The term Upanishad has been translated in many ways, "sitting near devotedly", "secret teachings", and the more elaborate, "knowledge of God." It is the knowledge of God that truly captures the essence of the Upanishads.

The 7th century scholar, Shankara, describes the Upanishads as "the knowledge of Brahman, the knowledge that destroys the bond of ignorance and leads to the supreme goal of freedom." Each Upanishad illustrates the path towards discovering this inner knowledge, thus achieving escape from samsara, or this world of suffering.

This translation contains the twelve standard Upanishads, including one of the most famous, the Brihad-aranyaka, which is the oldest and largest of these ancient scriptures.
This work embodies the mystical and esoteric aspects of ancient Hindu philosophy, and serves as an interesting and enlightening guide to knowledge of Self.

I am so glad to see this classic translation back in print. If you have ever been intimidated by the multi-volume scholarly translations of the Upanishads, then this book is for you. I still marvel at how Prabhavananda and Manchester managed to encapsulate so much of the core content and meaning of the twelve principle Upanishads in such a slim volume. Yet they did- and it works.

Of course if you truly understand these oldest of mystical scriptures then you could condense them down still further to:
Brahma is true, the world is false,
The soul is Brahma and nothing else.

Or if that is a bit wordy for you, then you can sum up the Upanishads, and all the Vedas, with: "Tat tvam asi" (Thou art that.)

Most people need to work up to the true understanding of these statements with a bit more commentary, however....

This is the most embarrassing book I know written by a writer of literary reputation. It is a mean-spirited, self-aggrandizing work that will only detract from the author's standing as a serious author. There are repetitive renditions of affairs, including intimate details that make one wonder why this book, not finished, was published posthumously at all. Gossipy, and spiteful, awkwardly written, this is a shameful document, not literature.

If your looking to know the real "Christopher Isherwood" this is the book to read first. I really enjoyed this memoir called "The Lost Years" 1945-1951 because of its openness & honesty. If your interested in Christopher's daily life in every detail, from his friends, sex partners, lovers, and acquaintances it's all here. I expected to get details about all faucets of his daily life from this memoir and that's exactly what I got. If your looking for a sugar coated boring sexless book, look elsewhere. Christopher is very honest in laying out in graphic detail his sexual conquests. But that's not to say the book is just about his sexual life, it's like I said about all the daily details of his everyday life for those years. There's a wonderful Chronology in the back of the book for a quick history lesson of his life, and a glossary that is outstanding that contains all the bio's and history of his friends, partners, and relatives.

This book really opened my eyes to this wonderful writer, who happened to be gay. I thought the 90's were gay but after reading this book, things weren't much different back in the 40's. Gay life as we call it today, was really just as gay back then. Katherine Bucknell has done a wonderful job in editing this book, and gives us a wonderful introduction. Getting to know Christopher Isherwood as a writer and a human being has been a wonderful experience for me. Highly recommended.

This memoir raises the bar for sexual candor way above what we are used to, and that is a good thing. Isherwood, in commenting and elaborating on his sketchy daily calendar notes for these years, takes a fiercely critical view of himself and his obsessions and, in the process, reveals the very funny and humane man behind the suave, mannerly one we have been familiar with up to now. From what he describes, gay life in Los Angeles during these years was covert yet very, very wild. He was a busy guy, both professionally and personally. His portraits of his friends, lovers, tricks, flirtations and coworkers in the film industry are vivid and viscerally engaging. When Isherwood wrote this memoir in the 1970s he no longer had any use for euphemisms and politesse and, consequently, he simply calls a three-way a three-way and says who did what to whom in what order and whether he later went back for more. What comes through loud and clear is that Isherwood loved the sex he had, and that he had no time for those suffering Saras and Sams who claimed that shame and suffering lurk behind the lure of sensuality. The body was a temple to him and he attended services every day and often more than once a day. When he set out to have fun with the boys, he had fun with the boys. When he had lunch with Garbo, he had a GREAT lunch with Garbo; and when he talked with Ava Gardner as a pal, he dedicated 100% of his attention to her. Does knowing this much intimate detail diminish Isherwood-the-writer? If anything, this brilliant, dishy and hilarious memoir deepens my regard for the Isherwood who produced the fiction classics like The Berlin Stories and A Single Man. I am in awe of his honesty.

