In Our Time - The Upanishads

Episode Date: November 8, 2012

Melvyn Bragg and his guests discuss the Upanishads, the ancient sacred texts of Hinduism. Dating from about 700 BC, the Upanishads were passed down through an oral tradition in priestly castes and were not written down until the 6th century AD. They constitute the final part of the Vedas, the collection of texts which form the foundation of the Indian Hindu world, and were originally spoken during sacrificial rituals.Yet the Upanishads go beyond incantations performed during sacrifices, and ask profound questions about human existence and man's place in the cosmos. The concepts of Brahman (the universal cosmic power) and Atman (the deeper soul of the individual) are central to the understanding of the Upanishads. Each individual treatise has its own character. Some are poetic; some are scientific; others are dialogues between kings and sages or metaphysical reflections. More than one hundred Upanishads were produced, thirteen of which are regarded as the canonical scriptures of Hinduism.With:Jessica Frazier Lecturer in Religious Studies at the University of Kent and a Research Fellow at the Oxford Centre for Hindu Studies at the University of OxfordChakravarthi Ram-Prasad Professor of Comparative Religion and Philosophy at Lancaster UniversitySimon Brodbeck Lecturer in Religious Studies at the University of CardiffProducer: Natalia Fernandez.

Thank you for downloading this episode of In Our Time, for more details about In Our Time, and for our terms of use, please go to BBC.co.com.uk slash Radio 4. I hope you enjoy the programme. Hello, what are we here for? What's the essence of human existence, and what's the force that drives the universe? Such questions lie at the heart of the ancient Indian philosophical texts, the Upanishads. The earliest Upanishads derive from about 1,500 BC, though composed in about 700 BC, but weren't written down until about the 5th or 6th century AD.

They were secret, intended only for the elite and those initiated in spiritual wisdom, passed down in priestly casts from father to son from generation to generation. The Odu Panishad means to sit down close together. This concept is key to understanding the teaching methods of the text, which often take the form of a question and answer session between pupil and teacher. These mystical scriptures question the nature of being and became hugely important in the Hindu religion. But what answers do the Upanishads offer us in a quest to understand our place in the world?

With me, to discuss the Upanishads are Jessica Frazier, lecturer in religious studies at the University of Kent, and a research fellow at the Oxford Centre for Hindu Studies at the University of Oxford, Chakravati Ram Prasad, normally called Ram, Professor of Comparative Religion and Philosophy at Lancaster University, and Simon Broadbeck, lecturer in religious studies at Cardiff University. Jessica Frazier, the oldest of Panisad's date from about 700. BC. Can you give us some idea of the state of Indian civilization at that time?

Yeah, well, India in the first millennium BC is this vastly diverse subcontinent. We see tribal cultures all across the whole territory in the jungles, in the mountains, in the deserts, and all of these different, if you like, tribal cultures have their own languages and their very own ideas. But what's happening in the period towards the writing of the Upanishads is that these cultures, starting to coalesce into what you might think of as a city state, into kingdoms that have distinctive kings and courts. And with that, the means to create a real intellectual culture

that hadn't been there in the same way before. So you describe it basically as a court culture? It's a court culture. And what we see in the Upanishads themselves is reference to kings who are speaking to their courtiers, speaking to holy men and learned people, and providing the platform for discussion of, if you like, more philosophical, metaphysical,

cosmological ideas. That's a pattern that we see across the world at that time. So something quite similar is happening in ancient Greece, where you get city-states enabling people like Socrates to discuss with his peers. In China, something not totally dissimilar is happening, enabling people like Confucius to come up with extraordinary ideas. It's a cure at congruence, isn't it?

It's absolutely fascinating. I think it has a lot to do with the idea that the world is creating urban civilization in which that people start to start to. to think and discuss in a new way. In India, this is really important, particularly on the Gangesitic plain in the north, where there are two key cultures that will contribute

to the Upanishadic philosophy. On the western end towards modern Pakistan and Uttar Pradesh, we've got priests who have developed a language in which to write and describe their ideas. And in the eastern side, we have people interested in notions of an immortal soul, of reincarnation and meditation. And when these cultures come together,

we're going to see, if you like, a philosophical revolution in progress. Can we make a reference here, Jessica, to the Vedic body of Hindu sacred thought, which began around 1,500 Psi'i, and Upanishads might say to grow out of them. Anyway, they were there for several centuries before the Upanishads. Can you just refer to them?

