Him I call indeed a Brâhmana whose path the gods do not know, nor spirits (Gandharvas), nor men, whose passions are extinct, and who is an Arhat. Him I call indeed a Brâhmana who calls nothing his own, whether it be before, behind, or between; who is poor, and free from the love of the world. Him I call indeed a Brâhmana, the manly, the noble, the hero, the great sage, the conqueror, the indifferent, the accomplished, the awakened. Him I call indeed a Brâhmana who knows his former abodes, who sees heaven and hell, has reached the end of births, is perfect in knowledge, a sage, and whose perfections are all perfect. INTRODUCTION HE “Upanishads" are reckoned to be from a hundred and fifty to a hundred and seventy in number. The date TH of the earliest of them is about B.C. 600; that is an age anterior to the rise of Buddha. They consist of various disquisitions on the nature of man, the Supreme Being, the human soul, and immortality. They are part of Sanscrit Brahmanic literature, and have the authority of revealed, in contradistinction to traditional truth. We see in these books the struggle of the human mind to attain to a knowledge of God and the destiny of man. The result is the formulation of a definite theosophy, in which we find the Brahman in his meditation trusting to the intuitions of his own spirit, the promptings of his own reason, or the combinations of his own fancy, for a revelation of the truth. The result is given us in these wonderful books. We call them wonderful, because the unaided mind of man never attained, in any other literature, to a profounder insight into spiritual things. The Western reader may find in an "Upanishad " many things that seem to him trifling and absurd, many things obscure and apparently meaningless. It is very easy to ridicule this kind of literature. But as a matter of fact these ancient writings well repay study, as the most astounding productions of the human intellect. In them we see the human mind wrestling with the greatest thoughts that had ever yet dawned upon it, and trying to grasp and to measure the mighty vision before which it was humbled to the dust. The seer, in order to communicate to the world the result of his meditations, seems to catch at every symbol and every word hallowed by familiar usage, in order to set out in concrete shape the color and dimensions of mystic verities; he is employing an old language for the expression of new truths; he is putting new wine into old wine-skins, which burst and the wine is spilt; words fail, and the meaning is lost. It is not lost, however, to those who will try to study the "Upan |