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Philosophy of the Upanishads
The Philosophy of the Upanishads is a comprehensive book written by Paul Deussen that delves into the philosophical teachings of the Upanishads, a collection of ancient Hindu texts that explore the nature of reality, the self, and the ultimate goal of human existence. The book is divided into three parts, each of which examines a different aspect of Upanishadic philosophy. In the first part, Deussen provides an overview of the Upanishads and their historical context, explaining their significance in the development of Hindu philosophy and their influence on other religious traditions. He also discusses the various themes and concepts that are central to Upanishadic thought, such as Brahman, Atman, and karma.The second part of the book focuses on the major Upanishads themselves, providing detailed analyses of their key teachings and exploring their philosophical implications. Deussen examines each Upanishad in turn, discussing its structure, themes, and underlying philosophical ideas.Finally, in the third part of the book, Deussen offers a broader perspective on Upanishadic philosophy, considering its relationship to other philosophical traditions and exploring its relevance to contemporary philosophical debates. He also discusses the ways in which Upanishadic thought has influenced Western philosophy and spirituality.Overall, The Philosophy of the Upanishads is a comprehensive and insightful exploration of one of the most important and influential philosophical traditions in human history. It is an essential resource for anyone interested in Hindu philosophy, comparative religion, or the history of ideas.1908. This treatise on the Upanishads illustrates the teaching of the ancient Indian seers and is presented in the clearest light, and claims the sympathetic study of all lovers of truth. It discussed the philosophy of the Upanishads, the culminating point of the Indian doctrine of the universe. Divided into five parts introduction to the philosophy of the Upanishads; Part theology, or the doctrine of Brahman; Part cosmology, or the doctrine of the universe; Part psychology, or the doctrine of the soul; Part eschatology, or the doctrine of transmigration and emancipation, including the way thither (practical philosophy).This scarce antiquarian book is a facsimile reprint of the old original and may contain some imperfections such as library marks and notations. Because we believe this work is culturally important, we have made it available as part of our commitment for protecting, preserving, and promoting the world's literature in affordable, high quality, modern editions, that are true to their original work.
- GenresPhilosophy
444 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1898
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April 3, 2026
Paul Dessen dives into the weeds of Indology to provide an account of Indian religion that is useful for enhancing structural comprehension (for a novice such as myself) but is tainted by German romanticism. Reflecting the trends of the time, the book is written in a very objective, non-narrative manner as Dessen builds his case out of a patchwork of citation from the Upanishads. Even as he traces exciting religious genealogies Dessen doesn't get carried away but keeps his remarks brisk, objective "in style" even if realistically they reveal some of his own emphases and attitudes. Indian religion is a many-headed beast with multiple subtle ideas that cannot be flattened into the constraints of European development of religion so it always strikes one as a challenging thicket to approach, readily offering itself to the Hegelian illusion of India as a land without history - something that is rebuffed by the evolutionary character of Indian religion. I don't think I have read any book about Indian religion that has been "easy" to read or that has left me with an incredibly clear-headed view of what's going on. It is no different with this book and so I recommend that one read at least something about Vedas before reading this book: for me, this paired well with Frits Staal's Discovering the Vedas, allowing me to build up and re-encounter information from that book in a new light.
One reviewer states that this book is free from English colonial prejudices, presumably referring to the pattern of thought identified by Edward Said as orientalism where Eastern thought is objectified according to a specific type of chaotic-irrationalism to justify colonial control. That may be so but there very much is a more subtle, German angle that colours this book which amounts to imagining a Golden Chain of wisdom from Upanishads to the Greeks after whom it gets lost only to be saved by the Germans. While the similarities between Upanishadic doctrines and Neoplatonism are striking and the influence is apparent to anyone with a map, nobody should be fooled by this seemingly loving attempt at connecting to the motherly source of ideas in India. The claim that it is only with Immanuel Kant that the doctrine of atman-centrism or idealism enters the West is historically and philosophically inaccurate. Kant is not a simple idealist, infinity of time is for him as incomprehensible as a beginning of time, and Catholic thinkers like Augustine and Descartes explored the primacy of self over deceptive sensation deeply. Though Deussen sometimes appears to treat Kant more fairly, it is fairly apparent that his work is completely mutilated in order to make him into a sort of national hero of "the land of poets and thinkers", perhaps on account of how abstruse his text is. Indian religion functions here as a myth of exalted origin for a palingenesis based on abstruse philosophies ill-understood which is worth keeping in mind while reading this. I'm not saying you absolutely can't find convergence with Kant's doctrine and Upanishads, as Schopenhauer did, but it's not to be found simply on the account of idealism or atman.