Well, the priestly culture that we see in the western side is focused on rituals, something that we see quite similarly in the ancient near east in places like Egypt, actually not dissimilar in Greece, where they do rituals to a seven, of gods who they hope will help them with their lives who will help install order. And those rituals are described and written down in these Sanskrit texts called the Vedas.

The Vedas helped to maintain that ritual tradition. Would it be fair to say that sacrifice is an essential part of that ritual? Yeah, sacrifice offerings to the gods that we see on altars in temples that are meant to help human survive essentially. What's interesting about the Vedic culture is that as the centuries progress towards the period of the Upanishads, simply describing and transmitting the ritual is no longer going to be enough.

And we seem to see a younger generation who are asking questions about cosmological issues. Where does the universe come from? If you like physics and metaphysics, how do things work? And bigger questions than simply survival, like immortality, what happens after we die. And the Upanishads will be the texts

late in that period that offer answers to this. But the reason I raise the notion of sacrifices, from the very beginning, there's an attempt to control, isn't it? This is an attempt to control what is happening, the ancient quest for people on earth to not knowing the forces that are controlling them, like why they're born, why they die,

why the sun comes up, why their floods, trying to control it. So the idea of control is deeply in there before we come to the Upanishad. I think that's right. And there's an early idea that sacrifice and the gods will give you control. If you give the gods the right thing,

they will help to order the world for you. But later, people think they're going to need to understand the universe itself in order to have that kind of control. Ramprasat, how many, can you just give us some idea of how many Upanishads there are, what form they take, and let's get down the business. Well, as usual with India, there's no straight answer. The number of Upanishads is literally countless because they continue to be written right up to the last century or two.

Usually we think of the main Upanishads as numbering 14, primarily because by the early medieval period the commentaries are written primarily on them so they get somewhat solidified as the classic open as shards and their composition ranges from the earliest sort of probably from about 1,000,000 B.C. when they are first emerging right up to the start of the common era so they actually represent a range of the widest type of

Hindu thought and speculation of the first millennium BC. We were talking about something that began as an oral culture, as most cultures did. And that meant that it was in the hands of very few people. It was easy to keep, we might use

the word, Eidius wrongly, it was easy to keep among a few people, leave it at that. That's right. But even the redaction of these texts, which should have happened from about the first, second century onwards of the common era, still did not alter the nature of the elitism of the texts.

It just became somewhat differently approached because they became part of material culture in a way they hadn't been. The actual sort of explosion of much more wide-ranging access to this material really coincides with modernity, perhaps in the middle of the 19th century onwards. But we're talking about it then much earlier than that around. We're talking about it then being written down and using Sanskrit as a language, which is the language of, as it were, the nobility,

the language of the educator, the language. When did that happen? And could you tell us what they were that was written down? Were they chapters, were they verses, were they prose, were they poetry? Could you just give us an idea? Yes. For that, almost for the first thousand years of their existence, they are almost entirely oral

and transmitted from father to. son, they are often in the form of dialogues, usually quite a wide range, a husband and wife, king and priest, father and son, some famous teachers meeting a holy man whose powers they do not know and understand over the course of asking questions. Dialogue is actually the dominant way in which these questions are explored, but there are also narratives about what the Godstead, how they come up against their own limitations in the face of reality. There are also a great deal of guidance on things like what do you do when you desire to have a son? What do you do when you start searching for answers yourself? How do you attain certain ends?

So there's a combination of these three things, guidance, narratives and dialogue. When we think of dialogue, dialogues around that time, we think of Plato's dialogues. Is there any comparison between the two? They are very much so because the dialogue form allows the, for us now the reader, but those who have learned then, to start from where they are, which is of not knowing. So the questions that are articulated seek to locate the audience from the perspective of the enquirer. So that means that when the answers start coming in, just as our own understanding gets layered through getting more and more comprehensive, complex answers, so to the dialogues themselves progress towards deeper and deeper wisdom. But just to go back to a question asked two or three times ago, some of it's in poetry, some of it's in prose, some of them are very short, and even long ones are only 40 or 50 pages.

