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Isha Upanishad
This book contains Sri Aurobindo s final translation and analysis of the Isha Upanishad. In his definitive commentary on this important Vedantic scripture, he presents its central idea, which is a reconciliation and harmony of fundamental opposites, and shows how in its verses one can discover the resolution of such pairs of opposites such as God and Nature, renunciation and enjoyment, action and freedom, the active and inactive Brahman, and works and knowledge.
79 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1984
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* They are officially published under that name
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* They are religious texts not generally attributed to a specific author
Books whose authorship is merely uncertain should be attributed to Unknown.
See also: Anonymous
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Displaying 1 - 15 of 15 reviews
May 6, 2011
I think that of all the major spiritual texts of the world's religions the Upanishads (I am thinking of the Kena especially) have the most intensive and concentrated philosophical depth and poetry in them. There may be more humanity in the parables of Jesus, more intellectual rigor and inevitability in the teachings of the Buddha, more crazy wisdom and artistic sense in Chuang Tsu, but this goes straight for the heart of an uncanny intuition, and cannot be understood otherwise. It is primarily because of that aspect, especially in the Isha and Kena Upanishads, and their lucid commentaries by Sri Aurobindo that I give this five stars.
I must warn the reader of this review that I am a nontheist who accepts the possibility of transrational and unitive states or levels of consciousness. I stress that I make a distinction between spirituality, and the metaphysical baggage and irrational beliefs that often accompany organized religion. (For more of my boring prejudices see my generally highly favorable review of The Little Book of Atheist Spirituality.)
If I were ranking this on the basis of organization or completeness, I would give it a 3 or 4 ranking.This was assembled as a collection of early translations by Aurobindo, and later translations of major Upanishads (after he had become a practicing yogi) this is a bit of a mixed bag. However, the lovely squiggles at the heading of each sentence filled me with longing to learn pre-classical Sanskrit. (I actually learned to decipher the verse numbers,)
The crown jewel of this collection is the Kena Upanishad and its extensive commentary. Kena, I learn means from whence. The subject is: in what sense things owe their coming into existence? The answer given is Brahman. This is a term that is translated in the West as God, which is not too bad a way of expressing it, but it is closer to the concept of Godhead, or the God beyond God of Meister Eckhart, or a philosophical God, than a personal or magico-mythical God. Indra (or Agni or whoever...)is a God in that more traditional and Western religious sense, not Brahman. Unlike some strains of Hinduism, in the thought in many of these Upanishads (according to Sri Aurobindo) there is no idea that the World is unreal, it is completely unified with That.
To my way of thinking, and it is a way of thinking in words, it is actually Being that underlies everything, the actual nature of Being is so marvelous, so deep, and so unseen (like the sea is to fish).
But allowing for that subtly different way of thinking I find the intuition behind much in this Upanishad quite beautiful and sympathetic to my way of thinking. I stress that my non-theistic belief is one of words, and Aurobindo stresses that the words of the Upanishad are meant to take you to something quite beyond words; this is quite different than the way that a systematic philosopher, a mediaeval scholastic, or many Buddhist texts approach things. The idea is to use the words, and use them in all their depth (there are many many plays on all the alternate interpretation of words), to aim beyond what can be expressed in words. Now this is a scholar's translation, so sometimes the poetry twists and turns a bit in the confines of Aurobindo's effort to squeeze the most apt and telling layers of meaning out into English. So you may enjoy a more poetic version. For example, the more poetic English translation, That which makes the mind think but which cannot be thought by the mind - that alone is God, not what people worship. is rendered by Sri Aurobindo as That which thinks not with the mind, that by which the mind is thought, know that to be Brahman and not this which men follow after here. However after reading his commentary, I found myself growing to like his version. It certainly carries several subtle senses not available in the other case.
I will include a few passages in the spoiler section:
I must warn the reader of this review that I am a nontheist who accepts the possibility of transrational and unitive states or levels of consciousness. I stress that I make a distinction between spirituality, and the metaphysical baggage and irrational beliefs that often accompany organized religion. (For more of my boring prejudices see my generally highly favorable review of The Little Book of Atheist Spirituality.)
