Upanishads (Paramananda)
Contents — 5 chapters
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About this book
The Upanishads are the philosophical conclusion of the Vedas, the "Vedanta." This volume presents three of the principal twelve — the Isa, Katha, and Kena — in Swami Paramananda's 1909 English rendering: short dialogues on the identity of the individual Self (Atman) and the cosmic Absolute (Brahman), and the limits of discursive knowledge.
Relevance to this project
A cross-cultural emanation text in the comparative frame the project sets against the Hebrew letter-tradition: like the Sefer Yetzirah, the Upanishads describe the descent of the manifold from a unified, unnameable source, and the insufficiency of language to grasp it — "the Self is not to be grasped by speech." The shared ancient structure (a generative first principle, an emanation series, named forms) is what the Revelations section collects across cultures.