their own religion more truly and more fairly. Just as a comparative study of languages has thrown an entirely new light on the nature and historical growth of our own language, a comparative study of religions also, I hoped, would enable us to gain a truer insight into the peculiar character of Christianity, by seeing both what it shares in common with other religions, and what distinguishes it from all its peers. We learn both by comparing and by contrasting, and it is hardly too much to say, that he who knows one religion only, knows none.

The Upanishads.

Each religion has its own lesson to teach us, but there are few religions more instructive than that which is founded on the books with which our series begins, the Upanishads. These Upanishads stand at the end of the Vedas, and are therefore, or because they place before us the end or the highest objects of the Vedas, called Vedânta, i.e., end of the Veda. They are often no doubt very strange in their form. They are fragments only, sometimes in prose, sometimes in poetry. They are not the works of one author, and contain the strangest mixture of wisdom and folly. But they teach us, nevertheless, more of the historical origin and growth of religion in general, than any other book.

They teach us, first of all, that religion and phiIsophy were in their origin inseparably united, and that the unholy divorce between them was a misfortune of later times. The Upanishads form the foundation of what may be called the Vedic religion, as well as of Vedic or Vedântic philosophy. On the one hand they lead to religious Monothe

THE UPANISHADS.

e

ism, represented by the worship of such gods as Pragâpati, lord of creatures, Visva-Karman, maker of all things, and on the other to philosophic Monism. The concepts which form the foundation of that philosophical Monism, or of the Vedânta philosophy, are Brahman and Âtman.

Brahman is that from whence comes the origin of the universe;' Âtman is the Self, the Self of man as well as of God or Brahman. Both words are of Vedic growth, but if we want to discover their deepest roots and their earliest development, we are led back far beyond the Vedas, and far beyond the limits of literary chronology in India. What the Upanishads have to teach is that the two, Âtman and Brahman, are one, while it is the object of the Vedantic philosophy to defend that truth against all objections, and to draw all the consequences that flow from it.

On these two ideas a complete philosophical system, the Vedânta or Uttara-mî-mâmsâ, has been erected, which need not fear comparison with any other philosophy. Nay, it has been truly said that without a knowledge of it no one can in future call himself a philosopher, as little as he could do so without a knowledge of Kant. The book in which the Vedanta philosophy has been elaborated, the Vedanta-Sutras, has been most successfully translated in this series by Professor Thibaut of Benares, while German readers will find a German translation of Professor Deussen extremely valuable. The same scholar has also given us a German translation of the Upanishads, which deserves the high

1

Die Sûtras des Vedânta, nebst dem vollständigen Commentar des Samkara, 1887.

est credit. I had, in the Sacred Books of The East, given a translation of the twelve important or classical Upanishads only, classical, because they form the chief basis of the Vedânta philosophy. But we possess a list of one hundred and eight Upanishads, most of them, however, of far more modern date, and of small importance. To how late a date Upanishads have been composed in India, may be seen from the title of one of them, the Allopanishad, i.e., the Upanishad of Allah.

Professor Deussen's translation comprises sixty Upanishads, and it was my intention to publish an English translation of some of the more important of these also, in a third volume of this collection. This, however, has now become unnecessary.

I have often called attention to the fact that there are many passages in the Upanishads which, though explained by native commentators according to the traditions of various schools, remain as yet very obscure, and difficult to render into any modern language. We owe much in this branch of study to the labours of Anquetil Duperron, Windischmann, Weber, and Boehtlingk, but most of all to the most recent translator, Professor Duessen. Each one has contributed something, but there is still much left to be improved, and to be finished by those who come after us. In these studies everybody does the best he can; and scholars should never forget how easy it is to weed a field that has once been ploughed, and how difficult to plough unbroken soil. The passages, the text of which is unsettled, and the translation in consequence doubtful, do not, however, affect the general purport of the Upanishads. They supply material for the exercise of a

THE UPANISHADS.

g

angry

scholar's critical ingenuity, sometimes even for and tedious controversy, but they leave the general teaching of these ancient treatises quite untouched. Readers of these translations may, therefore, rest assured that they get in them the sense of the originals, rendered as accurately and as faithfully as in the best translations of Greek or Roman classics, and that little, if anything, is lost to them of the ancient guesses at truth embodied in the Upanishads, F. MAX MÜLLER.

OXFORD, November 5, 1897.