Living with the Texts: The Upanishads

This is part of a monthly series on engaging with world scriptures. The translations from the Upanishads are by Eknath Easwaran.

The children and I had great fun telling the story of Uddalaka and Shvetaketu with homemade play-dough, sculpting different plants and animals, and asking, is this a tree or is it clay? How about this--is this a bird or is it clay? Oh, it's both! As Uddalaka says, "By knowing one lump of clay, dear one, we come to know all things made out of clay.... So through...spiritual wisdom, dear one, we come to know that all of life is one" (Chandogya Upanishad, VI.1.4-6).

Peace,

Rev. Laura

***

Living with the Texts: The Upanishads

The Rev. Laura Horton-Ludwig, Minister
First Unitarian Universalist Church of Stockton
October 17, 2010

I’m so glad to have this chance to share with you
some little taste of one of the most profound and important
collections of religious texts in the entire world,
the Upanishads, the great mystical wisdom texts of India.
This is the second one in a series of nine services this year
that I’m putting together so that we can engage
with different sacred texts from around the world.
I’ve chosen to do this because it seems to me
so many of us are hungry for understanding
about the religions of the world,
and not only for intellectual understanding—
I think there is a longing here to allow ourselves to be transformed
by the deep wisdom in these texts,
to sit at the feet of masters who were truly awakened spiritually,
and to be changed ourselves.

And, indeed, the literal meaning of the Sanskrit word “Upanishad”
is “sitting down near,”
as in sitting down next to a spiritual teacher to receive wisdom.
These are philosophical texts.
Many of them are in the form of a dialogue
between student and teacher,
conversations that address the really big questions:
what does it mean to be alive?
How is it that we are here, living and experiencing and thinking?
What is death?
Why is there anything at all?

Today I want to speak to you about the core message
that I find in the Upanishads, and why I think it matters to us,
and also share with you a few thoughts
about the practice of reading texts like these.
First let me say just a brief word
about my own experience with these texts.
I first tried to read the Upanishads about ten years ago,
and I will tell you, I found them very challenging.
The first time through I actually had to stop reading
and put them aside for a couple of years.
Because I could read the words
and understand on a surface level what they were saying,
but when I tried to take these teachings in
and understand them at a deeper gut level,
I found I wasn’t ready.
A lot of it, I just could not understand on that gut level,
and what I did understand and begin to take in,
I found myself resisting; I was afraid of it, almost,
and it was so clear to me that I was not ready.
I had to put the book down,
and I remember saying, I’m sorry, I just can’t go there right now.

A couple of years later,
having had different experiences in my life,
I went back to the Upanishads
and had a completely different experience.
I fell in love with them, the poetry
and the mystical sense of the sacred dwelling in everything,
of which you’ve already heard something
in the Story for All Ages and also the second reading today.

I tell you this not only so you can know where I’m coming from,
but also because I think this is a very common experience
when we begin to engage with sacred texts.
It’s going to be different for every one of us,
but for every one of us, there may be times in our life
when we’re just not ready to receive a text or a teaching,
and that’s OK.
It doesn’t mean we’re bad people;
it doesn’t mean we’re not smart;
it just is what it is.

There’s a story about a beginning student
who asks a master, “Please, tell me the secret of everything.”
The master says not a word, but picks up a steaming pot of tea
and pours it out onto the floor.
The student leaps back to avoid being burned.
He says, “Why did you do that?!”
The master says,
“Before you pour the tea, you have to prepare a teacup.
Before you can receive wisdom, you have to prepare your mind.”
Likewise, my own experience
is that our lives prepare us in different ways, at different times,
to receive wisdom from outside ourselves.
Spiritual practice can help.
But sometimes we’re just not ready. And that’s OK.
This is not something that can be forced.
It doesn’t need to be.
Wherever we are is OK.

That said, with deep respect for the very rich variety of experiences
and spiritualities present in this room,
let me tell you about what I understand
the core message of the Upanishads to be.
I already told you one version in today’s Story for All Ages, which came from one of the earliest and most important of the Upanishads,
called the Chandogya Upanishad.
By the way, I should mention there are about 200 Upanishads,
but there are about twelve that are the oldest
and most important in the tradition.
The Chandogya Upanishad is one of these.
In the part we heard about today,
the wise man Uddalaka is teaching his son Shvetaketu.
He tells him a Creation story,
a story about what happened “in the beginning.”

Before I read the text,
let me mention one other point about reading sacred texts.
This particular text uses the language of “he” and “him”
to try to talk about the divine Being itself,
which of course does not have a gender;
being neither male nor female, or at least not just one or the other.
When we read ancient texts,
that kind of male-gendered language is very common,
and it is going to be a huge barrier for some of us.
I want to name that,
and also give you permission to find your way around it
however you can.
Whenever you hit a word or a concept in a text like this
that feels unhelpful, hurtful, oppressive,
I want to give you permission right now to question it,
critique it, maybe play around with rewording it in your mind
to see if that helps the text come alive for you.

We have that freedom to play around and question the language that’s used, partly because we’re working with translations already—
most of us are only going to be able to read these texts
in translation, not in the original language.
But even more importantly, in the kind of reading I’m talking about,
we approach these texts not so much as scholars
but as spiritual seekers.
The whole point of engaging with these texts at all
is that they are trying to point to a spiritual reality
that cannot ever be fully put into words.
The words are a tool to help us wake up to how things truly are.
Zen Buddhists tell the story:
one night a master pointed to the moon and asked, “What is this?”
The student answered, “That’s the moon.”
The master said, “No, that is a finger pointing toward the moon.”
Don’t confuse the words and the stories and the teaching
with the reality they are pointing to.
Words are useless
unless they help us begin to sense the reality behind them,
the truth and the wholeness and the mystery
that can never be put into sufficiently true and real words.
All we can do is point.
So don’t let yourself get blocked by the language.
Don’t let yourself get blocked.

