The problems of human life and destiny have not been superseded by the striking achievements of science and technology. The solutions offered (in ancient classics like Upanishads), though conditioned in their modes of expression by their time and environment, have not been seriously affected by the march of scientific knowledge and criticism. (Dr S Radhakrishnan in his Preface to The Principal Upanishads).
Beyond Data and Discovery: The Undying Light of the Upanishads
In 1951, sitting in Moscow as India's ambassador to the
Soviet Union, the philosopher and statesman Dr S Radhakrishnan wrote the
preface to his celebrated work, The Principal Upanishads. He observed that the
deep problems of human life and destiny had not been resolved by even the most
striking advances of science, and that the answers offered in the Upanishads,
though expressed in the language of their own age, had not been seriously
shaken by the march of scientific knowledge. He wrote those words from inside
one of the great laboratories of twentieth century scientific ambition, in a
state that had placed its entire faith in material progress.
More than seventy five years on, his observation has only
grown sharper. We now carry more computing power in our pockets than entire
nations possessed in 1951, yet anxiety, loneliness, ecological strain and the
search for meaning have not retreated; in many ways they have multiplied. The
instruments have changed beyond recognition. The question a human being asks at
three in the morning has not changed at all.
What Are the Upanishads
The word Upanishad describes the act of sitting down
(nishad) near (upa) a teacher, the posture of a pupil receiving the most
confidential knowledge directly from a guru. The Upanishads form the concluding
portion of the four Vedas, which is why this body of literature is also called
Vedanta, the end and culmination of the Veda. They were composed and
transmitted orally by rishis living in forest hermitages over many centuries,
roughly between 2000 BCE and the early centuries of the common era, long before
they were ever committed to writing.
More than two hundred Upanishads exist, but ten to thirteen
are regarded as principal, since these were the ones the eighth century teacher
Adi Shankaracharya chose to comment upon: among them the Isha, Kena, Katha,
Mundaka, Chandogya and Brihadaranyaka. Their shared subject is the relationship
between Atman, the individual self, and Brahman, the one underlying reality,
and the claim, startling for any age, that the two are not ultimately separate.
Two Kinds of Knowledge
The Upanishads anticipated the science versus wisdom debate
three thousand years before it became fashionable. The Mundaka Upanishad
divides all knowledge into two categories: apara vidya, the lower knowledge,
which includes the Vedas themselves along with grammar, ritual, prosody and
astronomy, and para vidya, the higher knowledge, by which the imperishable
alone is grasped (Mundaka Upanishad, Chapter 1, Section 1, Verses 4-5). Science
and technology, however refined, belong entirely within apara vidya. They are
extraordinarily good at describing and rearranging the world of objects. They
were never designed to answer who is doing the describing, or why that observer
suffers, fears death, and longs for meaning.
What Science Has Given Us, and What It Has Not
It would be dishonest to deny what science and technology
have achieved. Vaccines, surgery, clean water systems and instant global
communication have measurably eased human suffering and extended life. The
error lies not in these gains but in mistaking them for the whole of human
welfare. Despite unprecedented material comfort, the present age is also marked
by record levels of anxiety and isolation, an information flood that has not
translated into wisdom, and an industrial capacity powerful enough to alter the
climate of the entire planet and to build weapons capable of ending
civilisation in an afternoon.
The Katha Upanishad addressed this gap directly: nayam atma
pravachanena labhyo na medhaya na bahuna shrutena, the Self is not attained
through clever exposition, nor through sharp intellect, nor even through
extensive learning (Katha Upanishad, Chapter 1, Valli 2, Verse 23). Information
about the world, however vast, belongs to a different category altogether from
knowledge of the one who is gathering it.
Symbolism and Meaning: The Self Beyond the Senses
The most famous teaching in the Upanishads is contained in
three words spoken by the sage Uddalaka Aruni to his son Svetaketu: tat tvam
asi, thou art that (Chandogya Upanishad, Chapter 6, Section 8, Verse 7).
Through examples such as salt dissolved invisibly in water and the subtle
essence hidden in a banyan seed, the father leads the son to see that the
innermost self is not a separate fragment but identical with the very ground of
reality.
This is the opposite of the picture a purely materialist
worldview tends to offer, in which the individual is a temporary biochemical
event in an indifferent universe. Technology, by its nature, works by taking
things apart, measuring components and reassembling them. It is extremely good
at the parts. The Upanishads point toward something a microscope can never
isolate, because it is not an object among other objects but the very capacity
to perceive any object at all.
Modern Day Relevance: An Age of Information, Not Wisdom
The prayer in the Brihadaranyaka Upanishad, asato ma
sadgamaya, tamaso ma jyotirgamaya, mrityorma amritam gamaya, lead me from the
unreal to the real, from darkness to light, from death to the deathless
(Brihadaranyaka Upanishad, Chapter 1, Section 3, Verse 28), is recited in homes
across India today exactly as it was three thousand years ago. Artificial
intelligence can answer almost any factual question in seconds, yet it cannot
tell a grieving person why someone they love had to die, nor can an algorithm
supply the courage with which a human being faces that loss. The speed of
information has increased a millionfold; the depth of self-understanding has
not kept pace, and arguably cannot, because it was never a matter of speed.
Life Lessons From the Upanishads
The opening verse of the Isha Upanishad offers a lesson that
fits the present consumer age with uncomfortable precision: ishavasyam idam
sarvam yatkincha jagatyam jagat, tena tyaktena bhunjitha ma gridhah
kasyasviddhanam, everything that exists in this changing world is pervaded by
the Divine; enjoy it through renunciation, and do not covet what belongs to
another (Isha Upanishad, Verse 1). In a world driven by manufactured desire and
disposable goods, this is less a religious instruction than a practical antidote
to the restlessness that more devices and more consumption have repeatedly
failed to cure.
The wider lesson running through every Upanishad is the
same: treat science and technology as instruments, immensely useful within
their domain, but never mistake the instrument for the goal. Knowledge that
does not eventually turn inward, toward the one who knows, remains, in the
Upanishadic sense, only half of knowledge.
The Light That Has Not Dimmed
Dr Radhakrishnan's observation from Moscow in 1951 has only been confirmed by the decades since. Laboratories have split the atom and mapped the human genome; they have not located the self that wonders about its own mortality, nor have they replaced the need for that wondering. The Upanishads, composed in forest clearings long before anyone imagined a microchip, continue to speak to that exact need, because the question they address was never about the world outside. It was always about the one looking at it.