The Upanishads
Description:... The Upanishads are a collection of Vedic texts which contain the earliest emergence of some of the central religious concepts of Hinduism, Buddhism and Jainism. They are also known as Vedanta ("the end of the Veda"). They are regarded as the source of Vedanta and Samkhya philosophies. The Upanishads are considered by Hindus to contain revealed truths (Sruti) concerning the nature of ultimate reality (brahman) and describing the character and form of human salvation (moksha). The Upanishads are found mostly in the concluding part of the Brahmanas and Aranyakas and have been passed down in oral tradition. More than 200 Upanishads are known, of which the first dozen or so are the oldest and most important and are referred to as the principal or main (mukhya) Upanishads. The mukhya Upanishads all predate the Common Era, possibly from the Pre-Buddhist period (6th century BC) down to the Maurya period. The remainder of the Muktika canon was mostly composed during medieval Hinduism, and new Upanishads continued being composed in the early modern and modern era, down to at least the 20th century. With the Bhagavad Gita and the Brahmasutra (known collectively as the Prasthanatrayi), the mukhya Upanishads provide a foundation for the several later schools of Vedanta, among them, two influential monistic schools of Hinduism. With the translation of the Upanishads in the early 19th century they also started to attract attention from a western audience. Schopenhauer praised the Upanishads. The 19th century transcendentalists, like Emerson and Thoreau, noted similarities between the doctrine of Upanishads and those of Plato and Kant.
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