That's right, and very often different to punishes replicate almost exactly the same passages. When they were written down around, do we know who wrote them down? And was it at a court, or did they have proto-university? or what do we talk about? Well, there would have been circles of learning which would have been proto-universities, although the universities themselves, in any recognisable form don't develop till about the fourth, fifth century onwards.

But by that time, these texts had become material objects. They must have been redacted by people who took themselves to belong directly in the line of dissent from some of the sages and some of the characters, half-mythological, but certainly their... lines of dissent are preserved quite carefully, indeed, to this very day. So it would have been written down, as it were, and capture text. We're talking about copying down rather than inventoring, yes.

That's right. Would have been done by people who felt that they were the direct inheritors of the insights of their ancestors. Simon Broadbeck, who were these Apanishads intended? Who was the intended audience? Let's move to the, let's move to 7th century AD, common era, 7th century AD. Can you give us a sense of how they were originally, how they were recounted at that time were they aimed for anybody in particular, if so,

whom? I think with these texts, you have to remember that they are part of the Vedas, which are divided into four sections, depending on specific types of priests who would work at the solemn ritual for rich patrons. And the Vedas were, as it were, the professional handbooks

for these families of priests, as four basic types of priests who would perform different kinds of actions at the ritual and an awful lot of very careful technology went into storing and handing on these texts. So they were patrimonies, as it were, handed down from, and memorized exactly in, from an early age,

in the same way that we or I certainly learned, the Lord's Prayer as a sequence of syllables, and it wasn't until many years later that I began to give them meaning. And the Upanishads are, as it were, the last part of this Vedic knowledge. And I suppose they are largely about how knowledge works, because they are families who lived by knowledge. They lived by the power of their knowledge and their utterance and what they had learned.

And in the Upanishads we see not just the listing of what needs to be known, but reflections on the process of knowledge, on the process of getting and transmitting knowledge and the kinds of transformations that can happen to an individual on account of knowledge. You're talking about the priests there and Jessica referred earlier to the court were the priests at the court? What place did they play in society

at that early time when the Panishads are being written down in Sanskrit? Well it's very hard to tell what was going on socially at this time because what we have basically is frozen textual material without much context to place it in but from what we can tell from the content of the Upanishads in particular we can see that there were courts, that there were kings,

that priests, Noah's sages came along to those courts to try and win the patronage. Were they resident of priests or were they travelling priests? I think some were travelling priests, but as far as we can tell from the Indian royal tradition, even the earliest kings had dedicated priests, so in the same way as kingship would go in families, so being the priest to that kingly family would go in the family. And you said an interesting phrase, I didn't get it accurately, but they lived in knowledge, they lived for knowledge.

How did they, I mean, it's ridiculous. Well, it's the... 21st century, Grays, then I'm going to ask, but how did they support themselves? Were they supported at the court? They would have been very richly supported. by the Dakshinar, which is given to the priests at the end of the ritual. What's that?

Well, it's thousands of cows. That's rich. Well, I mean, you have to remember about the Vedic sacrifice that it is premised on the power of utterance. So knowing the correct magic word, syllable perfect, which only the priests will know, is absolutely vital to the rest. rich person paying for the ritual in order for him and his

family to get what they want to keep their cosmos working to keep their realm working to keep the universe as a whole going as it should and what did they want well probably the same kinds of things as rich and powerful people

want today they wanted to swell their coffers and increase their realms and make sure that they defeated their enemies and that their line would continue. Now, we've got some idea of the format. Ram gave us some idea of the format and the content.

Can we develop the idea, can we develop the content? Is there a broad, can you give us a broad overview of what the Upanishads were about? Well, they contain a vast variety of different kinds of material. They are compendia. miscellaneous and they are not necessarily organized according to any visible principle. They do contain, I would say, as a basic generalisation, reflections on the education process and the content and effects of knowledge. But there is an awful lot of different stuff there.

there are cosmogonies, there are etymologies, there are an awful lot of analogies between different realms of knowledge. So, for example, probably the oldest Upanishad begins with the statement that the head of the sacrificial horse is the dawn.

And this is developed into an elaborate analogy between... It's wonderful. I read it in your thoughts. It's an amazing piece of it. I'm putting it in my newsletters or people can read it in full. It's absolutely terrific. Well, it is baffling also, but the way the Upanishads tend to work

is by shocking you out of your normal way of thinking. Often, there's an awful lot of teaching by paradox. Can you just go on about the horse? Well, the head of the horse is the dawn. Just a few bits more. We didn't read the entire thing here. I can't remember the all the different... Oh, it's the flanks and the front and the back and the liver.

