Taittiriya-Upanisad (traducere adnotată)

Taittiriya-Upanisad is one of the oldest Upanisads, belonging to the branch of the Black Yajur-Veda. The text interlaces the ancient cosmological and dynamic approach to reality, of Vedic influence, with more recent ontological and substantial approaches. Whether cosmological or ontological, all these approaches reveal the unity of reality (either functional either substantial). The text takes over an ancient Vedic approach to reality, which considers food (anna) as the very essence of everything and reinterprets it in the new monist metaphysical context, presenting food as the substantiality of everything, as the universal ontological foundation. Some paragraphs, such as I.iii.1-3, III.x.2-III.x.3, II.viii.1, offer an interesting approach to the ultimate reality; Brahman is presented under a dynamical, functional aspect, as the complementarity of the world processes or as the specific process of the elements of the Universe. Such an approach is rare in the Upaniads, which usually prefer a static, substantial ontology and not one of the process type. A major contribution of the text is the depiction, in the paragraphs II.i-II.v and III.i-III.vi, of the ultimate reality (Brahman) as bliss (ananda). This could be considered as the “gospel” of Hinduism, bliss being stated as the fundamental condition of reality, the ultimate finality of everything. The text also exposes a theory which would become classical in later Advaita Vedanta, namely the one regarding the five „sheaths” (kosa) of the reality. The difference between the way Taittiriya-Upanisad depicts reality and the way classical Advaita Vedanta does it lies in the fact that, for Taittiriya, bliss (ananda) is not the most subtle cover of the absolute, but is identical with the ultimate reality itself. Hence, the text is ontologically quite tolerant, avoiding a sheer delimitation between “real” (sat) and “illusory” (māyā), as later Advaita Vedānta would do, but seeing everything as real, in various degrees. Reality is therefore all-encompassing, only that in more or less diluted ways.