Atma Upanishad Three

The Upanishads are among a number of sacred works cherished by Hindus. According to Juan Mascaró in his translation of the Bhagavad Gita, the Upanishads that were written in prose may date from about 700 BCE, while those written in verse were probably composed much later. No one knows how far back the oral tradition goes but it is estimated to be perhaps 1500 BCE. Nothing at all is known about the authors of these brilliant texts.

"The supreme Self is neither born nor dies. It cannot be burned, moved, pierced, cut, nor dried. Beyond all attributes, the supreme Self is the eternal witness, ever pure, indivisible, and uncompounded, far beyond the senses and the ego... It is omnipresent, beyond all thought, without action in the external world, without action in the internal world. Detached from the outer and the inner, this supreme Self purifies the impure."

It is no wonder that Sakyamuni Buddha, who was immersed in such a rich heritage came to some of the insights that he shared with his followers for the forty seven years of this teaching career. These insights were not all just spontaneously arrived at, they are rather, the synthesis and the culmination of all the wisdom that preceded him. In fact, the Dhamapada says that Sakyamuni visited all the great Spiritual Teachers of his time. He, even for a time, studied with the Great Mahavira who was the 24th and the last Tirthankara (a human who attains 'Perfect Knowledge'.) Mahavira is known as the founder of Modern Jainism in India and was born about 40 years before Sakyamuni.

The traditions of Awakening are ancient, and go back farther than any of us can imagine. Today, we have the ability to take pictures of planets in the nether reaches of our solar system with unmanned probes of unimaginable complexity. We can take pictures of the background radiation and glimpse what perhaps started this cosmos a very long time ago. Yet, with all of these advances, we continue to kill one another. We continue to steal, and to lie, and to create havoc out of a pure and clear universe. It seems that the wise ones have been around for a very long time, it is my aspiration that perhaps we can all come together with a greater understanding of humanity, and perhaps a more loving view of what it means to be human.

Source: The Upanishads. Trans. Eknath Easwaran. Tomales, CA.: Nilgiri Press, 1987. ISBN 0915132397: Atma Upanishad 3, p. 242
Photo: Angkor Wat in Sepia by Paul Lynch, JDPSN