The Upanishads

Picture the oldest classroom there is: no walls, no desks, just a teacher and a few students who have come close enough to hear him speak quietly.

Müller thought the word itself describes that scene. Upa-ni-shad breaks into upa, "near", ni, "down", and shad, "to sit". An Upanishad would be a sitting down near the teacher: pupils gathered at a respectful distance around the one who knows.

He was honest about the weak spot. In every text he had read, the word never once appears meaning a session of pupils. Wherever it turns up, it already means a doctrine, often a secret one. So the classroom is a guess from grammar. It is a good guess, and worth holding exactly that lightly.

Indian commentators never read the word that way. For them it came from roots meaning to destroy or to approach: an Upanishad is what destroys ignorance and passion, or what brings a person near to Brahman. Shankara offered a third reading, that the highest bliss is contained in it.

Müller found these derivations perverse as grammar. Then he conceded what matters. They were plays on words rather than etymologies, and they described exactly what the texts were for.

The first European edition said it more bluntly still. When the Upanishads were printed in Latin, the title page called them a secret to be kept. Whatever the word once meant, the tradition heard in it a teaching you receive only by coming close.

According to Müller, what did the word upanishad most likely mean at first?

• A charm recited to destroy ignorance and passion
• The teaching that contains the highest bliss
• A session of pupils seated near their teacher✓Correct answer
• The closing chapter that ends each of the Vedas

Müller reads upa, ni and shad as pupils sitting down near a teacher. Destroying ignorance and holding the highest bliss are the Indian commentators' readings, which he treats as wordplay about the texts' purpose rather than the word's origin.

The Veda is not one book but layers laid down over centuries: hymns, then priestly manuals on performing the sacrifice, then the Aranyakas, the "forest books", where most of the old Upanishads are kept.

Indian tradition splits all of it into two portions. One is the portion of works: the chants, the fire, the exact gestures. The other is the portion of knowledge, and the Upanishads are its heart.

The old teachers did not throw the first portion away. Learning the hymns and performing the sacrifices were treated as preparation for knowledge, and enlightenment was the reward at the end of that long discipline. That is why these texts keep talking about chants and fires even while they reach for something no ritual can perform.

In the Veda's own scheme, the sacrifices are not rejected by the Upanishads but treated as preparation for the knowledge they teach.

True✓Correct answer

True. The old philosophers divided the Veda into works and knowledge, and saw the hymns and sacrifices as groundwork for enlightenment. Müller even notes that the Upanishads presuppose the ritual books; it was later reformers who set that discipline aside.

Open this volume expecting a clean book of spiritual advice and Müller stops you on his first page. Anyone who believes the sacred books are full of primeval wisdom, or at least of simple moral teaching, he says, will be disappointed.

His picture is a dig. Earlier scholars had pulled a few pieces of pure gold out of a heap of rubbish and shown the public only the gold. Müller refused. Extracts will no longer suffice, he wrote: you do not know Germany because you know the Rhine.

He also explained the mess. These texts lived for generations in memory, handed from father to son, and whatever felt holy was kept whole, grain and chaff together. So you will meet sharp dialogues and riddles right beside pages of chant lore that once mattered to someone.