Despite his biases, Deussen is very knowledgeable and systematic which allows him to trace out a kind of genealogy or history of Indian religious thought even if he doesn't indulge in narrativity. The Upanishadic, relatively abstract insight of atman over Vedic ritual, emerges as a teaching of kshatriya as opposed to brahmans responsible for the Vedic cult. Upanishads comprise vedanta, meaning end of the vedas, and the word literally means secret word - secret teaching, esotericism. It seems to be so because while it maintains an intimate relation to the Vedas, it undermines naive belief in or submission to Vedic ritual. It therefore makes sense that it shouldn't be told to those in thrall of the elaborate Brahmanic ritual structures. At the same time, it seems to be almost nothing without that structure: the "insights", taken by themselves, can easily degenerate into Eckhart Tolle-like platitudes that feel curiously full of empty air and ungrounded. So even if the presuppositions of Vedic ritual are denounced the recipient of the knowledge must be conversant in Vedic ritual. In Wittgensteinian terms, the upanishadic gnostic must climb the ladder and throw it away only at the end: a very different act to seeing a ladder and simply knocking it over without even bothering to see what's up there.
While Upanishads challenge the authority of the priests, they were nonetheless worked into the Indian ashrama system of the four stages of life which includes the study of Vedas as the very first stage. Upanishads, then, were directed to the people nearing death. This idea arose as an extension of the third life stage of forest-dwellers which followed the execution of familial householder duties and involved more metaphorical discussions of sacrifice in Aranyaka texts while Upanishads rip out the blindfold and reveal: it was all you, you made it all happen, you are the impressions you receive from rituals, you are their efficacy etc. This is the formula of atman is brahman. This is also the very same thing Aleister Crowley attempted to do for Christian-oriented magical traditions with his New Aeon teachings: Come unto me is a foolish word: for it is I that go. In the Indian system, however, there were clear paths from traditional religion to the gnosis, others emphasizing the study of sacrifice, others the Rigvedic hymn itself, others the melody: and all these then had their own Aranyakas and Upanishads, with diverse emphases and approaches to the attainment of gnosis that led to different tendencies in Indian religion.
It is the structural coherence which relates the Vedic cult to the highest gnosis that allows Deussen to analyze the system as almost a microcosmic history of religion where, however, the stages are not negated and then dredged up from negation to harmony in aufhebung, as in the Hegelian system, but are instead preserved as co-existing stages that keep a certain reference to each other. The religious thought evolves from the primeval sludge of cultic superstition and submission to priests to a level where "the question" of it all must be posed: start of religion and philosophy as "we" know it. In Deussen's genealogy, the question first takes the form of idealism, or the atman is all- formula of the Upanishads. However, as the human mind cannot consciously process this and can only attain it in deep sleep, it has to imagine co-extension of the world with atman such that atman "creates" a world and enters it only to get deluded by it - this really sounds like a doctrine of emanation and it also sounds very much like Plotinus' account of the demiurge who gets lost in the material world he fashioned. Deussen calls this pantheism but I guess htis is technically panentheism. Evolving from this doctrine the Shiva-oriented Upanishads start to display signs of theistic religion as the separation of the world and atman has crept in this way: now atman is a higher, other self than the individual self immersed in the world. Finally, the process ends in atheism and dualism: not being able to process a higher principle whose relation to the world is shattered, the world imbibes this characteristic dualism so that in Sankhya doctrine there are now many purushas each enmeshed in prakrti, instead of simply atman. Deussen is at his most astute when he analyzes this atheism as a source of the soteriological tendency that ultimately influenced Hellenic philosophers like Epicurus or the Stoics and is highly apparent in Buddhism. While in Upanishadic idea the knowledge is the point because it is destroying the illusions of Vedic ritual, in the Sankhya and Buddhist doctrines the idea is not to get knowledge but to be rescued from prakrti or samsara so that it is all inverted.
