What Are the Upanishads

What is an Upanishad

The Sanskrit word “upaniṣad” literally means “sitting near”: it named the confidential instruction a teacher passed to a student seated close by, as distinct from the hymns and ritual injunctions recited for everyone. Hence the defining trait of these texts: they speak not of sacrificial technique but of what is most intimate — the nature of Brahman (the absolute reality), the Ātman (the soul), and the relationship between them.

The Upanishads crown the corpus of each Veda and are therefore also called Vedānta — the “end of the Vedas” and, at the same time, their summit. Where the hymns of the Saṃhitās address the gods of sacrifice, and the Brāhmaṇas describe how to perform that sacrifice, the Upanishads ask: who performs it, for what, and what remains once the rite itself is no longer needed.

Vedaword reads the Upanishads from the standpoint of the Gauḍīya Vaiṣṇava tradition — the line of Śrī Chaitanya Mahāprabhu. Brahman here is not an impersonal void that dissolves the soul without remainder, but the radiance of the Personal Lord; the soul is not wholly identical with Him, nor wholly separate — it is simultaneously one with Him in nature and distinct as a part is from the whole (acintya-bhedābheda, “inconceivable oneness and difference”). So where other schools hear in the Upanishads a call to merge and vanish, we hear an invitation to eternal personal relationship with the One behind the word “Brahman”.

Where the list of 108 comes from

Originally there were far fewer Upanishads — they formed the closing portion of the Vedic schools (śākhās) themselves. Over time, new texts of the same genre were attached to them — on yoga, asceticism, and the worship of particular forms of God — which likewise came to be called Upanishads, even though formally they postdate the core Vedic corpus.

The best-known complete enumeration — 108 Upanishads — is given by the Muktikā Upanishad itself: in it, Lord Rāma tells Hanumān that for some, liberation is opened by the Māṇḍūkya Upanishad alone; for those who need more, by the ten principal (mukhya) Upanishads; for the more exacting, by thirty-two; and whoever seeks liberation while still embodied should study all one hundred and eight. The Muktikā Upanishad names them one by one — and is itself the last on the list, the hundred and eighth.

These 108 texts are traditionally divided into seven groups:

• mukhya — the ten principal Upanishads, recognized by every school of Vedānta
• sāmānya (Vedānta) — general philosophical Upanishads not tied to one particular form of worship
• sannyāsa — on renouncing the world
• vaiṣṇava — devoted to Viṣṇu and His forms: Nārāyaṇa, Rāma, Kṛṣṇa
• śaiva — devoted to Śiva
• śākta — devoted to the Goddess
• yoga — on the practice of yoga

The list Vedaword uses is taken from the consolidated text of the Muktikā Upanishad on sanskritdocuments.org (proofread by M. Giridhar). The full table is below.

Translation status on Vedaword

So far 53 of 108 are translated: all ten principal Upanishads, plus the short Vaiṣṇava Kalisantaraṇa Upanishad — the text in which the Hare Kṛṣṇa mahā-mantra first appears in scripture. The rest are still to come; the table below shows what's already done.