If I were ranking this on the basis of organization or completeness, I would give it a 3 or 4 ranking.This was assembled as a collection of early translations by Aurobindo, and later translations of major Upanishads (after he had become a practicing yogi) this is a bit of a mixed bag. However, the lovely squiggles at the heading of each sentence filled me with longing to learn pre-classical Sanskrit. (I actually learned to decipher the verse numbers,)
The crown jewel of this collection is the Kena Upanishad and its extensive commentary. Kena, I learn means from whence. The subject is: in what sense things owe their coming into existence? The answer given is Brahman. This is a term that is translated in the West as God, which is not too bad a way of expressing it, but it is closer to the concept of Godhead, or the God beyond God of Meister Eckhart, or a philosophical God, than a personal or magico-mythical God. Indra (or Agni or whoever...)is a God in that more traditional and Western religious sense, not Brahman. Unlike some strains of Hinduism, in the thought in many of these Upanishads (according to Sri Aurobindo) there is no idea that the World is unreal, it is completely unified with That.
To my way of thinking, and it is a way of thinking in words, it is actually Being that underlies everything, the actual nature of Being is so marvelous, so deep, and so unseen (like the sea is to fish).
But allowing for that subtly different way of thinking I find the intuition behind much in this Upanishad quite beautiful and sympathetic to my way of thinking. I stress that my non-theistic belief is one of words, and Aurobindo stresses that the words of the Upanishad are meant to take you to something quite beyond words; this is quite different than the way that a systematic philosopher, a mediaeval scholastic, or many Buddhist texts approach things. The idea is to use the words, and use them in all their depth (there are many many plays on all the alternate interpretation of words), to aim beyond what can be expressed in words. Now this is a scholar's translation, so sometimes the poetry twists and turns a bit in the confines of Aurobindo's effort to squeeze the most apt and telling layers of meaning out into English. So you may enjoy a more poetic version. For example, the more poetic English translation, That which makes the mind think but which cannot be thought by the mind - that alone is God, not what people worship. is rendered by Sri Aurobindo as That which thinks not with the mind, that by which the mind is thought, know that to be Brahman and not this which men follow after here. However after reading his commentary, I found myself growing to like his version. It certainly carries several subtle senses not available in the other case.
I will include a few passages in the spoiler section:
December 8, 2021
This is solely my thoughts on Sri Aurobindo's commentary on the text. In his introduction, Aurobindo starts with a discussion of the ancient and modern approaches to Upanishadic thought:
The reader, or rather the hearer, was supposed to proceed from light to light, confirming his intuitions and verifying by his experience, not submitting the ideas to the judgment of the logical reason. To the modern mind this method is invalid and inapplicable.
Later, he interprets the Isha Upanishad within his framework of realistic Advaita - the idea that Brahman is in all, including Maya, and hence, an individualist escape from the world is not the ultimate transcendence (contra Adi Shankaracharya). Aurobindo argues that the Isha Upanishad stands as the primary example against Shankaracharya's Mayavada (illusionism).
Shankaracharya's illusionism does not provide us with a reason for creation. Why did the Absolute/Brahman create this world, the purpose of which is individual escape? Aurobindo's integral/realist Advaita, accepting the reality of everything around us as manifested Brahman, provides a stronger reason for existence: the idea of leela, of divine enjoyment being the cause for creation:
His object in manifestation being possession and enjoyment of his world, he is unable to enjoy because of his limitation. This contrary result comes about by Avidya, the Ignorance of oneness: and the knot of the Ignorance is egoism.
Enjoyment of the universe and all it contains is the object of world-existence, but renunciation of all in desire is the condition of the free enjoyment of all.
Being one with all beings, we possess, in their enjoyment, in ours and in the cosmic Being’s, delight of universal self-expression. It is only by this Ananda at once transcendent and universal that man can be free in his soul and yet live in the world with the full active Life of the Lord in His universe of movement.
I am still struggling with the "why?" question as a response to Aurobindo's idea of leela though. The unity (Brahman) created and embodied itself in the multiplicity (the world and people around us), and it is now for us to discover within ourselves together that unity - the struggle of doing this is the purpose of life. My response, however, remains - "but why?". Why create this imperfection when the natural state of perfection, which we progressively realise in our spiritual evolution, is the ultimate return? Why go around in this circle? Surely, the joy of this recovery of unity must surpass that of the initial and ultimate states. Yet the recovery, according to Aurobindo himself, is an arduous process of self-sacrifice.
