Living Bhagavad Gita 19: The Religion of the Upanishads

A series of short articles on the Bhagavad Gita for people living and working in our volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous times filled with stress and fear. This scripture born in a battlefield teaches us how to face our challenges, live our life fully, achieve excellence in whatever we do and find happiness, peace and contentment.

[Continued from the previous post.]

When families are destroyed, timeless family traditions are destroyed. And when that happens, families plunge into lawlessness. And with families plunging into lawlessness, women become corrupt. And when women become corrupt, Krishna, varna sankara results. Varna sankara [the intermixture of varnas] leads to hell both those who destroy the families and the families themselves. Deprived of the offerings of water and food, the spirits of the ancestors fall. By these evil deeds of those who destroy families, causing confusion of varnas, the eternal dharmas of families and castes are destroyed. BG 1.40-43  

The religion of the Upanishadsis very different from religion as we commonly know it. It is a religion that takes us straight to the very heartof spiritual seeking. They tell us what the only way worth living is. They show us the only way to end all bondage and achieve ultimate freedom. They show us the path to reach the goal all humanity is pursuing, consciously or unconsciously. And they do not beat about the bush when they do this.  

The Upanishads do not give much importance to rituals. The term Upanishads use for rituals is ishta. Ishta comes from the same root word from which ishti comes and as is well known, ishti means Vedic rituals like putrakameshti. The word ishtika, another word of common origin, means bricks and it is because all vedic sacrifices are performed in vedis or kundas [sacrificial pits] made of bricks that they are all called ishtis or ishtas.

They speak of rituals as the lowest form of religion. Some of them openly reject rituals altogether so that people climb to the true heights of spirituality without getting trapped in the lower world of the religion of the rituals.For instance, the Maitreyi Upanishad says “The real temple is the body wherein resides the living soul, jeeva, the one and only Shiva” The Upanishad arranges sadhanas in a hierarchical order and says the best spiritual practice is meditation on the truth [uttamaa tattvachintaiva], then comes the analysis of the scriptures as the mediocre way [madhyamam shaastra-chintanam] and the lowest is the preoccupation with mantras [adhamaa mantrachintaa cha – repetition of the mantras, mantrajapa]. But there is one thing that is worse than the lowest – endlessly roaming from one pilgrimage site to another [teertha-bhraanti adhamaa-adhamaa].

Let me talk of one more mantra from the precious Upanishad to make the spirit of the Upanishads clear before we move on.

paashaana-loha-mani-mrinmaya-vigraheshu

poojaapunar-janana-bhogakareemumukshoh

tasmaadyatihswahridaya-archanamevakuryaad

baahyaarchanampariharedaounar-bhavaaya

Worshipping idols of stone, metal, jewels, crystals and clay will lead the seeker only to repeated births in the world of bondage. For that reason, if he wants liberation, freedom from the cycle of births and deaths, the committed seeker should offer worship in his own heart and abandon external worship.     

What the Gita teaches is the religion of the Upanishads. The Bhagavad Gita is the essence of the Upanishads retold by Krishna for the modern man – of his day and of today. One of the dhyana shlokas of the Bhagavad Gita traditionally chanted before any study of the scripture begins says:

Sarvopanishado gaavah dogdhaa gopaala-nandanah

Paartho vatsah sudheer bhoktaa dugdham geetaamritam mahat

The Upanishads are all cows and Krishna is the milkman. Arjuna is the calf and intelligent men are those who get to drink the milk [of these cows]. And the milk itself is the supreme nectar called Gita.

So the Bhagavad Gita is the milk of the Upanishads.

A great modern teacher once said that religions begin with the profound spiritual experiences of great masters, but in the hands of their disciples, they are reduced to philosophy and over generations of these disciples they end up as mere rituals, by which time there is very little that is true religion or spirituality left in them.

But in spite of that, to the common man rituals mean much. In fact, for the vast majority of people, religion is nothing but rituals – the daily rituals you perform at home, the rituals performed in places of worship, the ones performed on special occasions like birth, marriage and death, rituals performed as part of religious festivals and so on. When Arjuna says the ancestral spirits [pitarah] shall fall from their worlds when varna sankara takes place because they then will not get the offerings of water and food offered to them through rituals [lubdha-pindodaka-kriyaah], he is referring to rituals like shraaddhas and so on. Let’s now take a look at this argument he forwards as a reason for abandoning his duty as a kshatriya and running away from the battle for dharma leaving power over people in the hands of those who believe in power for the sake of power and not for the good of people.

O0O

Nga Nyo and Ba Saing were two poor twenty years old friends who lived in a Burmese village called Chaungo who made a living by selling betel leaves. One day Ba Saing borrowed some rice from Nga Nyo but was bitten by a snake and died before he could return the rice. This happened sometime between 1270 and 1280 of the Burmese Era, corresponding to the beginning of 20^th century CE.

Sang was now reborn in Nyo’s house, perhaps because his dying thoughts were of the rice he had borrowed from his friend and not returned. He was born not as a human being though, but as a cockerel and Nyo trained it in cock fighting. The cock won its first three fights, but lost the fourth fight and in anger Nyo brutally dashed its head on the ground holding it by its legs. Carrying the dying cock home, he threw it down near a water pot, where his cow came and touched it gently by its lips.

The affection of the cow apparently touched the dying cock deeply. After his death as a cock, Saing was reborn as a calf to this cow. His tragedy doesn’t end here either. When the calf was a year or so old, Nyo sold it to four of his friends who butchered it and cut up the meat in preparation for a feast, which Nyo himself was to join. A clerk from the nearby town and his wife happened to pass by them at that time and the woman, looking at the calf being cut up, said she wouldn’t have slaughtered it so cruelly had it been their calf. “Even if it had died a natural death,” she added, “I wouldn't have the heart to eat its meat. I would just bury it."

The calf is now reborn as the child of this couple. He remains without speaking until the age of seven, perhaps because of the pain of his previous life experiences which he still remembers. One day his father tells him that it was his payday and he will bring some fresh clothes for him, but he must speak. That evening the father comes home from office with pretty clothes for his son. And for the first time in his life the child speaks. His first words were, “Pay back Nga Nyo’s measure of rice.”

When the father agrees he would do anything for him, pay back not just a measure of rice but a whole bag if necessary, the boy tells him in that case they should go to Nyo and settle the debt immediately.

Guided by their seven-year-old son at each step, the father reaches Nga Nyo’shome, carrying with him a bag of rice in a cart. Instantly recognizing Nga Nyo and delighted at seeing his old friend who is by now an elderly man, the boy asks him, "Hey Nga Nyo, don’t you remember me?" The elderly man is offended when he is thus addressed by his name by a mere childbut is pacified when the clerk explained that the child believes he is old friend of Nyo.