It is hard not to see an analogy with Christianity in the whole of this process: the mighty atman ultimately descends into the world to "save" the people, just as the theistic God is massively humiliated and materialized in Christ. This obsession with salvation has almost come full circle to the original superstitions of the Vedic ritual: contrary to expectations of fierce life-affirming war worship, Deussen shows that the religion of the Vedas has a very naive, clear concept of heaven for those who are righteous and in this heaven also, the weak will have their day. So much for "Christian disease": the idea appears even here which many zealous neo-pagans upheld as the apotheosis of anti-Christianity. Granted, the soteriological doctrine is a mutated version of these superstitions but in one respect it is a regression from the Upanishads: it returns to the idea of salvation as a goal. We must not be too quick to judge this as simply naive any more, however: in Upanishads, while knowledge may have been the goal, it was considered automatically salvific, in which respect it accords with the Greek ideas that emphasise the essentially natural and good character of knowledge - man by nature wishes to know and all that. With atheistic dualism and with Buddhism, knowledge is no longer seen as an automatic good but especially in Buddhism it is denigrated as a mere method to some Enlightenment - really, an undefined state for ordinary person. This way, a weird kind of simulation zone of thinking is created where none of the thoughts can be legitimately pursued towards knowing but rather only as expedients for the sake of something that is not even known. Of course, while we can find the similarity to Christianity, that religion goes even further in claiming you are, in fact, already saved so that even the soteriological thrust of Epicurus and the Stoics flies out the window and all that is left of God and the spiritual is a rotting corpse. It is the same salvation complex as Buddhism, Sankhya and Yoga but in reverse direction, so to speak.
Christianity represents the final rejection of the otherworldly speculations because with the idea of being already saved, almost no intellectualized idea of one's role in the world can be admitted. You are, in a sense, not allowed to think: you can only do, create or failing that feel the fires of mysticism. Deussen makes the perceptive analogy of yoga with phenomena like hypnotism or trances that were in vogue at that time but there is also, to my mind, a kind of relation between Christian mystics and yogis. I would even say there's a relation between yogis and charismatic Christianity where people are like quivering and sweating and _having an experience_. In USA they also have books about "Nuclear Power of Christ" that can be achieved through ascetic practises: totally related to Kundalini yoga. Yoga was heavily influenced by Sankhya but it conceptualised it salvation via turiya, the fourth state in addition to waking, dreaming and deep sleep, the latter of which was identified with immersion with Brahman by Upanishadic thought. To relate this to the ever popular figure of Gurdjieff, the whole point of Upanishads seems to have been to go to sleep while in Yoga, the relation to Vedic ritual was rejected in favour of the idea of wakefulness in every situation which is the fourth state. So, in Yoga the gnostic strand at least still survives but it is embedded deeper into perception itself: while Upanishads require reference to ritualistic aspects of society and their re-interpretation, Yoga starts from simplistic perceptions and conceptualizes its search for knowledge based on that rather than in relation to the ritual. There are fascinating connections here, provided one doesn't overlook the essential differences too reductively, between the progress from Descartes' Meditations (discovery of atman within the context of pre-established theism, which gives it already a different direction) to Husserlian phenomenology and to existentialism of Sartre.
With all this in mind, is this a book on philosophy? Are Upanishads "philosophy"? They are a somewhat philosophical turn in relation to the ritual but reading this book you will find equal parts mythological explanations co-existing with basic philosophical idealist notion that it seems something very different than philosophy as it is usually known. As said previously, the superstitious cultic elements exist simultaneously with their upanishadic renunciations: they form part of one system of tradition. Then again, Platonic oeuvre is replete with mythological themes and it is rather in Aristotle that they are separated. In addition, Hellenic soteriological tendency helped to develop secular philosophies of salvation that address functions of a self-evident cosmos, ignoring the ritual aspect of life. Evidently there was a cleavage of sorts between the brahmanic, ritualistic, conventional aspect of life where its arbitrariness comes aggressively to the fore and between the thinkers and natural philosophers. A figure like Lucretius marries together the soteriological focus on ataraxia with natural philosophy to the point that they become nigh-inseparable: the express purpose is to free man from fear of death and religious oppression. At the other side, you have the Christian materialism which has made the Epicurean assumption of cosmos contingent on grace and being "already saved" - and hence potentially unstable, not essentially ordered, and something man has to confront. These are the twin faces of materialism that Hans Blumenberg analyzes very perceptively. The relation of this particular ideological progress to Indian thought is complicated but it must be remembered that being philosophical is not necessarily a virtue: if someone would deny Upanishads the claim of philosophy, that would not necessarily be an insult, although in Western universities philosophy still subsists as some kind of a hegemonic zombie. If you would ask characters such as René Guénon or René Adolphe Schwaller de Lubicz, not being "philosophy" would be an entirely laudable characteristic of the Indian system.
