Essence of the Upanishads: A Key to Indian Spirituality

ESSENCE OF THE

UPANISHADS

A Key to Indian Spirituality

by EKNATH EASWARAN

NILGIRI PRESS

20230117

Table of Contents

Preface: The Wisdom of India

Introduction

The Myth: A Dialogue with Death

1 An Inward Journey

2 Two Paths

The Teaching: The Journey of Self-Discovery

3 The City of Eleven Gates

4 Gross & Subtle

5 A Field of Forces

6 Will & Desire

7 Clear Seeing

8 The Stream of Thought

9 Shadow & Self

10 Death & Dreaming

11 Waking Up

12 The Lesson of the Lilac

Further Reading

The Katha Upanishad

The Books of Eknath Easwaran

SERIES PREFACE

The Wisdom of India

Some years ago I translated what I called the Classics of Indian Spirituality: the Upanishads, the Bhagavad Gita, and the Dhammapada. These ancient texts, memorized and passed from generation to generation for hundreds of years before they were written down, represent early chapters in the long, unbroken story of India’s spiritual experience. The Upanishads, old before the dawn of history, come to us like snapshots of a timeless landscape. The Gita condenses and elaborates on these insights in a dialogue set on a battlefield, as apt a setting now as it was three thousand years ago. And the Dhammapada, a kind of spiritual handbook, distills the practical implications of the same truths presented afresh by the Compassionate Buddha around 500 BC.

These translations proved surprisingly popular, perhaps because they were intended not so much to be literal or literary as to bring out the meaning of these documents for us today. For it is here that these classics come to life. They are not dry texts; they speak to us. Each is the opening voice of a conversation which we are invited to join – a voice that expects a reply. So in India we say that the meaning of the scriptures is only complete when this call is answered in the lives of men and women like you and me. Only then do we see what the scriptures mean here and now. G. K. Chesterton once said that to understand the Gospels, we have only to look at Saint Francis of Assisi. Similarly, I would say, to grasp the meaning of the Bhagavad Gita, we need look no farther than Mahatma Gandhi, who made it a guide for every aspect of daily living. Wisdom may be perennial, but to see its relevance we must see it lived out.

In India, this process of assimilating the learning of the head into the wisdom of the heart is said to have three stages: shravanam, mananam, and nididhyasanam; roughly, hearing, reflection, and meditation. These steps can merge naturally into a single daily activity, but they can also be steps in a journey that unfolds over years. Often this journey is begun in response to a crisis. In my own case, though I must have heard the scriptures many times as a child, I don’t remember them making any deep impression. When I discovered the Bhagavad Gita, I was attracted by the beauty of its poetry; I didn’t understand its teachings at all. It was not until I reached a crisis of meaning in my mid-thirties, when outward success failed to fill the longing in my heart, that I turned to these classics for wisdom rather than literary beauty. Only then did I see that I had been, as the Buddha puts it, like a spoon that doesn’t know the taste of the soup.

Since that time I have dedicated myself to translating these scriptures into daily living through the practice of meditation. The book in your hands is one fruit of this long endeavor. Such a presentation can only be intensely personal. In my translations I naturally let the texts speak for themselves; here I make no attempt to hide the passion that gave those translations their appeal. To capture the essence of the Gita, the Upanishads, and the Dhammapada, I offer what I have learned personally from trying to live them out in a complex, hurried world. I write not as a scholar, but as an explorer back from a long, long voyage eager to tell what he has found.

Yet however personal the exploration, these discoveries are universal. So it is not surprising that at the heart of each of these classics lies a myth – variations on the age-old story of a hero in quest of wisdom that will redeem the world. In the Upanishads, a teenager goes to the King of Death to find the secret of immortality. In the Gita, standing between opposing armies on the eve of Armageddon, the warrior-prince Arjuna seeks guidance from an immortal teacher, Sri Krishna. And behind the Dhammapada lies the story of the Buddha himself, a true story woven into legend: a prince who forsakes his throne to find a way for all the world to go beyond sorrow in this life. These old stories are our own, as relevant today as ever. Myth always involves the listener. We identify with its heroes; their crises mirror ours. Their stories remind us not only what these scriptures mean but why they matter. Like the texts themselves, they seek a response in our own lives.

So this book is both the fruit of a journey and an invitation. If you like, you may read it as a traveler’s tale rich in the experience of some distant place, enjoying the sights and adventures without the travail of actually making the trip yourself. But this place is really no more distant than the heart, so if you find that this description calls you to your own voyage of exploration, my highest purpose in writing will be fulfilled.

