unsolvability, degree of See DEGREE OF UNSOLV -. ABILIT. Upanishads, a group of ancient Hindu philosophical texts, or the esoteric sacred doctrines contained in them. ‘Upanishad’ includes the notion of the student ‘sitting near’ the guru. In the eighth century A.D., Shankara identified certain Upanishads as the official source of Vedanta teachings: Aitreya, Brhadaranyaka, Chandogya, Isa, Katha, Kaufitaki, Kena, Maitri, Mupdaka, Prasna, Svetasvatara, and Taittiriya. These are the classic Upanishads; together with the Vedanta Sutras, they constitute the doctrinally authoritative sources for Vedanta. The Vedanta Sutras are a series of aphorisms, composed somewhere between 200 B.C. and A.D. 200, attributed to Badarayana. Practically unintelligible without commentary, these sutras are interpreted in one way by Shankara, in another by Ramanuja, and in a third way by Madhva (though Madhva’s reading is closer to Ramanuja’s than to Shankara’s).
For Vedanta, the Upanishads are ‘the end of the Vedas,’ both in the sense of completing the transcript of the immutable source of truth and articulating the foundational wisdom that the Vedas presuppose. While the Upanishads agree on the importance of religious knowledge, on the priority of religious over other sorts of wellbeing, and on the necessity of religious discipline, they contain radically disparate cosmologies that differ regarding agent, modality, and product of the creative process and offer various notions of Brahman and Atman.
See also BRAHMAN , AMA RA ANUJA , SHAN NKARA , VEDANT. K.E.Y.