The Upanishads

‘The safest general characterization of the European philosophical tradition is that it consists of a series of footnotes to Plato.’ – Alfred North Whitehead In The Upanishads: An Introduction, Parsa Venkateshwar Rao Jr argues, with greater justification, that the whole of Indian philosophy is a footnote to the Upanishads. What Western scholars perceive to be the religious stigma of the Upanishads is the very reason these texts remain intellectually alive three thousand years after they had been expounded. The Upanishads did not remain static, and served as the crucible for philosophical developments in the centuries that followed. Drawing upon the scholarship of Indologists such as S. Radhakrishnan, Surendranath Dasgupta, Chandradhar Sharma, Daya Krishna, Max Mueller, Karl Harrington Potter and Patrick Olivelle, this handbook introduces the general readers to the tenets of Indian philosophy and its core ideas, discussing them as they unfold in the Upanishads through dialogue and stories.