EDITORS’ NOTE

This is a revised edition of a book originally titled Dialogue with Death: The Spiritual Psychology of the Katha Upanishad. We have added a previously unpublished introduction and made some minor revisions – including the removal of dated references – suggested by the author before his death, in 1999. Other than that, the text stands as he left it. Though some of his ­examples are no longer current, the problems and principles they illustrate remain relevant: the Cold War, for example, may be behind us, yet the global threat of arms races and nuclear weapons is as urgent as ever.

Introduction

This is a personal exploration of the fundamental ideas of the Upanishads, among the earliest sources of Indian spirituality, and the light they throw on how to live today. My focus is practical: what I have found most meaningful in my own life, after decades of the practice and teaching of meditation.

The Upanishads are probably the oldest body of wisdom literature in the world. Though removed from us by thousands of years, the insights they give into the nature of the phenomenal world, the human mind, and the underlying reality called God are as dazzling today as ever. And the questions they pose never become dated. They are new for every human being, fresh for every generation, because they are questions that each of us has to answer for ourselves.

Out of hundreds of these documents, one in particular appeals to me as the essence of the Upanishads. Lyrical, dramatic, practical, inspiring, the Katha Upanishad embraces the key ideas of Indian mysticism and presents them in the context of a mythic adventure that everyone can relate to: the story of a young hero who ventures into the land of death in search of immortality.

Following this cue, I have laid out this book too like a journey. In the Katha, insights are scattered without regard to order, like flares bursting at random to illumine a hidden landscape; and the central concepts are taken for granted, which can be baffling for readers in a different culture thousands of years later. Here those concepts and insights are presented systematically in the course of exploring deeper and deeper levels of personality. Taken this way, the Katha provides a comprehensive answer to the central question of all philosophy, Who am I? – which, of course, is not just an end but a beginning.

The Upanishads

The Upanishads are the earliest instance in history of the perennial philosophy: the discovery that beneath the incessant change of the phenomenal world lies a changeless reality that can be discovered deep in consciousness by following disciplines that are essentially the same regardless of culture or religion. Spinoza might have been quoting the Upanishads when he summed up this discovery thousands of years later in one simple sentence: The finite rests upon the Infinite, and the Infinite is God.

This is the language of philosophy, but the Upanishads are not philosophy. They do not state opinions, expound theories, or dictate dogma. They record experience, direct encounters with a land beyond change. In Sanskrit they are darshana, sightings. How old they are we cannot know; long before they were written down, they were passed from generation to generation in a meticulously faithful oral tradition still practiced today, so that by the time they emerge in written form, they seem almost to come from beyond the beginning of time.

Given this antiquity, it is amazing how directly they speak to us now. We hear in them the voice of the Eternal, always immediate, always new, always seeming to speak to each of us personally – to you and me. This should not surprise us. The Upanishads are ageless precisely because they describe realities that do not change. And that is how they have always been revered in India: not as written works but as elements of an immutable landscape, the very bedrock of reality. Explorers seeing the Himalayas for the first time record what they see, but the records are not the experience. The Upanishads are like the experience itself, a vision with no barrier between observer and observed, as breathtakingly beyond words as one’s first glimpse of Everest shimmering at the crown of the world.

Yet they have been put into words, so each Upanishad strains language with the passion to communicate what cannot be expressed. Reading them reminds me of that extraordinary scrap of paper on which Blaise Pascal recorded a similar encounter – a precocious mathematician and one of the finest stylists in the French language so struck dumb by this experience that he can only scrawl down fragments:

From about half past ten till about half past midnight fire

God of Abraham, God of Isaac, God of Jacob

not of the philosophers and scholars

Certitude. Certitude. Feeling. Joy. Peace.

Pascal was writing solely for himself, but other masters of ­language before and after him failed equally at the task of ­putting this experience into words. Thomas Aquinas, after a similar encounter towards the end of his life, simply wrote, All that I have written – virtually the whole foundation of Catholic ­theology – now seems no more than straw. Shankara, an Indian mystic of equal authority, was more poetic: Words turn back frightened there, unable to cross. And Mechthild of Magdeburg, lyrical even in her prose, confides, Of the holy things that God has shown me, I can speak no more than a single word – no more than a honeybee can carry away on its feet from an overflowing jar.

Whatever this experience is, though beyond words, it is full of meaning; we can see that from the transformation of personality that follows. Yet how can ordinary people like you and me hope to learn from the records of such experiences if ineffability and random insight are their hallmarks? Some might say we cannot; we must simply take them as they are. But today especially there must be many who, like me, need not only to wonder but to understand; and for that, words and intellectual discrimination must be pressed back into service to give at least some sense of what is beyond their reach.

