The Sleepwalkers - pg. 255

For the man who wills Goodness and Righteousness wills thereby the Absolute, and it was revealed to Esch for the first time that the goal is not the appeasement of lust but an absolute oneness exalted far above its immediate, sordid and even trivial occasion, a conjoint trace, itself timeless and so annihilating time; and that the rebirth of man is as still and serene as the universal spirit that yet contracts and closes round man when once his ecstatic will has compelled it, until he attains his sole birthright: deliverance and redemption.

India: A Million Mutinies Now - pg. 417

Vishwa Nath said, 'I am not a religious man at all.' The Upanishads? 'Play of words. The Upanishads are just a play of words. Atman, Brahma - the whole existence is to prove that atman is part of Brahma, and Brahma is atman. Some say yes, some say no, some say it's half-and-half. The Hindu philosophers spend all their lives hair-splitting.'

The Discovery Of India - pg. 57

There is a question in the Upanishads to which a very curious and yet significant answer is given. "The question is: 'What is this universe? From what does it arise? Into what does it go?' And the answer is: 'In freedom it rises, in freedom it rests, and into freedom it melts away.; " what exactly this means I am unable to understand, except that the authors of the Upanishads were passionately attached to the idea of freedom and wanted to see everything in terms of it. Swami Vivekenanda was always emphasizing this aspect.

The Upanishads - Opening

In the first mantra of the first chapter the student asks the teacher: "Directed by whom does the mind think, impelled by whom does Prana, or vital force, function, and willed by which god does speech utter, eyes see and the ears hear?"

To Adi Shankaracharya

The greatest teacher of the Vedanta

ASIAN HUMANITIES PRESS

Asian Humanities Press offers to the specialist and the general reader alike the best in new translations of major works and significant original contributions to enhance our understanding of Asian literature, religious, cultures and thought.

Copyright 1999 by Shyam N. Shukla. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the written permission of the publisher except for brief passages quoted in a review.