The boy then tells Nyo that he is actually his old friend Ba Saing. He recalls several of their experiences together when they betel sellers and explains how he had died by snake bite and had been reborn as a cockerel in his house. He recalls the cockfights and Nyo’s killing the cockerel in anger and his subsequent birth as a calf because of the kindness a cow had shown him. Saing then recalls to a by now silently weeping Nyo how he was butchered as a one year old heifer to be eaten in a feast by him and his friends. He recalls the compassionate words of his present mother to the dying heifer as a result of which he was born as their child, adding that he has come to repay the rice he had borrowed from him as Ba Saing.

As the Bhagavad Gita says, death is the individual leaving one body to move on to another – in the words of the Gita, like discarding old clothes and using fresh ones. It is something that happens to all of us – jaatasya hi dhruvo mrityuh. And just as death is certain to the living,it is equally certain that everyone who dies is reborn – dhruvam janma mritasya cha.

This cycle of birth, life and death, and again birth, life and death goes on and on endlessly. Because of what happens between death and rebirth, because of the trauma of the life in the womb [which the west does not accept as painful but considers the most blissful state] and the trauma of the process of the birth itself [which the west accepts], most of us do not remember our past lifetimes. It is only rare individuals who escape this vismarana, the erasing of the memory oftheir past existences, though people who remember their past existences in their childhood are not as rare as we would like to believe. For instance, lots of children in their moments of great fear, like during a nightmare, scream for their father or mother but fail to recognise them when they come running and continue screaming and looking for their mother or father as was portrayed frighteningly in the movie The Reincarnation of Audrey Rose. Even in the case of people who retain these memories, practically all of them lose those memories over time.  Nga Nyo seems to be a rare individual who retains these memories.

Speaking to Arjuna in the Gita, Krishna tells his friend that both of them have had numerous lives in the past and he remembers them all though Arjuna does not:

bahooni me vyateetaani janmaani tava cha arjuna

taany aham veda sarvaani na twam vettha parantapa BG 4.5

O0O

As we saw in the Burmese story above, after Ba Saing is killed by snakebite he is immediately reborn as Nga Nyo’s cockerel – there does not seem to have been much time gap.  And after the cockerel is killed by Ba Saing, it is soon reborn again as a calf – again without much time gap. And then after the calf is slaughtered, it is reborn as the son of the clerk while Ba Saing is still alive, though by now he has grown old. All the four life times of Ba Saing happen within a single life time of Nnga Nyo.

In the Mahabharata we have the story of Princess Amba of Kashi who kills herself in a ritual fire she ignited with the desire to be reborn as Bhishma’s killer. She is subsequently reborn as Drupada’s daughter Shikhandini while Bhishma is still alive.

The Padma Purana tells us that the washer man who criticises Rama for keeping in his house Sita who has lived in ‘Ravana’s house’ was in his previous life one of a pair of birds whom Sita in her childhood had separated from its mate. The bird kills itself after cursing that it would soon be reborn and will cause Sita’s separation from her husband in that life.    

The understanding of India’s epics and Puranas, as well that of other scriptures, is that rebirths happen is fairly quick succession and the bodiless state, the state between death and rebirth, is usually not long.

One of the books that talks most authentically about death and explains what happens in the moments of death and immediately afterwards is the very unusual book called The Tibetan Book of the Dead or Bardo Thodol, authored by Tibet’s great Yogi Padmasambhava about a thousand years ago and first translated into English in 1924 by W.Y. Evans Wentz and published with an introduction by Dr Carl Jung. It is a book based on the experiences of great yogis who die consciously, live in the post-death state consciously and then take birth consciously. The book discusses what happens to us immediately before death, during the moments of death and following death. It describes in great detail the experiences the bodiless individual undergoes during the first forty-eight days after death. Bardo Thodol stops with the forty-eighth day because practically all dead individuals find a new body to be reborn into by then. The book describes how the dead individual searches for an appropriate body and chooses one among the available ones according to his karmas – his driving psychological needs – and enters it to be reborn again.

O0O

Let’s now look at a case of reincarnation from the western world discussed by Rosemary Ellen Guiley in her Tales of Reincarnation – that of Gail Bartley, an attractive young woman who worked as an advertising professional in New York. Let me reproduce here part of an article of mine called Reincarnation, Transactional Analysis and Karma [available online] in which I discuss her case as narrated by Guiley.

“Soon after her marriage ended in divorce, she fell in love with Roger. As an advertising executive she had ample opportunities for meeting other attractive young men, she did not really like Roger, her mother took an instant dislike for him and a voice in Gail’s head kept screaming all the time, ‘Get away. He hates you. He is trying to destroy you!’ In spite of all these Gail felt irresistibly drawn toward Roger. And he abused her constantly, hurt her emotionally and did not hesitate to beat her up occasionally; once he even tried to choke her to death during one of the fairly frequent violent outbursts between them. The relationship had wrecked her personal life, drained her emotionally, destroyed her self-esteem. However, in spite of all this, Gail found herself unable to get away from the man – and she completely failed to understand her love-hate relationship with this man, as did the other people around her. 

“It was this riddle of her relationship with Roger that eventually sent her to a past life regressionist. Upon regression, reaching her first past life experience, Gail found herself standing in a bedroom with high ceilings. She was now a twenty-three year old woman called Joyce in the 1920s. The experience, completely new to Joyce, was strange and eerie: she was at once the woman Joyce and Gail, who was watching her. Gail experienced that Joyce was shaking with fear, fear caused by a man who was with her in the room, lying on their bed – and that man was none other than Joyce’ s husband and the man Gail knew as Roger.

“And then Gail experienced the man getting up from their bed and walking towards her. Joyce was now shaking in terror and Gail’s breathing changed as she watched it. She began to hyperventilate and the regressionist asked Gail what was happening and she told her the man was strangling her. Joyce fell on her knees at the violence of the attack and then collapsed on the ground as the man continued to throttle her. However, Joyce did not die. Before that could happen, the man released her throat and walked away, leaving her on the ground, struggling to breathe.

“In a later part of the regression, Gail once again felt Joyce’s terror. Joyce was in their room again, that same night, and she hears him approaching her, climbing the stairs leading to their room. As he comes near, she sees he has something in his hand, which he is hiding behind him. His eyes are cold and she breathes in the hatred that emanates from him.

‘He rips open her gown with the knife he was hiding behind him, and brutally stabs her with it. Gail feels choked, her breath escapes her and she realizes she is experiencing the last moments of her life as Joyce. Coming out her body and hovering in a corner of the room, Joyce watches what is happening. One of the things she witnesses is her husband’s utter shock at what he has done, his complete disbelief and intense remorse.