There's lots. Exactly. I mean, because, you know... Represents the cosmos, the horse represents the cosmos and represents, and most of all, breath and so on. But why is that so central and why is it put first? Well, it's central because the horse sacrifice was the greatest of royal sacrifices. Ah, right.

And these Vedic priests, apart from anything else they were, they were also butchers, and they knew an awful lot about how to dismember animals and apportion different pits of the animal for different purposes. Jessica Frazier, the relationship between man and cosmos, which sounds very grand, but it's what we still do. So if it's grand, let it be grand. How did the Upanishads approach this? Can you give us the basis for inquiry, if you like?

Well, the Upanishads have this a particularly grand way of thinking about the cosmos, grander than many other cultures aspired to. In the later stages of the Vedic texts, we have a wonderful hymn called the Nath. Sadiya Sukta, and it starts by saying, in the beginning, before the creation of the universe, existence didn't exist. In fact, even non-existence did not exist. So what was there? What is it that encompasses the whole of everything, even that which is not? It's, we're talking far... We're still doing the same today, aren't we? Yeah, and we're talking... What was there before the Big Bang? Exactly. And even beyond the Big Bang, what is there before even the possibility of existence? It's a really large-scale way of looking. at things where in other cultures were saying who created it all. They're saying who created the creator.

And we start to get the answer to things like that in these texts that we find in the end of the Vedic period called the Upanishads, where there's a key concept that in a way answers those questions. And that concept is Brahman. They are, as Simon says, very diverse texts, but we see this idea coming up again and again in different forms. Brahman is that which is infinite and encompasses all existence. It's eternal. It's unchanging. It transcends the universe we see around us. And those are ideas we see in many different cultures, but here's the extra distinctive element of the Upanishadic idea. It's also all-pervading. It's throughout the universe in many descriptions.

It's present. And indeed, it's even present in the self, in the human soul. This is really distinctive. We get an idea of a reality that contains the earth and the sky, fire and wind, sun and moon, lightning and the sun, stars. The Upanishads tell us that all the world, all beings, all desires are contained within this Brahman. What's interesting, however, is that in its diversity, the Upanishads actually describe it in a wide range of different ways. There's no single account of this. And so in the Chandoggi Upanishad, we see it described as a substance of which different things are made, like pots are made of clay, ornaments are made of gold. In the Mundaka Upanishad, we see it as something which emanates the world as a spider emanates a web, as a fire emanates sparks. And in the Kainopanishad,

we see it as that which is the controller and the source of all thought, all experience, all of our understanding. So there are lots of different analogies, images, for the way in which this extraordinary reality is said to actually encompass the world. As usual, in those, as usual, I think it is as usual, those ancient probing civilizations, their sort of, their poetry becomes our physics, really. Ram, you. wanted to come in. Well, I just wanted to say there are two different ways in which conceptually we can

approach the use of Brahman through these Upanishads in these different ways. So one is the way Jessica is talking about which is you assume that Brahman is the reality and because it's all encompassing reality it is described

in many different ways. Another way of putting it might be to say, well, it's simply a formal term for any number of answers that individuals and individual contexts throw up so that this baffling diversity of what is called Brahman isn't that there is one thing of which many things are said, but rather it's the one name that keeps popping up for the many answers we give about what there is. So that also explains why for a long time afterwards, the tradition itself kept coming up with

radically divergent accounts of what Brahman meant. So in a sense, it's almost an important characteristic of the modern period that we start trying to look for analogies with, for example, the Christian Semitic God and so forth, and then try and understand all these divergent answers in the context of Brahman. And while you're with Roman, can you go on to Atman, the self, perhaps in other terms, the soul, and what the importance of Atman is? Yes, I think, again, the artman is the word that's used for a diversity of things.

It means the body. It means breath. And there is, you know, the breath. The breath, because it's a life. They keep recurring to it. The breath is the essential thing. That's right. We can live without eyes. We can live without ears. That's right.

But even there, I mean, there are sort of dazzling sequences where, you know, the question is asked by a sage of this young teenage sage, what is the athman? And you have the sequences. Is it the word? Is it speech? Is it thought? Is it intention?

