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THE RELIGION OF THE UPANISADS
Many collections of Upanisads have been published. One collection contains no less than 108 texts and others are known. Only a small number of these are ancient. Many of the later ones are sectarian writings. The oldest Upanisads, by contrast, represent spiritual teachings and investigations which are a common reference point for all subsequent Indian philosophy, including the thinkers of nastika sects who reject the scriptural status of the Vedas. The great philosopher Sankara wrote commentaries on eleven of Upanisads, and these eleven have acquired a special status shared by very few others. In Hindu tradition the Upanisads as the Vedanta, the last element in the Veda, have full scriptural authority. They are Sruti, revealed scripture handed down by the sages. [Their status as Sruti suggests the experience underlying the sages' words is accepted as self-authenticating.]

The Upanisads allow us to watch the ancient sages teaching, we can sit alongside and overhear the discourses and discussions they hold. They are teaching texts memorised and handed down generation to generation in Brahmin families for centuries before they were committed to writing.

Vedic religion was sacrifice-centred, ritualistic and originally polytheistic. The hymns of the Rg Veda and Sama Veda express the religious consciousness of this tradition, but even in those hymns we see the emergence of speculative and sceptical philosophical thought reshaping the religion away from polytheism into a rationally and spiritually more satisfying focus on a single Divine Reality, seen as source and sustainer of the Universe.

The Vedic sacrifices were rites of quite extraordinary complexity, involving numbers of different priests with distinct functions. In the course of certain parts of the rites, the priests asked each other riddling questions about the sacrifice, the gods, the ultimate structure of the Universe. The Brahmin priests were not simply ritualists content to carry out their religious duties and hand on the tradition handed down to them: they argued and debated the significance of their sacrificial rituals. The Brahmanas represent their attempts to interpret the sacrificial rites as embodiments of the ultimate meanings of the Universe and of human life. The Aranyakas contain a different form of theological speculation; these texts emanate from the mystical meditations of Brahmin sages working in their forest hermitages, not carrying out the sacrificial rites, but imagining them and using their meditations on the rites as a means of investigating ultimate reality. The Upanisads emerge from the Brahmanas and Aranyakas, no longer focussing centrally on the sacrificial rites, but rather seeking a direct, immediate and life-transforming knowledge of the Self and of the Real.

As a consequence of the Aryan settlement in India, and the adaptation of Aryan religion to the life of a settled agricultural, commercial and in part urban culture, the social role of the Brahmin castes underwent significant transformation. The brahmins were still the living encyclopedias of Aryan learning and the ritual experts of the community, but the settled life made it possible to develop the kinds of educational and cultural institutions unknown to nomadic life, and the temple, the royal court and the school reshaped the priestly role. It came to be common for religiously motivated Brahmins to relinquish family life after fulfilling their household duties and to retire to an eremitical life in the forests or to become wandering ascetics, their homeless life a lived symbol of their spiritual quest. Many forest hermits became teachers, drawing young celibate students as well as older men who had retired from domestic life to seek to share their wisdom. In such loose communities the spiritual quest went far beyond the search for the inner meaning of the sacrificial rites. Astonishingly, given the age of the texts, we find women amongst the seekers after ultimate knowledge and even amongst the sages who profess it.

The Upanisads represent the spiritual tradition of the forest hermits and to a lesser extent of the wandering ascetics. It is a tradition of:

UPASANA - meditation, both discursive meditation exploring the inscape of meaning of religious symbols and contemplative meditation seeking direct experience of the Self and the Real, Atman and Brahman.

TEACHING - the forest sage became Guru to the young brahmacarins who came to sit at his feet,

ASCETICISM- a disciplined, frugal, simple life was typical of the sages, a life that put aside all the riches and all the security and support offered by the settled life.

DEBATE - one of the sources of vitality of Indian philosophical tradition is the practise of disputation and debate. Sages disagreed, they became rivals and fought each other in informal or in formal verbal combat -and from an early period began to compose handbooks of debating technique -and teachers used the techniques of debate to teach and test their disciples.

The Upanisadic tradition has its roots in mystical experience but it seeks rational and intelligible expression and invites the testing of its conclusions.

CRITICAL ORTHODOXY -the Upanisadic sages belong to Hindu tradition, not only in the obvious sense that their teachings are preserved in texts which Hindus accept as scripture, but also in the much more important sense that they stand within the living tradition of Brahminical Hinduism. The Upanisadic sages are frequently critical of elements in the priestly tradition, some deny the efficacy of rites and sacrifices as a means to Liberation. They still remain, however, within the same tradition as the sacrificing priests, they still make use of sacrificial imagery to interpret human life or to depict the structure of the cosmos.

