The Upanishads moved Hinduism from fire sacrifice to questions about the self
The oldest Hindu scriptures were mostly about rituals and chants. Then came the Upanishads, the last layer of the Vedas, asking how the individual self relates to the ultimate reality behind everything. Nobody knows who wrote most of them, and dating them precisely, one scholar warns, is a house of cards.
The name is usually glossed as sitting down near a teacher, picturing a student receiving hidden knowledge, though the word originally meant something like connection or equivalence. Translators have rendered it as secret doctrine, mystic meaning or, in Patrick Olivelle's version, hidden connections. The philosopher Adi Shankaracharya read it as knowledge of the self or of Brahman. Every Upanishad circles the links among ritual, the cosmos and the human person, placing Atman and Brahman at the top of that order, though they disagree about how the two relate.
About 108 are known. The first dozen or so, the principal Upanishads, sit at the end of older ritual texts and were memorised and passed on by mouth for centuries. The Brihadaranyaka and the Chandogya are the earliest; Olivelle places them before the Buddha, somewhere around the 7th or 6th century BCE, allowing a century's leeway either way. Johannes Bronkhorst argues for much later dates, perhaps as late as the 2nd century BCE even for the oldest. Some 95 minor Upanishads followed over many centuries, and about half of the texts on renunciation may date from the 14th to 15th centuries CE.
Authorship is mostly anonymous, and texts seem to have been expanded by many hands, since manuscripts from different regions differ in wording, style and grammar. Ideas are credited to sages such as Yajnavalkya and Uddalaka Aruni, and women, including Maitreyi and Gargi, take part in the dialogues. The Shvetashvatara is an exception, ending with a credit to its named sage. The early texts come from northern India, from an area now covering Bihar, Uttar Pradesh, Haryana and neighbouring regions.
With the Bhagavad Gita and the Brahmasutra, the principal texts form the foundation that rival Vedanta schools interpret in very different ways. Translations reached Europe in the early 19th century, and Arthur Schopenhauer was so taken with them that he rated them the most elevating reading in the world.
Source: Upanishads
