SAIVA-SIDDHANTA

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THE SVETASVATAKA
UPANISHAT.
We are glad to say that Professor Max Muller has cleared
the ground before us, of many misconceptions and fallacies
which were entertained about this Upanishat. He meets in his
own way the arguments adduced to show that this is a modern
Upanishat and that it is a sectarian Upanishat, an Upanishat of
the Sankhya and of Bhakti school and so on, and his conclusions
are that "no real argument has ever been brought forward to
invalidate the tradition which represents
it as belonging to the
Taittirlya or Black Yajur Veda, and he points out that it
holds a very high rank among Upanishats and that its
real drift is the same as the Doctrine of the Vedanta
Philosophy.
Professor Garbe and Macdonnell however, in their recent
works, * speak of this as a Sivite compilation, and the latter
scholar refers to the Upanishat itself ascribing the authorship to
a sage called SvetaSvatara, unlike other Upanishats. But this
is not characteristic of this Upanishat alone. The fifteenth
khan^a of the last Prapathaka of Chhandogya Upanishat also
traces the line of teachers in a similar way and there is a similar
statement in the Mandukya Upanishat and others. When each
Hymn of the Rig Veda has its own author, it cannot be any
surprise that each particular Upanishat should have an
individual author; and we don t
suppose the Professor inclines
to the orthodox view that the Veda and the Upanishats had no
human authors, and were revealed.
*Garbe s
Philosophy of Ancient India (1897)
and Macdoimell s
History of Sanskrit Literature (1900).