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APPENDIX II
THE RIDDLE OF THE VEDANTA
Of the six schools of philosophy which were expounded by the ancient philosophers of India the most famous is of course the Vedanta philosophy. Not only has it the name but it has also a hold on the Hindus which none of its rivals has ever had. Every follower of the Vedas is proud of the Vedanta. He not only owns it but regards it as the most valuable contribution which India has made to the philosophic thought of the world. He regards Vedanta philosophy as embodying the end or aim of the teachings of the Vedas, a sort of culmination or flowering of the teachings of the Veda. He never suspects that there was any time in the history of India when the Vedanta Philosophy was regarded as repugnant and hostile to the Vedas. He would never believe that there was a time when the word Vedanta had a totally different meaning than the meaning which is now current and according to which the word Vedanta far from being used in the sense of culmination of Vedic thought was used to designate a body of thought contained in a body which was outside the range of the cannonical part of the Vedic literature. Yet that was in fact the case.
It is true that this repugnance between the Vedas and the Vedanta does not become manifest from the word Upanishad which is the generic name of the literature on which the Vedanta philosophy came to be built up and about the etymology of which there is a considerable difference of opinion.
Most European scholars are agreed in deriving Upanishad from the root sad, to sit down, preceded by the two prepositions ni, down, and upa, near, so that it would express the idea of session, or assembly of public sitting down near a person. As Prof. Max Muller points out there are two objections to the acceptance of this derivation. Firstly such a word, it would seem, would have been applicable to any other
This is a 21-page typed first copy entitled ‘The Riddle of the Vedanta’. The chapter seems complete and does not contain any modifications by the author.—Ed.