fidently stake against the claims of superiority of any foreign religion or philosophy. It is noteworthy that the significant movement indicated by the reforming and theistic Samājas of modern times was inaugurated by one who was the first to prepare an English translation of the Upanishads. Rammohun Roy expected to restore Hinduism to its pristine purity and superiority through a resuscitation of Upanishadic philosophy with an infusion of certain eclectic elements.

They are also being taken up and exploited by a certain class who have found a rich reward and an attractive field of operation in the mysticism and credulity of India. Having hopes for the Upanishads as a world-scripture, that is to say, a scripture appealing to the lovers of religion and truth in all races and at all times, without distinction,' theosophists have been endeavoring to make them available for their converts.1

Not only have the Upanishads thus furnished the regnant philosophy for India from their date up to the present time and proved fascinating to mystics outside of India, but their philosophy presents many interesting parallels and contrasts to the elaborate philosophizings of Western lands. And Western professional students of philosophy, as well as literary historians, have felt and expressed the importance of the Upanishads. In the case of Arthur Schopenhauer, the chief of modern pantheists of the West, his philosophy is unmistakably transfused with the doctrines expounded in the Upanishads, a fact that might be surmised from his oft-quoted eulogy: 'It [i. e. Anquetil du Perron's Latin translation of a Persian rendering of the Upanishads] is the most rewarding and the most elevating reading which (with the exception of the original text) there can possibly be in the world. It has been the solace of my life and will be of my death.' 2

Professor Deussen, the Professor of Philosophy in the University of Kiel (Germany), has always regarded his thorough study of the Vedanta philosophy as a reward in

1 The Upanishads, by Mead and Chattopadhyaya, p. 5, London, Theosophical Publishing Society, 1896. See also The Theosophy of the Upanishads (anonymous), London, Theosophical Publishing Society, 1896, and The Upanishads with Sankara's Commentary, a translation made by several Hindus, published by V. C. Seshacharri, Madras, 1898 (dedicated to Mrs. Annie Besant).

itself, apart from the satisfaction of contributing so largely to our understanding of its teachings. For in the Upanishads he has found Parmenides, Plato, and Kant in a nutshell, and on leaving India in 1893, in an address before the Bombay Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society,' he gave it as his parting advice that 'the Vedanta, in its unfalsified form is the strongest support of pure morality, is the greatest consolation in the sufferings of life and death. Indians, keep to it!'

Professor Royce of Harvard University deemed the philosophy of the Upanishads sufficiently important to expound it in his Gifford Lectures, before the University of Aberdeen, and to introduce some original translations especially made by his colleague Professor Lanman.

So, in East and West, the Upanishads have made and will make their influence felt. A broad survey of the facts will hardly sustain the final opinion expressed by Regnaud : 'Arbitrary or legendary doctrines, that is to say, those which have sprung from individual or popular imagination, such as the Upanishads, resemble a gallery of portraits whose originals have long since been dead. They have no more than a historical and comparative value, the principal interest of which is for supplying important elements for the study of the human mind.' 3

Historical and comparative value the Upanishads undoubtedly have, but they are also of great present-day importance. No one can thoroughly understand the workings and conclusions of the mind of an educated Hindu of today who does not know something of the fountain from which his ancestors for centuries past have drunk, and from which he too has been deriving his intellectual life. The imagery under which his philosophy is conceived, the phraseology in which it is couched, and the analogies by which it is supported are largely the same in the discussions of today as are found in the Upanishads and in Sankara's commentaries on them and on the Sutras. Furthermore, although some elements are evidently of local interest

1 Printed as a pamphlet, Bombay, 1893, and also contained in his Elements of Metaphysics, English translation, p. 337, London, 1894.

2 Royce, The World and the Individual, 1. 156–175, New York, 1900.

3 Regnaud, Matériaux pour servir à l'histoire de la philosophie de l'Inde, 2. 204, Paris, 1878.

and of past value, it is evident that the pantheism of the Upanishads has exerted and will continue to exert an influence on the pantheism of the West, for it contains certain elements. which penetrate deeply into the truths which every philosopher must reach in a thoroughly grounded explanation of experience. The intelligent and sympathetic discrimination of these elements will constitute a philosophic work of the first importance. As a preliminary step to that end, the mass of unorganized material contained in the Upanishads has been culled and the salient ideas here arranged in the following outline.

CHAPTER II

THE UPANISHADS AND THEIR PLACE IN
INDIAN PHILOSOPHY

THE Upanishads are religious and philosophical treatises, forming part of the early Indian Vedas.1 The preceding portions are the Mantras, or Hymns to the Vedic gods, and the Brāhmaṇas, or directories on and explanations of the sacrificial ritual. Accordingly these three divisions of the Śruti, or 'Revelation,' may be roughly characterized as the utterances successively of poet, priest, and philosopher. The distinction, of course, is not strictly exclusive; for the Upanishads, being integral parts of the Brahmaņas,2 are continuations of the sacrificial rules and discussions, but they pass over into philosophical considerations. Much that is in the Upanishads, particularly in the Brihad-Aranyaka and in the Chandogya, might more properly be included in the Brāhmaṇa portion, and some that is in the Brāhmaṇas is Upanishadic in character. The two groups are closely interwoven.

