of the latest Upanishads, comes close to classical yogic methods of finding the self. According to Śvetāśvatara Upaniṣad 2.8ff., a yogi should sit with the body erect and steady, checking bodily movements and restraining the breath. Thus quieting the senses and the mind, the yogi begins to move inward toward the core of the self and the world: “Fog, smoke, sun, wind, fire, fireflies, lightning, crystal, the moon—these are the preliminary appearances” (Śvetāśvatara Upaniṣad 2.11). Deprived of external distraction, the mind experiences these forms of light, which emerge from the inner light of the self. Eventually, the yogi moves through the layers of the self to its innermost core: “Just as a mirror stained by dust shines brilliantly when it is well cleansed, so the embodied (self), seeing the nature of the self, becomes single, its goal attained, free from sorrow” (Śvetāśvatara Upaniṣad 2.14). The true self is the end of the journey, for it is the foundation on which are built all the other states of mind and self.

Comparing the approach of Yājnavalkya and his successors and that of Uddālaka shows both the range and the common direction of the Upanishads. The two approaches begin with different paradigms for defining totality. Uddālaka's method is to describe the principle from which the world evolves and into which it devolves. In contrast, Prajāpati, Yājnavalkya, and the yoga teacher of the Śvetāśvatara Upaniṣad distinguish different levels of existence and experience and then move through these levels until they uncover the final, fundamental level. Thus, according to Yājnavalkya, to shift from the world experienced while awake to that of dreamless sleep is to advance to the deepest level of the self. Similarly, in the Śvetāśvatara Upaniṣad, different meditative states mark the progress toward the true self. Their approach is based on a hierarchical ordering of reality.

Not only do Yājnavalkya and Uddālaka operate with different paradigms, but also they begin from opposite directions. Yājnavalkya's is essentially an internal approach, which seeks the fundamental principle by turning back the layers of the self. Uddālaka, on the other hand, begins externally, with the world outside the self. Yājnavalkya investigates the self psychologically by observing its different states of consciousness, while Uddālaka analyzes the physical world and reduces its constituents and processes to a simple system. But both try to confirm their teachings by observation, either of internal states or of external realities. And both, whether they move from inside to outside or outside to inside, finally locate a principle which is simultaneously at the core of both the self and the world. For Yājnavalkya, the self that is the unknowable subject of all knowing is also the self of the whole world. For Uddālaka, being gives rise to the world, but it is also the self to which all living things return at death and from which they come forth at birth. Thus both teachers create visions of totality, even though they construct them differently.

PARADOX

Oddly, and perhaps even paradoxically, paradoxes can also create a unified vision. In a paradox, normally distinct objects are unexpectedly related or even equated to one another. If we encountered a very poor but happy couple, we could say that “paradoxically, they are rich in their poverty.” Normally, wealth and poverty exclude one another, but in these people, material want and emotional richness coincide. In the same way, the Upanishads can use paradox to bring together things that appear to be separate in order to create a larger whole.

The best known Upanishadic paradox is the teaching of the sage Śānḍilya. Actually, this teaching occurs for the first time in a late portion of the Śatapatha Brāhmana, but it is repeated almost verbatim in Chāndogya Upaniṣad 3.14. Śānḍilya's teaching fuses the extremes of reality in a paradox. It concludes: “that self of mine in the heart is smaller than a grain of rice or of barley or a mustard seed or a grain of millet or the kernel of a grain of millet; that self of mine in the heart is greater than the earth, greater than the midspace, greater than the sky, greater than these worlds” (Chāndogya Upaniṣad 3.14.3). The self is the most intimate part of a person, the very center of one's being, and therefore it is the smallest of the small. Yet, at the same time, it surpasses everything. The paradox thus undercuts any exclusion or any separation of an individual from the rest of the world, for there is nothing beyond the self. If the self is the very smallest and the very largest, what is not encompassed by it?