Frits Staal's Discovering the Vedas makes a likely argument that the Vedic texts, replete with Indo-European terminology, were not so much brought to India by warriors from the north because of the imposing mountain ranges they would have had to face. Instead, he contends that we are talking about a group of Indo-European people passing through the mountain ranges who possessed the knowledge of the spoked wheel that was not familiar to the aboriginal inhabitants of the Indus Valley at that time. It is clear to see that a priestly parasitism quickly formed around this magnificent technology, associating it to necessities of the cosmos and analogizing social life with individual and the cosmos while they hold the power of contact to these strangers, the true explanation of their technology and the means with which to maintain the order of the world. Or then, when the jig is practically up, it has accrued such social capital that it is better to try to advance within it than to demolish the whole system: and there are there justifications of tradition, man needs meaning, there is chaos without such myth. While this may sound judgemental, it is not really what I mean because easy judgement would be the first mistake here that would expose us to similar illusions. Therefore the development of the vedic culture presents a clear lesson: to what extent is the technological might surrounding me used for ideological domination extraneous to what it really is? To what extent is it presented all wrong, with only the argument, the same one indubitably used by the priests, that it is not possible to question a system that produces such wonderful results? Starting from here, from our current narratives, where is our upanishad?
One reviewer states that this book is free from English colonial prejudices, presumably referring to the pattern of thought identified by Edward Said as orientalism where Eastern thought is objectified according to a specific type of chaotic-irrationalism to justify colonial control. That may be so but there very much is a more subtle, German angle that colours this book which amounts to imagining a Golden Chain of wisdom from Upanishads to the Greeks after whom it gets lost only to be saved by the Germans. While the similarities between Upanishadic doctrines and Neoplatonism are striking and the influence is apparent to anyone with a map, nobody should be fooled by this seemingly loving attempt at connecting to the motherly source of ideas in India. The claim that it is only with Immanuel Kant that the doctrine of atman-centrism or idealism enters the West is historically and philosophically inaccurate. Kant is not a simple idealist, infinity of time is for him as incomprehensible as a beginning of time, and Catholic thinkers like Augustine and Descartes explored the primacy of self over deceptive sensation deeply. Though Deussen sometimes appears to treat Kant more fairly, it is fairly apparent that his work is completely mutilated in order to make him into a sort of national hero of "the land of poets and thinkers", perhaps on account of how abstruse his text is. Indian religion functions here as a myth of exalted origin for a palingenesis based on abstruse philosophies ill-understood which is worth keeping in mind while reading this. I'm not saying you absolutely can't find convergence with Kant's doctrine and Upanishads, as Schopenhauer did, but it's not to be found simply on the account of idealism or atman.
Despite his biases, Deussen is very knowledgeable and systematic which allows him to trace out a kind of genealogy or history of Indian religious thought even if he doesn't indulge in narrativity. The Upanishadic, relatively abstract insight of atman over Vedic ritual, emerges as a teaching of kshatriya as opposed to brahmans responsible for the Vedic cult. Upanishads comprise vedanta, meaning end of the vedas, and the word literally means secret word - secret teaching, esotericism. It seems to be so because while it maintains an intimate relation to the Vedas, it undermines naive belief in or submission to Vedic ritual. It therefore makes sense that it shouldn't be told to those in thrall of the elaborate Brahmanic ritual structures. At the same time, it seems to be almost nothing without that structure: the "insights", taken by themselves, can easily degenerate into Eckhart Tolle-like platitudes that feel curiously full of empty air and ungrounded. So even if the presuppositions of Vedic ritual are denounced the recipient of the knowledge must be conversant in Vedic ritual. In Wittgensteinian terms, the upanishadic gnostic must climb the ladder and throw it away only at the end: a very different act to seeing a ladder and simply knocking it over without even bothering to see what's up there.
While Upanishads challenge the authority of the priests, they were nonetheless worked into the Indian ashrama system of the four stages of life which includes the study of Vedas as the very first stage. Upanishads, then, were directed to the people nearing death. This idea arose as an extension of the third life stage of forest-dwellers which followed the execution of familial householder duties and involved more metaphorical discussions of sacrifice in Aranyaka texts while Upanishads rip out the blindfold and reveal: it was all you, you made it all happen, you are the impressions you receive from rituals, you are their efficacy etc. This is the formula of atman is brahman. This is also the very same thing Aleister Crowley attempted to do for Christian-oriented magical traditions with his New Aeon teachings: Come unto me is a foolish word: for it is I that go. In the Indian system, however, there were clear paths from traditional religion to the gnosis, others emphasizing the study of sacrifice, others the Rigvedic hymn itself, others the melody: and all these then had their own Aranyakas and Upanishads, with diverse emphases and approaches to the attainment of gnosis that led to different tendencies in Indian religion.