“Further regressions reveal a sad tale of revenge and guilt spanning across life times, centuries and continents. It all started in ancient Rome where Roger and Gail in a long ago lifetime lived as brothers. The two of them loved each other deeply and thoroughly enjoyed their life as Roman citizens. In her regression, Gail sees herself as the younger brother, a blond young man filled with raw energy and impatience to win a chariot race that is about to begin. The race begins and his chariot takes off like a storm, another chariot keeping abreast with him. And then the tragedy takes place. His chariot swerves violently, hits the other chariot, the man driving that chariot thrown off his balance and falls, his head hitting his own chariot wheel, causing an instant death. In the middle of his shock he realizes the saddest truth: the man killed by his mistake is none other than his beloved brother.

“This life follows a series of lifetimes revealed by the regression, in each the elder brother is violent and vengeful, and the younger brother, Gail of this lifetime, is his victim. In one of these, Gail is a boy of seventeen, George, who lived in the Old West of America with his ill tempered, hateful, domineering father and his mother who was terrified of him. On one occasion his father catches George with his girlfriend, a girl who had grown up with him as his playmate. The two were together in the barn and they were kissing and feeling each other. The father orders George back into the house and then rapes George’s girlfriend. One night the boy is asleep in his tent while camping out with his father in the wilderness. He wakes up hearing repeated dull thuds and realizes his father is digging something in the night. His father has been furious with him that evening about some small thing, maybe he hadn’t tied up the horses properly. Sudden realization comes: his father is digging a grave for him! And then the father hits him on the head with a shovel and he is dead and out of his body. He sees his father dragging his body to the pit he had dug and burying him in it.”

More regressions reveal more such lifetimes in each of which the elder brother who was killed in the accident is the violent aggressor and the younger brother his victim. They are born again and again, repeating their life pattern that is now more than two thousand years old. 

As this real life past life regression story too tells us, the dead does not live forever in some mysteriousdimension, but are born again and again, directed by their life scripts that India calls karmas. 

Dr Brian Weiss is today the most widely known authority on rebirth and past life regression in the western world who uses his knowledge and expertise for healing people from diseases which cannot be explained by causes in their current life. In his best seller books like Many LivesMany Masters and Through Time into Healing, he talks about people being born again and again and when regressed reliving their past lives. In his work too what we come across is every one of us being reborn after our death, as the Gita speaks of when it says jatasya hi dhruvo mrityuh dhruvam janma mritasya cha: Those who are born are certain to die and those who die are certain to be born again.

O0O

Even though the Upanishads reject ritualism and the path the Bhagavad Gita teaches is not of rituals but of the yogas of bhakti, karma, jnana and so on, rituals do have their own beauty if you practice them with the right vision. For instance, bali and tarpana are offered to the dead ancestors  in the rituals of shraaddha. Shraaddhas are offerings made out of shraddhra for ones ancestors – love and reverence for them. They are also expressions of our gratitude and indebtedness to them – we wouldn’t have been born but for them. In that sense they are beautiful. But what Arjuna means when he says that when varna sankara happens these ancestors will fall from their worlds is that these ancestors are not reborn on earth but live permanently in another world where they are sustained by the tarpana we offer to them and would fall from there if tarpana is not offered by their children.

As the Gita says, to quote again verse 2.27 quoted earlier, jatasya hi dhruvo mrityuh dhruvam janma mritasya cha: those who are born are bound to die and those who die are bound to be reborn. If the ancestors are already born on earth and living their lives here as new individuals, with new identities, in new families, with new parents, then sending offerings for them into some other world does not make sense, apart from the question how something physical offered here can reach them in their world.

Shraadha rituals are exactly what the name says – expressions of our love, reverence and indebtedness to the dead. As far as sustenance in post-death existences is considered, what sustains us there is our own karmas and not what others do.

So Arjuna’s argument that the war will cause varna sankara and that will ultimately make our ancestors fall from their worlds does not hold water. That is yet another argument he gives for running away from the unhappy challenge he has to face in the battlefield.   

O0O

The Great Way of the Heart

I read something tremendously beautiful this morning in Osho’s The Discipline of Transcendence, Vol. 1. The book is published in four volumes and is a commentary given by Osho in Pune in 1976 on forty-two sutras by the Buddha. The original book is called The Sutra of Forty-two Chapters and, unlike most other books on the teachings of the Buddha, this has never existed in India – neither in Sanskrit, nor in Pali or any other language. Tradition tells us that in response to a request from Emperor Ming of the Han dynasty in AD 67, a small group of Buddhist monks went to China and there made a short anthology of Buddha’s sayings as a first introduction of the great master’s teachings to the Chinese people.

Buddhism is commonly understood as a religion of the head as against the religion of the heart or faith. However, the sutra that is commented upon below tells us how wrong the notion is. As the Upanishads say, spirituality is not for the head at all. Naayam aatmaa pravachanena labhyah, na medhaya, na bahuna shrutena: “This Self cannot be attained through discourses, not through the intellect, nor by lots of learning.”

Spirituality is something to be cultivated through the silence of the heart, through stillness, through joy and celebration, through the awe one feels for existence, through trust, through love and through waiting.

The Katha Upanishad mantra which says naayam aatmaa pravachanena labhyah, also says later in the same mantra: yam eva esha vrnute tena labhyah, tasya esha aatmaa vivrnute tanum svaam: It is to be attained only by the one whom it chooses. To him this Self reveals its body.

That choice – swayamvara – is made by the Self. And the Self chooses only the one who has silence in his heart, stillness, joy and celebration; only the one whose heart is filled with awe, with trust, with love and with waiting. Into such hearts, the Self descends. In such hearts, the Self reveals itself.

Here is the sutra along with very short excerpts from Osho’s detailed commentary on it.

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“IF YOU ENDEAVOUR TO EMBRACE THE WAY THROUGH MUCH LEARNING, THE WAY WILL NOT BE UNDERSTOOD. IF YOU OBSERVE THE WAY WITH SIMPLICITY OF HEART, GREAT INDEED IS THIS WAY.”

Life is very simple. Just sometimes put your head away, sometimes behead yourself, sometimes look with no clouds in the eyes—just look. Sometimes sit by the side of a tree—just feel. By the side of a waterfall—listen. Lie down on the beach and listen to the roar of the ocean, feel the sand, the coolness of it, or look at the stars, and let that silence penetrate you. Or look at the dark night and let that velvety darkness surround you, envelop you, dissolve you. This is the way of the simple heart.

