The thirteen

कैवल्योपनिषद्

Kaivalya Upanishad

The Purusha Beyond the Highest

Teach me, Lord, the highest knowledge of Brahman, the secret knowledge ever followed by the saints.

The Kaivalya is a short Upanishad, and a reader who comes to it through Sri Aurobindo should know at the threshold how little of it he wrote upon. Around 1912, in Pondicherry, he translated its first verse and began a commentary, and there he stopped: the translation and commentary cover, in the words of the editors of his Complete Works, "only the first verse of the Upanishad". A commentary in Sanskrit on the same verse was found among his papers and stands, in English, in the ninth volume of the Complete Works. Of the remaining twenty-three verses we have no word of his.

The English of those verses in this edition is that of K. Narayanasvami Aiyar in the Thirty Minor Upanishads. The Gateway will therefore draw on what Sri Aurobindo wrote of the opening, which is a good deal for one verse, and will set beside it, in the light of his other writings, the teaching that follows: a path of faith, devotion, meditation and renunciation, and a great declaration of identity, leading to kaivalya, the state of the alone, the free.

Sri Aurobindo’s writings on it · 1

The text · 21 passages

Translation by K. Narayanasvami Aiyar; the opening by Sri Aurobindo.

1. Kaivalya Upanishad 1
2. Kaivalya Upanishad 2
3. Kaivalya Upanishad 3–4
4. Kaivalya Upanishad 5–7
5. Kaivalya Upanishad 8
6. Kaivalya Upanishad 9
7. Kaivalya Upanishad 10
8. Kaivalya Upanishad 11
9. Kaivalya Upanishad 12
10. Kaivalya Upanishad 13
11. Kaivalya Upanishad 14
12. Kaivalya Upanishad 15
13. Kaivalya Upanishad 16
14. Kaivalya Upanishad 17
15. Kaivalya Upanishad 18
16. Kaivalya Upanishad 19
17. Kaivalya Upanishad 20
18. Kaivalya Upanishad 21
19. Kaivalya Upanishad 22
20. Kaivalya Upanishad 23
21. Kaivalya Upanishad 24