For one Upanishad, the Iśā Upanisad, paradox is a central strategy. This entire poem consists of sets of paradoxes and antinomies. In v. 4, for example, the poet says that the One, the fundamental principle of things, is “unmoving” and yet it is swift, “swifter than the mind.” It is unmoving because it is eternal; it is swifter than the mind because it is inconceivable. Therefore the paradox, like that of the couple's wealth and poverty, does not express a real contradiction, only a rhetorical one. But this rhetorical paradox lays the basis for a real paradox in the next verse. There the Upaniṣad says that the One “moves and does not move. It is far away and it is near. It is within everything and outside of everything” (Iśā Upaniṣad 5). Here the running-standing model from the previous verse is restated as a moving-not moving opposition. The rest of the verse then develops this opposition. The consequence of moving is that the One is far; the consequence of not moving is that it remains near. The limit of distance is to be outside everything; the limit of nearness is to be inside. The paradoxical claim is that the One is both. In some way, the One is beyond time and space, and yet it is also within the world as the source of everything. Timelessness and time, perfection and movement—these only appear to be opposites, for in actuality, the One is all of them.

Both the teaching of Śānḍilya and that of the Iśā Upaniṣad, therefore, connect a single principle to opposite and apparently exclusive extremes. By so linking the extremes, they imply that this principle comprehends everything else as well. There is nothing that the principle does not include, nothing that remains separate from it and from everything else within it. In that way, the self of Śānḍilya and the One of the Iśā Upaniṣad become symbols of the totality of things.

CYCLES

A final strategy for creating an integrative vision is to represent world processes as a cycle. Of the various constructions of a vision of totality, this has the clearest foundation in the earlier Veda. The Vedic rituals followed the repeating sequences of natural events: the alternation of day and night, the phases of the moon, the seasons of rain and no rain, and the succession of years. Through the rituals, therefore, people understood and regulated their lives according to the course of nature. Even more explicitly than this ritual tradition, the Upanishads consolidate life and death, the succession of natural events and the divisions of time into recurring cycles.

One such cycle follows the movement of water, which represents the essence of life. This pattern appears in the parallel texts, Chāndogya Upaniṣad 5.3.7ff. and Brhad Āranyaka Upaniṣad 6.2.9ff. According to them, the gods fill the moon with soma, which is the holiest of all ritual offerings and which represents the elixir of life. As the moon wanes, soma is poured out as rain, which falls to earth where it nourishes the plants and becomes their sap and juice. Men ingest it with their food and pass that life essence to women through their semen. Within a woman, semen gives birth to a new human being. When that person dies and the body is cremated, the life essence rises once again with the smoke. For some, the life essence then returns to the moon and the cycle begins again. This vision thus integrates the birth and death of humans into the natural movement of water down to earth and up again to the sky. But that cycle does not continue for everyone. For those who understand this process and do not allow themselves to be entangled in the world controlled by this pattern, the cycle is broken at death. They go on to realms from which there is no further birth.

These passages, therefore, contain two concepts which were to become central to the Indic tradition: the idea that time moves in cycles and the idea of rebirth. The earliest Upanishads present rebirth as a concept which few know. In Brhad Āranyaka Upaniṣad 3.2, for example, a brahmin named Ārtabhāga quizzes Yājnavalkya again and again about a person's destiny after death. Finally, Yājnavalkya says, “‘Ārtabhāga, my friend, take my hand. We two alone will know of this. This matter of ours is not (to be discussed) in public.’ So the two went away and deliberated. What they spoke of was action (karma). What they proclaimed was action. Now, by good action one becomes good, by bad action bad” (Brhad Āranyaka Upaniṣad 3.2.13). This passage points toward the classical concept of karma, which comes to mean not only action but also the effect of action on one's own destiny. According to the developed tradition, by the accumulation of good karma, one secures a good rebirth, by bad karma, a bad one.

Later Upanishads take the reality of rebirth and karma for granted, and frame their goals in terms of them. The constant cycle of rebirths comes to express entrapment by death and suffering, and therefore release from that cycle becomes the critical achievement. Thus, the Kaṭha Upaniṣad starkly opposes the two possible fates: “On the one hand, he who is without understanding, who is unmindful and ever impure, does not attain the goal and goes into the cycle of rebirths. But he who understands, who is mindful and ever pure, attains the goal from which he is not born again” (Kaṭha Upaniṣad 3.7f.).