1 That which is hidden in the secret of the Vedas, even the Upanishads.'Śvetāśvatara Upanishad 5. 6.

2 Technically, the older Upanishads (with the exception of the Īsā, which is the last chapter of the Samhita of the White Yajur-Veda) form part of the Aranyakas, 'Forest Books,' which in turn are part of the Brahmanas, the second part of the Vedas.

Later a distinct class of independent Upanishads arose, but even of several of the classical Upanishads the connection with the Brāhmaṇas has been lost. Only the thirteen oldest Upanishads, which might be called classical and which are translated in this volume, are here discussed.

This fact, along with the general lack of data in Sanskrit literature for chronological orientation, makes it impossible to fix any definite dates for the Upanishads. The Satapatha Brāhmaṇa, of which the Brihad-Aranyaka Upanishad forms the conclusion, is believed to contain material that comes down to 300 B.C. The Upanishads themselves contain several references to writings which undoubtedly are much later than the beginnings of the Upanishads. The best that can be done is to base conjectures upon the general aspect of the contents compared with what may be supposed to precede and to succeed. The usual date that is thus assigned to the Upanishads is about 600 or 500 B. C., just prior to the Buddhist revival.

Yet evidences of Buddhist influences are not wanting in them. In Brih. 3. 2. 13 it is stated that after death the different parts of a person return to the different parts of Nature from whence they came, that even his soul (ātman) goes into space and that only his karma, or effect of work, remains over. This is out and out the Buddhist doctrine. Connections in the point of dialect may also be shown. Sarvävat is a word which as yet has not been discovered in the whole range of Sanskrit literature, except in Śatapatha Brāhmaṇa 14. 7. 1. 10 [= Bṛih. 4. 3. 9] and in Northern Buddhist writings.'1 Its Pāli equivalent is sabbāvā. In Bṛih. 4. 3. 2–6 r is changed to 7, i. e. paly-ayate for pary-ayate-a change which is regularly made in the Pali dialect in which the books of Southern Buddhism are written. It may be that this is not a direct influence of the Pāli upon the Sanskrit, but at least it is the same tendency which exhibits itself in Pāli, and here the two languages are close enough together to warrant the assumption of contact and mutual influence. Somewhat surer evidence, however, is the use of the second person plural ending tha for ta. Müller pointed out in connection with the word acaratha (Muṇḍ. 1. 2. 1) that this irregularity looks suspiciously Buddhistic. There are, however, four other similar instances. The word. samvatsyatha (Praśna 1. 2) might be explained as a future indicative (not an imperative), serving as a mild future imperative. But prcchatha (Praśna 1. 2), apadyatha (Praśna 2. 3), and janatha and vimuñcatha (Mund. 2. 2. 5) are evidently meant 1 Kern, SBE. 21, p. xvii.

as imperatives, and as such are formed with the Pāli instead of with the regular Sanskrit ending. It has long been suspected that the later Śiva sects, which recognized the Atharva-Veda as their chief scripture, were closely connected with the Buddhistic sects. Perhaps in this way the Buddhistic influence1 was transmitted to the Praśna and Muṇḍaka Upanishads of the Atharva-Veda.

This shows that the Upanishads are not unaffected by outside influences. Even irrespective of these, their inner structure reveals that they are heterogeneous in their material and compound in their composition. The Brihad-Araṇyaka, for instance, is composed of three divisions, each of which is concluded, as if it were a complete whole, by a vaṁśa, or genealogy of the doctrine (that is, a list of teachers through whom the doctrine there taught had originally been received from Brahma and handed down to the time of writing). The first section, entitled 'The Honey Section,' contains a dialogue between Yājñavalkya and Maitreyī which is almost verbally repeated in the second section, called The Yajnavalkya Section.' It seems quite evident that these two pieces could not have been parts of one continuous writing, but that they were parts of two separate works which were mechanically united and then connected with the third section, whose title, 'Supplementary Section,' is in accord with the heterogeneous nature of its contents.

Both the Brihad-Aranyaka and the Chandogya are very composite in character. Disconnected explanations of the sacrificial ritual, legends, dialogues, etymologizings (which now appear absurd, but which originally were regarded as important explanations),2 sayings, philosophical disquisitions, and so forth are, in the main, merely mechanically juxtaposed. In the shorter and later Upanishads there is not room for such a collection; but in them, more and more, quotations from the earlier Upanishads and from the Vedas are inserted. Many of these can be recognized as such. There are also certain passages, especially in the Katha and Svetāśvatara, which,

1 See on this point the interesting testimony adduced by Foucher, Etude sur l'iconographie bouddhique de l'Inde, Paris, 1900.

2 Such as Bṛih. 1. 2. 7; 1. 3. 22; 1. 4. 1; 3.9. 8-9; Chand. 1. 2. 10-12; 6. 8. 1.

3