The Upanishads

One evening, a small child tugged at their mother's sleeve and asked the question every child asks. "Mom, why?"

The mother did not answer right away. She smiled and drew the child down to sit beside her.

"Nearly 3,000 years ago, wise teachers sat in the old forests of India, and they asked exactly the same question. Why? What is real? Who are you?"

That small question from a child is how a whole line of philosophy was born.

The people of ancient India called this line of thought the Upanishads. The name itself tells a story.

In Sanskrit, the ancient language of India, the word Upanishad is made of three parts. Upa means near. Ni means down. Shad means to sit.

Put together, Upanishad means "to sit down near the teacher."

It was not a classroom with a blackboard and rows of benches. It was an open space in the forest, under the trees, sometimes beside a river. The student came, sat close to the teacher, and listened.

This was an intimate way of handing down knowledge, close and personal, almost a whisper. It was not a lecture to a crowd.

Many of these texts are also tied to a kind of writing called the Aranyaka, which means the text of the forest. They were studied deep in the woods, far from the villages, in silence.

The mother went on, her voice soft. "Think about it. No phones, no printed books. Only the teacher, the student, and the biggest questions people have ever dared to ask."

By tradition, there are 108 Upanishads in all. Scholars consider 12 to 14 of them the principal texts, the very core.

They were composed over a very long stretch of time, roughly from 800 BC to 200 BC.

They form the closing part of an even older body of scripture, the Vedas. Because they come at the end, this whole line of philosophy is called Vedanta. The word literally means "the end of the Veda."

"So what did the teacher in the forest teach, Mom?" the child asked.

The mother gently shook her head. "The strange thing is, the teacher did not give ready-made answers. The teacher taught by asking questions."

That is what makes the Upanishads special. They are not a set of doctrines to learn by heart. They are a way of asking.

The most famous teacher is Yajnavalkya, in the Brihadaranyaka Upanishad. Students, kings, and other sages came to sit beside him.

They asked the biggest questions. What is Brahman? What is the self? What remains after we die? In Hindu thought, Brahman is the eternal first principle and source of the universe.

The teacher answered with a metaphor, or sometimes with a question turned back on them.

The other Upanishads work the same way. One uses the image of salt dissolving in water, but that is told in another story.

Another tells of a boy named Naciketa, who bravely knocked at the door of the god of death to ask what happens after we leave this life. That, too, is a story of its own, and well worth telling.

What matters here is not each answer. It is the questions themselves. They are the greatest questions humankind has ever asked.

The child thought it over. "Mom, did anyone ever answer them all?"

The mother laughed. "Some answers were wrapped up in just a few short words. In India they are called the great sayings."

One saying is Tat Tvam Asi, which means "You are that." Another is Aham Brahmasmi, "I am Brahman." A third is Prajnanam Brahma, "Consciousness is Brahman."

"But don't try to understand them all at once," the mother said. "Those sayings are not there to explain. They are like a finger pointing at the moon. The point is to look up."

Remarkably, the questions from those old forests did not stay in the forest.

Thousands of years later, they traveled around the world.

There was a German philosopher named Arthur Schopenhauer. He read the Upanishads in translation and was so moved that he called them "the most rewarding and elevating reading possible in the world."

That line appears in Parerga and Paralipomena, a work of his published in 1851. He added that the Upanishads had been the consolation of his life, and would be the consolation of his death.

Max Müller, a German-born scholar who worked in England, translated the Upanishads into English, starting in 1879. From then on, many more readers in the West could read those conversations beneath the trees.

Then, on September 11, 1893, an Indian monk named Swami Vivekananda stepped onto the stage at the World's Parliament of Religions in Chicago.

He began to speak, and the whole hall fell silent, then burst into applause. The Vedanta philosophy of India's forests rang out in the heart of the West.

"What about here, Mom?" the child asked. "Does anyone read those books?"

"Of course." The mother nodded. "Here in Vietnam, a library called Thư viện Hoa Sen keeps many writings about the Upanishads in Vietnamese, for anyone who wants to learn."

In Hanoi, the University of Social Sciences and Humanities, part of Vietnam National University, has a department of Eastern studies. It even has a section devoted to Indian studies.

The child leaned against the mother's shoulder, eyes already half closed. "So my question is like the one the teachers asked in the forest, Mom?"

The mother stroked the child's hair and looked out at the dark sky beyond the window.

"Yes, it is. Nearly 3,000 years ago, a teacher and a student sat together in the forest and asked the question: who am I?"

"And here is the wonderful part. That same question is still being asked, tonight."