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The Vedas and Upanishads: The Eternal Wisdom at the Root of Hindu Spirituality

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Somewhere in the northern Indian subcontinent, approximately 3,500 years ago, priests of the ancient Aryan culture sat around ritual fires and composed hymns of astonishing beauty and philosophical depth. These hymns — memorized by generations of priests, transmitted across millennia through a tradition of oral precision so rigorous that the texts survive today almost exactly as they were composed — are the Vedas : literally "knowledge" or "wisdom," from the Sanskrit vid , "to know." The Vedas are the oldest surviving literature in any Indo-European language. They are the foundational scriptures of Hinduism — the texts from which, over three thousand years of philosophical reflection, one of humanity's most sophisticated spiritual traditions evolved. And the remarkable insights crystallized in their later portions — the Upanishads — constitute what the German philosopher Schopenhauer called "the production of the highest human wisdom" and r...