Upanisads
*That is Fullness*
*This is Fullness*
*From Fullness comes Fullness*
*Take Fullness from Fullness*
*What remains is Fullness*
*[Aum] Santih santih santih***
I’ve been returning to my study of P. Lal’s translations of the Upanisads recently, especially the Mundukya, Svetasvarana, and Isa Upanisads, for now. More on those later. I recently shared the Svetasvarana with a friend of mine who is Christian, advising her to simply be willing to substitute her own names for what she understands as her higher power in place of the names the text provided. She did a good job of highlighting the inner monism of a lot of Hinduism: the belief in one unnameable, all-pervasive, unknowable Power, which then gets attached to a lot of different names.
I’m working on a project that will print and bind texts like this on an extremely small and cottage-industry level and sort of make it available to whoever might be able to find them. It’s still in the preliminary stages yet, but I have bookshelves full of these books which are unavailable anywhere in the West and barely available in India, but I find that their power is too immense for me to bear alone.
A word on the political moment of the upanisads:
The Upanisads are sort of a second-or-third generation set of Hindu texts–the first being the Vedas, then the Puranas/Brahaminical text. So that places these texts in the same generation or moment of the Buddha. It was a time of reformation. The Brahmins had made Hinduism too political and institutionalized, and the religion was beginning to fragment into sects that reformed the ideas of Hinduism, like Jains and Buddhists. In order to maintain legitimacy and a following, thinkers within Hinduism found themselves opening up to a more personal, spiritualist set of ideas; if they didn’t, all their followers who were looking for that content would have become Buddhists. In a way, the moment of the Upanisads is kind of similar to the moment of the protestant reformation–which is why all the questioning of authority and god, and all the affirmation of personal devotion and theology. In the end, Hinduism is a monist religion; they believe in one unknowable and incomprehensible force that runs through everything, that can be named whatever we want it to name. Rudra is an early name of the god Shiva, who can be seen as the god of entropy; he’s something of an outsider among the gods, as well; he’s known to shirk his duties of receiving sacrifice and spend his time alone meditating. At the moment of the Upanisads, gods like Rudra/Siva were supplanting the old of gods like Indra, who is more akin to Zeus than anything recognizable to modern religion; Indra was the king of the gods, but was also petty and very political, so calling Rudra the god of the gods might have been an effort to undermine that old-guard system.
The text relies on the power of poetry and aesthetics, rather than dogma and description, to convey the power at issue:
Since Rudra is one
there is no second.
Those who know this
do not even imagine a second.
He rules the worlds
with divine power.
He projects the worlds
He protects the worlds
He withdraws the worlds
at the time of dissolution.
3
His eyes are everywhere
Everywhere his face
his arms
his feet
He is the One Divinity
who created
heaven and earth
He is the One
who gave hands to humans
and wings to birds.
6
O Girisanta
O Mountain-Dweller
O Thunderbolt-Wielder
O Giritra
O Mountain-Protector
make your thunderbolt auspicious— the nectar of non-death
9
Nothing better than him
nothing worse
Nothing greater than him
nothing smaller
He dazzles
by his own dazzle
Firm as a tree
he straddles the universe.
11
All faces
All heads
All necks
Such is he
He lives
In the hearts of all
Bhagavan
is everywhere
Bhagavan Siva
is omnipresent
12
The Great Lord
The Great Purusa
He inspires
the mind
to the perfect and pure
He is the Ruler
the Undecaying Radiance
15
The Purusa is
that which is past
that which is future
that which is present
The Purusa
grants *amrita*
the nectar of non-death.
2
You are That!
That is fire
That is the sun
That is the moon
That is the constellations
That is Brahman
That is water
That is Prajapati
Lord of all life!
3
You are woman
You are man
You are boy
You are girl
You are old man
tottering with a stick
You are the one born
with faces everywhere!
4
You are
the blue butterfly
the green parrot with red eyes
You bear
the lightning in your womb
You are
the seasons
the seas
You are
without beginning
You always are
From you
emerge all worlds
5
A he-goat
pleasurably
sleeps with a she-goat
The she-goat
is red
and white and black
Red for fire
white for water
black for earth
The she-goat
gives birth
to countless offspring
One other
leaves her
after enjoying her.
6
Two lovely birds
two close friends
perch on the bough
of a *pippala* tree
One eats
the ripe
and delicious
*pippala* fruit
The other watches.
Which one is happier?
To me, the fundamental line is, “You are that!” What is being described is nothing beyond your own self, reader! This is how I mantain a spiritual athiesm that my Christian friend couldn’t understand: what is being described is only what is known and understood; it does not hover above reality, it is reality. The only step–and it is not a step of faith, only a step of humility–is to understand that in a human form, one can never have access to a fraction of existence–but it exists, and we can content ourselves with our unknowing, our inability to know. Nonetheless, there it is, in your body, ten fingers above your navel.
Expect more along this line on this blog…if I am to write every day, I may have to rely on such abstractions…