There are more than two hundred books with the name of Upanishad. Since there is no central authority among the Hindus, anyone can write a book and call it an Upanishad. We have books such as allopanishad.

The authoritative Upanishad books are those which reflect some aspects of the vedic thought and also are attached to one of the four Vedās namely Rigveda, Yajurveda, Sāmaveda and Atharvaveda.

We will clarify the sets of the so called ten major Upanishads, the thirteen Upanishads, the eighteen Upanishads, the one hundred and eight Upanishad and finally the collection, “Oupenkhat”, being the translation of fifty Upanishads into Persian. The Latin translation and the German translation of this Persian version introduced the Upanishads to the Westerners.

The earliest available commentary on the Upanishads is due to Sri Shankaracharya and he commented on the ten Upanishads some of whose phrases have been quoted in the famous ancient sūtra text of Bādarāyaņa. They are regarded as the ten major Upanishads named below:

The thirteen major Upanishads are made up of the above ten and Shvetāshvatara, Kauşhītaki and Maitrāyaņi. The latter three Upanishads are well known and should be regarded an important as the other ten.

In 1958, V.P. Limaye and R.D. Vadekar published the original texts of eighteen Upanishads. They used several available manuscripts. It was published by the Vaidic Samshodhan Mandala. It contained the above thirteen Upanishads and five more given below:

All of them are archaic and are easily recognized as belonging to an ancient period. It is stated in the text that the manuscripts of the first four Upanishads in the list was discovered recently (1958). The first one, Bāşhkhala mantra is associated with a recension of Rigveda named Bāşhkala which is now lost.

Kena Upanishad, which is one of the 10 major Upanishads is a part of the Jaiminīya Upanishad mentioned above.

In the Hindu tradition, 108 is a sacred number and there was a hunch that there could be a list of 108 Upanishads.

Muktika Upanishad gives the list of 108 Upanishads. It is given as the teaching of the Divine Incarnation Sri Rāma to his devotee Hanumān. It mentions the list in two places. In the first section (khānda) of adhyāya 1, verses 30 - 39, the 108 names are given in a metrical form. In the first adhyāya, second section (khānda), verses 1-5, is given the subsets of these Upanishads associated with the five Vedās namely Rigveda (10), Shukla Yajurveda (19), Krishna Yajurveda (32), Sāmaveda (16) and Atharvaveda (31).

The list of 108 Upanishads is quoted below. The text of Muktika Upanishad can be found in the book, “Sāmānya Vedānta Upanishads” published by Adyar Library, Adyar, Chennai. We omit the first ten major Upanishads quoted earlier.

In the early part of the nineteenth century, some of these were know only in their Persian- Latin-German translation. Deussen’s Book on Upanishads states that a complete text of the Upanishads was published in 1883 in Telugu script in Chennapuri (Madras or Chennai).

Later it was found out that a complete text of all these Upanishads was available along with a commentary by Sri Upanishad-Brahmayogin, whose real name is Sri Ramachandrendra, belonging to Sri Shankarāchārya Maţha in Kānchi in Tamil Nadu. The entire group is divided into six categories namely Sāmānya Vedānta, Yoga, Sannyāsa, Shiva, Vişhņu and Shakta.

All the Upanishads in the six categories are available as separate books with the original text, the commentary of Upanishad-Brahmayogin and the English translation of some of them published by Adyar Library and Research Centre. They can be obtained in India from their office in Adyar, Chennai-600020 and in U.S. from P.O. Box 270, Wheaton, IL, 60187, USA. The program of publishing these books was started in 1905.

Sāmānya Vedānta Upanishads (24)

 

Akşhi	Adhyātma	Annapūrņa	Ātma
Ātmabodha	Ekākşhara	Kaushītakibrahmana	Garbha
Nirālamba	Paingala	Prāņāgnihotra	Mantrika
Maha	Muktika	Mudgala	Maitrāyaņi
Vajrasūchika	Sharīraka	Shukarahasya	Sarvasāra
Sūrya	Subāla	Sāvitri	Skanda

Sannyāsa Upanishads  (17)

Shākta Upanishads (8)

Vaishnava Upanishad (14)

Shaiva Upanishads (15)

Yoga Upanishads  (20)

To get the number 108, some of the Upanishads have been combined. For example consider the texts of Vişhņu Upanishads published by the Adyar Library. In that book, Gopāla Tāpinī is listed as two separate books namely Gopālapūrva Tāpini and Gopāla Uttara Tāpinī. Similarly Rāmatāpini U.

Oupnek'hat Collection and its Journey to West

This collection of Upanishads was the first to be translated into a non-Indian language namely Persian. This translation was made at Delhi (1656-1657) by Pandits who had been brought together for that purpose by Prince Dārā Shukoh, son of the Mogul Emperor, Shah Jehan. This Persian translation was translated into Latin by Anquetil Duperron and published in 2 volumes of pages 735 and 916 in 1801-1802. Franz Mischel translated this into German in 1882.

It is believed that such a collection was already existent and the translators did not create the order of the Upanishads in the list.

We give below the listing of the fifty Upanishads given in the Deussen book translated by Bedekar and Palsule.

The interesting feature here is that Taittirīya 1 is missing, but Taittirīya 2 and 3 are regarded as two separate Upanishads.

This collection includes four pieces or passages from the Vājasaneyi Samhita, chapters 16, 31, 32, 34 (Nos. 19, 40, 8, 22) of which the Shatarudrīyam (Vaj. Samh. 16) appears among other collections of the Atharva-Upanishads, in an abridged form as Nīlarudra-Upanishad, while the three remaining have not been included, as far as our knowledge goes, in any collection, presumably because they were regarded as being well-known passages in the Vājasaneyi. Samhita.

Shaunaka, Chhāgaleya and Bhāşhkala Upanishad part of the eighteen Upanishads are also here.

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