TEN PRINCIPAL UPANISHADS – FIRST REPRINT (PM Modi gifted the same book to President Joe Biden)

Preface

Incompetent to expound Indian philosophy, I shall illustrate some few things that have to be said from my own daily thoughts and contemporary poetry.

Shree Purohit Swami has asked me to introduce what is twice as much his as mine, for he knows San- skrit and English, I but English. Before, after and dur- ing his nine years’ pilgrimage round India he has sung in Sanskrit every morning the Awadhoota Geeta, at- tributed to Dattatreya, an ancient Sage to whom he pays particular devotion, and two Upanishads, the Sad- guru, his own composition, and the Mandookya; and perhaps at night to entertain or edify his hosts, songs of his own composition; those in Marathi or Hindi among the unlearned, those in Sanskrit among the learned. Sanskrit has been a familiar speech, not changing from place to place, but always on his tongue.

For some forty years my friend George Russell (A.E.) has quoted me passages from some Upanishad, and for those forty years I have said to myself-some day I will find out if he knows what he is talking about. Between us existed from the beginning the antagonism that unites dear friends. More than once I asked him the name of some translator and even bought the book, but the most eminent scholars left me incredulous. Could latinised words, hyphenated words; could polyglot phrases, sedentary distortions of unnatural English:- ‘However many Gods in Thee, All-Knower, adversely slay desires of a person’-could muddles, muddied by ‘Lo! Verily’ and ‘Forsooth’, represent what farmers sang thousands of years ago, what their de- scendants sing today? So when I met Shree Purohit Swami I proposed that we should go to India and make a translation that would read as though the original had been written in common English: “To write well,’ said Aristotle, ‘express yourself like the common people, but think like a wise man’, a favour- ite quotation of Lady Gregory’s-I quote her diary from memory. Then when lack of health and money made India impossible we chose Majorca to escape tele- phones and foul weather, and there the work was done, not, as I had planned, in ease and leisure, but in the in- terstices left me by a long illness. Yet I am satisfied; I have escaped that polyglot, hyphenated, latinised, muddied muddle of distortion that froze belief. Can we believe or disbelieve until we have put our thought into a language wherein we are accustomed to express love and hate and all the shades between? When belief comes we stand up, walk up and down, laugh or swing an arm; a mathematician gets drunk; finding that which is the prerogative of men of action.

I have not worked to confound George Russell, though often saddened by the thought that I could not -he died some months ago-but to confound some- thing in myself. He expressed in his ceaseless vague preoccupation with the East a need and curiosity of our time. Psychical research, which must some day deeply concern religious philosophy, for its evidences surround the pilgrim and the devotee though they never take the centre of the stage, has already proved the exist- ence of faculties that would, combined into one man, make of that man a miracle-working Yogi. More and more too does it seem to approach a main thought of the Upanishads. Continental investigators, who reject the spiritism of Lodge and Crookes, but accept their phenomena, postulate an individual self possessed of such power and knowledge that they seem at every moment about to identify it with that Self without limitation and sorrow, containing and contained by all, and to seek there not only the living but the dead.

But our need and curiosity have no one source. Be- tween 1922 and 1925 English literature, wherever most intense, cast off its preoccupation with social problems and began to create myths like those of antiquity, and to ask the most profound questions. I recall poems by T. S. Eliot, ‘Those Barren Leaves’ by Aldous Huxley, where there is a Buddhistic hatred of life, or a hatred Schopenhauer did not so much find in as deduced from a Latin translation of a Persian translation of the Upanishads: certain poems-“The Seven Days of the Sun’, ‘Matrix’, ‘The Mutations of the Phoenix’, by W. J. Turner, by Dorothy Wellesley, by Herbert Read, which have displayed in myths, not as might some writer of my youth for the sake of romantic s gestion but urged by the most recent thought, the world emerging from the human mind. A still younger gener ation has brought a more minute psychological curi osity, suggesting an eye where a goldsmith’s magnify. ing glass is screwed, to like preoccupations.

In their pursuit of meaning, Day Lewis, MacNeice, Auden, Laura Riding have thrown off too much, as 1 think, the old metaphors, the sensuous tradition of the poets: ‘High on some mountain shelf Huddle the pitiless abstractions bald about the neck,” but have found, perhaps the more easily for that sacri fice, a neighbourhood where some new Upanishad, some half-asiatic masterpiece, may start up amid our averted eyes.

When I was young we talked much of tradition, and those emotional young men, Francis Thompson, Lionel Johnson, John Gray, found it in Christianity. But now that The Golden Bough has made Christianity look modern and fragmentary we study Confucius with Ezra Pound, or like T. S. Eliot find in Christianity a convenient symbolism for some older or newer thought, or say with Henry Airbubble, ‘I am a member of the Church of England but not a Christian.’ Shree Purohit Swami and I offer to some young man seeking, like Shakespeare, Dante, Milton, vast sentiments and gene- ralisations, the oldest philosophical compositions of the world, compositions, not writings, for they were sung long before they were written down. European scholar- ship with many doubts has fixed their date, or the date of the most important, as a little before 600 B.C. when Buddha was born, but Indian scholarship prefers a far earlier date. Whatever the date, those forest Sages be- gan everything; no fundamental problem of philosophy, nothing that has disturbed the schools to controversy, escaped their notice.

It pleases me to fancy that when we turn towards the East, in or out of church, we are turning not less to the ancient west and north; the one fragment of pagan Irish philosophy come down, ‘the Song of Amergin’, seems Asiatic; that a system of thought like that of these books, though perhaps less perfectly organised, once overspread the world, as ours today; that our genuflections discover in that East something ancestral in ourselves, something we must bring into the light before we can appease a religious instinct that for the first time in our civilisation demands the satisfaction of the whole man.

Upanishad is doctrine or wisdom (literally ‘At the feet of’, meaning thereby ‘At the feet of some Master’), the doctrine or wisdom of the Wedas. Each is attached to some section and sometimes is named from the section. The Katha-Upanishad for instance is part of the Kathak

1 All Indian clerks in Government offices have just been or- dered to wear trousers, so at any rate declares a London mer- chant, an exporter to India, who has decided to specialise in trouser-stretchers. It follows the flag.

Brahman section in the Yajur-Weda. Shree Purohit Swami has omitted the usual first five chapters of the Chhandogya-Upanishad because they are so intermixed with ritual that they are no longer studied, though still sung. For the same reason he has selected from Briha- daranyaka-Upanishad such passages as contain no such intermixture. A few passages have been omitted, not because descriptions of ritual but because repetitions of what is said and said as well elsewhere. Their order wherein the Upanishads should be studied, according to tradition, is that in which they are printed in this book. W. B. YEATS.