It is the structural coherence which relates the Vedic cult to the highest gnosis that allows Deussen to analyze the system as almost a microcosmic history of religion where, however, the stages are not negated and then dredged up from negation to harmony in aufhebung, as in the Hegelian system, but are instead preserved as co-existing stages that keep a certain reference to each other. The religious thought evolves from the primeval sludge of cultic superstition and submission to priests to a level where "the question" of it all must be posed: start of religion and philosophy as "we" know it. In Deussen's genealogy, the question first takes the form of idealism, or the atman is all- formula of the Upanishads. However, as the human mind cannot consciously process this and can only attain it in deep sleep, it has to imagine co-extension of the world with atman such that atman "creates" a world and enters it only to get deluded by it - this really sounds like a doctrine of emanation and it also sounds very much like Plotinus' account of the demiurge who gets lost in the material world he fashioned. Deussen calls this pantheism but I guess htis is technically panentheism. Evolving from this doctrine the Shiva-oriented Upanishads start to display signs of theistic religion as the separation of the world and atman has crept in this way: now atman is a higher, other self than the individual self immersed in the world. Finally, the process ends in atheism and dualism: not being able to process a higher principle whose relation to the world is shattered, the world imbibes this characteristic dualism so that in Sankhya doctrine there are now many purushas each enmeshed in prakrti, instead of simply atman. Deussen is at his most astute when he analyzes this atheism as a source of the soteriological tendency that ultimately influenced Hellenic philosophers like Epicurus or the Stoics and is highly apparent in Buddhism. While in Upanishadic idea the knowledge is the point because it is destroying the illusions of Vedic ritual, in the Sankhya and Buddhist doctrines the idea is not to get knowledge but to be rescued from prakrti or samsara so that it is all inverted.
It is hard not to see an analogy with Christianity in the whole of this process: the mighty atman ultimately descends into the world to "save" the people, just as the theistic God is massively humiliated and materialized in Christ. This obsession with salvation has almost come full circle to the original superstitions of the Vedic ritual: contrary to expectations of fierce life-affirming war worship, Deussen shows that the religion of the Vedas has a very naive, clear concept of heaven for those who are righteous and in this heaven also, the weak will have their day. So much for "Christian disease": the idea appears even here which many zealous neo-pagans upheld as the apotheosis of anti-Christianity. Granted, the soteriological doctrine is a mutated version of these superstitions but in one respect it is a regression from the Upanishads: it returns to the idea of salvation as a goal. We must not be too quick to judge this as simply naive any more, however: in Upanishads, while knowledge may have been the goal, it was considered automatically salvific, in which respect it accords with the Greek ideas that emphasise the essentially natural and good character of knowledge - man by nature wishes to know and all that. With atheistic dualism and with Buddhism, knowledge is no longer seen as an automatic good but especially in Buddhism it is denigrated as a mere method to some Enlightenment - really, an undefined state for ordinary person. This way, a weird kind of simulation zone of thinking is created where none of the thoughts can be legitimately pursued towards knowing but rather only as expedients for the sake of something that is not even known. Of course, while we can find the similarity to Christianity, that religion goes even further in claiming you are, in fact, already saved so that even the soteriological thrust of Epicurus and the Stoics flies out the window and all that is left of God and the spiritual is a rotting corpse. It is the same salvation complex as Buddhism, Sankhya and Yoga but in reverse direction, so to speak.
Christianity represents the final rejection of the otherworldly speculations because with the idea of being already saved, almost no intellectualized idea of one's role in the world can be admitted. You are, in a sense, not allowed to think: you can only do, create or failing that feel the fires of mysticism. Deussen makes the perceptive analogy of yoga with phenomena like hypnotism or trances that were in vogue at that time but there is also, to my mind, a kind of relation between Christian mystics and yogis. I would even say there's a relation between yogis and charismatic Christianity where people are like quivering and sweating and _having an experience_. In USA they also have books about "Nuclear Power of Christ" that can be achieved through ascetic practises: totally related to Kundalini yoga. Yoga was heavily influenced by Sankhya but it conceptualised it salvation via turiya, the fourth state in addition to waking, dreaming and deep sleep, the latter of which was identified with immersion with Brahman by Upanishadic thought. To relate this to the ever popular figure of Gurdjieff, the whole point of Upanishads seems to have been to go to sleep while in Yoga, the relation to Vedic ritual was rejected in favour of the idea of wakefulness in every situation which is the fourth state. So, in Yoga the gnostic strand at least still survives but it is embedded deeper into perception itself: while Upanishads require reference to ritualistic aspects of society and their re-interpretation, Yoga starts from simplistic perceptions and conceptualizes its search for knowledge based on that rather than in relation to the ritual. There are fascinating connections here, provided one doesn't overlook the essential differences too reductively, between the progress from Descartes' Meditations (discovery of atman within the context of pre-established theism, which gives it already a different direction) to Husserlian phenomenology and to existentialism of Sartre.
