The Thirteen Principal Upanishads, With An Outline Of The Philosophy Of The Upanishads

by Robert Ernest Hume (translator)

This scarce antiquarian book is a facsimile reprint of the original. Due to its age, it may contain imperfections such as marks, notations, marginalia and flawed pages. Because we believe this work is culturally important, we have made it available as part of our commitment for protecting, preserving, and promoting the world's literature in affordable, high quality, modern editions that are true to the original work.

Genres: Philosophy, Religion, India, Classics, History, Spirituality, Nonfiction

556 pages, Hardcover

First published December 31, 1971

Reviews

[Jeffrey · Rating 5 out of 5]

I had a revelation while listening to a Ram Dass lecture, read the Bhagavad Gita in one sitting, and setting aside a life of desire and pleasure-seeking, began frantically seeking for ultimate truth. I became a zen student, but ignored warnings not to examine contemplation of the self through academic pursuits, but instead to do the work of choice less awareness, and let the contemplation happen in it's own time. That might be oversimplified. Still, after a couple years of vigorously digging into Buddhist spiritual texts and study groups, I came upon mention of Jiddu Krishnamurti, and while at first I was a skeptic, I gradually began to open to the notion of man, reality, and the self as being subjective discriminations of the same whole and contiguous supreme existence. I became greatly interested in Dr. David Bohm through his work with Krishnamurti, and I believe, although I am not positive, that it is through Dr. Bohm that I first came to hear about Arthur Schopenhauer, and his book The World as Will and Reason. These two western minds allowed me to conceptualize Indian philosophical concepts and relationships in a more fluent way, which in turn renewed my curiosity in religious source texts. It was by that route that I came to read the 13 Principal Upanishads, and during the course of reading to discover Adi Shankara and Advaita Vedanta. This, coupled with a well-presented lecture on early Buddhism which claimed the notion of anatta (non-self) was absent in original Buddhism has done a great deal to shift my alignment from more Buddhist to more Hindu. I can not say concretely which beliefs seem most credible currently, but I can say that the pursuit of ultimate reality has become very interesting since I began to explore Hinduism in a scholarly way.

[Ian Slater · Rating 1 out of 5]

Let me say at once that the single star is for this particular Kindle edition of a very good book, not for the Upanishads themselves, or even the rather old translation.

The edition is a transfer by OCR from the Internet Archive (which is credited), and there is no sign that a responsible human being ever looked at the text before slapping a price on it, and offering it to the public. As a result, there are things like floating page numbers and footnotes, page headings dropped into the middle of texts where there used to be a page break, and some garbling of the text -- I couldn't bring myself to read enough to estimate how often that happens.

The result is, I think, pretty much unreadable, and is in no way a pleasant (or even intelligible) introduction to some of the most important religious/philosophical works of ancient India.

(I'm not going into the philosophical contents, which I'm not really qualified to discuss, except in the most superficial manner. There is a condensed treatment on -- of course -- Wikipedia, for the curious.)

Back in 2012, I got a Kindle edition of the same work (at $2.99), which had been properly proofed and formatted, and I have found it very handy, even reading some of it on an iPhone while waiting for an appointment -- my ultimate test for readability of a digital version. For example, Hume's translation often gives Sanskrit originals for terms as they appear in the translation, since some can't be translated very consistently without straining the meaning of the English words beyond recognition. (E.g., is atman better translated by "soul" or by "self"? It may depend on the context.) This offers endless opportunities for typographical errors, but that edition seemed to spell the terms consistently throughout.

That version long ago disappeared from Amazon (although Goodreads still displays it THE THIRTEEN PRINCIPAL UPANISHADS - Translated From The Sanskrit With an Outline of The Philosophy of the Upanishads and An Annotated Bibliography), that links to "can't find the page") and I was hoping that this newer (2016) version was similar, so that I could recommend it others.

Unfortunately, that is not the case. Even at the $0.99 price, it is too expensive, since you are getting pretty much nothing in return except frustration.

It is less important that the text offered is of a 1921 (out-of-copyright in the US) edition, rather than the 1931 expanded edition, which offered additional bibliography and a useful concordance of parallel passages, in addition to corrections which the translator, Robert Ernest Hume, described as "trivial." However, for those who don't care about copyright restrictions, the Internet Archive (archive.org) offers multiple clean PDFs of both editions, the 1931 versions having been uploaded by the Indian National Library. In those cases, the copies are offered as both plain PDFs and as PDFs with text, meaning that they have been OCR'd to allow searches. In such cases, I get both versions, just to be sure I'm not reading something that was garbled in the process.

There are actual hard-copy paperbacks (mainly) of the 1931 edition available on Amazon, through dealers -- even the most recent printing seems to be unavailable otherwise. Most copies are of an old (1960s, I think) Galaxy Book (Oxford University Press paperbacks) printing, but there is a more recent incarnation from Oxford India, The Thirteen Principal Upanishads, also available on Amazon.

