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 Easwaran takes one of India's classic wisdom texts, the Katha Upanishad, and explains how it embraces all the key ideas of Indian spirituality within the context of a powerful mythic quest - the story of a young
hero who ventures into the land of death in search of immortality. Easwaran shows how the Katha Upanishad can help us understand our lives today
Illustrating the insights of the Katha through analogies and everyday examples, Easwaran shows how these ancient teachings help us gain a deeper understanding of our world and ourselves today.
Excerpts Get up! Wake up! Seek the guidance of an Illumined teacher and realize the Self. Sharp like a razor's edge, the sages say, Is the path, difficult to traverse.
- Katha Upanishad
SOME YEARS AGO I translated what I called the Classics of Indian Spirituality: the Upanishads, the Bhagavad Gita, and the Dhammapada. These ancient texts, memorized and passed from generation to generation for hundreds of years before they
were written down, represent early chapters in the
long, unbroken story of India's Spiritual experience.
The Upanishads, old before the dawn of history; come
to us like snapshots of a timeless landscape. The
Gita condenses and elaborates on these insights in a
dialogue set on & battlefield, as apt a setting now as
it was three thousand years ago. And the Dhammapada,
a kind of spiritual handbook, distills the practical implications
of the same truths presented afresh by the
Compassionate Buddha around 500 BC.
These translations proved surprisingly popular;
perhaps because they were intended not so much
to be literal or literary as to bring out the meaning
of these documents for us today. For it is here that
these classics come to life. They are not dry texts ;
they speak to us. Each is the opening voice of a conversation which we are invited to join - a voice
that experts a reply. So in India we say that the
meaning of the scriptures is only complete when
this call is answered in the lives of men and women
like you and me. Only then do we see what the
scriptures mean here and now. G. K. Chesterton
once said that to understand the Gospels, we have
only to look at Saint Francis of Assisi. Similarly, I
would say, to grasp the meaning of the Bhagavad
Gita, we need look no farther than Mahatma
Gandhi, who made it a guide for every aspect of
daily living. Wisdom may be perennial, but to see
its relevance we must see it lived out.
In India, this process of assimilating the learning of
the head into the wisdom of the heart is said to have
three stages: shravanam, mananam, and
nididhyasanam; roughly, hearing, reflection, and meditation. These steps can merge naturally
into a single daily activity, but
they can also be steps in a journey
that unfolds over years. Often this
journey is begun in response to a
crisis. In my own case, though I
must have heard the scriptures
many times as a child, I don't remember
them making any deep impression.
When I discovered the
Bhagavad Gita, I was attracted by
the beauty of its poetry. I didn't understand
its teachings at all. It was
not until I reached a crisis of meaning
in my mid-thirties, when outward
success failed to fill the
longing in my heart, that I turned
to these classics for wisdom rather
than literary beauty. Only then did
I see that I had been, as the Buddha
puts it, like a spoon that doesn't
know the taste of the soup.
Since that time I have dedicated
myself to translating these scriptures
into daily living through the
practice of meditation. The book in
your hands is one fruit of this long
endeavor. Such a presentation can only be intensely personal. In my
translations I naturally let the texts
speak for themselves; here I make
no attempt to hide the passion that
gave those translations their appeal.
To capture the essence of the Gita,
the Upanishads, and the
Dhammapada, I offer what I have
learned personally from trying to
live them out in a complex, hurried
world. I write not as a scholar, but
as an explorer back from a long,
long voyage eager to tell what he
has found.
Yet however personal the exploration,
these discoveries are universal.
So it is not surprising that at
the heart of each of these classics
lies a myth - variations on the ageold
story of a hero in quest of wisdom
that will redeem the world. In
the Upanishads, a teenager goes to
the King of Death to find the secret
of immortality. In the Gita, standing
between opposing armies on the
eve of Armageddon, the warrior prince
Arjuna seeks guidance from
an immortal teacher, Sri Krishna.
And behind the Dhammapada lies
the story of the Buddha himself, a
true story woven into legend: a
prince who forsakes his throne to
find a way for all the world to go
beyond sorrow in this life. These old
stories are our own, as relevant today
as ever. Myth always involves
the listener. We identify with its heroes;
their crises mirror ours. Their
stories remind us not only what
the
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