The Upaniṣads (Sanskrit: “sessions,” lit. “sitting near” (i.e. “at the feet of a guru)”) are the ancient sacred treatises of Hinduism. Written in Sanskrit c.800–200 BCE, the Upaniṣads expand on the Vedas in mostly mystical and monistic terms. The Upaniṣads were passed down through an oral tradition within the priestly social groups and were not written down until the sixth century CE.
The Upaniṣads comprise the concluding portions of the Vedas; hence, they are called Vedānta (“the culmination of the Vedas.”) The major Upaniṣads are the repositories of many of the theological and philosophical ideas that have come to tower over later Vedāntic thought.
The Upaniṣads transcend the chants performed during sacrifices and pose philosophical questions about human existence and man’s place in the cosmos. The conceptions of Brahman (the universal cosmic power) and Ātman (the innate soul of the individual) are fundamental to the understanding of the Upaniṣads.
More than one hundred Upaniṣads were created—the later lesser-known Upaniṣads continued to be composed right down to the sixteenth century. Thirteen of the Upaniṣads are considered the canonical scriptures of Hinduism. The first five of these—Bṛhadāraṇyaka, Chāndogya, Taittirīya, Aitareya, and Kauṣītaki—were composed in prose and interposed with verse. The middle five—Kena, Kaṭha, Ῑśā, Śvetāśvatara, and Muṇḍaka—were composed chiefly in verse. The last three—Praśna, Māṇḍūkya, and Maitrāyaṇī—were composed in prose.
The French Indologist Abraham Hyacinthe Anquetil-Duperron first translated fifty Upaniṣads into Latin in 1801–02. The Upaniṣads had a considerable effect on such nineteenth-century philosophers as Arthur Schopenhauer, who asserted that the Upaniṣads were “the fruit of the most sublime human knowledge and wisdom.” The Upaniṣads also came to the attention of American philosophers and writers in the nineteenth century, mainly by way of many threads of the Idealist, Romantic, and Transcendentalist movements of Germany and England.
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Tat Tvam Asi: “That art thou”: Whatever we see or think about, we are That. We are the ultimate Thou and I in all.
—The Upanishads
Who sees all beings in his own Self, and his own Self in all beings, loses all fear.
—The Upanishads
Wherefrom do all these worlds come? They come from space. All beings arise from space, and into space they return: space is indeed their beginning, and space is their final end.
—The Upanishads
Health, a light body, freedom from cravings, a glowing skin, sonorous voice, fragrance of body: these signs indicate progress in the practice of meditation.
—The Upanishads
Topics: Meditation
The world is the wheel of God, turning round And round with all living creatures upon its rim. The world is the river of God, Flowing from him and flowing back to him.
—The Upanishads
Life in the world and life in the spirit are not incompatible. Work or action is not contrary to knowledge of God, but indeed, if performed without attachment, is a means to it.
—The Upanishads
As an eagle, weary after soaring in the sky, folds its wings and flies down to rest in its nest, so does the shining Self enter the state of dreamless sleep, where one is freed from all desires.
—The Upanishads
Topics: Desires, Desire
He who knows Self as the enjoyer of
The honey from the flowers of the senses,
Ever present within, ruler of time,
Goes beyond fear. For this Self is Supreme!
—The Upanishads
The Lord of Love is before and behind. He extends to the right and to the left. He extends above; he extends below. There is no one here but the Lord of Love. He alone is; in truth, he alone is.
—The Upanishads
He who knows both the transcendent and the immanent, with the immanent overcomes death, and with the transcendent reaches immortality.
—The Upanishads
Sarvam Kalvidam Brahma – “The whole universe is Brahman”: Not only the consciousness in everyone but also the ‘principle of being’ are all Divine. The entire universe is Divine, which includes our Self.
—The Upanishads
Awake, arise! Strive for the Highest, and be in the Light! Sages say the path is narrow and difficult to tread, narrow as the edge of a razor.
—The Upanishads
Like a ball bated back and forth, a human being is batted by two forces within.
—The Upanishads
Topics: Conflict
As the sun that beholds the world is untouched by earthly impurities, so the Spirit that is in all things is untouched by external sufferings.
—The Upanishads
Life is the fire that burns and the sun that gives light. Life is the wind and the rain and the thunder in the sky. Life is matter and is earth, what is and what is not, and what beyond is in Eternity.
