A Constructive Survey of Upanishadic Philosophy c2.7

c2.7

4. Examination of the Opinions of a few Orientalists.—The work which has been accomplished by Western Scholars upon Upanishadic literature has not been by any means scanty. Though the volume of work turned out by them on Upanishadic literature is neither so large nor so profound as that turned out on Vedic literature, it is neither on the other hand either meagre or small. Towards the end of the present volume may be found a succint account of all the work that has been done on Upanishadic literature by scholars like Weber, Röer, Max Müller, Böhtlingk, Whitney, Deussen, Oldenberg, Oltramare, Hertel, and Hillebrandt. Deussen's work on the Upanishads is a monument to his great scholarship, industry, and insight, and so is the work of Oldenberg and Oltramare. We do not wish to enter here into a detailed examination of the various opinions held on the subject of Upanishadic literature by early scholars, which have become the common property of all Upanishadic students; we only wish to examine here a few of the latest utterances on the subject. When Hertel, for example, says in his brilliant, though somewhat one-sided, introduction to the Kenopanishad in his "Die Weisheit der Upanishaden," that Brahman in that Upanishad is not to be understood as "the World-Soul in which all the individual Souls ultimately merge", he forgets to notice the point that the aim of that Upanishad is simply to describe Brahman, in Wordsworthian fashion, as a power or a presence,