The Brihadaranyaka Upanishad

by Swami Sivananda

The Brihadaranyaka Upanishad is the most detailed and magnificent revelation of the ancient philosopher-seers, which, in its six chapters packed with thought and revelation, provides to the students a practically exhaustive and concentrated teaching on every aspect of life, making it an indispensable guidebook to the student of literature as well as the philosopher, the religious devotee, and the mystical and spiritual seeker engaged in meditation for divine realization.

Table of Contents:

• Invocatory Prayer and Preface
• Introduction
• The Universe as a Sacrificial Horse
• The Creation of the Universe
• The Superiority of the Vital Force Among All Functions
• Creation from the Universal Self
• Prajapati's Production of the World as Food for Himself
• The Conversation of Yajnavalkya and Maitreyi on the Absolute Self
• Madhu-Vidya: The Honey Doctrine
• The Line of Teachers and Pupils
• Sacrificial Worship and its Rewards
• The Man in Bondage and His Future at Death
• The Resort of the Performers of the Horse Sacrifice
• The Unknowability of Brahman
• Renunciation, the Way to Know Brahman
• Brahman, the Universal Ground
• The Nature of the Inner Controller
• The Unqualified Brahman
• Many Gods and One Brahman
• Eight Different Persons and their Corresponding Deities
• Five Directions in Space, Their Deities and Supports
• The Self
• Man Compared to a Tree
• Inadequate Definitions of Brahman
• Concerning the Soul
• The Light of Man is the Self
• The Different States of the Self
• The Self in Dream and Deep Sleep
• The Self at Death
• The Soul of the Unrealised after Death
• The Supreme Self and the Supreme Love
• Brahman, the Inexhaustible
• The Three Principal Virtues
• Brahman as the Heart
• Brahman as the True or the Real
• The Real Explained
• The Divine Person
• Brahman as Lightning
• The Veda Symbolised as a Cow
• The Universal Fire
• The Course after Death
• The Supreme Austerities
• The Via Media of Attitude
• Meditation on the Life-Breath
• The Sacred Gayatri Prayer
• Prayer to the Sun by a Dying Person
• The Threefold Creation
• The Self Identified with the Sixteenfold Prajapati, the Time Spirit
• The Three Worlds and the Means of Winning Them
• A Father's Benediction and Transmission of Charge
• The Unfailing Vital Force
• The Threefold Character of the Universe
• A Progressive Definition of Brahman
• The Vital Force Embodied in a Person
• The Two Forms of Reality
• Recapitulation
• The Absolute and the Universe
• The Supreme Goal of Life
• Divine Immanence and the Correlativity of all Things
• The Inner Reality
• The Principles of Meditation
• The Spiritual and the Temporal
• Conclusion
• Notes.

About the Author: 

Sri Swami Sivananda, born on the 8th September, 1887, in the illustrious family of Sage Appayya Dikshita and several other renowned saints and savants, Sri Swami Sivananda had a natural flair for a life devoted to the study and practice of Vedanta.

He was an inborn eagerness to serve all and an innate feeling of unity with all mankind. He is the author of over 300 volumes and has disciples all over the world, belonging to all nationalities, religions and creeds. To read his works is to drink at the Fountain of Wisdom Supreme.