From SHWETASHWATARA UPANISHAD SHWETASHWATARA UPANISHAD chapter four The One was without form and hue; and He, by Yoga of His own might, became manifold; He weareth many forms and hues, but hath no object nor interest therein; God into Whom all the universe breaketh up and departeth at the end of all and He alone was in the beginning. May He yoke us with a bright and gracious understanding. God is fire that burneth and the Sun in heaven and the Wind that bloweth: He too is the Moon. His is the seed and Brahma and the waters and He is Prajapati, the Father of his peoples.

FIVE Maya: The Energy of The Absolute MAYA then is the fundamental fact in the Universe, her dualistic system of balanced pairs of opposites is a necessity of intellectual conception; but the possibility of her existence as an inherent energy in the Absolute, outside phenomena, has yet to be established. So long as Science is incomplete and Yoga a secret discipline for the few, the insistent questions of the metaphysician can never be ignored, nor his method grow obsolete. The confident and even arrogant attempt of experimental Science to monopolise the kingdom of mind, to the exclusion of the metaphysical and all other methods, was a r

TWO Nature of the Absolute Brahman viewed in the light of these four great illuminations the utterances of the Upanishads arrange themselves and fall into a perfect harmony. European scholars like Max Müller have seen in these Scriptures a mass of heterogeneous ideas where the sublime jostles the childish, the grandiose walks arm-in-arm with the grotesque, the most petty trivialities feel at home with the rarest and most solemn philosophical intuitions, and they have accordingly declared them to be the babblings of a child humanity; inspired children, idiots endowed with genius, such to the Western view are the great Rishis of the Aranya

THE GREAT ARANYAKA A COMMENTARY ON THE BRIHADARANYAKA UPANISHAD The Great Aranyaka FOREWORD THE Brihad Aranyaka Upanishad, at once the most obscure and the profoundest of the Upanishads, offers peculiar difficulties to the modern mind. If its ideas are remote from us, its language is still more remote. Profound, subtle, extraordinarily rich in rare philosophical suggestions and delicate psychology, it has preferred to couch its ideas in a highly figurative and symbolical language, which to its contemporaries, accustomed to this suggestive dialect, must have seemed a noble frame for its riches, but meets us

The Secret of the Isha IT IS now several thousands of years since men ceased to study Veda and Upanishad for the sake of Veda or Upanishad. Ever since the human mind in India, more and more intellectualised, always increasingly addicted to the secondary process of knowledge by logic and intellectual rationalism, increasingly drawn away from the true and primary processes of knowledge by experience and direct perception, began to dislocate and dismember the many-sided harmony of ancient Vedic truth and paved it out into schools of thought, a system of metaphysics, its preoccupation has been rather with the opinions of later Sutras and Bhashyas than with the e

PHILOSOPHY OF THE UPANISHADS ONE The Discovery of the Absolute Brahman THE idea of transcendental Unity, Oneness, and Stability behind all the flux and variety of phenomenal life is the basal idea of the Upanishads: this is the pivot of all Indian metaphysics, the sum and goal of our spiritual experience. To the phenomenal world around us stability and singleness seem at first to be utterly alien; nothing but passes and changes, nothing but has its counterparts, contrasts, harmonised and dissident parts; and all are perpetually shifting and rearranging their relative positions and affections. Yet if one thing is cer

Readings In The Taittiriya Upanishad The Knowledge of Brahman The knower of Brahman reacheth that which is supreme. This is that verse which was spoken; “Truth, Knowledge, Infinity the Brahman, He who knoweth that hidden in the secrecy in the supreme ether, Enjoyeth all desires along with the wise-thinking Brahman.” This is the burden of the opening sentences of the Taittiriya Upanishadʼs second section; they begin its elucidation of the highest truth. Or in the Sanskrit, brahmavid āpnoti param— tad eṣābhyuktā — satyam jñānam anantam brahma — yo veda nihitam guhāyām — parame vyoman —

EARLY TRANSLATIONS OF SOME VEDANTIC TEXTS The Karikas of Gaudapada THE Karikas of Gaudapada are a body of authoritative verse maxims and reasonings setting forth in a brief and closely-argued manual the position of the extreme Monistic School of Vedanta philosophy. The monumental aphorisms of the Vedanta Sutra are meant rather for the master than the learner. Gaudapadaʼs clear, brief and businesslike verses are of a wider utility; they presuppose only an elementary knowledge of philosophic terminology and the general trend of Monistic and Dualistic discussion — this preliminary knowledge granted, they provide the student with an admirab

PRASHNA UPANISHAD PRASHNA UPANISHAD (Being the Upanishad of the Six Questions) first question OM! Salutation to the Supreme Spirit. The Supreme is OM. Sukesha the Bharadwaja; the Shaibya, Satyakama; Gargya, son of the Solar race; the Koshalan, son of Ashwala; the Bhargava of Vidarbha; and Kabandhi Katyayana; — these sought the Most High God, believing in the Supreme and to the Supreme devoted. Therefore they came to the Lord Pippalada, for they said: “This is he that shall tell us of that Universal.ˮ The Rishi said to them: “Another year do ye dwell in holine

SUPPLEMENT The Ishavasyopanishad WITH A COMMENTARY IN ENGLSIH With God all this must be invested, even all that is world in this moving universe; abandon therefore desire and enjoy and covet no manʼs possession. the guru The Upanishad sets forth by pronouncing as the indispensable basis of its revelations the universal nature of God. This universal nature of Brahman the Eternal is the beginning and end of the Vedanta and if it is not accepted, nothing the Vedanta says can have any value, as all its propositions either proceed from it or at least presuppose it; deprived of this central and highest truth,