The Chhandogya Upanishad : the tripod of Indian Culture, being constituted of the Upanishads, the Brahmasutras and the Bhagavadgita. 1.1

18/04/2018

The Chhandogya Upanishad :

Chapter One: Vaishvanara-Vidya

1.THE PANCHAGNI-VIDYA-1.

The Upanishads are mainly meditations intended to act as correctives to the binding effects that are produced by the phenomena of natural processes. While what we call a natural process subjects us to its own laws, these laws can be overcome and their imposition upon the individual can be counteracted by techniques of meditation.

The philosophy of the Upanishads is that it is an ignorance of the way in which the Universe works that binds the individual to samsara—the series of births and deaths. Our sorrows are, in a way, created by our own selves, because they follow as a consequence of our not abiding by the law of the universe.

The affirmation of a reality independent of what really is, is called the ego. That is the centre of personality. This affirmation of individuality, jivatva, personality, or something separate from the organic structure of creation, is the cause of the sorrow or the suffering of the jiva, the individual manifested due to the affirmation of the ego.

Births and deaths are the punishments, as it were, meted out to the individual in order that it may be reformed in the field of experience of the world for the purpose of enabling it to return to the normal state of consciousness which is universality of being, of which it is deprived at present due to the ignorance of its connection with the universe and a false notion that it has about its own self that it has an independence of its own.

The sections of the Chhandogya Upanishad, which we are going to study, are a gradational ascent of knowledge for the purpose of meditations which lift us above the phenomena of ordinary experience, such as birth and death and bondage of every kind, and point to the methods of transcending all sorrow, whatever be its nature, and regaining the originality of being.

The various sections that follow are a systematic teaching on what we may call Adhyatma-Vidya, or Atma-Vidya, a knowledge of the ultimate Self, which is the only remedy for the malady of empirical existence.

To be continued ..