If you approach life through this simplicity you will become wise. You may not know the Veda, you may not know the Bible, you may not know the Gita, but you will come to know the real song of life—and that is where the real Gita is, the real song is. You may not know the Veda, but you will come to know the real Veda—that which is written by God himself.

This life is his book, this life is his Bible, this life is his Koran. Recite it! Recite this life. Sing it, dance it, be in love with it—and by and by you will know what the Way is, because by and by you will become more and more happy. The more happy you become, the more you are acquainted with the Way, the right Way. And whenever a step goes out of line, immediately you feel pain.

Pain is an indication that you have missed the Law, and happiness is an indication that you have been in harmony. Happiness is a by-product. If you go in accordance with the Law you are happy. Unhappiness is an accident. It simply shows you have gone far away from the Law.

Make happiness and unhappiness your criterion. The path is: become simple, trust more, doubt a little less. If you really want to doubt, doubt doubt, that’s all. Doubt doubt; trust trust—and you will never miss.

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Upanishads: A Personal Encounter

Speaking about Indian thought, EWF Tomlin says in his book Great Philosophies of the East: “Indian thought arrives at subtleties of distinction so varied and acute that the uninitiated and unprepared reader may well receive the impression that Indian philosophers enjoy the use of half a dozen intellects instead of one. We are accustomed to the idea of scientists constructing artificial brains to effect calculations which neither a single individual nor a team of individuals devoting a lifetime to the task, could hope to achieve. The elaborate system of certain Indian philosophers sometimes appear to be the product of such socially-constructed intellects.”

Of all Indian thought, the most highly respected is the philosophy of the Upanishads. Strictly speaking though, the teachings of the Upanishads cannot be called either thought or philosophy. For, they originate at a dimension beyond thought. The wisdom of the Upanishads is born when all thought has been transcended, when the mind itself has been transcended. Speaking of a dimension beyond the mind and thought, the Upanishads themselves say: yato vacho nivartante aprapya manasa saha – “that from which words return, having not reached, along with the mind.” It is in this dimension that the wisdom of the Upanishads is born. And when anyone, at any time, reaches that dimension, the wisdom of the Upanishads is again revealed to him.

A modern master uses the metaphor of an awakened man and a sleeping man to point out the difference between the wisdom of the Upanishads and philosophy. Philosophy is like the thoughts of a man who has never seen the morning lying in his bed, the widows of the room closed, speculating on what the morning is like. He has never seen a sunrise, he has never heard the sounds of the birds and animals that wake up with the dawn, never seen plants and trees bathed in the glory of the morning light. And he lies there, refusing to open his eyes, speculating about that the morning is like. And he forms theories of what the morning is like, he contradicts the theories of other men like him who have formed other theories of the morning but have like him never seen a morning. Since none of them have seen the morning, you can have as many theories about what the morning is like, and one man can have many theories about what the morning is all about. The Upanishads, in contrast, are the wisdom of the man who has woken up, opened the windows of his room and looked out. He has seen the rising sun, he has heard the birds and the animals, he has seen the plants and trees bathed in morning glory, he has smelt the freshness of the morning and felt its wonderful touch on his skin.

The Upanishads preserve for us from across time the teachings of the ancient masters who had seen the morning, who had the direct experience of the highest truth.

All the Upanishads speak of the same truth – for truth cannot be different. And yet their experiences will be different – different to the extent that ten people looking out of their windows will experience the same morning in ten different ways.

The Upanishads are not logical thought systems. They do not have the consistency of philosophical systems. For, they are ecstatic outpourings of masters inspired by their experiences. Nor are the seers of the Upanishads interested in constructing meaningful thought systems. For, their aim is something entirely different from that of the philosophers. The seers of the Upanishads are interested in only one thing. In making us wake up, in making us open the windows and look out through them. Uttishthata, jagrata – that is their call: Get up, wake up. They are interested in intellectually convincing us only to the extent that it will inspire us to wake up, open the windows and look out. So they use logic, they use words, they use shock treatments, they use all other means available to them, not with the intention of constructing systems, but to motivate us to wake up, get up, open the windows and look out.

The Upanishads begin in experience and their end is experience. The Upanishads originate in the experience of the seers and their end will be achieved when we experience the truth that they have experienced.

The word seer is interesting. It literally means that – one who has seen. In Sanskrit, rish [rsh, actually] means to see, and rishi means one who sees or has seen, a seer. The teachers of the Upanishads are the seers who have seen That and who constantly see That One [tad ekam] even when they look at the many.

O0O

Some of the most beautiful things about the Upanishads were told by a man who was professedly a nonbeliever in religion. In Discovery of India, Jawaharlal Nehru, with an ecstatic thrill in his words, says: “Again and again the restless mind peeps out, ever seeking, ever questioning: “At whose behest doth mind light on its perch? At whose command doth life, the first proceed? At whose behest the men send forth this speech? What god, indeed, directed eye and ear?” Again, “Why cannot the wind remain still? Why has the human mind no rest? Why, and in search of what, does the water run out and cannot stop its flow even for a moment?” It is the adventure of man that is continually calling and there is no resting on the way and no end of the journey.

“There is no humility about all this quest, the humility before an all-powerful deity, so often associated with religion. It is the triumph of mind over the environment. “My body will be reduced to ashes and my breath will join the restless and deathless air, but not I and my deeds. O mind, remember this always, remember this.” In the morning prayer, the sun is addressed thus, “O sun of refulgent glory, I am the same person as makes thee what you art!” What superb confidence!””

I still recall vividly the thrill that passed through me as I read these words of Nehru as a young boy. I remember taking the book straight to my mother and reading Nehru’s words out to her and sharing my ecstasy with her. Reading these lines was an important event in my life. I believe I was born with strong spiritual urges, I believe I was born carrying with me forgotten memories from across lifetimes of searches for the truth the Upanishads speak about. Many of us are. All that we require to ignite the fire within is a spark. I was transformed by my contact with these lines from Nehru.

Coming back to the Upanishads, here is what the great scholar C. Rajagopalachari had to say about them: “The spacious imagination, the majestic sweep of thought, and the almost reckless spirit of exploration with which, urged by the compelling thirst for truth, the Upanishad teachers and pupils dig into the ‘open secret’ of the universe, make this most ancient of the world’s holy books still the most modern and the most satisfying.”

Numerous western scholars too have found in the Upanishads the highest wisdom of humanity. The philosopher Schopenhauer praised them endlessly and read a few pages from the Upanishads every night before he went to sleep. He said about his reading of the Upanishads: “In the whole world there is no study so beneficial and so elevating as that of the Upanishads; it has been the consolation of my life and will be that of my death.” Schopenhauer felt that “the Upanishads are the production of the highest human wisdom and I consider them almost superhuman in conception,” and held that “From every sentence of the Upanishads deep, original and sublime thoughts arise, and the whole is pervaded by a high and holy and earnest spirit.”

