by Juan Mascaró, 1965

The Sanskrit word Upanishad, Upa-ni-shad, comes from the verb sad, to sit, with upa, connected with Latin s-ub, under; and ni, found in English be-neath and ne-ther. The whole would mean a sitting, an instruction, the sitting at the feet of a master. When we read in the Gospels that Jesus ‘went up into a mountain: and when he was set, his disciples came unto him’ we can imagine them sitting at the feet of their Master and the whole Sermon on the Mount might be considered an Upanishad.

The Upanishads are spiritual treatises of different length, the oldest of which were composed between 800 and 400 B.C. Their number increased with time and about 112 Upanishads have been printed in Sanskrit. Some were composed as late as the fifteenth century A.D. These repeat most of the ideas of the older Upanishads, using them for a particular school of thought or religious instruction. The longest and perhaps the oldest Upanishads are the Brihad-aranyaka Upanishad and the Chandogya Upanishad which cover about one hundred pages each, while the Isa Upanishad, one of the most important, not far in age from the Bhagavad Gita, has only eighteen verses.

If all the known Upanishads were collected in one volume, they would make an Anthology about the length of the Bible. The spirit of the Upanishads can be compared with that of the New Testament summed up in the words ‘I and my Father are one’ and ‘The kingdom of God is within you’, the seed of which is found in the words of the Psalms ‘I have said: Ye are gods; and all of you are the children of the most High’.

The Bhagavad Gita could be considered an Upanishad; and at the end of each chapter we find a note added in later times which begins with the words: ‘Here in the Upanishad of the glorious Bhagavad Gita’.

In theory, an Upanishad could even be composed in the present day: a spiritual Upanishad that would draw its life from the One source of religions and humanism and apply it to the needs of the modern world.

When prince Dara Shukoh, the son of the emperor Shah Jahan who built the Taj Mahal, was in Kashmir in 1640, he heard about the Upanishads and he had fifty of them translated into Persian. This translation was finished in 1657, and it was much later put into Latin by Anquetil Duperron and published in Paris in 1802. This was read by Schopenhauer, who said of the Upanishads: their reading ‘has been the consolation of my life, and will be of my death’ — ‘Sie ist der Trost meines Lebens gewesen und wird der meines Sterbens sein.'

In the songs of the Vedas we find the wonder of man before nature: fire and water, the winds and the storms, the sun and the rising of the sun are sung with adoration. They sometimes remind us of the love of nature of St Francis when he sings:

*Glory be to thee, my God, for the gift of thy creation, and especially for our brother, the sun, who gives us the day and by whom thou givest us light. He is beautiful and radiant and of great glory, and bears witness to thee, O most High.

Glory be to thee, my God, for our brother the wind and the air, serene or in clouds and in all weathers, by which thou dost sustain all creatures.

Glory be to thee, my God, for our sister water, which is very useful and humble, and precious and pure.

Glory be to thee, my God, for our brother fire, by whom thou dost illumine the night; and he is beautiful, and joyful, and strong and full of power.*

The songs of the Vedas cannot begin with ‘Glory be to thee, my God’, as the song of St Francis does, nor reach the sublime end of the song: ‘Glory be to thee, my God, for those who forgive for love of thee* - ‘Laudato si', mi Signore, per quelli che perdonano per lo tuo amore.’ The ascension from the many to the One was not yet complete in the Vedas, nor do we find in them the Spirit of love revealed in the Svetasvatara Upanishad, in The Buddha, and in the Bhagavad Gita.

When in the Vedas , however, the soul of the poet is one with the god he is praising, we often find a sense of oneness, as if there were one God above all the gods, as when we hear these words to Varuna, the god of mercy:

*We praise thee with our thoughts, O God. We praise thee even as the sun praises thee in the morning: may we find joy in being thy servants.

Keep us under thy protection. Forgive our sins and give us thy love.

God made the rivers to flow. They feel no weariness, they cease not from flowing. They fly swiftly like birds in the air.

May the stream of my life flow into the river of righteousness. Loose the bonds of sin that bind me. Let not the thread of my song be cut while I sing; and let not my work end before its fulfilment.*

— ऋग्वेद The Rig Veda 11.28

In **one of the latest songs of the Vedas, the song to Purusha, we find that the god is described in words that remind us of the Brahman of the Upanishads:

Purusha is the whole universe: what has been and what is going to be. One fourth of him is all beings, three fourths of him is immortal heaven.

And when the poet of the Vedas sings the glory of Vata, the god of the winds, he says: ‘Spirit of the gods, seed of all the worlds’, ‘Ātmā devānām, bhuvanasya garbho’.

We also find in the Vedas some of those supreme questions, asked by man when he considers the meaning of this great All, which were to be answered later on in the Upanishads:

*There was not then what is nor what is not. There was no sky, and no heaven beyond the sky. What power was there? Where? Who was that power? Was there an abyss of fathomless waters?

There was neither death nor immortality then. No signs were there of night or day. The one was breathing by its own power, in infinite peace. Only the one was: there was nothing beyond.

Darkness was hidden in darkness. The all was fluid and formless. Therein, in the void, by the fire of fervour arose the ONE.

And in the ONE arose love: Love the first seed of the soul. The truth of this the sages found in their hearts: seeking in their hearts with wisdom, the sages found that bond of union between Being and non-being.

Who knows the truth? Who can tell whence and how arose this universe? The gods are later than its beginning: who knows therefore whence comes this creation?

Only that god who sees in highest heaven: he only knows whence came this universe, and whether it was made or un¬ created. He only knows, or perhaps he knows not.*

— ऋग्वेद The Rig Veda X.129

The ritual of adoration in the Vedas, when men felt the glory of this world and prayed for light, must in time have become the routine of prayers of darkness for the riches of this world. We find in the Upanishads a reaction against external religion; and when ideas of the Vedas are accepted they are given a spiritual interpretation. It is the permanent struggle between the letter that kills and the spirit that gives life. We thus read in the Mundaka Upanishad:

But unsafe are the boats of sacrifice to go to the farthest shore; unsafe are the eighteen books where the lower actions are explained.

In the Bhagavad Gita the same idea is even more powerfully expressed;