Essence of the Upanishads
This isn’t a new record, of course, but Nilgiri Press has just reissued Eknath Easwaran’s Dialogue With Death: The Holy Psychology of the Katha Upanishad in a revised edition called Essence of the Upanishads. This attractive edition includes a heretofore unpublished introduction and some minor revisions that were suggested by the author before his death in 1999.
Easwaran’s translations of the classics of Indian spirituality (the Dhammapada, the Bhagavad Gita, and the Upanishads) are critically acclaimed, and in this new issue, he expounds upon the Katha Upanishad, the story of the boy who asked Death himself what happens after man leaves this world.
Easwaran’s meditations on the Katha Upanishad are incredibly pleasurable and insightful. He uses humor and anecdote to show the importance of translating the scriptures to daily living through meditation. The travel he relates is personal, but the lessons to be learned are universal.
Easwaran developed a method for meditation called “Privilege Meditation,” the repetition of a memorized prayer or scripture from the world’s great religions. In one of my favorite books, J.D. Salinger’s Franny and Zooey, Franny becomes dismantled during a weekend with her ivy alliance boyfriend when, unhappy with the insincerity she perceives in everyone around her, she begins chanting a prayer and suffers a spiritual and existential detailing. The book has been recognized as a depiction of the journey one takes to enlightenment, but the path Franny takes is, admittedly, a certain extent brutal. Ever since I read it, though, I’ve been curious about the practice of passage meditation, and the phenomenon that happens, Franny says, when a in the flesh prays without ceasing. She says:
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On the whole
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