This negative turn gives the cyclical paradigm an equivocal status. In the Brāhmanas and early Upanishads, the natural cycles provided models for making sense of the world and human life, and even in later texts, they never completely lost that significance. However, these cycles could also be seen not just as embracing life but also as imprisoning it. For this reason, in order to break out of the cycle of constant death and rebirth, this paradigm had to be rejected as the final truth about human life.

THE INTEGRATIVE VISION

An integrative vision of things was not the only concern of the Upanishads, but it was a central one. This survey suggests some of the reasons for its significance. First and fundamental was the aesthetic and intellectual satisfaction in the ability to see things as a whole. The vision comprehends the world, and by it, people know who they are and where they are. People understand that they are a part of everything, in fact, that they are at the very center of everything, and they know that everything is a part of them. Second, this vision was a powerful knowledge. From early in the Vedic tradition, to know the truth of something was to have control over it. To know the world is therefore also to master the world and to direct one's fate. Especially the later Upanishads insist that insight into the true nature of things effects the highest attainment of all, the attainment of a final release from all temporal and spatial limitation. Third, the vision of totality was a transforming vision. Above all, it required a reevaluation of what one truly is and therefore what is truly consequential. In their various ways, the Upanishads argue that people are really not what they appear to be. They seem to be individuals, vulnerable to suffering and death, subject to their private destinies. That individual self, however, is not the true self. Death cannot affect the true self, nor can anything else, for the self precedes and embraces everything. The person who truly sees the self in this way, therefore, should have neither desire nor fear, for that person knows that no harm can come to the self. Fourth, this vision was a compelling experience. The Upanishads are not first-person records of religious or mystical experiences but rather the intellectual forms which molded and reflected such experiences. As a result, they do not give direct access to the experience of knowing the ātman or the brahman. Nevertheless, they do suggest the drama of that experience. The vision is only fully known when one becomes the true self or when one directly perceives the world in its singleness.

Why did this vision develop at this time and in this place? One reason was that its basis was firmly established in the Brāhmanas, which anticipate the Upanishadic aspiration to see the world as a totality. Moreover, the search for an integrative vision and the ability to experience this vision are not unique to India. Other cultures have also created paradigms for consolidating the diverse elements of experience, and other societies have given rise to mystical movements. The reason for the crystallization of Upanishadic thought may lie partly in the social and political changes occurring at the end of the Vedic period. This was not only a time of intellectual change, but one which saw the creation of cities and the consolidation of tribes into states. The stress on personal more than corporate identity, which can accompany these developments, may have provoked a nostalgia for a sense of the whole and for a definition of the self which did not isolate the individual.

At the same time, the Upanishads are a result of the very individuality they seem to compromise. They are the compositions of creative individuals, and they address themselves to individuals. Some Upanishads imply that the realization of the truth can occur only by a supremely individualistic act: breaking away from society and retreating to the forest for a life of study and meditation. Thus, the Upanishads may be the product of a contradiction, but if so, it is one of the creative contradictions which have driven the development of Indic culture and its complexity.

Suggested Translations

Paul Deussen, Sixty Upaniṣads of the Veda, 2 vols. (Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass, 1980). This is an English version of a German translation of the Upanishads, originally published in 1897. Despite the age of the original and the problems of a double translation, this collection is still useful, especially because it includes a large number of the later Upanishads.

Franklin Edgerton, The Beginnings of Indian Philosophy (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1965). This work contains good translations of the central chapters of the Brhad Āranyaka Upaniṣad, Chāndogya Upaniṣad 6, and the Kaṭtha Upaniṣad. These selections provide an excellent introduction to Upaniṣadic thought.

Swami Gambhirananda, Eight Upaniṣads, 2 vols. (Calcutta: Advaita Ashrama, 1957-58). These translations of the shorter Vedic Upanishads include Śankara's commentary, for those who wish to see how the Upanishads' most influential interpreter understood them.

Robert Ernest Hume, The Thirteen Principal Upanishads 2d ed. (London: Oxford University Press, 1931). This remains the best translation of the Upanishads. But the translation is literal, so much so that at times it can be difficult to read.