Despite belonging to the Orthodox tradition, the Upanisadic sages represent a style of religious practise and thought far removed from what we find in the early Vedic hymns. A significant shift in religious consciousness has occurred:

EARLY VEDIC RELIGION

1. Polytheism tending in later hymns to seek a single deity as source and sustainer of the Cosmos.
UPANISADIC SAGES
Monism: the focus is not a god or even God, but the Self, the Real.

2. Sacrifice as the central practise of the religion. Sacrificial symbolism used to interpret human life or cosmological structures.

3. Religious rites and rituals as the focal duty the carrying out of which leads to the highest level of attainment. Rites as irrelevant to Liberation: the mediative quest for the Self/the Real as the central spiritual practise.

4. Religion expressed in ritual texts and hymns and exegesis of them. Religion expressed in spiritual discourses, discussions and debates showing and teaching Brahmavidya.

5. The ritual texts, Vedic hymns and commentaries on the rites and the disciplines needed to understand them as the content of Brahminical education. The learning of Upasana as the one central content of spiritual training

6. Ritual priesthood as the highest religious office/ role. Ascetic, contemplative life as the highest form of religious life.

7. Priest's sacrificial and teaching function in community. Guru's teaching function with disciples.

8. The final attainment as rebirth in the Heavenly Realms with the Gods and/or Ancestors. Final attainment is Moksa, release from the cycle of rebirth and existence as Atman/Brahman free from the trammels of incarnate existence.

9. Focus of religious learning on the interpretation of the Vedic hymns and the ritual texts. Focus of religious learning on psychological, metaphysical and cosmological analysis.

The Upanisads represent a radical reconstruction of religious concerns. The sages consciously link themselves to earlier tradition in a variety of ways, e.g. the sages and their pupils are normally Brahmins, they continue the tradition of interpretation of the sacrificial rites, though they are concerned with the symbolism of the rites not with the rites themselves. The distance the sages experience between themselves and the priestly ritualists is expressed in the Upanisads in a variety of ways, e.g. in the way Svetaketu's father dismisses his son's priestly learning, or in the image the Chhandogya offers of a procession of dogs, the tail of one in the mouth of the other, solemnly chanting "Aum, let us eat! Aum let us drink!" Sometimes the sages seek merely to relativise the importance of the sacrificial cult and its priestly ministers, sometimes they address it with real hostility.

The Upanisads mark a major turning point in the development of Indian thought. They place meditation and mystical experience and the philosophical interpretation of its significance at the heart of the religious quest. They are not concerned merely with an intellectual quest for the Self, for the Real, the quest on which the sages are set is experiential. There are passages of sophisticated philosophical analysis and argument in the Upanisads, but in the end it is not intellectual conviction but lived realisation that is the aim of Upanisadic teaching. Given their focus on the lived experience of meditation and on the disclosure of Being it offers, it is no surprise that the Upanisads were used as a sourcebook and reference point not only by Orthodox thinkers throughout religious history, but also by Nastika dissidents. Buddhist texts, for example, are rich with material drawn from the early Upanisads.

The Upanisadic tradition did not go unchallenged. While the earliest Upanisads predate the Buddha, many of the classic Upanisads are from his period or later. Even before the major attack on Orthodoxy mounted by the Buddhists and the Jains, other teachers were already promulgating dissident doctrines which denied the truth of Upanisadic teachings. We need to see the Upanisads in general not as the products of a serene, self-confident, unchallenged spiritual tradition, but as from an early date as presenting the spiritual manifesto of an Orthodoxy under siege. The position of the sages is all the more interesting in that they represent not a defensive rearguard action, but rather a response critical of its own tradition but still loyal to it. Like the Nastikas they can oppose the priestly evaluation of rituals and rites, but unlike them remain loyally part of the Hindu community. There is perhaps a parallel to be found in the position of the Franciscan and Dominican friars in Medieval Catholicism: they shared many of the spiritual aspirations and critical positions of heretical groups such as the Poor Men of Lyons, and even share many aspects of their life-style, but remain within the structure of the Church and find a unique role within it. To some extent this has been the position of the Upanisadic sages and their later successors in the Orthodox monastic orders.

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