Page:Sacred Books of the East - Volume 15.djvu/18

xii Xll UPANISHADS.

We owe to the same editor in the earlier numbers of the Bibliotheca the following editions :

Nnsiwhapurvatclpani-upanishad, with commentary.

NWsiwhottaratipani-upanishad, with commentary.

Sha/^akra-upanishad, with commentary by Nir&ya/za.

Lastly, Hara£andraVidyclbhusha#a and VLrvan&tha Sdstri have published in the Bibliotheca Indica an edition of the Gop&latcipani-upanishad, with commentary by Vwvexvara.

These editions of the text and commentaries of the Upanishads are no doubt very useful, yet there are many passages where the text is doubtful, still more where the commentaries leave us without any help.

Whatever other scholars may think of the difficulty of translating the Upanishads, I can only repeat what I have said before, that I know of few Sanskrit texts pre- senting more formidable problems to the translator than these philosophical treatises. It may be said that most of them had been translated before. No doubt they have been, and a careful comparison of my own translation with those of my predecessors will show, I believe, that a small advance, at all events, has now been made towards a truer understanding of these ancient texts. But I know full well how much still remains to be done, both in restoring a cor- rect text, and in discovering the original meaning of the Upanishads ; and I have again and again had to translate certain passages tentatively only, or following the com- mentators, though conscious all the time that the meaning which they extract from the text cannot be the right one.

As to the text, I explained in my preface to the first volume that I attempted no more than to restore the text, such as it must have existed at the time when »Sankara wrote his commentaries. As Sankara lived during the ninth century A.D. 1, and as we possess no MSS. of so early a date, all reasonable demands of textual criticism would thereby seem to be satisfied. Yet, this is not quite so. We may draw such a line, and for the present keep within it, but scholars who hereafter take up the study of the

1 India, What can it teach us ? p. 360.

Digitized by VjOOQ 1C