Hinduism

Kaṭha Upanishad

The dialogue of Naciketas and Death, in independent Sanskrit and historical English editions.

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HinduismKaṭha UpanishadKaṭha Upaniṣad

Contents and editions

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First adhyāya

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Editions & sources

F. Max Müller 1884 · English Selected edition

Language: English
Coverage: All 120 numbered main-text paragraphs in six vallīs: 29/25/17/15/15/19. Includes the 119 core paragraphs and separately numbered final peace invocation VI.19. Translator footnotes and introductions excluded; embedded parentheticals retained. References use six vallīs numbered 1–6; in the two-adhyāya system, vallīs 4–6 are 2.1–2.3. English 6.19 is the closing invocation.
Contents: Müller groups the six vallīs into two adhyāyas.
Credits: F. Max Müller, The Upanishads, Part II, Sacred Books of the East XV (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1884), Kaṭha-upanishad, pp. 1–24. Wikisource contributors, revision 9500995; complete main-text scan review and 18 logged correction records in KATHA-ENGLISH-COLLATION.md.
Text and translation: Independent historical translation and Sanskrit edition. Müller ends at VI.19 (peace invocation), Sanskrit GRETIL ends at VI.18; no verified correspondence table. Müller III.1 lacks the five-fires phrase in Sanskrit, faithfully retained as printed.
Rights: Historical printed translation public domain; Wikisource transcription reused with CC BY-SA 4.0 attribution and logged scan corrections

GRETIL Sanskrit · IAST, edited readings

Language: Sanskrit
Coverage: All 119 numbered GRETIL Sanskrit mūla segments in six vallīs; source normalized anusvāra/anunāsika and editorial corrections explicitly disclosed. References use six vallīs numbered 1–6; in the two-adhyāya system, vallīs 4–6 are 2.1–2.3. English 6.19 is the closing invocation.
Contents: This Sanskrit edition numbers six consecutive vallīs.
Credits: Vienna University Student Team (SoSe 2016), Sanskrit input/proofreading based on Patrick Olivelle, The Early Upaniṣads: Annotated Text and Translation (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), pp. 374–402; GRETIL, SUB Göttingen, TEI version 2020-07-31, CC BY-NC-SA 4.0. Three project orthographic corrections and one declared variant choice supported by E. Roer (ed.), Bibliotheca Indica VIII (Calcutta, 1850), logged in UPANISHAD-CANDIDATE-REVIEW.md.
Text and translation: Independent editions, no verified alignment. Sanskrit 1.1–6.18; Müller 1.1–6.19 includes peace invocation. Identical reference numbers do not prove identical underlying readings.
Rights: CC BY-NC-SA 4.0; includes four explicitly documented text adaptations (three orthographic corrections, one variant choice). Noncommercial use only; share adaptations under the same license.

Naciketas at the house of Death

The encounter with Death

The Kaṭha Upanishad is associated with a school of the Yajurveda. Its teaching takes the form of an encounter between a young visitor, Naciketas, and Yama, Death. The boy waits three nights at his absent host’s house and is offered three gifts in recompense. One of his requests concerns disagreement about what becomes of a person after death. Yama’s attempts to interest him in other gifts make the cost of that question part of the story.

Structure and imagery

The text unfolds in six divisions called vallīs, conventionally grouped into two larger parts. The image of a chariot gives the body, the senses, the mind and the discerning intellect different roles. Elsewhere the dialogue evokes an inward self that eludes ordinary perception. These images have had a long life in Indian philosophical interpretation.

Editions and their endings

The English edition is F. Max Müller’s translation published in 1884 in the Sacred Books of the East. The digital Sanskrit text follows the edition identified with Patrick Olivelle. The two sources treat the concluding prayer differently. The final section in each edition preserves the ending of that particular publication, a detail that matters when a quotation includes its closing words.