Note 44 — Chapter III · MAGIC IN INDIA

The analysis of Éliphas Lévi requires to be checked at all points. He followed the Latin version of Anquetil Duperron, made from a Persian text, and this is so rare as to be almost unobtainable. I shall therefore deserve well of my readers by furnishing the following extract from Deussen’s Religion and Philosophy of India, regarding the Oupnek’hat:

“A position apart from the 52 and the 108 Upanishads is occupied by that collection of 50 Upanishads which, under the name of Oupnek’hat, was translated from the Sanskrit into the Persian in the year 1656 at the instance of the Sultan Mohammed Dara Shakoh, and from the Persian into the Latin in 1801-2 by Anquetil Duperron. The Oupnek’hat professes to be a general collection of Upanishads. It contains under twelve divisions the Upanishads of the three older Vedas, and with them 26 Atharva Upanishads that are known from other sources. It further comprises eight treatises peculiar to itself, five of which have not up to the present time been proved to exist elsewhere, and of which therefore a rendering from the Persian-Latin of Anquetil is alone possible. Finally the Oupnek’hat contains four treatises from the Vaj. Samh. 16, 31, 32, 34, of which the first is met with in a shorter form in other collections also, as in the Nilarudra Upanishad, while the three last have nowhere else found admission. The reception of these treatises from the Samhita into the body of the Upanishads, as though there were danger of their falling otherwise into oblivion, makes us infer a comparatively later date for the Oupnek’hat collection itself, although as early as 1656 the Persian translators made no claim to be the original compilers, but took the collection over already complete. Owing to the excessive literality with which Anquetil Duperron rendered these Upanishads word by word from the Persian into Latin, while preserving the syntax of the former language—a literality that stands in striking contrast to the freedom with which the Persian translators treated the Sanskrit text—the Oupnek’hat is a very difficult book to read; and an insight as keen as that of Schopenhauer was required in order to discover within this repellant husk a kernel of invaluable philosophical significance, and to turn it to account for his own system. An examination of the material placed at our disposal in the Oupnek’hat was first undertaken by A. Weber, Ind. Stud. I, II, ix., on the basis of the Sanskrit text. Meanwhile the original texts were published in the Bibliotheca Indica in part with elaborate commentaries, and again in the Anandas’rama series. The two longest, and some of the shorter treatises have appeared in a literal German rendering by O. Bohtlingk. Max Müller translated the twelve oldest Upanishads in Sacred Books of the East, vol. i. 15. And my own translation of the 60 Upanishads contains complete texts of this character which, upon the strength of their regular occurrence in the Indian collections and lists of the Upanishads, may lay claim to a certain canonicity. The prefixed introductions and the notes treat exhaustively of the matter and composition of the several treatises.”