this entitlement came responsibilities,
particularly to observe puritylaws, to
which younger children were not
subject. If nothing else, this rite is an
essential prerequisite to marriage, since
without it the young man is still
considered a child, and in some
contemporary cases it is performed
immediately before the wedding.
According to the dharma literature,
this rite was restricted to young men
from the three highest traditional social
classes (varnas), namely, brahmins,
kshatriyas, and vaishyas. Indeed, it is
the entitlement for this rite that makes
these three the “twice-born” groups. For
each group, a different age was pre-
scribed for initiation and a different
duration fixed for study, with brahmins
being both earliest to start and the
longest to study. The heart of the
upanayana samskara is investing the
young man with the sacred thread
(janeu), which he must wear from that
day forth, and teaching him the sacred
formula known as the Gayatri mantra.
This rite is still important and still widely
performed, although it tends to be
stressed most by brahmins. This is not
surprising, given their traditional posi-
tion as teachers and scholars and their
concern for conserving that status, even
in modern times. For further informa-
tion see Pandurang Vaman Kane (trans.),
A History of Dharmasastra, 1968; and Raj
Bali Pandey, Hindu Samskaras, 1969.
The former is encyclopedic and the
latter more accessible; despite their
age, they remain the best sources for
traditional Hindu rites.
Upanishad
The latest textual stratum in the Vedas,
the oldest and most authoritative Hindu
religious texts. The literal meaning of the
word upanishad is “to sit near [a
teacher],” but a better sense of its true
meaning would be “secret teaching.”
The Upanishads mark a clean break
from the immediately preceding Vedic
literature, the Brahmanas, in which the
essential concern was to lay out the
concrete procedures for performing
highly complex sacrificialrites. In con-
trast, the Upanishads were concerned
with more speculative and abstract
questions: the essential nature of the
cosmos, the essence of the human
being, and the relationship between
these two. The conclusion in the
Upanishads is that the essence of the
universe is an impersonal reality known
as Brahman, and that the essence of the
human being is called the “Self”
(atman). The fundamental insight and
essential teaching in the Upanishads
is the identity of Brahman and atman,
and thus of the macrocosm and the
microcosm. This identity is one of the
most fundamental Hindu religious ideas
and underlies religious thought up to
the present time.
The twelve or thirteen oldest upan-
ishads are not a cohesive set but a series
of independent documents, although
the later ones were clearly influenced by
the earlier ones. The two oldest are the
Brhadaranyaka Upanishad and the
Chandogya Upanishad. Each is much
longer than all the others combined,
they are written in prose as a series of
dialogues between famous sages, the
Sanskritlanguage in them is clearly
more archaic, and their ideas are embry-
onic and undeveloped. Later upan-
ishads—such as the Isha,Kena,Katha,
Prashna, and Mandukya—are much
shorter, are written in verse, and have
well-developed ideas. Some of these
introduce the notion of theism, but not
until the Shvetashvatara Upanishad is
the Supreme Being identified as a god,
in this case Rudra. For much of their
history, the Upanishads would have
been transmitted orally from master to
student; this makes it unlikely that these
texts were widely known because they
would have been secret and carefully
guarded teachings.
The Upanishads are important
because of the speculative questions
they ask and because many of their
teachings are fundamental assumptions
in Hindu religious life, even today: the
notion of an eternal Self that gives aUpanishad