...every level of consciousness really represents something beyond itself, depth of depth, continent of continent. It is a play of the divine Consciousness existing for its own satisfaction and adding nothing to That, which is already complete. It is a fact of conscious being, justified by its own existence, with no purpose ulterior to itself. The idea of purpose, of a goal is born of the progressive self-unfolding by the world of its own true nature to the individual Souls inhabiting its forms; for the Being is gradually self-revealed within its own becomings, real Unity emerges out of the Multiplicity and changes entirely the values of the latter to our consciousness.
For all life is a constant birth or becoming...All birth entails a constant death or dissolution of that which becomes, in order that it may change into a new becoming
Man represents the point at which the multiplicity in the universe becomes consciously capable of this turning and fulfilment.
Highlighting the collective nature of his spiritual evolution, Aurobindo writes, in this beautiful passage -
Nor is individual salvation the end; for that would only be the sublime of the ego, not its self-realisation through the Lord in all…Having realised his own immortality, the individual has yet to fulfil God’s work in the universe. He has to help the life, the mind and the body in all beings to express progressively Immortality and not mortality. This he may do by the becoming in the material body which we ordinarily call birth, or from some status in another world or even, it is possible, from beyond world. But birth in the body is the most close, divine and effective form of help which the liberated can give to those who are themselves still bound to the progression of birth in the lowest world of the Ignorance
In my reading, this closely parallels the idea of the Bodhisattva, fully developed in Mahayana Buddhism. But note that while in Buddhism, the collective realisation for which the Bodhisattva works is Nirvana (extinguishing, cessation from the cycle of births and deaths that is samsara), here, the collective realisation is a transcendence into the supramental consciousness, and beyond that, into the collective divine spiritual (in the literal sense) life where the apparent multiplicity recognises its essential unity.
In fact, Aurobindo explicitly calls the Moksha or Nirvana of Advaita Vedanta or Buddhism respectively as the penultimate realisation -
The desire of the exclusive liberation is the last desire that the soul in its expanding knowledge has to abandon; the delusion that it is bound by birth is the last delusion that it has to destroy
I can appreciate how beautifully Aurobindo weaves his integral Advaita around the impenetrable mysticism of the Isha Upanishad. While I do sense an underlying optimistic craving for immortality which, as the Buddha argued, is at the root of Vedic eternalism, if Aurobindo has universal spiritual experiences to verify his remarks on the Absolute within us all, this small book challenges me deeply.
Get rid of this, see oneness everywhere, be the One manifesting Himself in all creatures; ego will disappear; desire born of the sense of not being this, not having that, will disappear; the free inalienable delight of the One in His own existence will take the place of desire and its satisfactions and dissatisfactions.
The reader, or rather the hearer, was supposed to proceed from light to light, confirming his intuitions and verifying by his experience, not submitting the ideas to the judgment of the logical reason. To the modern mind this method is invalid and inapplicable.
Later, he interprets the Isha Upanishad within his framework of realistic Advaita - the idea that Brahman is in all, including Maya, and hence, an individualist escape from the world is not the ultimate transcendence (contra Adi Shankaracharya). Aurobindo argues that the Isha Upanishad stands as the primary example against Shankaracharya's Mayavada (illusionism).
Shankaracharya's illusionism does not provide us with a reason for creation. Why did the Absolute/Brahman create this world, the purpose of which is individual escape? Aurobindo's integral/realist Advaita, accepting the reality of everything around us as manifested Brahman, provides a stronger reason for existence: the idea of leela, of divine enjoyment being the cause for creation:
His object in manifestation being possession and enjoyment of his world, he is unable to enjoy because of his limitation. This contrary result comes about by Avidya, the Ignorance of oneness: and the knot of the Ignorance is egoism.
Enjoyment of the universe and all it contains is the object of world-existence, but renunciation of all in desire is the condition of the free enjoyment of all.
Being one with all beings, we possess, in their enjoyment, in ours and in the cosmic Being’s, delight of universal self-expression. It is only by this Ananda at once transcendent and universal that man can be free in his soul and yet live in the world with the full active Life of the Lord in His universe of movement.
