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Updated: June 26, 2025
The later Buddhists compose nothing in the style of the Nikâyas: they write about Gotama in new and fanciful ways, but no Acts of the Apostles succeed the Gospels. Though the Buddhist suttas are sui generis and mark a new epoch in Indian literature, yet in style they are a natural development of the Upanishads.
The "Veda" in the larger sense is made up of these three bodies of compositions, mantras, brahmanas, and upanishads. These three belong to revelation or "S'ruti," i.e. hearing; what is contained in these is to be regarded as having been heard by inspired men from a higher source. The counterpart of S'ruti is "smriti," i.e. recollection, tradition.
Then he went on the Emperor Gordian's expedition to the East, hoping to learn the philosophy of the Hindus. The Upanishads would have puzzled Plotinus, had he reached India; but he never did. Gordian's army was defeated in Mesopotamia, no "blessed word" to Gordian, and Plotinus hardly escaped with his life. He must have felt like Stendhal on the retreat from Moscow.
The Upanishads often receive such epithets as transcendental and idealistic but in many passages—perhaps in the majority—they labour with imperfect success to separate the spiritual and material. The self or spirit is sometimes identified in man with the breath, in nature with air, ether or space.
The ancient Rig Veda is at present only a book of antiquarian interest. The Upanishads, which are the fountainhead of Hindu thought and philosophy, are only the text-books and treasure-houses of philosophers and metaphysicians.
At any rate they anathematized his teaching with a violence unusual in Indian theology. In spite of such lively controversy he found time to write thirty-seven works, including commentaries on the Upanishads, Bhagavad-gîtâ and Vedânta Sûtras.
In India they seem indigenous to the soil and not imported by the Aryan invaders, for they are not clearly enunciated in the Rig Veda, nor formulated before the time of the Upanishads . They were introduced by Buddhism to the Far East and their presence in Manichaeism, Neoplatonism, Sufiism and ultimately in the Jewish Kabbala seems a rivulet from the same source.
Nor should it be said that we must have recourse to the Upanishads for the purpose of establishing that the Real found in the way of perception and inference is at the same time of the nature of bliss; for the merely and absolutely Intelligent is seen of itself to be of that nature, since it is different from everything that is not of that nature.
It is impossible to say how many Upanishads there are, nor does a Hindu think the less of an Upanishad because it is not found in a certain list. And in mediaeval and modern times these ancient sacred books have been replaced for all except Brahmans by more recent Sanskrit works, or by a vernacular literature which, though having no particular imprimatur, claims the same authority as the Vedas .
And thus in the case of the texts of the Upanishads also. If we thought that these texts do not mean to intimate the real existence of Brahman, the mere idea of Brahman to which they give rise would not satisfy us in any way.
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