With all this in mind, is this a book on philosophy? Are Upanishads "philosophy"? They are a somewhat philosophical turn in relation to the ritual but reading this book you will find equal parts mythological explanations co-existing with basic philosophical idealist notion that it seems something very different than philosophy as it is usually known. As said previously, the superstitious cultic elements exist simultaneously with their upanishadic renunciations: they form part of one system of tradition. Then again, Platonic oeuvre is replete with mythological themes and it is rather in Aristotle that they are separated. In addition, Hellenic soteriological tendency helped to develop secular philosophies of salvation that address functions of a self-evident cosmos, ignoring the ritual aspect of life. Evidently there was a cleavage of sorts between the brahmanic, ritualistic, conventional aspect of life where its arbitrariness comes aggressively to the fore and between the thinkers and natural philosophers. A figure like Lucretius marries together the soteriological focus on ataraxia with natural philosophy to the point that they become nigh-inseparable: the express purpose is to free man from fear of death and religious oppression. At the other side, you have the Christian materialism which has made the Epicurean assumption of cosmos contingent on grace and being "already saved" - and hence potentially unstable, not essentially ordered, and something man has to confront. These are the twin faces of materialism that Hans Blumenberg analyzes very perceptively. The relation of this particular ideological progress to Indian thought is complicated but it must be remembered that being philosophical is not necessarily a virtue: if someone would deny Upanishads the claim of philosophy, that would not necessarily be an insult, although in Western universities philosophy still subsists as some kind of a hegemonic zombie. If you would ask characters such as René Guénon or René Adolphe Schwaller de Lubicz, not being "philosophy" would be an entirely laudable characteristic of the Indian system.
Frits Staal's Discovering the Vedas makes a likely argument that the Vedic texts, replete with Indo-European terminology, were not so much brought to India by warriors from the north because of the imposing mountain ranges they would have had to face. Instead, he contends that we are talking about a group of Indo-European people passing through the mountain ranges who possessed the knowledge of the spoked wheel that was not familiar to the aboriginal inhabitants of the Indus Valley at that time. It is clear to see that a priestly parasitism quickly formed around this magnificent technology, associating it to necessities of the cosmos and analogizing social life with individual and the cosmos while they hold the power of contact to these strangers, the true explanation of their technology and the means with which to maintain the order of the world. Or then, when the jig is practically up, it has accrued such social capital that it is better to try to advance within it than to demolish the whole system: and there are there justifications of tradition, man needs meaning, there is chaos without such myth. While this may sound judgemental, it is not really what I mean because easy judgement would be the first mistake here that would expose us to similar illusions. Therefore the development of the vedic culture presents a clear lesson: to what extent is the technological might surrounding me used for ideological domination extraneous to what it really is? To what extent is it presented all wrong, with only the argument, the same one indubitably used by the priests, that it is not possible to question a system that produces such wonderful results? Starting from here, from our current narratives, where is our upanishad?
April 30, 2022
This is the only western treatise on the Upanishads which comes close to discover their true meaning. Most western authors who have written books on Upanishads were British and Americans in the colonial period, and their anti-hindu bias makes them project their own agendas into the Upanishads. But Paul Deussen was a German and he had no colonial interests in India, which is precisely why his exposition of the Upanishads is the most accurate one. His mastery over Sanskrit is amazing and his study of ancient Sanskrit texts is vast. I particularly liked his theory that both Samkhya and Buddhist philosophies were a degeneration of the Upanishadic idealism resulting from a growth of materialistic realism.
July 20, 2022
A beautiful, lucid and accessible text perfect for someone coming from a western philosophical background.
May 29, 2025
Life-changing read. The Upanishads are the height of ancient wisdom; and their apparent doctrinal diversity is beautifully unified by Deussen in this book.
Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews