The Principal Upanishads

The Principal Upanishads form the philosophical summit of the Vedas, the work of forest sages such as Yajnavalkya, and the foundation of the Vedanta tradition. They mark a decisive turn from outward ritual to the inward question of the Self, asking what it is that knows and underlies all experience.

Their central revelation, tat tvam asi, "thou art that," equates the innermost consciousness, Atman, with the ground of all being, Brahman. The seer's discovery is that the deepest subject within and the ultimate reality without are one, so that liberating knowledge is not the acquisition of something external but the recognition of an identity already present. Sustained contemplative inquiry, rather than sacrifice, becomes the path to this realization.

As the speculative culmination of the Vedic corpus, the Upanishads supplied the metaphysical core that later Indian philosophy and much of the world's mysticism would draw upon. For a study of the mind they stand as perhaps the boldest of all claims for the primacy of consciousness: that awareness itself is the fundamental reality of which the universe is the expression.