Hello friends and listeners, I am Arghya Goswami, and along with my wife Jiniya, we will be your host, for this podcast series named -“Stories from Upanishads”. We will attempt at retelling the stories from Upanishads, which brings to you a bouquet of tales which pushes you for self-realisation, understanding the Brahman or Supreme Self, and understanding other nuances of foundational building blocks on which Santana Dharma philosophy resides. We have worked hard to bring to you these great tales in a much more simplified format so that they can be understood in the context of the modern world.
The basic contents are sourced from the various Upanishads, books by Swami Ranganathananda, and Upanishads.org.
We aren’t experts in Upanishads but have toiled really hard to understand the crux of important messages hidden within these sacred texts. We love to read various Indian scriptures and doctrines and believe in spreading the knowledge further.
I hope, you will enjoy listening to our podcast. Please follow or download the episodes if you like.
Before we could tell you the stories, we must first introduce you to what these texts are! I Upaniṣads serve as the ultimate truth in form of “Srutis” or oral traditions, which provides “Vastutantrajnāna”, which is “the knowledge of reality as it is”!
Literally, the word “Upaniṣad” in Sanskrit means “sitting down near” or “sitting down at the feet”. So this is the basic building block of the “Guru Shishya” tradition where the revered guru teaches and shares secret knowledge with his students in an ashrama or hermitage. Modern-day science acknowledges that reality is partly visible and mostly invisible. Upaniṣads were the first scriptures which confirmed this truth many centuries ago. Hence the Upaniṣads use human personalities to depict the idea of the ‘Supreme Being’. The Upaniṣads describe the various aspects of nature of the “Supreme Self” called “Brahman” and “Individual Self” called “Atman”. Apart from these, it also contains precious information on “Karma” or right action and “Moksha” or liberation from the cycle of birth and death. Thus these are the Vedic doctrines that explain “Self-realization” through yoga and meditative practices.
Most of the stories in Upanisads are a dialogue between two or three characters, either between a guru or his disciples or between the pupils of a hermitage or between two enemies. So this is an enchanting world of stories entangled with inner meanings of life, time and space.
Upaniṣads provide us with an intelligible body of verified and verifiable spiritual insights along with a mixture of mythology and legends and cosmological speculations relating to nature and the origin of the universe.
Most scholars are divided as to date the composition of these great texts. However, many of these agree that the principal Upaniṣads were composed before Gautama Buddha in the 7th century before Christ.
There are over 200 Upaniṣads, and many of them are sectarian in character and are evidently written in the post-Buddhist era and also some of them are composed after Adi Shankaracharya’s era.
These were written over a huge period and the principal Upaniṣads are accepted to be those which were commented on by none other than Adi Shankaracharya. He commented on 10 Upanishads namely Isā, Kena, Katha, Prasna, Muņdaka, Māņdūkya, Taittirīya, Aitareya, Chāndogya and Bŗhadāraņyanka. Some scholars also believe that Shankaracharya also commented on the 11th Upaniṣad namely Śvetāśvatara. [AG]
So my dear friends and listeners. We invite you all to embark on a journey to know the truth about life, know about Brahman or the Supreme Reality, about Atman or the Individual Self and many other foundational philosophies of the Hinduism in form of simple tales from the Upaniṣads.
In our podcast, this is the episode zero and will serve as a baseline knowledge to understand the Upanisads in a nutshell, while in each of the following episodes in this podcast series, we will narrate to you a story from these great texts. These stories you may know or may have heard in the past but these still possess the ancient secrets and foundational knowledge of the mankind.