World of Philosophy

SR No.: 007005
Original Sutra Author: N/A
Author: Christopher Key Chapple, Intaj Malek, Dilip Charan, Sunanda Shastri, Prashant Dave
Publisher: Shanti Prakashan
Publication Year: 2011
Total Pages: 1002
Language: English
Classification: Book_English
File Size: 30 MB

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SPIRITUALSCAPE OF THE UPANI.ADS
- Professor R Balasubramanian
The Upanisads are not only the concluding portion, but also the consummation, of the Vedas. There are four Vedas, and each Veda has four sections which are called Mantras, Brahma.as, Ara.yakas, and Upanisads. The Mantras are hymns in praise of gods and goddesses. The Brahma.as deal with sacrificial rites. The Ara.yakas contain meditative practices. The Upanisads are philosophical treatises dealing with Being and beings of all kinds. Though we speak of the different sections of the Vedas, each section having a specific theme, the Vedas have thematic unity and help the spiritual aspirant to achieve the final goal of liberation through prayers and rituals, meditative practices and philosophical investigation. The transition from the Mantras through the Upanisads is comparable to the change from the mystifying twilight to the bright and brilliant sunlight of the day. What is implicit or suggested in the hymns becomes explicit through rigorous explorations in depth in the philosophical tracts. The Upanisads discuss the most fundamental question of metaphysics-the nature of Being and how beings, both living and non-living, are related to it. 1
FUNDAMENTAL QUESTIONS
The Upanisads are extra-ordinary philosophical texts. They are extra-ordinary for two reasons. First of all, the subject matter they deal with is extra-ordinary. They are not concerned with stocks and stones, which can be known through perception and other sources of knowledge. On the contrary, they are concerned with Brahman-Atman, which is trans-empirical, transrelational, and translinguistic. They are not interested in the analysis of the different categories of knowledge such as substance, qualities, and action, the universal and the particular, and so on. Not that such an analysis is unimportant. There are philosophical systems and positive sciences which give us a lot of information about them widening the frontiers of our knowledge. There are two kinds of metaphysics, descriptive and transformative. Descriptive metaphysics has its own value; but it has at the same time its own limitations. Its major limitation is that it does not deal with Being which transcends the space-time-cause framework even though Being is the ground of the world. It does not tell us about the inward Self in everyone of us, which remains covered or enveloped by the mind-sense-body complex which is material. The fundamental questions are: "Who am I? What is Being? How is it related to me and to the outside world in which I am placed?" A little reflection tells us that, endowed as we are with the mind whose emergence in the process of evolution has heightened the evolutionary course, our purposive life cannot be confined to the bodily, vital, sensory, and mental levels and that we must seek the inner reality, the Self in us, which is the source and support of all our mental, vital, and bodily activities. Through a
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