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INTRODUCTION
Next to the Vedas, Upanishads are the most important
repositories of Vedic thought. They have inspired people all
over the world with spiritual knowedge. Not only in India,
even in the West they have been acclaimed as books containg
truths of highest value capable of giving peace and divine in-
fluence. Muslims and christians, all alike, have paid their tribute
to these treasures of divine knowledge proclaiming their
superiority to all other books of spiritualism. Dara, the elder
brother of Aurungzeb, was so much enamoured of them that he
got them translated into Persian. Schopenhour, a Christian,
used to keep a copy of the Upanishads under his pillow to
read their contents every night before going to sleep
Upanishads have so much influenced the thinkers of the world
that they have been translated in every language of the globe.
The quintessence of the Upanishads lies in the realisation
of two things. First that the body is not the soul, Second, that
the matter is not God. This is not only a theoretical but a practi-
cal teaching of Upanishads. Unfortunately, in a materlalistic
world we do not make a distinction between the body and the
soul, nor between the Matter and God. On the other hand, the
materialist tries to interpret soul in terms of the body, and God
in to-ms of the Matter with the result that he denies the
existences of soul in the individual, and the existence of God
in the world of matter. Upanishads speak from the pedestal of