“On the tree of wisdom there is no fairer flower than Upanishads and no finer fruit than the Vedanta philosophy,” said Paul Deussen. Other famous westerners who came under the spell of the Upanishads include Wagner, Tolstoy, Emerson, Thoreau and Walt Whitman, my favourite American poet whose Songs to Myself closely echo the wisdom of the Upanishads.

O0O

Most of the Upanishads are in the form of questions and answers, and one of them is indeed named the Upanishad of Questions – Prashna Upanishad. In their attempt to communicate the incommunicable, the seers use all tools available to them: similes, metaphors, illustrations, symbolism, stories, self-contradictions, all. The truth of the Upanishads is not validated by any of these though – these are merely the tools the teachers use. To use an ancient example, it is like pointing out the moon with the moon with your finger and saying it is the bright thing that you see among the branches of the three – neither your finger nor the branches of the tree has any connection with the moon.

The truth of the upanishads is validated only by one thing – the experience of it, initially by the teacher and subsequently by the student. The Upanishads themselves reject the intellectual understanding of their content and call it worthless. “Yadi manyase suvedeti, dabhram evapi noonam tvam vettha brahmano roopam,” says the Kena Upanishad: “If you think you know it well, indeed you know very little of the nature of Brahman.” And then the Upanishad explains why it holds so; For: “This Truth is that by which the mind understands, and not that which the mind can understand. This cannot be seen by the eyes, it is that by which the eyes see; this cannot be heard by the ears, it is that by which the ears hear.”

The Upanishads are a journey into the nature of ourselves and the world in which we live. Speaking of the nature of the world [jagat], the Upanishads tell us that the world is not real the way we experience it. A man under hallucination does not experience the world as it is, but the world is to him whatever his mind shows it to be. So too is it with all of us. We do not perceive the world as it is.


You do not really need the example of a man under hallucination to understand what the seers tell us. A straight rod as it leaves one medium and enters another is deflected. Our eyes see a mirage in the desert where there is no water. So too, the sages tell us, the world is not seen by us in its real form. Our mind distorts reality as a defective, or a concave or a convex mirror does. To see the world as it is, say the seers, we need a mind that has been purified of all the things that distort it, a mind that has been emptied of thoughts and made still.

The Upanishads use a word to speak of the illusory nature of the world – maya. Under the influence of maya, the impossible becomes possible, the unreal appears as real and the real as unreal. One other metaphor used by the Upanishads to explain the nature of the world as it really is and as it appears to us is that of the alata [alaata] – the circle of glowing fire that appears when a child waves a burning stick. While the fire at the tip is real, the fire circle is not. It is mere appearance. And so is the world, say the Upanishads. While there is a reality behind the world, the world is not real as it appears to us.

Incidentally, Adi Shankara’s paramaguru [guru’s guru] Gaudapada wrote a scholarly treatise on the Mandukya Upanishad, a short Upanishad that discusses the four states of consciousness, and one of the chapters in the treatise is called alata-shanti-prakarana, the chapter on putting out the alata.

In their enquiry into the nature of the self [jiva], the Upanishads discover and declare that the source from which we spring and the source from which the universe comes into existence are one and the same. They also declare that we have never been separated from our source, our roots are still there. The tree might hold its head up in the skies, but its roots are still deep in the earth. In the same way, even now our roots are in that Truth and we are that Truth, even as an ornament made of gold forever remains gold.

Aham brahmasmi: I am Brahman, the Boundless, the source of all creation, say the seers of the Upanishads, declaring this truth.

Four mahavakyas, great statements, selected from different Upanishads beautifully summarise the teachings of the rishis on this topic. The four mahavakyas are: ayam atma brahma – This self is Brahman; prajnanam brahma – Brahman is consciousness; tat tvam asi – You are that; and aham brahmasmi – I am Brahman. While the first three are the teachings of the rishis based on their personal experience, the final statement is of the student based on his eventual experience of the self.

According the seers, all suffering is because we consider ourselves different from what we really are and all human life is nothing but a search for oneself, a pilgrimage into oneself, and all our struggles are our attempts to reclaim our true self which we have apparently lost. Suffering will not end, grief and misery will not end, whatever we do, whatever we attain, so long as we do not realize our real nature. One of the metaphors used by the ancient teachers to explain this is that of the musk deer, which frantically, madly, searches for musk all over the mountains and forests, without knowing that the source of it is itself.

Unlike most other religions and even subsequent Hinduism, the Upanishads are not too preoccupied with Go [ishwara], though it does speak of God, and of the reality that functions as God.

The God of the Upanishads is precisely the God of the Vedas, whose vision of God is unique in the history of world’s theistic thought. As Dr Abinash Chandra Bose puts it, “Vedic theism is neither monotheism nor polytheism, but the worship of the One Divinity in many names and forms. This is precisely what the Vedas mean when they say ‘ekam sat vipra bahudha vadanti’. Divinity is the One as many and many as the One. And while that one is contemplated upon in the neuter, the many could be masculine or feminine, of any age and of any relation to man. In form the deities are many, but in essence they are one. When the one is conceived as many, each one of them carries all the ‘vibhutis’ of the one: all of them are splendorous [jyoti], have glory [bhargas], greatness [mahas], loveliness [shri], and so on. Each of them is all powerful, all knowing and all pervading. At the same time, each of them has all qualities, is beyond time and place, beyond all limitations, like the One Divinity which is at once saguna and nirguna – It has no attributes and yet all attributes are Its.”

It is this God that the Upanishads too speak of. Ishavasyam idam sarvam, says the first mantra of the Ishavasya Upanishad, which sees all existence as pervaded by the One God, permeated by the One God. Here is a mantra from the highly poetic Shvetashvatara Upanishad, which says precisely the same thing in different words: “You are woman, you are man, you are the young boy and the young girl and you are the old man walking with the help of a stick. You, becoming manifest, become all this. You are the blue moth, you are the green bird with red eyes, you are the lightning-bearer [the cloud], carrying lightning in your womb, you are the seasons, the oceans. All things are born of you though you yourself are without a beginning, and you are pervaded in everything.” Shvetashvatara Upanishad 4.3-4

Apart from pointing out the true nature of ourselves and the world and the higher reality called Brahman, the Upanishads also teach us how to realize – to reach, to discover, to experience – the truth of their teachings.

