The Mundaka Upanishad – The bridge to Immortality – is number 5 in the Muktika canon of 108 Upanishads of Hinduism and it is considered one of the primary Upanshads. Contrary to most other Upanishads the Mundaka is not used for rituals but for meditation and for teaching spiritual topics. The Mundaka Upanisad teaches among other things the way to complete liberation, the difference between higher and lower knowledge and the truth about the nature of Brahman, the Self. From the introduction:
“If the Vedas, to paraphrase Kalidasa, can be compared to the mighty Himalayas stretching majestically from the Hindu Kush in the West all the way across to the Eastern sea, like some gigantic measuring rod against which the world’s great traditions will have to be gauged, then the Upanishads may be likened to those great Himalayan peaks which stand in splendour reflecting on their eternal snows the sparkling glory of the sun of wisdom. They have rightly been descibed as the supreme expression of the Hindu mind, indeed one of the high watermarks of the human spirit since the dawn of civilization. A record of the deepest spiritual experiences of a whole series of Rishis or sages across many centuries, they are, as Sri Aurobindo puts it “docunents of revelatory and intuitive philosophy of an inexhaustible light, power and largeness and, whether written in verse or cadenced prose, spiritual poems of an absolute and unfailing inspiration, inimitable in phrase, wonderful in rhythm and expression.”
Download the complete scanned PDF of Mundaka Upanishad here:
Mundaka Upanishad
