Interpreting the Upanishads

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Actually, they are rather plain and direct. They do not construct any complex system of ideas and beliefs. Nor do they build elaborate pictures of the world. Instead, in somewhat brief and uncompromising language, they ask what is plainly and simply true: beneath all the complications of our uncertain beliefs.
This skeptical questioning was their traditional difficulty. It went against the habits of faith and obedience upon which traditional society depended.
As a result, the Upanishads were kept traditionally secret and inaccessible. They were hidden behind a forbidding reputation: as teaching an esoteric and mystical doctrine, to be kept away from all but a few special initiates.
Today, with our modern freedom of thought, we have learned to be more open about questioning things that are usually taken for granted. In particular, we can be more open about the kind of radical questions that the Upanishads ask.
That is the idea of this book. Some passages from the Upanishads are here translated and retold. To explain how some of their ideas may interpreted in simple language, for ordinary people.
More retellings may be found in a companion volume, called From the Upanishads.

ANANDA WOOD, as his name suggests, is one of those people with a rather mixed background. He was born and brought up in India, studied mathematics at King's College, Cambridge, and went on to a doctorate in anthropology at the University of Chicago. Alter this university education, he returned home to India, where he has now settled down to concentrate on a long-standing interest, in the modern interpretation of Advaita philosophy.

Do we know anything that is plainly and simply true, without any of the 'ifs' and 'buts' that complicate everything we perceive through our limited and uncertain personalities?
And is it thus possible to find any common basis of knowledge on which we can always rely, no matter what particular conditions and uncertainties surround our little bodies, senses and minds in a much larger universe?
The Upanishads are early texts that describe just such an enquiry into plain truth. However, there are two problems which complicate our under- standing of these texts today.
First, they were composed at a time when knowledge was largely expressed in the imaginative metaphors of myth and ritual. Thus, along with their philosophical enquiry, the Upanishads also describe an archaic mythical and ritual context. It is from this archaic context that the enquiry was made, in times that are now long passed.
And second, as the founding texts of a very old philosophical tradition, they are expressed in a highly condensed way: which leaves them rather open to interpretation and explanation. The condensed statements of the Upanishads were called 'shruti' or 'heard'; because they were meant to be learned by hearing them directly from a living teacher, who would recite and interpret the words. Having received such a statement of condensed philosophical teaching, a student was meant to think about it over and over again, through a sustained process of individual reflection and enquiry. Eventually, after passing through many stages of thinking and rethinking the questions involved, the student was meant to come at last to a thorough and independent understanding of the statement, in his or her own right.
In the two and a half thousand years or more since the Upanishads began to be composed, their original statements have been interpreted and explained in many different ways, through many different schools of thought. Some schools have emphasized a religious approach to truth, through devotion to a worshipped God. Some schools have emphasized a mystical approach, through exercises of meditation that cultivate special states of experience beyond the ordinary limitations of our minds. And some schools emphasize a philosophical approach, through reasoned enquiry into common experience.