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c. 800-500 BCE (earliest Upanishads)Reputable source · 2 sourcesWell documented

The Upanishads Turn Ritual Religion Into a Search for the Self

"Thou art that": a new idea that the self and the universe are secretly one thing

On the timeline · around c. 800-500 BCE (earliest Upanishads) · Vedic OriginsVedic OriginsClassical HinduismThe Upanishads Turn Ritual Religion Into a Search for the Self1,250 BCE1,000 BCE750 BCE500 BCE250 BCE

Quick facts

Earliest Upanishads
c. 800-500 BCE
Total number
180-200, with 13 principal
Core teaching
Tat Tvam Asi, "Thou Art That" (Atman = Brahman)
Name meaning
Vedanta, "end of the Vedas"

What happened

Appended to the end of each of the four Vedas, the Upanishads shifted Vedic religion's center of gravity from external ritual toward internal philosophical inquiry. The earliest six Upanishads date to roughly 800 to 500 BCE, with later texts composed afterward; there are between 180 and 200 Upanishads in total, of which 13 are considered principal. Their central claim is that Brahman, the supreme reality that both created and is the universe, is identical with Atman, an individual's innermost self, a unity expressed in the phrase Tat Tvam Asi, "Thou Art That." The Upanishads present this insight through narrative dialogues between teachers and students rather than through ritual instruction, and because they sit at the conceptual end of the Vedic corpus, they came to be called Vedanta, "the end of the Vedas." They also gave systematic form to the linked concepts of karma, action and its consequences, samsara, the resulting cycle of rebirth, and moksha, liberation from that cycle through self-realization that unites Atman with Brahman.

Why it matters

The Upanishads supplied the philosophical vocabulary, Brahman, Atman, karma, samsara, moksha, that every later Hindu school of thought, and later Buddhist and Jain thought as well, had to engage with, and their reframing of religion as inward self-knowledge rather than outward sacrifice set the direction Hindu philosophy would take for the next two thousand years, culminating centuries later in Adi Shankara's Advaita Vedanta.

How we know

The Upanishads survive as a defined textual corpus embedded within the four Vedas, and orthodox Hindu tradition regards them, like the Vedas themselves, as Shruti, eternally revealed rather than authored; their composition dates are established through linguistic layering within the larger Vedic corpus.

Sources

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Part of a timelineHistory of Hinduism26 events · Hymns memorized for three thousand years without writing them down, a philosophy that a self and the universe are the same thing, and a religion with no founder that became the world's third largestView all →
The Upanishads Turn Ritual Religion Into a Search for the Self · History of Hinduism · SourcedStory