CultureSouth Asia

The Upanishads

701 BCE – 301 BCE

From sacrifice to the question of what the self really is

In depth

The passage from the ritual religion of the Vedas to the inward search of the Upanishads is one of the great breaks in religious history, and happened at roughly the same time as Confucius in China and the Greek natural philosophers. Karma and rebirth are here formulated as systematic ideas. Schopenhauer called the Upanishads the greatest consolation of his life, and through him they reached European philosophy.

For children

In the forests by the Ganges, teachers began asking a new kind of question: what am I, really? The answer they arrived at was that the innermost in a person and the innermost in the universe are the same. It became the foundation of Hinduism.

Connects to

The Vedas1,501 BCE – 1,001 BCE
The Buddha and the Axial Age484 BCE
Jainism600 BCE – 528 BCE

Part of Terra Saga — the story of Earth on a timeline. terrasaga.org