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152 DR. BABASAHEB AMBEDKAR : WRITINGS AND SPEECHES
portion of the Veda as well as to the chapters called Upanishad, and it has never been explained how its meaning came thus to be restricted. Secondly the word Upanishad, in the sense of session or assembly has never been met with. Whenever the word occurs, it has the meaning of doctrine, secret doctrine, or is simply used as the title of the philosophic treatises which contains the secret doctrine. There is a third explanation noted by Prof. Max Muller proposed by Sankara in his commentary on the Taittiriya-Upanishad II, 9, is that the highest bliss is contained in the Upanishad ( param sreyo’syam nishannam ) . Regarding this Prof. Max Muller says:
“The Aranyakas abound in such etymologies, which probably were never intended as real as plays on words, helping to account somehow for their meaning.”
Prof. Max Muller however favours a derivation of the word Upanishad from the root sad to destroy and meant knowledge which destroys ignorance, the cause of Samsara, by revealing the knowledge of Brahma as a means of salvation. Prof. Max Muller points out that this is the meaning which the native scholars have unanimously given to the word Upanishad.
If it be granted that this is the true derivation of the word Upanishad it would be one piece of evidence in support of the thesis that there was a time in the history of India when Vedanta was regarded as a system of thought which was repugnant to the Vedas. But it is not necessary to depend upon the help of etymology to support the thesis. There are other evidences better and more direct. In the first place the word Vedanta was never used to denote “the last books of the Vedas” which they are. As observed by Prof. Max Muller [1] :
“Vedanta as a technical term, did not mean originally the last portions of the Veda, or chapters placed, as it were, at the end of a volume of Vedic literature, but the end, i.e. the object, the highest purpose of the Veda. There are, of course, passages, like the one in the Taittirya-Aranyaka (ed. Rajendra Mitra p. 820), which have been misunderstood both by native and European scholars, and where Vedanta means simply the end of the Veda : yo vedadu svarah prokto vedante ka pratishthitah, ‘the Om which is pronounced at the beginning of the Veda, and has its place also at the end of the Veda”. Here Vedanta stands simply in opposition to Vadadu, it is impossible to translate it, as Sayana does, by Vedanta or Upanishad. Vedanta, in the sense of philosophy, occurs in the Taittiriya-Aranyaka (p. 817), in a verse of the Narayania-Upanishad, repeated in the Mundak-Upanishad III, 2, 6 and
1 The Upanishads (S.B.E.) Vol. I, Introduction p. Ixxxvi.