For those with a serious interest, and more money to spend, there are two similar recent translations of much the same set of texts. One is by Patrick Olivelle, a recognized Indologist and a good translator -- not always the same thing -- from Oxford World's Classics Upaniṣads, which I found readable, and another, which I have not seen, from Penguin Classics (replacing an old volume of excerpts) by Valerie J. Roebuck Upanisads

There are lots of other translations of other Upanishads -- Hume, Olivelle, and Roebuck stuck to those considered the most ancient, out of 108 considered as "standard," but there are many, many others, some relatively recent -- and of one or two of the same set, from various points of view, and from varying expertise in either Sanskrit or English. I have no idea how reliable any of them are. (Why exactly 108? It is a sacred number in India. It may have been chosen without a specific detailed "canon" in mind, leaving lots of room for disagreement on the actual list.)

By the way, a lot of write-ups on the Hume translation suggest that it is (well) over a century old. It is not quite there (this is still 2018 as of this writing), and that description may go back to confusing Hume's birth date with the first printing of his translation in 1921. Oh well, it will soon be true.

ADDITIONAL NOTE: There is also a properly formatted and proofed version of the 1921 edition available as a Nook Book (Barnes & Noble), for $2.99. There are Nook apps for other platforms, so you may not need the device to read it. There is a problem with it, too, however.

I was originally dubious about it because the sample showed little rectangles in the place of letters with diacritical marks (which makes the titles and Sanskrit words unrecognizable), but after finishing this review I tested the type faces available with it again, and determined that the face Ascender Sans does supply the proper Indological letters -- if you are using the Nook app for iOS (i.e., iPhone and iPad) to read it.

This does *not* work on the Mac OS version of the Nook app, where I originally tested it (although there the missing letters are designated by parallel lines, instead of boxes.) I don't have a Windows computer or an Android tablet (other than Amazon's Fire Tsblet, which doesn't load actually offer the competition on its App Store) on which to check those versions.

I would *assume* that the Nook device itself would display them properly, but I have no way of telling that, either.

[William Schram · Rating 5 out of 5]

Really fascinating. Reminds me of some of the first books of the Bible from it's references to laws and the founding of the universe and stuff. It also contains teachings to Brahmans and other such things. The names are a bit hard to pronounce, but I soldiered through it. I am not sure if I got it right though.

This particular version was printed back in 1968, so I am not sure if this book is the same as the one listed. It comes with a bibliography, annotations and a description of the philosophy of the Upanishads and the overall mythos of the philosophy.

Throughout, it contains important words that weren't translated, like prana, and some others. A lot of this book consists of stories and phrases that are repeated a lot. Some of the Upanishads are similar to the others and I don't know why they listed those too, but they probably had some good reason.

In any case, I really enjoyed this book.

[Mikey · Rating 3 out of 5]

Essentially the idea here is that God used to be everything then "woke up" and became separate from everything and through his senses the universe was formed. The true nature of everything and everyone is this same God, we've just forgotten it. Through diligence and letting go of our individuality we can "remember" this and move back to a higher plane of existence, but in the mean time each of our basic bodily sensations and functions can be used as a form of worship towards this original God. In a nutshell, this is what I gathered from these texts. It's certainly an interesting and fresh perspective on religious thought. Although, like most early religious texts, it tends to be riddled with inconsistencies which leave room for interpretation. Obviously, it's invaluable from a historical/cultural perspective. From a purely experiential perspective I enjoyed that it mixes the spiritual and mystical with the philosophical and logical but the overall tone of this text was a bit like someone trying to sell you something and even felt rather pompous at times. At other times it could verge on the psychedelic. Mostly, it just felt extremely repetitive with the same core message being repeated over and over again in different ways. Hume could have done more to provide context and explanation to the subject matter but did a serviceable job. Ultimately, there are some key ideas in this that are certainly worth keeping regardless of your religious beliefs or lack thereof.

[Morpheus Lunae · Rating 3 out of 5]

With a text this old it's a bit hard to "rate" it. But I will comment on my edition that uses the Hume translation from 1931. I had a hard time imagining what the target audience for it was. It clearly tried to target a casual reader (by giving a lengthy introduction to the philosophy outlined in the Upanishads) but also a scholar (by giving you an apparatus of untranslated terms, parallels and recurrences etc.). But those two targets intermingle in the main text so much that it was painful to read because you are forced to glance over information that simply is not for you. Also, why would the scholar not use the original text in the first place?
So all in all this wasn't the funnest experience for me. The Upanishads themselves have some interesting parts but there are tons of repetitions there. I imagine the best way to "read" these is, after all, being taught them by an old Yogi master in the middle of nowhere while the rushing of a waterfall clears your mind. Nonetheless I guess I will (in the far future) read the Vedas as well - given I find an edition that fulfills my needs, that is.

[Abhishek · Rating 4 out of 5]

A little more historical context around this would've been even better. If philosophy is your thing, you'll not regret spending time with this book.

[George Cole · Rating 4 out of 5]

The stories of life and death that concern our hearts so centrally. Schopenhauer said ‘It is the solace of my life, it will be of my death,’ when he had read them.