The Upanishads is the ancient Vedic text containing the basis for Hinduism in India and elsewhere. The Upanishads are a mystical interpretation of man, God, and the universe and the relationships among them. These writings antedate the birth of Buddha in the fifth century B.C. and are also known as the Vedanta because they make up the end of the Veda, or the whole body of philosophic development extending from 1500 to 600 B.C. These were secret teachings which embodied the concepts of the world as illusion and the spirit as the highest perfection. The history of the Upanishads will be examined, as will the nature of its teachings and the practices encouraged by those teachings, followed by a consideration of the sociology underlying the writings and the ethics entwined in the writings.
The age of the Upanishads is in some dispute, and the writings have been placed as early as 1200 B.C., while other scholars believe they could not have been written before 700 B.C. Chakravarti (1935) emphasizes that it is less important to know precise dates than to have a sense as to which particular stage of development a given class of ideas belongs. He notes that there is no doubt whatsoever that the ideas of the Upanishads come at the end of the Vedic period and long before the period of the sutra literature. The relative position and importance of the Upanishads remains the same no matter what specific time period a scholar chooses, within the parameters suggested to date (pp. 5-60).
The earliest traces of Upanishads is found in the books themselves, for there is a mention in S'vet 5, 6 of "the Upanishads that form the mystical portion of the Veda," and in S'vet 6, 22 that "in former times in the Vedanta was the deepest mystery revealed." The older Upanishads are thus referred to as a self-contained whole which already had some age. It was certainly based on the foundation of older and earlier works that Badarayana formally understo...