I am still struggling with the "why?" question as a response to Aurobindo's idea of leela though. The unity (Brahman) created and embodied itself in the multiplicity (the world and people around us), and it is now for us to discover within ourselves together that unity - the struggle of doing this is the purpose of life. My response, however, remains - "but why?". Why create this imperfection when the natural state of perfection, which we progressively realise in our spiritual evolution, is the ultimate return? Why go around in this circle? Surely, the joy of this recovery of unity must surpass that of the initial and ultimate states. Yet the recovery, according to Aurobindo himself, is an arduous process of self-sacrifice.
...every level of consciousness really represents something beyond itself, depth of depth, continent of continent. It is a play of the divine Consciousness existing for its own satisfaction and adding nothing to That, which is already complete. It is a fact of conscious being, justified by its own existence, with no purpose ulterior to itself. The idea of purpose, of a goal is born of the progressive self-unfolding by the world of its own true nature to the individual Souls inhabiting its forms; for the Being is gradually self-revealed within its own becomings, real Unity emerges out of the Multiplicity and changes entirely the values of the latter to our consciousness.
For all life is a constant birth or becoming...All birth entails a constant death or dissolution of that which becomes, in order that it may change into a new becoming
Man represents the point at which the multiplicity in the universe becomes consciously capable of this turning and fulfilment.
Highlighting the collective nature of his spiritual evolution, Aurobindo writes, in this beautiful passage -
Nor is individual salvation the end; for that would only be the sublime of the ego, not its self-realisation through the Lord in all…Having realised his own immortality, the individual has yet to fulfil God’s work in the universe. He has to help the life, the mind and the body in all beings to express progressively Immortality and not mortality. This he may do by the becoming in the material body which we ordinarily call birth, or from some status in another world or even, it is possible, from beyond world. But birth in the body is the most close, divine and effective form of help which the liberated can give to those who are themselves still bound to the progression of birth in the lowest world of the Ignorance
In my reading, this closely parallels the idea of the Bodhisattva, fully developed in Mahayana Buddhism. But note that while in Buddhism, the collective realisation for which the Bodhisattva works is Nirvana (extinguishing, cessation from the cycle of births and deaths that is samsara), here, the collective realisation is a transcendence into the supramental consciousness, and beyond that, into the collective divine spiritual (in the literal sense) life where the apparent multiplicity recognises its essential unity.
In fact, Aurobindo explicitly calls the Moksha or Nirvana of Advaita Vedanta or Buddhism respectively as the penultimate realisation -
The desire of the exclusive liberation is the last desire that the soul in its expanding knowledge has to abandon; the delusion that it is bound by birth is the last delusion that it has to destroy
I can appreciate how beautifully Aurobindo weaves his integral Advaita around the impenetrable mysticism of the Isha Upanishad. While I do sense an underlying optimistic craving for immortality which, as the Buddha argued, is at the root of Vedic eternalism, if Aurobindo has universal spiritual experiences to verify his remarks on the Absolute within us all, this small book challenges me deeply.
Get rid of this, see oneness everywhere, be the One manifesting Himself in all creatures; ego will disappear; desire born of the sense of not being this, not having that, will disappear; the free inalienable delight of the One in His own existence will take the place of desire and its satisfactions and dissatisfactions.
October 1, 2011
Classics are always hard to rate, but this if a great interpretation, the vague nature if sanskrit holds true. The isha is definitely a favorite for its concise brevity.
July 30, 2015
'The one book that could outlive the rest. The Isha Upanishad.' Pritish Nandy
August 12, 2015
Isha is Isha. If you read just one Upanishad, it may have to be this one. Aurobindo's language is a little dated (very Cambridge-y), but I trust his translations. Go for it!
December 30, 2017
कुर्वन्नेवेह कर्माणि जिजीविषेच्छत्ग्ण् समाः |
June 15, 2022
The Upanishads change your life or at least make you think
This, the Isha Upanishad can be summed up in three key points:
-You should not covet wealth or expect happiness from the material world, but rather from spiritual knowledge (which points to the final goal, Purusha).
-All beings are equal to themselves, they are God, so nothing alive can be hated. Understanding this unity removes selfishness and the cause of suffering (ignorance)
-There is darkness for the ignorant, but it will be worse for those who seek knowledge as a goal in itself.
PS: As a curious/funny fact, before knowing what an Upanishad was, when I came across this one, I thought it was some Muslim text about Jesus, since "Isha" is what they call him.
