The Religion and Philosophy of the Veda and Upanishads v2.c40.s2.21

v2.c40.s2.21

The next group of Upaniṣads is marked by the fact that it is composed of texts in metre, with very slight exceptions. It contains the Kaṭha, the Īçā, the Çvetāçvatara, Muṇḍaka and Mahānārāyaṇa,⁷ that is the last book (x) of the Taittirīya Āraṇyaka. The texts are distinguished from the previous group, not merely by their form, but by their contents. The old discussions with their tentative and confused efforts to reach definite results are replaced by a definite phraseology, in which the results of speculation have been summed up in brief dogmas, expressed often with an obvious desire for the paradoxical and the bizarre. The allegories, not rarely found in the Upaniṣads of the older class, which share them with the Āraṇyakas, disappear altogether. More marked still is the relation of the texts to the other collections: the Kaṭha bears the name of a famous school of the Black Yajurveda whose Saṁhitā is still preserved for us, but its nature is that it is really a rewriting, from a philosophical as opposed to a ritual point of view, of the story, found in the Taittirīya Brāhmaṇa, of Naciketas and the winning of boons from Death by him. The Mahānārāyaṇa is reckoned in some authorities as the tenth book of the Āraṇyaka of the Taittirīya school, but the Āraṇyaka is a body of very various and confused contents, and between it and the Upaniṣad there is no inherent connexion at all, such as always exists in the previous group. Similarly the Īçā Upaniṣad has succeeded in obtaining entry as a book (xl) of the Vājasaneyi Saṁhitā, with which it has nothing really to do, and which has been much added to in the course of time, parts of its contents in books xxxi, xxxii, and xxxiv¹ belonging in conception to the period of the Brāhmaṇas. The Çvetāçvatara and the Muṇḍaka have not even a nominal effective connexion with any extant text, beyond the fact that the Muṇḍaka uses the Atharvaveda (x. 7), and we need not suppose that they ever had any such connexion.