The Principal Upanishads

The Upanishads are the last layer of the Veda — the layer where ritual gives way to the question of the Self. Their central teachings on ātman and brahman and on rebirth and liberation have their own pages. This one is about the texts themselves: how many there are, where they come from, who speaks in them, and why every school of Vedānta claims them.

“Sitting near”

The word is built from upa (near), ni (down) and sad (to sit): “sitting down near” — the picture of a student at a teacher’s feet. That image is apt, because the teachings were given one-to-one, often only to a student who had proved himself. But the word in the texts themselves usually means something more like a secret or a hidden connection: a passage ends iti upaniṣat, “such is the secret teaching.” Many scholars now think this was the older sense.

Shankara offered a third explanation, as a traditional nirukti rather than history: sad can also mean “to loosen” or “to destroy,” so the Upanishad is that which loosens the bonds of ignorance for one who approaches it. Advaita etymology

108, ten, or thirteen?

More than two hundred texts call themselves Upanishads, composed over two thousand years. Tradition settled on a canon of 108, listed in the Muktikā Upaniṣad, where Rama teaches Hanuman which Upanishads lead to liberation. It sorts them by Veda: ten from the Ṛg, nineteen from the White Yajur, thirty-two from the Black Yajur, sixteen from the Sāma and thirty-one from the Atharva. Many of these — the Yoga, Saṃnyāsa, Vaiṣṇava and Śaiva Upanishads — are medieval.

Out of the 108, a smaller group stands apart: the ten on which Shankara wrote commentaries, called the principal (mukhya) Upanishads. Three more — the Śvetāśvatara, Kauṣītaki and Maitrī — are so often quoted by the classical teachers that many lists include them, giving eleven, twelve or thirteen. Tap a book:

The great dialogues

The Upanishads rarely lecture. They stage conversations — at royal courts, in the forest, on a deathbed — and some of their sharpest voices are women’s.

Maitreyī: “What would I do with it?”

The sage Yājñavalkya is about to leave home for the forest and offers to divide his property between his two wives, Kātyāyanī and Maitreyī. Maitreyī asks whether all the wealth of the earth would make her immortal. “No,” he says, “your life would be like the life of the rich.” Her reply has echoed ever since:

So he teaches her instead: it is not for the love of a husband, a wife or children that they are dear, but for the love of the Self — and so it is the Self that must be seen, heard, reflected on and meditated upon (2.4.5). The same dialogue is told again, with small changes, at 4.5.

Gārgī: the questioner

At King Janaka’s court, Yājñavalkya debates all comers for a prize of a thousand cows. Gārgī Vācaknavī presses him twice. First she asks on what each world is “woven,” layer under layer, until he warns her not to question too far, lest her head fall off (3.6). Later she returns, announcing two questions sharp as arrows: on what is everything woven, past, present and future? His answer is the imperishable, the akṣara:

Gārgī then tells the assembled Brahmins that none of them will defeat him in argument. She is the only debater in the contest to question him twice — and the one who openly declares him unbeatable.

Naciketas: three boons from Death

In the Kaṭha, a boy watches his father give away worn-out cows in a sacrifice and asks, “To whom will you give me?” Angered, the father answers: “To Death.” Naciketas goes to the house of Yama, who is away; when Yama returns to find a Brahmin guest unfed for three nights, he offers three boons. The third is the question of what happens after death. Yama tries to buy him off with long life, wealth and pleasure; the boy refuses them all. Yama then teaches that two paths always stand before us — the good (śreyas) and the merely pleasant (preyas) — and that the wise choose the good. The Upanishad ends its third section with a call that Swami Vivekananda made famous:

Uddālaka and Śvetaketu

In the Chāndogya’s sixth chapter, a father teaches his overconfident son through clay, seeds and salt, ending each lesson with tat tvam asi, “that you are.” The lessons are told on Atman & Brahman, and the saying itself on The Four Great Sayings.

Satyakāma: the truthful boy

Satyakāma wants to become a student, and must give his lineage. He asks his mother, Jabālā. She tells him she does not know: she moved about a great deal as a serving woman when she was young. “I am Jabālā, you are Satyakāma — call yourself Satyakāma Jābāla.” He repeats this word for word to the teacher Hāridrumata Gautama, who accepts him at once:

Sent to tend four hundred cows until they number a thousand, Satyakāma is taught along the way by a bull, the fire, a swan and a water-bird (4.5–4.8). The story is read in two ways, and both are honest: as a teaching that truthfulness, not birth, marks the real Brahmin — and as a story that still needed the student to be called a Brahmin before he could be taught.

The four states: Māṇḍūkya

The Māṇḍūkya Upaniṣad is twelve verses long. It begins: om ity etad akṣaram idaṃ sarvam, “Om — this syllable is all this.” It then says that the Self has four “quarters,” and maps them onto the three sounds of Om — a, u, m — and the silence after them. Step through the four:

The word for the fourth, turīya, simply means “fourth.” Gauḍapāda, Shankara’s teacher’s teacher, wrote a long verse commentary, the Māṇḍūkya Kārikā, which made this little text a foundation of Advaita. The Upanishad says the Self has three ordinary states; the radical claim is that you are not any one of them, but the awareness that runs through all three.

How the schools read the Upanishads

The Upanishads contain many voices, and their statements seem to point in different directions. Some say the Self and Brahman are one (“I am Brahman”); some say the Lord dwells within the self as its inner ruler (Bṛhadāraṇyaka 3.7); some speak of two birds on one tree, one eating and one watching. Every school of Vedānta had to explain all of these at once.

Shankara and Madhva each wrote commentaries on the ten. Ramanuja did not comment on them one by one, but built his reading of them into his commentary on the Brahmasūtra and his Vedārthasaṅgraha; later teachers of his school, such as Raṅgarāmānuja, completed the set.

How old are they?

For the tradition, the Upanishads are Śruti, eternal and unauthored, and the sages in them are the seers who received them. Historians date them by language and content:

1. c. 7th–6th c. BCEBṛhadāraṇyaka, ChāndogyaThe oldest, in prose, probably before the Buddha.
2. c. 6th–5th c. BCETaittirīya, Aitareya, KauṣītakiStill prose, still embedded in Āraṇyakas.
3. c. 5th–1st c. BCEKena, Kaṭha, Īśa, Śvetāśvatara, MuṇḍakaMostly verse, with growing theism and early yoga.
4. Turn of the eraPraśna, Māṇḍūkya, MaitrīThe Māṇḍūkya perhaps among the latest of the principal group.
5. MedievalThe later UpanishadsYoga, Saṃnyāsa and sectarian Upanishads, many gathered into the 108.

Who said it?

Questions people often ask

Key terms on this page

Sources & further reading

• Patrick Olivelle, The Early Upaniṣads: Annotated Text and Translation (Oxford University Press, 1998); and Upaniṣads (Oxford World’s Classics, 1996).
• S. Radhakrishnan, The Principal Upaniṣads (George Allen & Unwin, 1953).
• Eknath Easwaran, The Upanishads (Nilgiri Press, 1987; 2nd ed. 2007) — a readable devotional translation.
• Signe Cohen, Text and Authority in the Older Upaniṣads (Brill, 2008) — on dating and composition.
• Gauḍapāda, Māṇḍūkya Kārikā, with Shankara’s commentary, trans. Swami Nikhilananda (Ramakrishna Math).
• Brian Black, The Character of the Self in Ancient India: Priests, Kings, and Women in the Early Upaniṣads (SUNY Press, 2007) — on Maitreyī, Gārgī and the dialogues.