Is it the mind? Is it perception? Is it space? Is it hope? And it keeps going through this entire range of registers. And again, the only thing that really unites the word

is anything that seeks to explain who we are and how we are embedded in and how we are related to all there is, is called artman. It's only again later on that you start thinking, well, Atman must mean something

that's roughly translated as the self, and then we start asking, well, what is the self? Is it consciousness? Is it the content of consciousness? Is it some kind of immaterial substance? All these different kinds of answers, the later tradition reads back into the Upanishits.

Simon Broadbeck, can you mentioned, I think you did, in your introductory remarks, these dialogues between fathers and sons, kings and sages, gods and humans. Can you give us some examples of these dialogues and where they're driving to? I would say that the general category of dialogue is between teacher and pupil, but teachers and pupils can take on many different forms.

So in some cases we have dialogues between Brahmins and Brahmins, in some cases we have dialogues between fathers and sons. We have dialogues between husband and wife, where the husband is the teacher and the wife is the learner. There are conversations between rulers and Brahmins in both directions, Brahmins teaching kings and kings teaching Brahmins. The effect being to highlight the status of the knowledge over and above the status of the particular.

a teacher, I would say. Because in every case, what is being highlighted is that there's a lot of knowledge that's normal kind of knowledge, the kind of knowledge that you need to earn a living to get by in the world. But there is also a much, much more precious knowledge, a higher knowledge that is existentially transforming and that comes out being labeled as the only thing that's really worth knowing. and to get that, it is worth turning over everything else. Ram, we have a specific instance of teaching, an encounter here, which takes on what Simon's been saying. King Janaka, he holds a debating competition, finds a winner, and that encapsulates quite a lot of what has been drifting around this conversation so far. That's right. The winner is the sage called Yagnyvalchia.

And it's got several different things going for it. First of all, it encapsulates this idea of the dialogue. It says something about the emerging quarterly culture of the early urban formations in India that Jessica was commenting on. It sets up what afterwards becomes almost normative, which is how are the rules of debate laid down, how are winners identified, what kind of status-accharacters,

to the winner. It also says something about the role of the person called King Janaka, the sage called Jagna Melchia, because they are almost archetypes of how knowledge flows and is transformative

because Janaka pops up in very different context. Sometimes he's a teacher, sometimes he's a learner, sometimes he's the patron of an exchange. And the balance of epistemic power, is the power of knowledge between the king and the sage,

also says something about how this society was negotiating the balance of power between these elite groups, the kings and warriors on the one side, and the Brahmins, the priests and the intellectuals on the other. Jessica, can we turn to the religious themes in the Upanish? Can we talk about, can you talk about monism and pantheism and bring that into the discussion, please? Well, there are lots of different ideas being circulated in these texts, as Simon said, their compendia of almost all the disqualification.

different philosophies that are being discussed in this intellectual culture of the time. But I think there is a real desire to find an idea that will account for the whole of creation. And so we see again and again the idea that all beings arise from and return to this notion, all thought has its root in this notion, that there is an omnipresent and pervasive reality that's the foundation of everything. One of the etymologies, one of the word explanations that's given for the word Brahmann is that it comes from the Sanskrit root burr, which is related to the English bear, to bear up, to provide a foundation for everything. And in many ways, I think that this is what this notion is meant to do, to give the omnipresent sort of explanation for all. And so everything drifts into it.

One thinks of Blake, the world in a grain of sand, which is the world and a grain of sand, bringing to the ground. Well, there is a famous passage which is translated and quoted very often, especially it becomes important from the 19th century, but it talks about that which is greater, larger than the largest, and smaller than the smallest. And it's supposed to, therefore, allow you to think through several registers of reality at the same time. Simon Brobeck, I believe that the Pashads contain the earliest teachings references, what became later the doctrine of the idea of reincarnation.