Like explorers describing the same scene from different ­vantages, each Upanishad throws out these random, ineffable snapshots of a transcendent reality from its own point of view. If we could put these visions all together, we might have a map that brings into clear relief the whole inner geography of the spirit.

Yet the Upanishads themselves provide no such map, and without one, it is difficult to assemble these fragments into a coherent whole. In addition, however they may thrill and inspire us, their practical meaning is often far from clear: so obscure, in fact, that even to their contemporaries, the word upanishad came also to mean secret because to understand them requires the practice of spiritual disciplines – a long drawn-out and demanding affair that excludes those unwilling to make it the focus of their lives.

In other words – not surprisingly, perhaps – to understand the Upanishads, one must actually go to their source oneself. The result is almost paradoxical: mystics from other traditions such as Chuang Tzu, Jalaluddin Rumi, Teresa of Avila, or the Baal Shem Tov would have no difficulty recognizing these ecstatic testimonies, yet their meaning remains hidden to ­Pascal’s philosophers and scholars – and to the rest of us as well, until we undertake these disciplines ourselves or find a guide who has gone that way before.

The Katha Upanishad

With such a guide, however, the essence of these luminous documents can be brought to light, and two or three in particular stand out with special appeal for anyone today who wants to understand what this great adventure is all about.

Of these, as I said, the Katha Upanishad is a personal favorite, powerful, poetic, and practical. As Upanishads go, it is relatively late – perhaps only three or four thousand years old, recent enough to gather the insights of earlier Upanishads into one luminous outpouring. Virtually all the fundamental ideas of Indian spirituality are found there, not presented systematically but fully developed; and since these are really the cornerstones of the perennial philosophy, the Katha might be said to contain the fundamentals of mysticism anywhere. In it we find elements of theory and practice that are elaborated later in the Bhagavad Gita and sometimes even reminiscent of the Compassionate Buddha.

The similarities with the Gita are especially interesting. Both works are dialogues, in which a human being receives from an immortal teacher instruction into a higher mode of living. In both, too, the central questions are ones that have been asked since the earliest times: Who am I? What is the purpose of life? How am I to live? Most important, the very essence of both is choice. They present alternative ways of living, show their consequences, and then leave it to us to choose. This is a very positive, practical approach. Problems become challenges; living wisely becomes an adventure requiring daring, determination, and skill. The settings alone suggest this: the Gita unfolds on a battlefield; the Katha, in the shadowy kingdom of Death.

In its barest form, the story that provides the framework of the Katha is found in the oldest of Hindu scriptures, the Rig Veda. A boy is told by his father to go where his ancestors have gone. He joins the dead, but his faith and courage impel the King of Death, Yama, to show him how to return to life. A later version adds some dialogue and the boy’s name – Nachiketa – but little more.

Like a great dramatist, the anonymous seer who left us the Katha Upanishad took this mythic fragment and lifted it into a masterpiece of spiritual instruction. Nachiketa is no longer a faceless figure; he comes alive; we recognize him. Like Arjuna in the Bhagavad Gita, he stands for you and me, for everyone with a deep drive to know what life is for and why we are here. And Death is the perfect teacher – direct, challenging, never one to mince words. Step by step, he takes his student through the ­levels of personality to the final discovery, deep in consciousness, of a changeless Self beyond time and death.

In this book I try to bring these lofty insights back again to earth so that we can recognize their wisdom in the events of everyday life. Then we discover, perhaps with some surprise, that a visionary document thousands of years old actually provides a framework for understanding ourselves, the world, and even the daily news.

Presented this way, despite its ecstatic vision, the Katha is far from otherworldly. Its essential lesson is how to live – not marginally, but to the fullest of our human capacity. That is just what Yama teaches Nachiketa, and it is this practicality in daily living that gives the Katha Upanishad such importance for our world today.

The Plan of This Book

Venturing into other worlds to bring back the secrets of life and death is, of course, a quintessential theme in world mythology. It also provides a perfect scheme for arranging the insights of the Upanishads systematically, in the order in which we would discover them if we were on this quest ourselves; and that is the scheme I have followed in this book. The first two chapters set the stage for Death to teach; then, chapter by chapter, the essential ideas of the Upanishads that dominate the Katha are presented along the stages of a journey of exploration from the world of daily experience – the region of sense perception – to the final discovery of the core of personality that Indian philosophy calls Atman, the Self.

