A Century and a Half On, the Ishavasya Upanishad Returns to Oxford — This Time in Acharya Prashant’s Voice

In 1879, Professor Max Muller carried the Ishavasya Upanishad to the West, publishing its first English translation through Oxford University Press as the opening volume of the ‘Sacred Books of the East’. Nearly a century and a half later, an Indian philosopher has arrived at the same university to return the text to its living meaning. On June 8, at the lecture theatre in Oxford University’s Manor Road Building, Acharya Prashant delivered a detailed philosophical session on the second verse of the Isha Upanishad.

Earlier that day, Oxford students took Acharya Prashant on an extensive tour of the campus, taking in the historic New College and Somerville College among several other sites. Standing before the Oxford University Press building, he told IANS, “Max Muller did a remarkable job in bringing this text to the West. But words have to be brought to life, and life is this moment. I have come to set out the relevance the Upanishad holds for the world as it is today.”

The Manor Road Building, where the session was held, houses Oxford University’s Department of Economics and has hosted the prestigious Atkinson Memorial Lecture, at which some of the world’s leading thinkers, among them Nobel laureates, have spoken in recent years. In the very building where economics and policy are taught, Acharya Prashant argued, from the standpoint of Vedanta, that economics, technology and policy alone cannot resolve the crisis until the consuming individual turns to examine the self.

Speaking to the media, Acharya Prashant framed his message as a broad warning. The West, he said, has achieved extraordinary things in the external world, from exploring the universe to splitting the atom to uncovering the secrets of the body, and yet humanity now finds itself in the midst of the sixth mass extinction, a crisis entirely of its own making. Without self-knowledge and a mass-based education of the self, he argued, the prospect of any redemption is slim, and the same applies equally to the environmental crisis, sectarianism, international divisions, the threat of nuclear war and the mental health epidemic.

The session drew a varied audience, including Oxford students and research scholars from the UK, Europe and the United States. Its central question was, “Who is the actor?” Acharya Prashant said the Upanishads are concerned less with the action than with the actor who stands behind every thought, action and experience. Drawing the distinction between vidya and avidya, he said humanity already holds an abundance of knowledge of the external world, and that this should go on advancing, but that the task of knowing the knower remains unfinished. “The ego is not merely the sufferer; it is suffering itself,” he said. No action, he added, is good or bad in itself; what makes it binding or liberating is the consciousness from which it springs.

He also said that the fear of death belongs not to the body but to the ego, since it is the ego that dreads the dissolution of its own existence. He compared the ego to a coloniser that keeps the body alive, not out of love but out of self-interest. True freedom, he said, lies not in the ego gaining more choices but in release from its compulsions. “The body is a fact; the ego is an error,” he observed, adding that “the finest deeds happen in the absence of the ego.”

Acharya Prashant called the teaching of Vedanta at Oxford by an Indian a meaningful turn. The knowledge of Vedanta, he said, was never secret; the qualification for it rests not on birth or caste but on the merit-based attributes set out in the ‘Sadhan Chatushtaya’. The tradition the West once studied from the outside, as an object of inquiry, he said, is now being presented from within its own living lineage.

Acharya Prashant, founder of the PrashantAdvait Foundation and author of Truth Without Apology (HarperCollins), told IANS at Oxford that the university is a place of logic, analysis and intellectual rigour, and that Vedanta asks for those same tools to be turned inward. “The only difference is that when you apply these tools to yourself, resistance arises from within, because there the seer becomes the seen. That is where inner honesty becomes as essential as outer honesty. You can be anyone and still be a fine scientist, but you cannot be just anyone and be a good human being,” he said.

“The body is a fact; the ego is an error. The finest deeds happen in the absence of the ego.”

Acharya Prashant, at Oxford