—The Upanishads
The Spirit filled all with his radiance.
He is incorporeal and invulnerable, pure and untouched by evil.
He is the supreme seer and thinker, immanent and transcendent.
He placed all things in the path of the Eternal.
—The Upanishads
The means of attaining the other world does not become revealed to the non-discriminating one who, deluded by wealth, has become negligent. He who thinks, ‘this world alone is and none else’ comes to death again and again.
—The Upanishads
People see his pleasure-ground; him no one sees at all.
—The Upanishads
Topics: Spirituality, Spirit
As the same fire assumes different shapes
When it consumes objects differing in shape,
So does the one Self take the shape
Of every creature in whom he is present.
—The Upanishads
Out of abundance and still abundance remained.
—The Upanishads
Topics: Abundance, Dance
When a man dies, what does not leave him? The voice of a dead man goes into fire, his breath into wind, his eyes into the sun, his mind into the moon, his hearing into the quarters of heaven, his body into the land cheerfully. earth, his spirit into space
—The Upanishads
Topics: Action
Even as the sun shines and fills all space With light, above, below, across, so shines The Lord of Love and fills the hearts of all created beings.
—The Upanishads
What is here is also there; what is there, is also here. Who sees multiplicity but not the one indivisible Self must wander on and on from death to death.
—The Upanishads
The self-existent Lord pierced the senses to turn outward. Thus we look to the world outside and see not the Self within us. A sage withdrew his senses from the world of change and, seeking immortality, looked within and beheld the deathless self.
—The Upanishads
Topics: Immortality
When a person is dying, his voice goes into his mind; his mind into
his breath; his breath into heat; the heat into the highest
divinity. that which is the finest essence – the whole world has
that as its soul. That is Reality. That is Atman. That art thou.
—The Upanishads
When the mind is silent, beyond weakness or non- concentration, then it can enter into a world which is far beyond the mind: the highest End.
—The Upanishads
A person may desire to live for hundreds of years if he works according to this truth because that sort of work will not bind him to the law of karma. And there is no alternative to this way for man.
—The Upanishads
Topics: Karma
The wise see the Lord of Love in the sun, Rising in all its golden radiance To give its warmth and light and life to all.
—The Upanishads
The Eternal is veiled by the real. The Spirit of life is The Eternal.
Name and form are the real, and by them the Spirit is veiled.
—The Upanishads
It is not the language but the speaker that we want to understand.
—The Upanishads
Topics: Understanding
The Spirit is beyond sound and form, without touch and taste and perfume. It is eternal, unchangeable, and without beginning or end; indeed above reasoning. When consciousness of the Spirit manifests itself, man becomes free from the jaws of death.
—The Upanishads
This is the truth: As from a fire aflame thousands of sparks come forth, even so from the Creator an infinity of beings have life and to him return again.
—The Upanishads
Know the Self as Lord of the chariot, the body as the chariot itself, the discriminating intellect as the charioteer, and the mind as the reins. The senses, say the wise, are the horses; selfish desires are the roads they travel.
—The Upanishads
Topics: Self-love, Selfishness
As pure water poured into pure water becomes the very same, so does the Self of the illumined man or woman verily become one with the Godhead.
—The Upanishads
Whatever is outside this universe is a complete system.This universe itself is also a complete system. Only a complete system can emerge out of a complete system. If a complete system is taken out of a complete system, whatever remains is also a complete system.
—The Upanishads
Even as a great fish swims along the two banks of a river, first along the eastern bank and then the western bank, in the same way the Spirit of man moves along beside his two dwellings: this waking world and the land of sleep and dreams.
—The Upanishads
The little space within the heart is as great as this vast universe. The heavens and the earth are there, and the sun, and the moon, and the stars; fire and lightning and winds are there; and all that now is and all that is not: for the whole universe is in Him and He dwells within our heart.
—The Upanishads
He who knows that as both in one, the knowledge and the ignorance, by the ignorance crosses beyond death and by the knowledge enjoys immortality.
—The Upanishads
As when rivers flowing towards the ocean find there final peace, their name and form disappear, and people speak only of the ocean, even so the different forms of the seer of all flows towards the Spirit and find there final peace, their name and form disappear and people speak only of Spirit.
—The Upanishads
As a spider emits and draws in its thread, As plants arise on the earth, As the hairs of the head and body from a living person, So from The Eternal arises everything here.
—The Upanishads
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