The Philosophy of the Upanishads c6.s3.6

c6.s3.6

The collection of 108 Upanishads, which the *Muktikâ* itself regards as later, appears to belong to an entirely different region (probably the south of India), and to a considerably more recent time. This collection includes all the treatises of Colebrooke (except the *Nîlarudra*, *Piṇḍa*, *Mahânârâyaṇa*, *Âs’rama*) and of Nârâyaṇa (except the *Varadatâpanîya*), although for the most part under different names and sometimes expanded by later additions to thirty or forty times their original extent. Added to these are the 11 Upanishads of the three older Vedas complete, with the exception of the *Mahânârâyaṇa*, and about seventy new texts found nowhere else. The circumstance that in this collection the Upanishads of the three older Vedas also find a place, and that at the very beginning of it, points to a time and region in which a living and reliable tradition of the *S’âkhâs* no longer existed; of which fact a further and yet stronger proof is the bold attempt, made without a shadow of justification, to assign 10 of these 108 Upanishads to the *Ṛigveda*, 19 to the White and 32 to the Black Yajurveda, 16 to the Sâmaveda, and 31 to the Atharvaveda, — a procedure against which the ancient Vedic schools would have strenuously protested. In other respects this collection is of great interest for the later history of the Vedânta (perhaps mainly or exclusively among the Telugu Brâhmans), and deserves closer examination now that it has been made accessible in the Devanâgarî edition of 1896. Previously there had existed only an edition in the Telugu character. It is worthy of note also that S'ankarânanda's readings often agree with those of the 108 Upanishads against those of the 52 and of Nârâyaṇa.