The Ten Principal Upanishads

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Incompetent to expound Indian philosophy, I shall illustrate come few things that have to be said from my own daily thoughts and contemporary poetry. Shree Purohit Swami has asked me to introduce what is twice as much his as mine, for he knows Sanskrit and English.

I but English. Before, after and during his nine years' pilgrimage round India he has sung in Sanskrit every morning the Awadhoota Geeta, attributed to Dattatreya, an ancient Sage to whom he pays particular devotion, and two Upanishads, the Sadguru, his own composition, and the Mandookya; and perhaps at night to entertain or edify his hosts, songs of his own composition; those in Marathi or Hindi among the unlearned, those in Sanskrit among the learned. Sanskrit has been a familiar speech, not changing from place to place, but always on his tongue.

For some forty years my friend George Russell (A.E.) has quoted me passages from some Upanishad, and for those forty years I have said to myself-some day I will find out if he knows what he is talking about. Between us existed from the beginning the antagonism that unites dear friends. More than once I asked him the name of some translator and even bought the book, but the most eminent scholars left me incredulous. Could latinised words, hyphenated words; could polyglot phrases, sedentary distortions of unnatural English:-'However many Gods in Thee, All-Knower, adversely slay desires of a person'-could muddles, muddied by 'Lo! Verily' and 'Forsooth, represent what grass farmers sang thousands of years ago, what their descendants sing today? So when I met Shree Purohit Swami I proposed that we should go to India and make a translation that would read as though the original had been written in common English: 'To write well,' said Aristotle, 'express yourself like the common people, but think like a wise man', a favourite quotation of Lady Gregory's-I quote her diary from memory. Then when lack of health and money made India impossible we chose Majorca to escape telephones and foul weather, and there the work was done, not, as I had planned, in ease and leisure, but in the interstices left me by a long illness. Yet I am satisfied; I have escaped that polyglot, hyphenated, latinised, muddied muddle of distortion that froze belief. Can we believe or disbelieve until we have put our thought into a language wherein we are accustomed to express love and hate and all the shades between? When belief comes we stand up, walk up and down, laugh or swing an arm; a mathematician gets drunk; finding that which the prerogative of men of action is.

**Contents and Sample Pages**