14 The Upani ṣadic episteme Jonardon  Ganeri The Upani ṣads are a polymorphous collection of anecdotes, parables, and dialogues. The earliest date from around or before the sixth century BCE , later ones written for many centuries afterwards. The two oldest Upani ṣads, the B ṛhad Ɨra ṇyaka and Ch Ɨndogya, were both composed before the time of the Buddha. They are symbolic, evocative and inspirational, plastic in meaning and, as with all canonical scriptures, hermeneutically pliable. Their function is to stimulate and to challenge, but they should not be taken as models of close conceptual analysis or theoretical system-building. There is, nevertheless, a broad theme and the elements of a common vision in the Upani ṣads. The fun- damental idea of the Upani ṣads is that there are hidden connections between things, and that knowing what these connections are is a profound source of insight. Indeed, the term upani ṣad means a hidden connection, or possibly a secret teaching. As Joel Brereton puts it very well: Each Upani ṣadic teaching creates an integrative vision, a view of the whole which draws together the separate elements of the world and of human experience and compresses them into a single form. To one who has this larger vision of things, the world is not a set of diverse and dis- organised objects and living beings, but rather forms a totality with a distinct shape and character. (Brereton 1990: 118) This order-inducing totality is what I will term “the Upani ṣadic episteme.” Remember how Michel Foucault begins The Order of Things (Foucault 1970). He refers, and is perhaps the irst contemporary writer to do so, to a short essay written by Jorge Luis Borges in 1942, the essay called “John Wilkins’ Analytical Language” (Borges 1999: 231) in which Borges introduces what he describes as “a certain Chinese dictionary entitled The Celestial Emporium of Benevolent Knowledge.” Of The Order of Things Foucault comments that: This book irst arose out of a passage in Borges, out of the laugh- ter that, as I read the passage, shattered all the familiar landmarks of my thought … breaking up all the ordered surfaces and all the planes 9781138795051_pi-418.indd 146 9781138795051_pi-418.indd 146 6/27/2017 9:54:04 AM 6/27/2017 9:54:04 AM