Upanishads : Humanity\'s Earliest Philosophical Compositions

"The Golden Books series of Indian religions is specially planned and designed for the general educated reader in India and abroad, who in the 21 century of the third millennium, wants to know about them to contribute his lot to the fast growing globalisation of world cultures. It includes Vedic, Upanishadic, Buddhistic and Jain religions, the mainstay of Indian culture, which have made their mark in various ways in Asia and the west since olden times. In terror-stricken modern times also, they are trying to play their role in setting things right and devising a new, eclectic way of life.

Indian religious have lots of philosophy and hundreds of scriptures with commentaries and commentaries on commentaries, which present a highly complicated picture especially in comparison to one-book religion-cultures. The golden books select the most important and the best of them, translated into simple, easy and understandable English, by learned scholars and present them in capsule form for wider use and benefit.

The Upanishads form the most significant part of Indian philosophy and culture, regarded as the first ever philosophy in the world. According to Paul Deussen, the Greek Parmenides and Plato, and Emannuel Kant in Germany later, propounded the same ideas as expressed by the Upanishads. There are a couple of hundred Upanishads in all but the major ten or eleven present the chief concepts, and were therefore selected by the great Shankaracharya, to write commentaries upon, to promote his advaita philosophy. This book follows his guidelines and succeeds in a remarkable manner in enunciating the whole in a manageable form." (jacket)