29. Varun Khanna | The Wisdom of the Upaniṣads

In this episode we sit down with Varun Khanna to discuss his
upcoming course, YS 207 | The Upaniṣads. We first learn about his
background as a pre-med student stumbling into Sanskrit when he
tried to study Ayurveda in India, learning Sanskrit as a spoken
language, and going on to earn his PhD at Cambridge University.
We discuss the mysterious nature of the Upaniṣads, their relation
to the earlier Vedic tradition and to later Indian philosophy,
the schools of Vedānta, the meaning of key terms like Ātman and
Brahman, and what studying the Upaniṣads offers us today in 2022.
 


Speaker Bio


Dr. Varun Khanna earned both his master’s degree in Sanskrit and
his PhD in Hinduism (studying consciousness in the Upaniṣads) at
the University of Cambridge. He has been teaching spoken
Sanskrit, Pāṇinian Sanskrit grammar, and topics in Indian
philosophy since 2008, and is now a Visiting Assistant Professor
of Classics teaching Sanskrit at Swarthmore College.


Varun’s research interests lie in the intersection of Sanskrit
grammar, Vedānta philosophy, and social justice. His latest work
centers on the perspectives that ancient Sanskrit literature
offers for thinking about equality, freedom, and justice. He is
also working on a new Sanskrit primer that incorporates Pāṇinian
grammar in order to help students learn the exact boundaries of
the rules of Sanskrit.


Links


YS 207 | The Upaniṣads