chapters in the midst of Brahmanas and Aranyakas, or expanded from such texts,
while others were added later. Most of them originally did not use the term
“Upanishad,” which in the Arthashastra (300 b.c.e.) still meant “secret weapon”
rather than a religious doctrine.
- Chakravarti (1987); Mizuno (1980); Hirakawa (1990); Jacobi (1884); Dutt (1962:
46–51). The Videha land, whose king sponsors debates involving such sages as
Yajñavalkya, is a scene of the Buddha’s life too. Both kinds of sources show kings
striving to attract famous sages to their courts by material patronage (e.g., Bri-
hadaranyaka Upanishad 2.1.1).
- Cf. Chandogya Upanishad 5.11 and 17; 6.1; Brihad. Up. 3.7; 6.2; Kaushitaki
Upanishad 1.1. This probably indicates the rivalry of the Samavedists to which
Uddalaka’s Upanishad was attached, against the White Yagur, allied to Yajñaval-
kya’s lore, as well as against the Rigvedists of the Kaushitaki.
14.Brihad. Up. 3.6.1; 3.9.27; cf. Chand. Up. 1.8; 10.10–11, where the threat that
“your head will fall off” invokes a magical punishment for singing a hymn without
knowing its meaning. The implication is that winning a debate sequence was
regarded as a demonstration of superior magic.
- Akin to this may be the famous lesson of Uddalaka Aruni about breaking a seed
into infinitesimal pieces to find the invisible essence (Chand. Up. 6.12). Ruben (in
Chattopadhyaya, 1979: 141–156) points out that Uddalaka’s sequence of argu-
ments (Chand. Up. 6.1–16) indicates a kind of hylozoist materialism of living
matter; for instance, he instructs his son to abstain from eating for fifteen days in
order to show that this impairs one’s memory, concluding that “mind comes from
food” (6.7.6). The ultimate lesson, that one’s self is part of the invisible essence of
the universe, does not so much imply that the universe is spiritual, as that the
human self, too, is produced from the hylozoic essence. Given the lack of distinc-
tion between levels of abstraction, what later philosophers interpreted as a tran-
scendental monism may just as well have been a claim for one physical element
underlying the others, in much the same sense that Thales posited water as the
primal element. Similarly, Uddalaka’s experiment with salt invisibly pervading
water (Chand. Up. 6.13) is primitive physics as much as it is transcendental
philosophy.
16.Brihad. Up. 6.3; this magic is attributed to Uddalaka Aruni, who gives it to his
“pupil” Yajñavalkya. Similar worldly magical claims are made in some of the most
“philosophical” Upanishads, e.g., Chand. Up. 2.1–29; Kaush. Up. 2.6.4–10.
- Only one of the classic Upanishads, the Maitrayani (1.3–4), equates life with
suffering, and it uses words identical with classic Buddhist phrases; this is a late
Upanishad from around 200 c.e.. (Nakamura, 1973: 77–78). Its contemporary,
the Mandukya Upanishad includes phrases found in the Prajñaparamitasutras of
Mahayana Buddhism.
- O’Flaherty (1980: xi–xxiv, 3–13). The clearest formulation of the karma doctrine
appears again in the late Maitrayani Upanishad (3–4), in virtually Buddhist lan-
guage; this is also the only Upanishad which links karma and rebirth to the
performance of caste duties (4.4.3). In the pre-Buddhist Brihad. Up. (3.2.13), a
debate is described in which one question has to be discussed privately. The
Notes to Pages 195–199^ •^963