This, the Isha Upanishad can be summed up in three key points:
-You should not covet wealth or expect happiness from the material world, but rather from spiritual knowledge (which points to the final goal, Purusha).
-All beings are equal to themselves, they are God, so nothing alive can be hated. Understanding this unity removes selfishness and the cause of suffering (ignorance)
-There is darkness for the ignorant, but it will be worse for those who seek knowledge as a goal in itself.
PS: As a curious/funny fact, before knowing what an Upanishad was, when I came across this one, I thought it was some Muslim text about Jesus, since "Isha" is what they call him.
December 29, 2021
Appears to be a coffee table type of book with beautiful illustrations interspersed with translations of the Isha Upanishad. While the author does assert in his forward that simplicity is what he was looking for I found the lack of context to many of the rather simple phrases/translations to be a bit incomplete. While the artwork is very beautiful, many of the flora and fauna elements appear to not be from our region, see for example some of the wood pigeon, audio like and large extra limit and parrot species illustrated. Perhaps the book was a misfit for me.
October 2, 2019
Good one
Excellent interpretation. Keep going. Let divine use u as medium to communicate. Pls add sanskrit verse and its translation too
Excellent interpretation. Keep going. Let divine use u as medium to communicate. Pls add sanskrit verse and its translation too
April 19, 2020
Complete.
August 8, 2025
Read a page a day and it will slowly changing your life
September 13, 2021
I've not read this particular book, but the Upanishad itself.
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March 15, 2016Ce volume contient le texte sanscrit et la traduction de l’Isha Upanishad, suivis d’un commentaire ; il avait paru en partie dans l’édition française de la revue Arya, qui eut seulement quelques numéros, en 1914-1915 ; la traduction de l’original anglais, restée alors inachevée, a été terminée par M. Jean Herbert. L’auteur, au début de son commentaire, fait remarquer que « les Upanishads, étant destinées à illuminer plutôt qu’à instruire, sont composées pour des chercheurs déjà familiarisés, au moins dans l’ensemble, avec les idées des voyants vêdiques et vêdântiques, et possédant même quelque expérience personnelle des réalités auxquelles elles se réfèrent. Leurs auteurs se dispensent donc d’exprimer les transitions de pensée et de développer des notions implicites ou secondaires… Les conclusions seules s’expriment, et le raisonnement sur lequel elles reposent demeure sous-entendu ; les mots le suggèrent, mais ne le communiquent point ouvertement à l’esprit ». Cela est parfaitement exact et nous pensons d’ailleurs qu’il y a, dans cette façon de procéder, quelque chose qui est inhérent à la nature même de l’enseignement traditionnel dont il s’agit, Shrî Aurobindo estime cependant qu’« une telle méthode n’est plus applicable pour la pensée moderne » ; mais celle-ci mérite-t-elle qu’on lui fasse des concessions, alors que, en tant qu’elle est spécifiquement moderne, elle se montre trop manifestement incapable de recevoir et de comprendre un enseignement traditionnel quel qu’il soit ? On peut assurément chercher à rendre les idées plus explicites, ce qui est en somme le rôle et la raison d’être de tout commentaire ; mais il est vraiment bien dangereux de vouloir les « systématiser », puisque précisément un des caractères essentiels des idées d’ordre métaphysique est de ne pouvoir se prêter à aucune « systématisation » ; et, au surplus, faut-il supposer un « raisonnement sous-entendu » dans un texte énonçant des vérités dont la source réelle est purement intuitive ? Ces observations portent surtout sur l’« arrangement », du commentaire dont il s’agit : sa division en différents « mouvements de pensée » (expression qui est d’ailleurs bien loin d’être claire) peut paraître assez artificielle, du moins à qui n’est pas exclusivement habitué à l’usage des formes particulières de la « pensée moderne ». Cependant, ces réserves faites, les divers paragraphes du commentaire, pris en eux-mêmes et indépendamment du cadre trop « rationnel » dans lequel on a voulu les insérer, n’en contiennent pas moins un grand nombre de vues fort intéressantes, et qu’on ne saurait lire et méditer sans profit, surtout si l’on possède déjà une certaine connaissance de la doctrine hindoue.
August 31, 2025
Aye Atman Brahman...
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March 12, 2018I finished the final vyakhyana of Isha. did not go through the other incomplete and unpublished manuscripts.
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