A Constructive Survey of Upanishadic Philosophy c13.s3.6

c13.s3.6

Johannes Hertel has recently published a critical edition of the Muṇḍakopanishad, Leipzig, 1924. Hertel's is an ambitious method of editing. He goes into questions of Metre and Language, differentiates the Traditional from the Original text, then gives a Restored text, and then discusses the contents, the origin, and the age of the Muṇḍakopanishad, along with its references to Jainism. After this prelude, Hertel prints the text of the Muṇḍakopanishad by the anastatic method, borrowing it from the Bibliotheca Indica. Hertel may have been inspired to adopt his method of the discussion of the Muṇḍakopanishad from attempts like that of Father Zimmermann on the Mahānārāyaṇa Upanishad, which was his Ph. D. Thesis, in which he discusses the Sources and the Relation between the different recensions of that Upanishad. Prof. Zimmermann goes into the text-parallels of the Upanishad, and the relation of them, and then proceeds to point out the contents and the sources of the Upanishad, and then ends with an arrangement of matter. In fact, such a method of procedure should be made applicable to every Upanishad.