The Philosophy of the Upanishads c5.s3.4

c5.s3.4

Under these circumstances it is very probable that the âtman doctrine, after it had been taken in hand by the S'âkhâs of the three older Vedas, was further prosecuted outside of these schools, and that consequently in course of time works were published, and have been partially at least preserved, which occupy a position as compared with the Upanishads of the Rig Sâma and Yajurvedas precisely similar to that of the Samhitâ of the Atharvaveda to their Samhitâs. And as at an earlier date hymns of various kinds found admittance into this Samhitâ, which were partly of too late composition for the older Samhitâs, and partly were despised by them; so now again it was the Atharvaveda which opened its arms to the late born or rejected children of the spirit of âtman research. The consequence of this generosity was that in course of time everything which appeared in the shape of an Upanishad, that is a mystical text, whether it were the expression merely of the religious philosophical consciousness of a limited circle or even an individual thinker, was credited to the Atharvaveda, or by later collectors was included in it without further hesitation. The regularity with which a given text reappears in the different collections forms, as far as we can see, the sole mark of its canonicity (if we may use the word in such a connection). Guided by this principle we have gathered together in our translation of the "Sixty Upanishads" all those texts which seem to have met with general recognition. Referring then for further details to the Introduction there to the Atharva-Upanishads, we propose here, for the sake of a general survey, merely to enumerate the more important of these works according to the fivefold classification which we have made of them.¹