The thirteen

मुण्डकोपनिषद्

Muṇḍaka Upanishad

The Bow of OM and the Golden Sheath

Take up the bow of the Upanishad, draw it with a heart wholly devoted, and let the soul be lost in the Immutable as an arrow in its target.

The Muṇḍaka Upanishad opens with no scene of wonder and no story of a boy at the gate of death. It opens with a lineage and a question. Brahma, first of the gods, gives the God-knowledge to Atharvan, his eldest son; it passes from teacher to disciple until Śaunaka, the great house-lord, comes to Aṅgiras in the due way of the disciple and asks the one question that holds all others: “Lord, by knowing what does all this that is become known?” Everything that follows, to the last salutation to the great seers, is the answer, laid like an arrow to the string.

Sri Aurobindo first translated this Upanishad at Baroda about 1900, gave it to the readers of the Karmayogin in 1910 and of the Arya in 1920, and revised it thoroughly once more in the late 1940s; the version printed in this edition is the fruit of that long returning. He left no continuous commentary upon it. We hear him in the rendering itself, in the lines that stand at the head of five chapters of The Life Divine, and in the chapter of The Synthesis of Yoga that takes the Upanishad’s two knowledges and shows them to be one seeking. It is enough. The Upanishad is brief, and it is a mantra that acts: it does not ask to be understood before it is entered.

Sri Aurobindo’s writings on it · 1

The text · 64 passages

Translation by Sri Aurobindo.

1. Muṇḍaka Upanishad 1.1.1
2. Muṇḍaka Upanishad 1.1.2
3. Muṇḍaka Upanishad 1.1.3
4. Muṇḍaka Upanishad 1.1.4
5. Muṇḍaka Upanishad 1.1.5
6. Muṇḍaka Upanishad 1.1.6
7. Muṇḍaka Upanishad 1.1.7
8. Muṇḍaka Upanishad 1.1.8
9. Muṇḍaka Upanishad 1.1.9
10. Muṇḍaka Upanishad 1.2.1
11. Muṇḍaka Upanishad 1.2.2
12. Muṇḍaka Upanishad 1.2.3
13. Muṇḍaka Upanishad 1.2.4
14. Muṇḍaka Upanishad 1.2.5
15. Muṇḍaka Upanishad 1.2.6
16. Muṇḍaka Upanishad 1.2.7
17. Muṇḍaka Upanishad 1.2.8
18. Muṇḍaka Upanishad 1.2.9
19. Muṇḍaka Upanishad 1.2.10
20. Muṇḍaka Upanishad 1.2.11
21. Muṇḍaka Upanishad 1.2.12
22. Muṇḍaka Upanishad 1.2.13
23. Muṇḍaka Upanishad 2.1.1
24. Muṇḍaka Upanishad 2.1.2
25. Muṇḍaka Upanishad 2.1.3
26. Muṇḍaka Upanishad 2.1.4
27. Muṇḍaka Upanishad 2.1.5
28. Muṇḍaka Upanishad 2.1.6
29. Muṇḍaka Upanishad 2.1.7
30. Muṇḍaka Upanishad 2.1.8
31. Muṇḍaka Upanishad 2.1.9
32. Muṇḍaka Upanishad 2.1.10
33. Muṇḍaka Upanishad 2.2.1
34. Muṇḍaka Upanishad 2.2.2
35. Muṇḍaka Upanishad 2.2.3
36. Muṇḍaka Upanishad 2.2.4
37. Muṇḍaka Upanishad 2.2.5
38. Muṇḍaka Upanishad 2.2.6
39. Muṇḍaka Upanishad 2.2.7
40. Muṇḍaka Upanishad 2.2.8
41. Muṇḍaka Upanishad 2.2.9
42. Muṇḍaka Upanishad 2.2.10
43. Muṇḍaka Upanishad 2.2.11
44. Muṇḍaka Upanishad 3.1.1
45. Muṇḍaka Upanishad 3.1.2
46. Muṇḍaka Upanishad 3.1.3
47. Muṇḍaka Upanishad 3.1.4
48. Muṇḍaka Upanishad 3.1.5
49. Muṇḍaka Upanishad 3.1.6
50. Muṇḍaka Upanishad 3.1.7
51. Muṇḍaka Upanishad 3.1.8
52. Muṇḍaka Upanishad 3.1.9
53. Muṇḍaka Upanishad 3.1.10
54. Muṇḍaka Upanishad 3.2.1
55. Muṇḍaka Upanishad 3.2.2
56. Muṇḍaka Upanishad 3.2.3
57. Muṇḍaka Upanishad 3.2.4
58. Muṇḍaka Upanishad 3.2.5
59. Muṇḍaka Upanishad 3.2.6
60. Muṇḍaka Upanishad 3.2.7
61. Muṇḍaka Upanishad 3.2.8
62. Muṇḍaka Upanishad 3.2.9
63. Muṇḍaka Upanishad 3.2.10
64. Muṇḍaka Upanishad 3.2.11