The Upanishads- An Introduction

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Preface For quite some time now, the upanishads have fallen off the map of Indian philosophy, especially in the last fifty years. This is mainly due to the philosophical trends and fashions of the latter half of the last century. Philosophy in the English- speaking world was dominated by linguistics (the study of languages) and epistemology (a branch of philosophy that studies the theory of knowledge), and this had its impact on Indian philosophy as well. J.N. Mohanty, a professor of Indian philosophy, in an article on Indian philosophy in the Encyclopædia Britannica characterizes the upanishads as 'pre- logical. The focus of much of twentieth-century philosophy was on linguistic analysis more than on epistemology. Bimal Krishna Matilal, a renowned Indian philosopher, had focused almost exclusively on the diverse and sophisticated schools of logic in India. It would be interesting to speculate what turn writing on Indian philosophy in our times would have taken had it been in French. It is no fault of professional and practising philosophers in India that their focus was on logical systems.

The first volume of the Enclyclopædia of Indian Philosophies, edited by Karl Potter and first published in 1970, is on Gautama's Nyaya Sutras, the first systematic work on logic in ancient India. There is much analysis of the Vedanta school, by which is meant the discursive writing on the subject that begins with commentaries on the upanishads by Shankara, followed by those of Ramanuja, Madhva, Nimbarka, Vallabha and Chaitanya, though there is reference to pre-Shankara Vedanta texts like that of Gaudapada's Mandukya Karika. The upanishads themselves are confined to the misty beginnings of Indian philosophy. This book is an attempt to focus on the upanishads, without eliding the stories and dialogues which seem mystical rather than logical, and to show the earliest lineaments of philosophical debate and insight that lie scattered across what are considered the more important and the older texts.

**Contents and Sample Pages**