How is that idea described in its initial stage? There are various different ways of describing the reincarnation process in the Upanishads. I should say first of all that it is not entirely clear where this idea came from. The ways in which it's described in the Upanishads seem to take up metaphors and descriptions that have occurred previously in Vedic literature, but some say that the idea came from outside the Vedic tradition. From where? It is said from further east or from different cultures,

but it's, I would say, impossible to tell. In any case, it's very beautifully described in terms of a caterpillar climbing up to the end of a blade of grass and reaching out onto another. It's described in terms of, a weaver unweaving a piece of cloth and using that same yarn to make another. And it's also described in terms of the world upstairs, that is the heavenly world, to which one can go after one dies, being a source of a kind of trickle-down effect

whereby souls come back to earth in rain and are then eaten as food by men. and ejaculated into women and take form as fetuses that way. So there's what becomes seen as a cycle. Circularity as well. Ram. I think one of the things about what happens in this tradition, this deep presupposition of a cycle of birds,

must be distinguished from some of the ideas that occur much later amongst, for example, the Neoplatonists in the 3rd, 4th century in the West. because what happens is that it's not at all clear that what goes through lives has a personal identity. So it's not that I will be Ram Prasad in this birth, Ram Prasad will be somebody else in the next one. Because what is reborn is not Ram Prasad at all.

It's the Atman itself. Is Ram Prasad in this birth? But it might have been my grand. It might have been your grandfather, the rabbit your grandfather ate. It could be anything. So there is a clear difference between that and the idea of how, for example, when Plotinus says, well, how could it be that Plato might have been reborn as Aristotle? Or Socrates might have been born as Aristotle because then the idea becomes, well, where is the personal identity? What is the soul which goes through births?

in the Indian material from very early on, what does that transition, isn't a person at all? Jessica, Jessica Frazier, the idea of reincarnation wasn't entirely welcome to a great number of people because the basic notion was that life was suffering and to come back to do more suffering, perhaps in a form rather less fortunate than that in which you found yourself, wasn't very attractive.

Anyway, I don't know what, I'd just rather trivial, because the idea of Moksha came in, which was the final deliverance, You died and you stayed dead but in a happy state. I think that's right. I mean, the Western fascination with immortality, living on beyond death, getting more life, didn't really make sense in the Indian context.

As Ram said, the person who gets to live the new life isn't you in any solid sense and you're not going to remember and get the benefit of another life. And I think that there's a strong idea that to be reborn is not terribly a great goal for many people in that culture. rather people started to desire an unchanging immortal state that would be beyond all suffering, all experience and all human identity. And the word that's given for that state is moksha,

the notion of a liberation of this eternal self, which is actually identical in some sense with Brahman, so that it can live as a truly integral reality that's beyond all suffering. And the way to do that is going to be to realize your true identity is something that is not the reincarnating self that you know today. So I as Jessica, Ram as Ram, Simon as Simon, we need to get rid of those identities and re-reduce ourselves through meditation

to that eternal self. And just there's a wonderful passage in one of the texts that expresses this that as long as you continue to look around and identify with the self you are now and the world you see around you, you'll be like a river that falls on a mountain and runs down on all sides. diverse, scattered, like a monkey who runs after different goals, but in the end doesn't really achieve any of them. It's not until you start to see the true nature of the self that it says you will cease to die and cease to be born again, and that ultimately is your goal.

Simon Brodbeck. Yes, I'd like to just point out that there is a variety of different kinds of immortality talked about in these texts, and one of the most pervasive, I mean there is, of course, an awful lot of what Jessica's just been talking about, but there is also a pervasive sense of being able to be immortal through one's children. And that that would be, if you like, a more personal kind of continuation in that one's son is like oneself. There's quite a lot of emphasis on this. There are spells, charms, rituals described in the earlier Panishads

for how to make sure that you have a good son. and of course it depends an awful lot on finding a good woman. And to go back to where I started, this is of course extremely important for the textual tradition because it's a tradition that goes through fathers and sons. So even if individuals are taking off and going behind the sun to where they can't come back from, the texts that they inherited also need to continue on earth through a son. Jessica? One of the things that's interesting

about both forms of immortality is it doesn't give you what we're used to getting in Western and Abrahamic religions which is an immortal self, an identity that continues after death, whether it's your son who is your immortality or whether it's the eternal artman.

The notion that you have to let go of the person you know now to be your own personal identity is really essential, I think, to the Apanishadic transformation of the ultimate religious goal. Ram, what I'd like to do is to move through the effect of the Upanishads in India and around that area of Asia.

And then we can come to its influence, which you've referred to two or three times already, how it melded into the Western tradition and showed itself to be a comparative, obviously a comparable, sorry, a comparable system. So can you just take us through? It's ridiculous for this. But can you take us through up to the 18th century? Did they prosper these teachings? did they grow? Were there more priests?

