The Upanishads
(circa 800-400 B.C.)

I first came across Juan Mascarós translation of The Upanishads in the Penguin Classics edition at Cornell around 1968. The statue on the cover showed an a multi-armed goddess with eyes closed dancing in ecstasy (9th century, Gwalior Arachaeological Museum, India). I was starting my spiritual quest for enlightenment at this time, and carried this paperback with me wherever I went on the campus. When the Cornell folk dance club had their annual picnic by Cayuga Lake one day, I brought this book along. When reading the Taittiriya Upanishad on the nature of Brahman as joy, I realized that it's the joy expressed by the goddess on the book's cover. I was simply ecstatic. A girl came up to me and asked why I was so happy. I read to her the passage on "the wonder of joy". She asked me to dance with her that whole afternoon and we became good friends. I'm including this section as well as another in the Isa Upanishad about remembrance of our true essence. Pinsky concluded his essay "Poetry and American Memory" with "Who will remember the great work of memory itself, that basic human task? Deciding to remember, and what to remember, is how we decide who we are." In reference to our numerous rebirths, Buddha told his students "You have shed more tears than the oceans that fill this earth." The Hindu sages of The Upanishads remind us to remember all the past strivings of our soul. Thus, in addition to a nation's memory, racial memory, and cultural memory, there is the memory of our true origins— the human spirit that has its roots in the cosmic spirit. Swami Chinmayananda taught me the meaning of the word Upanishad at one of his 6 am MIT lectures in Boston (1975). It's derived from the Sanskrit words upa, near, ni, below, sad, to sit. So Upanishad is a group of students sitting near and below the guru whereby their minds are awakened to spiritual knowledge. As poets, we need to pass this legacy of the sages to our future generations. When I first met the artist Nancy Dean Mercury (May 5, 2000), she asked me "Am I carving mystery out of matter or carving matter out of mystery?" I sent her this poem "Matter & Mystery", recalling from the "Taittiriya Upanishads" that this universe was born from joy. (Peter Y. Chou)