Insightful stories from Upanishads

Today I am starting a new series namely “Insightful stories from Upanishads”. As I have been doing earlier, I hope to talk to you twice a week, every Wednesday and Friday.

I had run a two month long series on Upanishads during the end of 2017. In that series, I had focused mainly on philosophic parts of Upanishads. Back to back with that series, I had also published a book “Upanishads – A journey into the unknown”.

If you have followed that series or read my book, probably you don’t need any introduction to Upanishads.

In the present series I will highlight more on the stories narrated by some of these Upanishads with some sprinkling of philosophy. I am intentionally lightening the tone, since I received feedback from some of my readers that they find high philosophy difficult to understand.

Before I start, let me place the Upanishads in the proper perspective.

Ancient Indians followed what they called Varnashrama Dharma or a way of living based on the profession one followed (Varna) and the stage in one’s life (Ashrama).

In my posts on Bhagavadgeetha last year, I had touched upon the Varna system of ancient India (please refer to my post “Four types of people” dated Sep 05, 2018).

Basically, a Varna is a classification of the human society into four different classes, based on their inherent nature and the profession they followed.

The four Varnas are the priestly class (or Brahmin), the warrior class (or the Kshatriya), the merchant or farming class (Vaishya), and the slave class (or the Shoodra).

First three of these classes are expected to go through formal education related to their profession, starting from an age of five to twelve, in residential schools under the tutelage of suitable teachers. A slave is not normally expected to undertake formal education since a slave’s only duty was to obey his master.

Normal life expectancy was believed to be 100 years. Out of this, in the first 25 years one is supposed to study whatever he is expected to study depending on his Varna.

For the next 25 years, he is supposed to lead the life of a householder, raising a family and playing an active role in the society.

After the age of 50, one is expected to retire from active worldly life and proceed to the forest and live with other such people. This is the time that they gradually detach from worldly bonds and prepare for spiritual journey. This phase will continue till one reaches the age of 75.

Beyond the age of 75, one is expected to break all bonds with the society as well as with his own near and dear ones, live a secluded life, and focus completely on spiritual upliftment till his final death.

These four stages of one’s life are called Ashramas. These ashramas are Brahmacarya (up to 25 years of age), Grihasta (25 to 50 years), Vanaprasta (50 to 75 years of age) and finally Sanyasa (75 years to end of life).

Basically, the idea is to first prepare yourself, play an active and contributing role in the society when the body permits, and then make a graceful exit.

In ancient India, an individual cannot forsake his responsibilities towards the society while making progress at individual level. Not at least during the first half of his life.

Now, where do Upanishads fit in this scheme of things?

Upanishads are parts of Vedic scriptures most sacred to ancient Indians. The main parts of the Vedas namely the Samhitas and the Brahmanas are meant for achieving various worldly gains by propitiating various divine beings. And these parts are targeted to Grihastas or householders. They follow these parts, perform various rituals and attain worldly benefits with the help of various divine beings.

But when one crosses the age of 50 and retires as per the scheme of things, he has no use of these ritualistic parts of the Vedas. He has to gradually shift his focus to philosophic parts of the Vedas.

These philosophic parts that are often called the Vedanta or the end parts of the Vedas are meant to help a person to make spiritual progress. Upanishads belong to this Vedanta part of the Vedas. They talk very little about worldly things. They deal with fundamental issues of life, existence, the life beyond, and the final emancipation or the Moksha.

These Upanishads are mostly in the form of stories. In some way they are like the parables of the Christian Bible. But unlike the Biblical parables, Upanishads are not completely imagined stories. But they are often based on real historical events and real people. But their purpose is to convey an idea rather than give a record of historical happenings.

These Upanishads have a deceptive simplicity, but they are highly philosophical and raise very serious issues. They are very symbolic, abstract and often mystical in nature. So, it is often very difficult to give a unique meaning to these Upanishadic stories. Depending on one’s exposure, insights and reasoning capabilities, one may read different meanings in these stories.

Keeping this apparent ambiguity in mind, I don’t claim the interpretation that I am going to give in this series as the right one. Also, I will try to avoid intricate philosophical issues and focus on broad ideas. To keep the interest, I will also focus more on narrative and story telling style of these scriptures.

So in the next episode, I will start with one of the stories from the Upanishads.

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Upanishads are concluding parts of ancient Indian Vedic scriptures believed to be at least 5000 years old. The interpretation is by Dr. King (Copyright © 2019 Dr. King).