Were there more manuscripts? And so and so forth. Well, towards the end of the sort of the period when these first 14 odd open issues were composed, probably at the start of the common era, a body of

aphorisms, a brief aid memoirs to aid memoir to reading and understanding this material came to be composed. They were the Brahmusutras. They were statements about Brahman, and they claimed to boil down the essence of all these Abanishads.

Clearly, sometime in the first few centuries of the Common Era, they began to gain in authority because it seemed that here was a body of thought, which distinguished itself both from the concern for the ritual elements, which go back to the Vedas, and which do not play a large role in the Brahmusutras, interpretation of the open issues. They were different also from the Buddhist and Jane material that was emerging. But it's only in about the 8th century that we get

the first extant commentary on them by Shankara who founds the system that we now call Advaitha or non-dualism. From then on, it becomes, for the next 6 or 700 years, necessary for any major thinker or figure who's working in either a theological or sectarian context to give his own interpretation of these Brahmusutras. And very much by the start of the common era,

the diverse elements of the Upanishads that Simon in particular has been talking about are kind of elided. We think much more of the Upanishads as talking about this sustained critical and phenomenological inquiry about the relationship between Atman and Brahman. And it is from that kind of dominance

as a representation of the highest, most abstract reaches of Hindu thought that this material gets translated in the time of the Mughal Empire into Persian. And it is a Persian version that then is translated into French and reaches the Enlightenment thinkers like Voltaire. So by this extraordinary complex transmission process, a very narrow version of the Upanishads becomes even more narrow as representative of ancient Indian thought. Jessica, do you want to take that up?

Jessica Frazier. Yeah, it's interesting to see how this starts to move into other cultures. So as Ram said, Dara Shikko, who's a Mughal, major figure in Indian culture, translates it into Persian and calls it the hidden book of the Quran. He says it's a secret philosophy that's in there. And it's Antiquille du Peron, the Frenchman, who translates it into a Latin version,

that again, it's very elite, as you say, a condensed version that only the elite of Western culture can actually read. But from there, it really makes its way into particularly German culture and has an enormous impact. In Schopenhauer. Exactly. Schopenhauer becomes, if you like, the patron of the Upanishads in the West. And from him, Novalis Nietzsche shelling, a wide range of,

people start to take it up. C.G. Jung eventually gets hold of it and feels that it offers the West, the focus on an inner self that it lacks, says that it's significant that it was first translated after the French Revolution. It offers a new way forward. And it goes into the American Transcendentalists

with Thorough and so on. I'm sadly running out of times. My fault, I've been dragging my heels. It's been so interesting. But Simon, can you, Simon Brodick, can you briefly tell us why you think the stories that are in the panishads

resonate so strongly today still? Well, you're asking an academic and I think that the Upanishas are particularly interesting for academics because they are about knowledge and the process of its transfer and what it can do

if it's our stock in trade as it were so they are full of amusing stories about bizarre teachers who teach in weird ways and... You'll get consolation from this too. Well, I see a lot of these characteristics still being perpetuated that the business of knowledge is very much the same as it ever was, I think.

Those sages that wrote those texts, little did they know, that thousands of years later, we would be making a living by teaching in the same way, but teaching that very material itself. I think they do have more of a legacy as well. I mean, in terms of the paradigms that they present and the paradigmatic characters that they present. For example, I've heard a lot of women say that they take inspiration from Gargi, who was one of the philosophers competing at the court of Janaka,

who competed on equal terms with men, and who was the first one in that party to say that she thought, that Gertchen Valkia was the bee's knees. Finally, Jessica. I think you're right that it's about questioning, it's about people looking for new answers to the ones that they've been given by tradition. And it's interesting that when they reach the West

and the rest of the world, for people like Tolstoy, for people in America, for people still today, it offers a very different perspective on the cosmos, on reality, and on the self to the one that the West has grown up with. In a sense, it's provided the alternative philosophical and religious outlook

to Western views for the cultures that we have here and continues to do that today. Well, thank you all very much. Thank you, Jessica Frazier, Simon Brodbeck and Chukravathe Ram Prasat. Next week we'll be talking about the French philosopher and social activist Simone Vey. Thank you very much for listening.

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