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How many Upanishads are there? The traditional answer is one hundred and eight, which in fact, is the wrong answer. The Motilal Banarsidas collection of Upanishads alone, for instance, has one hundred and eighty eight Upanishads. The correct answer is we do not know exactly how many Upanishads are there – many have been lost, and many are still being discovered from obscure sources. At one time the Upanishads formed a huge collection of literature. The reason why we say Upanishads are one hundred and eight is that one of the Upanishads give us a list of Upanishads and this consists of one hundred and eight Upanishads – but there is no reason why this list should be considered as all inclusive.

One of the highly misleading classifications of the Upanishads is into major and minor Upanishads. I do not know who originally classified them so [there is no such classification in Sanskrit], but whoever did it did a great disservice to the Upanishads, to Indian wisdom and spirituality itself. The classification gives us the impression that some Upanishads are more important than the others, of speaker of deeper truths, both of which are very wrong. Some Upanishads are called major only because several great acharyas have commented upon them, including Adi Shankara. These are the Ishavasya [Isha] Upanishad, Kena Upanishad, Katha Upanishad, Prashna Upanishad, Mundaka Upanishad, Mandukya Upanishad, Taittiriya Upanishad, Aitareya Upanishad, Chhandogya Upanishad and Brihadaranyaka Upanishad. [Isha-Kena-Katha-Prashna-Mundaka-Mandukya-Tittiri, Aitareyam cha Chhandogyam Brihadaranyakam tatha, says the sloka that is traditionally used as mnemonic device to remember their names. The names are conventionally listed in this order.]

The reason why the great acharyas chose to comment upon specifically on these Upanishads could be that together they cover most of what the Upanishadic lore teaches us. Or it could be that Acharya Shankara chose to comment only on these for his own reasons [Time, for instance; he lived a very short life, constantly travelling and constantly engaged in debates, constantly teaching.] and the subsequent acharyas chose to focus their attention mainly on these.

Let’s now take a look at some of the Upanishads.

Continued ... 2.

Book Review: The Life We Are Given

"The Life We Are Given is a synthesis and culmination of seventy years’ combined experience by two of the wisest and most pioneering explorers and teachers of the possibilities of human transformation. I recommend it highly.” Dean Ornish, MD, President and Director, Preventive Medicine Research Institute


The first thing that fascinated me about The Life We Are Given is the authors themselves: George Leonard and Michael Murphy.

I have always loved George Leonard in a special way ever since I read his beautiful book The Ultimate Athlete. The book has remained an obsession with me and ideas from it have enriched a large number of my training programmes for corporate executives, to whom I invariably recommend the book. The ultimate athlete Leonard speaks about is not really an athlete in the normal sense of the term, though it can include athletes too. He means by the term every person who performs at his best in any field – in athletics, in other sports, in singing, in dancing, public speaking, mountain climbing, brain surgery, leading a team or an organization or even such plain ordinary areas as a desk job in a nine-to-five office. In The Ultimate Athlete Leonard studies the physical and psychological state that makes peak performance possible in any walk of life. Associating Leonard’s ideas with ideas from the Bhagavad Gita and other Indian texts has enriched my insights into how we can transform work through karma yoga to achieve self-transcendence and experience timelessness. It is through Leonard that I gathered my first western insights into what Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi would later call the flow state – the peak performing state in which excellence is effortless.

George Leonard is one of the founders of the human potential movement in the west and was a senior editor of Look for seventeen years. He is also an aikido teacher of great repute who has introduced the martial art to tens of thousands of people across the world. He is currently president of the Board of Esalen Institute and a past president of the Association for Humanistic Psychology.

Michael Murphy, the other author of the book, is the co founder of Esalen Institute whose work has been of great interest to me, particularly what relates to human consciousness and altered states of consciousness. He is also a member of the International Advisory Council of Auroville Foundation, Pondicherry.

Murphy’s introduction to Sri Aurobindo was through Frederic Spiegelberg, who also introduced him to Sri Ramana Maharshi [my grandteacher – two of my teachers were the maharshi’s direct disciples]. Murphy was a student at Stanford University doing his premed when he attended a lecture by Spiegelberg who had just returned from India where he had met both Ramana Maharshi and Aurobindo. Inspired, Michael Murphy gave up his studies for premed and switched to philosophy. He began reading widely, with special focus on Indian wisdom and also started practicing meditation. Soon he was in India where he visited Ramana Ashram in Tiruannamalai and spent a year and half at Aurobindo Ashram in Pondicherry. Back in the states, he founded with his friend Richard Price Esalen Institute, which soon drew world attention and became the world’s new spirituo-intellectual capital in an age when humanity was breaking off chains of traditions that have been binding it for thousands of years and casting off blinds that kept it on the ‘straight path’. Those who led programs at Esalen included such intellectual celebrities as historian Arnold Toynbee, theologian Paul Tillich, psychologists Abraham Maslow, Carl Rogers and BF Skinner, mythologist Joseph Campbell, gestalt therapist Fritz Perls and family counsellor Virginia Satir.

The Life We Are Given, described as “A Long-Term Program for Realizing the Potential of Body, Mind, Heart, and Soul,” is a manual for personal growth based on what the authors call Integral Transformative Practice [ITP]. It is based on certain principles from Leonard’s book on long-term practice, Mastery, some of which are: Lasting transformation requires long-term practice; the most effective transformative practices involve the whole person – body, mind, heart, and soul; transformative principles in this age are best guided by several mentors rather than a single, all-powerful guru; and, though practitioners at times must surrender creatively to mentors, community and transformative agencies beyond ordinary functioning, the final authority always remains with the individual. Much of the book is also based on Murphy’s The Future of the Body.

The book also owes its existence to the first ITP programme, called Cycle 92, that began in January ’92 and continued for eleven months with one two-hour session every week. Cycle 92 is discussed at some length in the first part of the book, called Vision and Practice. The programme seems to have been quite effective. As the programme began, one of the participants, a thirty-nine-year-old psychologist, wrote describing her condition: “I am frequently in conflict over finances, writing ability, and my relationships with [a former teacher].” At the end of the programme she wrote: “This has been my most startling result. My financial situation has tripled as a result of my not plotting how it would resolve. My most serious interpersonal conflict has completely resolved…. There has been an almost total shift in my attitude. From former attempts to ‘make’ things happen to an acceptance of whatever is presented and an acceptance of whatever I am feeling. I truly feel more flowing and internally without the former obstacles that caused me sadness. I no longer feel stuck.”

One of the beautiful exercises described here reminded me of one line from a prayer from Rabindranath Tagore that I love very much: “Grant me that I may not be a coward, feeling your mercy in my success alone; but let me find the grasp of your hand in my failure.”