In myth, this kind of quest begins with a passage into another world that touches and interacts with our own world in hidden and mysterious ways. Often the entry is through something familiar and close at hand: a rabbit hole or looking-glass, the wardrobe of a forgotten room, a door in a garden wall, a steep path hidden in a baleful wood. This other world – or, rather, the world these stories allude to – is real, and even nearer than the myths suggest. It lies within us, and refers to regions in consciousness that are as much a part of us as the thoughts and feelings of waking life. Our normal waking consciousness, says William James,

rational consciousness as we call it, is but one special type of consciousness, whilst all about it, parted from it by the flimsiest of screens, there lie potential forms of consciousness entirely different. We may go through life without suspecting their existence; but apply the requisite stimulus, and at a touch they are there in all their completeness . . . they may determine attitudes though they cannot furnish formulas, and open a region though they fail to give a map. At any rate, they forbid a premature closing of our accounts with reality.

Entry into these inner realms is effected not by opening a door, as in the myths, but by closing them – closing the doors of perception. The world of everyday experience is the world of the senses: what we see, hear, taste, smell, and feel, together with the babbling brook of thoughts and feelings that we’re aware of, makes up what we mean by the real world. Only when we close the senses and learn to focus our attention on the contents of consciousness itself do we begin to see that there is much, much more to who we are.

The world within is literally boundless, as infinite as the space we gaze into on a starry night. What can travel mean in a realm without dimensions? A journey needs a starting point and a destination that takes time to reach. We expect distinct regions to cover, as in those wonderful travelers’ tales from times past, each with its own geography and dangers; we expect borders to cross and checkpoints where identities are verified and entry restrictions rigorously applied. As we shall see, all this will be found equally in the world within, and the Katha will lay out five distinct regions surrounding the Self, each with its own challenges, that we must pass through to discover the Self. In practical terms, this is the integration of personality – the precise meaning of the word yoga – at a deeper and deeper level, until at last we find ourselves whole. The marvel of this immersion in unity is that at the same time, we and the universe we live in become whole. The separateness that seemed so obvious at the physical level when we set out is found now to be an illusion – as Einstein wrote, a kind of optical delusion of our consciousness. There is no real barrier between us and others, no barrier dividing us from the rest of creation.

The Katha concludes with a quiet declaration that Nachiketa completed this journey and attained life’s goal. He knows who he is, from top to bottom – not a separate physical creature but inseparable from the deathless ground of life. On what comes next, the Katha Upanishad is silent. To see what this supreme achievement means in daily living, we must turn to later scriptures like the Bhagavad Gita – or, best, to the lives of those who have achieved this goal themselves. No one provides a better example than the Compassionate Buddha, who lived out the myth of Nachiketa and yet belongs to history, whose quest for a way beyond death left a legacy that has endured for thousands of years. In him we see what it means to go beyond death in this very life. So the last chapter of this book begins with his story, closing the circle for us as a proper myth should – and leaving it to us to follow if we choose.

THE MYTH

A Dialogue with Death

CHAPTER 1

An Inward Journey

Let me start with a story – one that has been handed down for thousands of years. Its hero is a teenager in ancient India named Nachiketa, who goes to the King of Death to learn the meaning of life. The place is not essential to the narrative, but Nachiketa’s age is not incidental. Teenagers can show tremendous spiritual potential, for they have the passion, the desire, the idealism, and the reckless daring to stake everything they have on an almost impossible goal.

Nachiketa has this daring, and he has also one other characteristic of teenagers that can get them into a lot of trouble: he is a ruthless observer. He sees right through superficial behavior, and like the little boy in the story of the emperor’s new clothes, he calls a spade a spade.

The opening scene is timeless; I can imagine it in Berkeley or Boston as easily as in ancient India. Nachiketa’s father is a real pillar of the community. He has wealth and status and everybody looks up to him, probably not without a twinge of envy. But as can sometimes happen to community pillars, he has grown accustomed to making compromises with his values. When the story opens, he has decided to make a grand donation to a worthy charity: the temple building fund. And a familiar little voice seems to have whispered, Wouldn’t you like to have your name on the cornerstone of that temple? Wouldn’t it be pleasant to hear the priest announce, ‘Without Nachiketa Senior, this magnificent edifice would never have been built. Generations to come will bless his name’? So Nachiketa’s father announces grandly that he is giving away all his possessions for this noble purpose – including a large herd of cows, which were legal tender in ancient India. And everyone is duly impressed.

Everyone, that is, except Nachiketa. Dad, he protests in a loud whisper, "what do you mean by that? You’re not giving away all