A Constructive Survey of Upanishadic Philosophy c13.s6.1

c13.s6.1

There are a number of important essays and systematic treatises connected with either a part or the whole of Upanishadic Philosophy. We must begin by noting a somewhat brilliant idea in Otto Wecker's *Der Gebrauch der Kasus in der älteren Upanishad-literatur*, Tübingen, 1905, wherein by a consideration of the various cases in ten of the principal Upanishads he comes at a chronological order of the Upanishads relative to the age of Pāṇini. This is rather an important idea; for, Pāṇini seems to have flourished before the Upanishadic era had faded away, and therefore, some Upanishads wherein the Pāṇinian uses do not occur may safely be taken to be pre-Pāṇini, while others where they do occur may be taken to be post-Pāṇini. With this important hint, Wecker arranges the Upanishads in four groups; Group one consists of the Bṛihadāraṇyaka, the Chhāndogya, and the Kaushītaki; Group two, of the Aitareya, the Taittirīya, and the Kaṭha; Group three, of the Kena, and the Īśa; Group four, of the Svetāśvatara and the Maitri. The first two are evidently pre-Pāṇini, the third possibly pre-Pāṇini, while the last is post-Pāṇini. In fact, this procedure of Wecker, in which he tries to arrive at a date of the Upanishads from a grammatical point of view is far more valid than that which avails itself of the presence or absence of the idea of Transmigration which we have noted in the first chapter of this work. One wonders why the idea of Incarnation has not been similarly requisitioned for such purposes. In an essay on *The Dramatic Element in the Upanishads* in the Monist, 1910, Charles Johnston discusses certain dialogues from the Bṛihadāraṇyaka, the Chhāndogya, and other Upanishads. A. H. Ewing writes a study in Upanishadic psycho-physics by considering the *Hindu conception of the function of Breath*. Dr. Betty Heimann offers a review of the Upanishadic speculations on deep-sleep in his *Die Tiefschlaf-Spekulation der alten Upanishaden*, 1922, while Rumball has written an essay on *The Conception of Sin in the Upanishads*, Open Court, 1909. We thus see how a searching analysis of the Upanishads has been made in the interest of the different studies pursued by Scholars.