Part II of the book, A Transformative Practice for Our time, where the authors discuss the ITP practice in detail, gives a large number of beautiful exercises. Exercises for developing balance and centre are named GRACE exercises, because they involve grounding [G], relaxation [R], awareness [A], Centering [C], and Energy [E]. The exercises in this group include several using water metaphors – Drill for Water, Pump Water, Fountain, Finger Spray, Half Windmill, and Rowing. I was happy to find surya namaskar included here [which I find beautiful but do not practice] along with many exercises from Yoga.

The instructions for deep relaxation exercises are thorough and include a relaxation visualization. I found the instructions [and the exercise] splendid. The instructions are practically identical with an exercise I have been using in some of my own training programmes for years and I have noticed they work beautifully every time. Those who are familiar with yoganidra would observe this is very close to the basic yoganidra practice. This could be a light meditation exercise in itself or could be the foundation exercise for numerous other practices, including a variety of meditations, NLP and regression.

The book proceeds from the deep relaxation exercise to creating energy waves, affirmations, image work and so on. The image work includes imaging for improving vision, preventing /reversing coronary artery disease, opening our hearts to others and becoming more loving, for reshaping the body and improving physical performance, increasing creativity and so on. The book also describes a simple meditation per se and discusses the benefits of meditation at great length. A full chapter is devoted to physical exercises [The Exercise Factor] and another to food [Food for Transformation]. I loved the chapter titled The Body as a Teacher. Like the authors, I have always believed that there is profound wisdom in the body and taught that the body’s wisdom is far superior to that of the mind. I totally agree with what the book says: the body is also a master teacher.

The book’s core vision has close affinity to what Sri Aurobindo said about the divinity within man and its unfoldment. With Aurobindo and several other masters since antiquity, eastern and western, the book believes that we enjoy “a secret contact or kinship with the founding principle of the universe. The recognition of a reality ordinarily hidden but immediately apprehended as our true identity, our immortal soul, our “original face,” our secret at-one-ness with God…. The idea that divinity is present in all things, manifesting itself through the immense adventure of evolution, helps account for the mystery of our great surplus capacities, our yearnings for God, our inextinguishable creativity, our sense of grace in human affairs. It helps explain our quest for self-transcendence and humanity’s proliferation of transformative practices.”

The authors of the book are convinced that “Every person on this planet can join the procession of transformative practice that began with our ancient ancestors. That is the guiding idea of this book. The ways of growth described here, which can be adopted by anyone, embrace our many parts. We call them integral to signify their inclusion of our entire human nature – body, mind, heart, and soul.” [From the Preface to the book]

There is one point on which I disagree with the authors: when they say “transformative principles in this age are best guided by several mentors rather than a single, all-powerful guru.” Certain things are not all that much influenced by social changes or lifestyle changes, and spirituality is one of these. Your growth happens not because of others, but from within yourself. It is not others who help you grow, but your own psychological and spiritual disposition. When you open yourself up completely, growth begins. To whom you open up is not as important as how completely you are open. In fact, as spiritual traditions all over the world have always believed, working with one master is better than working with several at a time. Working with several masters, in any age, modern or ancient, could even be detrimental to spiritual growth. Which is not to say that we cannot learn from several teachers.

Apart from this, The Life We Are Given is a beautiful, compact package of integral growth exercises and insights that can transform us completely – provided we are willing to give it time, dedication and commitment, a need the authors make sure we realize. They repeat it many times throughout the book. If you are willing to give these to the book, then it is for you, and a wonderful journey awaits you. If you just intend to browse through the book and then put it away, you might as well forget it.

By the way, I loved the short collection of quotations from masters across the world, given in the chapter The Marriage of Theory and Practice. I liked best the one from St Catherine of Genoa, who said: “My Me is God, nor do I recognize any other Me except my God himself.” This proves for the millionth time that the highest experience of masters is the same all over the world. The ancient Indian rishis would cheer Catherine, and say, true, and they do not know “any other God except the Me in myself.” This is the truth expressed by the Upanishads in such words as aham brahmāsmi.

The title of that chapter, The Marriage of Theory and Practice, is perhaps the best description of the book. For, it contains the highest wisdom with practices that will work beautifully for anyone who is sincere about them. This is a marriage that works as all marriages should but not all do.

O0O

The Life We Are Given, by George Leonard and Michael Murphy, Editions India, an imprint of Stone Hill Foundation Publishing, Cochin 2006, xiv+210 pp, ISBN 81-89658-43-3

Dara Shikoh and the Upanishads

Dara Shikoh, Emperor Shah Jahan’s son and brother of the much hated Aurangazeb, believed that the mystical traditions of both Hinduism and Islam spoke of the same truth. Unlike Aurangazeb, whose spiritual and religious views were fundamentalist, Dara Shikoh, who was a follower of the Qadiri order of Sufis and a disciple of Miyan Mir, devoted much of his time to the study of ancient Indian spirituality along with Islamic traditions and felt that the search for God was one all over the world and at all times. In his search for truth, Dara Shikoh tried to find the common ground between Upanishadic and Islamic spirituality believing that there was no need for spiritual traditions to live in isolation from each other and their mingling could produce a tradition that is healthier than either.

As the eldest son of Shah Jahan, and as the emperor’s and his wife Mumtaz Mahal’s favourite, the Mugal empire should have gone to him. But that was not to be, mostly due to the ambitions of the younger Aurangazeb. There were continuous power struggles among the royal brothers and much of Dara’s time was spent in these struggles and the battles that they lead to. In the middle of it all, though, he amazingly found time to pursue his quest for the common mystical heritage of Hinduism and Islam, particularly as taught by the Sufis. He believed that what is referred to in the Quran as Kitab al-Maknun [The Hidden Book] is actually the Upanishads. It was inspired by this belief that he spent whatever time he could find in translating the Upanishads into Persian, with the help of several pundits of Banaras. His translation of the Upanishads is appropriately called Sirr-i-Akbar, “The Greatest Secret.’ Before Sirr-i-Akbar he had written several other books, the most famous of which is Majma ul-Bahrain [“The Mingling of Two Oceans”], an independent work devoted to discovering the affinities between Vedantic and Sufi perceptions of the Ultimate Truth.

However, the spiritual stand that Dara who hated the rigidity of religious fundamentalists took did not go well with Aurangazeb who had by then managed to come up in the struggle for the throne and had all the power of the empire firmly in his hands. Partly because of his fundamentalist faith and partly from political compulsions, he called for a council of nobles and clergy to decide the fate of Dara Shikoh – and the council promptly declared Dara Shikoh a threat to public peace and a traitor to Islam, exactly as Aurangazeb had desired. Dara was put to death on the night of August 30, 1659.

