This book argues that Upanisads constitute a “field of wildflowers” of insight that later Vedanta has tried to fashion into a proper garden.

The early classical Upanisads (c. 800-300 BCE) are almost always read from the point of view of the later Vedantins, but they do not share in the neatly tailored characteristics of the mature Vedantic philosophies, representing, instead, divergent, variegated and even conflicting narratives. The author focuses on the earliest of these Upanisads: Brhadaranyaka, Chandogya, Aitareya, Taittiriya and Kausitaki Upanisads. These Upanisads are read “as they are,” emphasizing aspects of them that are often completely overlooked, among them: their Vedic approach to contradiction, their frequent acceptance of means other than gnostic knowledge of or veneration of atman/brahman as a means for liberation, their positing of entities/realities other than atman or brahman as totalistic, and their frequent depiction of the human body or embodied human as a microcosm of or in identity with the universe. In course, the interpretations of the Upanisadic view, the Vedantic view, for each of these Upanisads, of Sankaracarya (c. 800 CE) and Ramanujacarya (c. 1100 CE), as primary examples in the range of Upanisadic interpreters, will be examined and often refuted.