Episode 01 - The Universal, Worldwide Influence of the Upanishads.

THE UNIVERSAL, WORLDWIDE, APPEAL AND INFLUENCE OF UPANISHADS OVER THE AGES

The Upanishads have influenced world  religious thought, philosophy and culture,  partly  directly and mostly through other related scriptures like the Bhagavad Gita.

As history records that Indian Brahmin seers had visited Greece, it may be that the Upanishadic sages influenced ancient Greek Philosophy.  Many ideas in Plato’s Dialogues, particularly, have Indian analogues: several concepts in the Platonic psychology of reason bear resemblance to the guNas of Indian philosophy. Professor Edward Johns Urwick conjectures that Plato’s “The Republic” owes several central concepts to Indian influence. Plato had stated that every soul is immortal – a concept alien till then to western spiritual thought and religion.

Virgil (70-19 BC) in the “Aeneid” says, "All souls return again into living bodies". Pythagorus asserts:  "we are strangers  in this world  and the body is the tomb of the soul, and  yet we are not to escape by self-murder;  for we  are the chattels  of  God  who  is our  herdsman, and without  His command  we have  no  right  to make our escape."

Emperor Akbar’s reign (1556–1586) saw the first translations of the Upanishads into Farzi (Persian), and his own great-grandson  (a son of Shah Jehan), Dara Shikoh produced a collection called Sirr-e-Akbar (The Greatest Mysteries) in 1657, with the help of Sanskrit Pandits of Varanasi. Its introduction states that the Upanishads constitute the Qur’an’s "Kitab al-maknun" or hidden book. 

German philosopher Schopenhauer (1788-1860), in his book “World of Will and Representation” declares:

"The Upanishads are the production of the highest human wisdom and I consider them almost super-human in conception. The study of the Upanishads has been a source of great inspiration and means of comfort to my soul. From every sentence of the Upanishads  deep, original and sublime thoughts arise, and the whole is pervaded by a high and holy and earnest spirit. In the whole world, there is no study so beneficial and so elevating as that of the Upanishads.

"the native pantheism of India, which is destined sooner or later to become the faith of the people. Ex oriente lux. (Light of the East)

"Indian wisdom will flow back upon Europe, and produce a thorough change in our knowing and thinking,"

The American poet, Ralph Emerson (1802-1823) describes in his poems Celestial Love, Woodnotes and Brahma, nature and immanent God, akin to that seen in the Upanishads. Kata Upanishad influenced Emerson and he embraced the principle of the Supreme Being (paramaatman). "Soul is not born" he wrote, "it does not die; it was not produced from any one; Unborn, eternal, it is not slain, though the body is slain." He was a believer in the immortality of the soul and in reincarnation. Emerson wrote, "It is a secret of the world that all things subsist and do not die, but only retire a little from sight and afterwards return again - Nothing is dead; men feign themselves dead, and endure mock funerals and mournful obituaries, and there they stand looking out of the window, sound and well, in some new and strange disguise."

Walt Whitman (1819-1892) was also deeply influenced by Upanishads as evidenced by his compositions. In his poem Song of Myself he wrote:

I know I am deathless
We have thus far exhausted
Trillions of winters and summers,
There are trillions ahead, and
Trillions ahead of them.

(Should remind us of the phala sruti in Sri Vishnu Sahasranaamam: SAHASRA KOTI YUGA DHAARINE NAMAH:)

Leo Tolstoy, in his letter to Gandhiji (titled “A letter to a Hindu”), wrote:

"As we live through thousands of dreams in our present life, so is our present life only one of many thousands of such lives which we enter from the other, more real life and then return after death. Our life is but one of the dreams of that more real life, and so it is endlessly, until the very last one, the very real life - the life of God."

British poet laureate John Masefield in his poem about past and future lives writes:

I hold that when a person dies
His soul returns again to earth;
Arrayed in some new flesh disguise,
Another mother gives him birth
With sturdier limbs and brighter brain
The old soul takes the road again.

Max Muller, the German philosopher-cum-linguist who took an extraordinary interest in ancient Indian works in Sanskrit, had said:  “The Upanishads are the sources of the Vedanta philosophy, a system in which human speculation seems to have reached its very pinnacle. They are to me like light of the morning, like the pure air of the mountain – so simple, so true, if once understood”.(emphasis mine)

The Upanishads have been translated into various languages including Persian, Italian, Urdu, French, Latin, German, English, Dutch, Polish, Japanese and Russian. Max Mueller's 1879 and 1884 editions were the first systematic English treatment to include the 12 Principal Upanishads. After this, the Upanishads were also translated into Dutch, Polish, Japanese and Russian. 

Here is a curious and interesting view on the usefulness of the Upanishads, actually in propagating Christian Religion in India: In an article on Christian VedAntism, Mr. R. Gordon Milburn wrote,  in 191q3,'Christianity in India needs the VedAnta. We missionaries have not realised this with half the clearness that we should. We cannot move freely and joyfully in our own religion; because we have not sufficient terms and modes of expression wherewith to express the more immanental aspects of Christianity. A very useful step would be the recognition of certain books or passages in the literature of the VedAnta as constituting what might be called an Ethnic Old Testament. The permission of ecclesiastical authorities could then be asked for reading passages found in such a canon of Ethnic Old Testament at divine service along with passages from the New Testament as alternatives to the Old Testament lessons.'  1913. ]

Even the Buddhists and the Jains accept the teaching of the upaniShads, though they interpret it in their own ways, as seen in the introduction to Dhamma-pada and ViseShAvasyaka bhAShya, Yasovijaya Jaina GranthamAlA.