While it is certain that Indian history would have taken a different turn had Dara, who was in the middle of all literary, spiritual, and intellectual movements of his time, come into power instead of Aurangazeb, many people of the past shared the belief that the end of the Mugal empire in India came because of the curse of killing Dara Shikoh and the great Sufi sage and Persian poet Sarmad, whose disciple Dara Shikoh had become towards the end of his life.

Dara Shikoh completed his translation of fifty-two Upanishads in 1657, two years before he was executed. Such was his devotion to the goal he had set for himself, discovering the common ground between Hindu and Islamic spiritual traditions, that in order to do the work, he learnt Sanskrit. Apart from the Upanishads, Dara had, with help from Sanskrit scholars, translated into Persian two other classics of Indian spirituality – the Bhagavad Gita and the Yoga Vasishtha.

O0O

The following is from Dara Shikoh’s introduction to his work on the Upanishads, in which he refers to himself in the third person.

“Whereas this unsolicitous fakir Muhammad Dara Shikoh in the year 1050 after Hijra [AD 1640] went to Kashmir… And whereas, he was impressed with a longing to behold the Gnostics of every sect, and to hear the lofty expressions of monotheism, and had cast his eyes upon many books of mysticism and had written a number of treatises thereon, and as the thirst of investigation for unity, which is a boundless ocean, became every moment increased, subtle doubts came into his mind for which he had no possibility of solution, except by the word of the Lord and the direction of the Infinite.

“And whereas the holy Quran is mostly allegorical and at the present day persons thoroughly conversant with the subtleties thereof are very rare, he became desirous of bringing in view all the heavenly books, for the very words of God themselves are their own commentary; and what might be in one book compendious, in another might be found diffusive, and from the detail of one, the conciseness of the other might become comprehensible. He had, therefore, cast his eyes on the Book of Moses, the Gospels, the Psalms, and other scriptures but the explanation of monotheism in them also was compendious and enigmatical, and from the slovenly translations which selfish persons had made, their purport was not intelligible.

“Thereafter he considered, as to why the discussion about monotheism is so conspicuous in India and why the Indian theologians and mystics of the ancient school do not disavow the Unity of God nor do they find any fault with the Unitarians, but their belief is perfect in this respect; on the other hand, the ignoramuses of the present age – the highwaymen in the path of God – who have established themselves for erudites and who, falling into the trances of polemics and molestation, and apostatizing through disavowal of the true proficients in God and monotheism, display resistance against all the words of Unitarianism, which are most evident from the glorious Quran and the authentic traditions of indubitable prophecy.”

Dara Shikoh here mentions the four Vedas by name and states their hoary age. He quotes the Quran to say that prophets could be found in every tradition, and then continues:

“And the summum bonum of these four books, which contain all the secrets of the Path and the contemplative exercises of pure monotheism, are called the Upanekhats [Upanishads], and the people of that time have written commentaries with complete and diffusive interpretations thereon; and being still understood as the best part of their religious worship, they are always studied. And whereas this unsolicitous seeker after the Truth had in view the principle of the fundamental unity of the personality and not Arabic, Syriac, Hebrew, and Sanskrit languages, he wanted to make without any worldly motive, in a clear style, an exact and literal translation of the Upanekhats into Persian. For it is a treasure of monotheism and there are few thoroughly conversant with it even among the Indians. Thereby he also wanted to solve the mystery which underlies their efforts to conceal it from the Muslims.

“And as at this period the city of Banaras, which is the centre of the sciences of this community, was in certain relations with this seeker of the Truth, he assembled together the pundits and the sannyasis, who were the most learned of their time and proficient in the Upanekhats…in the year 1067 after Hijra; and thus every difficulty and every sublime topic which he had desired or thought and had looked for and not found, he obtained from the essences of the most ancient books, and without doubt or suspicion, these books are first of all heavenly books in point of time, and the source and the fountainhead of the ocean of unity, in conformity with the holy Quran.

“Happy is he, who having abandoned the prejudices of vile selfishness, sincerely and with the grace of God, renouncing all partiality, shall study and comprehend this translation entitled The Greatest Secret [Sirr-i-Akbar], knowing it to be a translation of the words of God. He shall become imperishable, fearless, unsolicitous, and eternally liberated.”

O0O

Dara Shikoh’s translation of the Upanishads into Persian was to play a very significant role in awakening the west to the wisdom of the Upanishads. Fourteen years after Dara Shikoh completed the translation, in 1671, Francis Bernier, a French traveler, took the translation to France. Interest in Indian philosophy was awakened in France. Later Victor Cousin, a French Philosopher of high repute, stated in words of high admiration that Vedanta, the philosophy of the Upanishads, is the highest philosophy that mankind has ever produced. The Upanishads and their philosophy soon became very popular in the intellectual circles all over the west.

German scholars like Friedrich Von Schelling (1775-1854), Arthur Schopenhauer (1788-1860) and Paul Deussen (1854-1919) were fascinated by the Upanishads. Schelling’s admiration for the ‘Oupnekhats’ led him to ask Max Mueller to translate them, for he ardently felt that the Upanishads deserved wide circulation in Germany and every member of the German intelligentsia need to know of them.

Schopenhauer was among the greatest admirers of the Upanishads in the west. His magnum opus The World as Will and Idea strongly reflects the power influence of the Upanishads on him. He felt that no other thought of humanity ever came near the Upanishads in the depth of their wisdom and in the service it can provide mankind. Speaking of the wisdom of the ancient sages of India as contained in the Upanishads, the German philosopher said that ‘it has been the solace of my life, it will be the solace of my death.’

Sir William Jones (1746-94), who founded the Asiatic Society in Calcutta in 1784 felt that “one correct version of any celebrated Hindu book would be of greater value than all the dissertations or essays that could be composed on the same subject.’

It is interesting to compare this with what Lord Macaulay had to say about eastern wisdom. The man who is credited with the founding of European education in India had expressed his view that if you put on one side of a balance a single rack of English literature and on the other all the literature of the east, English literature would weigh heavier. But of course, Macaulay’s statement was motivated by his political agenda as is evident from his own statement on February 2, 1835 in the British Parliament, Macaulay had said: “I have traveled the length and breadth of India and I did not meet a single person who was a thief. I have seen such affluence in that country, such competent individuals and such talent that I do not think we will be able to conquer that land so long as we do not break its cultural and ethical backbone. I therefore state that we change the ancient education system and culture of India because if the inhabitants of India begin to think that the ideas and thoughts of foreigners, of Englishmen, are better than and superior to their own, then they will lose their culture and self-respect and they will become a dependent nation, which is what we need.’

Dara Shikoh sought for and found the common ground between Upanishadic and Islamic spirituality. But it was not for himself alone that he sought it, but for all, particularly for all Indians. We today require the truth that Dara Shikoh found as much as his times needed it, perhaps more.

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