"The Upanishads".

The concluding sections of the Vedas are called the Upanishads. The Upanishads contain the cream of the Vedas. They constitute the sacrad Bible of the Hindus. Alas! Now a days it is an unknown text-book to the born Hindus! Even the educated erudite pundit-class is for all practical purposes absolutely illiterate in the field of the Upanishads because the Upanishad study can not be undertaken merely with the help of the sledge-hammer of language-knowledge, or the picaxe of word-meanings. Equiped with these instruments, when the grammarians and the dictionary muggers reach the Upanishads, they hack down the glory out of the Eternal Knowledge and make them as bald as the profit mongering contractors have done to our sacred Himalayan slopes.When such profit hunters have depleted the forests of the trees, the very climatic conditions of the country have changed, causing our food problems and this ultimately altered the very face of the Hindu Nation. Indirectly the cutting axes falling at the roots of the trees in the jungles, have today left marks of furrowed ugliness upon the face of the ever-smiling Hindu Janata. In fact, the word-hacking pundits have done, perhaps, more harm to the cultural heritage of the country than the sceptics, who have left, in their dread and disgust, the sacred books intact.

The very word Upanishad has been coined with a purpose to indicate completely some pregnant suggestions. The word is made by combining the suffix Upa with the word Nishad, Upa means near, and Nishad, to sit. Thus the very word indicates that this is the science, that one should learn at the feet of the master because, if you read with the helf of an encyclopaedia, the true import of the scriptures will be completely lost sight of. Thus, at all hands Upanishad is a volume of knowledge to be rightly understood from a specialist and the student must, through a process of living, come to experience fully, the subjective glance of the God-Consciousness and thereafter become eternally redeemed from all his sense of finitude and moral limitation.