With that in mind, let me turn back to the text itself,
the words of Uddalaka to his son
about the beginning of the universe:

In the beginning was only Being,
One without a second.
Out of himself he brought forth the cosmos
And entered into everything in it.
There is nothing that does not come from him.
Of everything he is the inmost Self.
He is the truth; he is the Self supreme.
You are that, Shvetaketu; you are that.

This is the core message of all the Upanishads:
everything that exists,
everything we can see and touch and know and think about,
everything that has ever been and ever will be,
comes from the same source, pure Being itself,
which can never be exhausted,
which is continually replenishing and recreating the world.
We are part of this great universal oneness;
within us is a spark of pure Being which gives us life
When we die we go back to the source.
We become part of that pure Being again,
like a drop of water falling into the ocean.
We are that.
We are that.
We are that.

Let me read you another text from the Shvetashvatara Upanishad
with a very similar message:

May the Lord of Love, who projects himself
Into this universe of myriad forms,
From whom all beings come and to whom all
Return, grant us the grace of wisdom.


He is fire and the sun, and the moon
And the stars. He is the air and the sea....
He is this boy, he is that girl, he is
This man, he is that woman, and he is
This old man, too, tottering on his staff.
His face is everywhere.


He is the blue bird, he is the green bird
With red eyes; he is the thundercloud,
And he is the seasons and the seas.
He has no beginning, he has no end.
He is the source from which the worlds evolve.

This testimony from thousands of years and half a world away
has become one of my very favorites,
and I want to tell you why it matters to me.
It matters to me because sometimes I get very scared
about what we human beings are doing to our planet right now,
and I need to believe there is hope for the future.
I know I’m not the only one here
who is deeply worried about what’s happening to the environment.
Global warming is no longer just a theory; it’s a fact.
Human beings are commandeering more wild lands every day.
Animals and plants are going extinct at a terrifying rate.
Biologists tell us we are in the middle of
a massive extinction of species,
the sixth great extinction that our planet has known.
I cannot promise you that we will be able to turn things around.
I wish I could, but I can’t.
And sometimes when I think of what’s happening,
I feel so much sadness and despair and disgust
for what we are making of this world.
This is a time when you and I and all of us
are in desperate need of hope.

And one place I have found hope for myself
is in this ancient testimony of the mystics of India.
When I read the Upanishads,
I am called back to the living knowledge
that all life has come out of an inextinguishable source.
The birds, the fish, the plants, the people, the rocks and hills
and oceans and sky and everything
have come forth from the one source
which is beyond all understanding
and which permeates all things, including you, including me,
including every creature.
And when I believe that, I believe there is hope.
I know there is hope.
Because here’s the thing:
we human beings are very powerful,
probably much too powerful for our own good.

But we are nowhere near as powerful
as the force that brings forth stars and planets and galaxies
and the incredible reality of life itself.
There is something at work in this universe
that is so vast, so incredibly strong and creative—
and destructive too—
and when I ponder this I feel we are caught up in something
much, much larger than ourselves, and it is all going to be OK,
though I cannot tell you now what OK looks like
on the other side of this darkness we are living through.
I do feel hope that this material world which we love so much
is going to be OK,
maybe not in any timespan that I can understand
or hope to witness—
it may take a very long time from our human perspective,
but I do have faith in that source of creation
that life itself is going to be OK
and flourish in ways that we who are here in this moment
cannot begin to imagine.

And that doesn’t mean we get to throw up our hands
and stop working and say, “Whatever.” Not for a minute.
I believe we still absolutely have an obligation
to do whatever we can to turn around the environmental devastation
which is happening on our watch,
because it is right for us to protect the life that is here now,
because we seek to love the life that is here now,
and because despair is poison to our souls.
But we have to have hope that all will not be lost
even if we are not strong enough and smart enough.
I find that hope in the testimony of the Upanishads
that the universe is created and sustained
by a power that does not need us to save it,
which gives birth to all things
and receives all things back to itself in the end.

The Isha Upanishad tells us:

In dark night live those for whom
The world without alone is real; in night
Darker still, for whom the world within
Alone is real.

This is a paradox.
“The world within”—
the world of awareness and pure Being itself—
is real, but it is not the only reality.
We don’t get to retreat forever
to some dreamy place of mystic contemplation
and say “All will be well in the end”
and not do anything to make it so.
We can’t stop working to protect this life on earth.
Yet this world, “the world without”—
the world we see and taste and touch and know—
is real, but it is not the only reality.
We have to try,
but neither should we despair if all our efforts are not enough,
because this life we experience moment to moment,
which seems so real to us, maybe seems like the only thing there is,
is not the only reality.
Behind it lies a force so great that nothing can harm it,
nothing can quench it,
nothing can destroy it.

What is asked of us in these days
is love,
and hope,
commitment,
and trust in the life-force that moves through us.
May we use the gifts which are ours
to do works of justice and peace
and hope for all creatures,
trusting always in the power which has brought us into being
and sustains us
and will receive us in the end.

Amen.