Mizejewski's Divine Decadence hails itself as a sort of history of the character developement of Sally Bowles through her many incarnations. It is an accurate analysis, but the book is also a valuable resource for information on Weimar culture in general, and it's chapter-by-chapter sections on each Sally Bowles may be taken one by one as individual "essays". For anyone reading Divine Decadence, I would highly recommend first familiarizing oneself with the works Mizejewski focuses on, such as Isherwood's Berlin Stories, Van Druten's I Am A Camera, and the Broadway musical (and film adaptation) Cabaret. Divine Decadence begins by establishing a sense of Weimar Germany and the sociopolitical origins of Isherwood's Berlin, as well as aquainting the reader with an understanding of the Nazi Party's rise to power within the context of Weimar culture. Mizejewski then begins a direct analysis of the original Sally Bowles of the Isherwood stories and also explores Isherwood's motivations for creating her in th 1930s. The following two sections are focused on the Van Druten play and subsequent film adaptation of Isherwood's Sally Bowles, I Am A Camera, evaluating the evolution of Sally, and also the story in general, as it was tailored for audiences of the 1950s. Next, Mizejewski analyzes the 1966 Broadway musical Cabaret and its 1972 film adaptation, discussing them in delicious depth as the Sally character is displaced by other forces in the stage musical, and then returned in campy splendour by Liza Minelli in the film. Mizejewski's prose tends to be highly dense and academic; like wading through treacle. Novices beware. But what do you expect from Princeton University Press? With the new revival of the musical Cabaret taking Broadway by storm, many readers may want to explore its literary history and its sociopolitical evolution. If you are up for a mental exercise, practicing your cencentration skills, seriously devoted to the subject matter, or just plain driven, I wholeheartedly recommend Divine Decadence.

Lovely book of letters: best read in conjunction with "Christopher and His Kind" by Isherwood (to get the other side of the story).

Isherwood takes on the ambiguities inherent in sexuality,religious devotion, and sibling relationships in a completelynon-polemical way. Easy to read, involving, and witty, the Isherwood way. A fifth star would be deserved if the book were a little messier--it does have a slight tendency toward "patness". But that's a minor quibble. END

First off, let me say I enjoy most of Huxley's work. The style of this book is totally different from the usual Huxley method. I've never read anything else by Christopher Isherwood. This book starts out boring, and ends boring. That's really the sum of it. The characters are flat and extremely simple. In his early work (say, pre "Brave New World"), Huxley's characters are an embodiment of one single trait. However, they are always developed well, and their thought processes are complex while remaining within this one trait. This book has the same characterization - Jacob, for example, is moronically kind and simple (think Forrest Gump). There are also the classic evil tricksters, and so on. It's not done well at all, and I left this book with a bad taste in my mouth.

Interesting how Hollywood types embrace such spiritual ideas without commiting to one chosen path. This work starts with an incredible insight into some of Jesus' words yet speaks to healing as a natural and mystical experience. I'd think the Creator would be more included in the reasoning.
Well worth reading. Many, many thanks to Sharon Stone for recognizing the beauty of this fable and giving it new life at this end of the century.

This screenplay is the collaborative effort of Christopher Isherwood and Aldous Huxley. This work has an unpolished feel to it and may have been an unfinished work. However, the stark and unadorned quality of the work adds rather than detracts from its message.

It is a fable about a ranch hand, Jacob, who discovers that he can heal animals with his touch. The owner of the ranch is a widowed college professor with a physically handicapped adult daughter. The professor resents his daughter and wastes no effort in hiding his feelings. The daughter desperately wants freedom and independence. She asks Jacob to heal her.

The screenplay's uncomplicated message is that physical health alone does not make a person whole or happy. This work is unlike anything else by Huxley in its simplicity and ambiguous final paragraphs. It is a short work and is easily finished in one or two sittings.

I found this book compelling for a number of reasons. Like at least two reviewers here, as an Isherwood fan, I found his accounts of the early years fascinating. More interesting perhaps, one of the reasons I found them fascinating was because they were often banal, tedious, (but were they ever malicious?) full of frality and the soft vanities of an aging man. Surrounded by vain and often shallow people, his struggle to find spirituality in his work and in his friends was admirable, even if at times it did shock. In the end it is the humility of some of these entries that struck me, the fear that the best was behind, that ahead lay only decline and darkness. Finally, the genre of the diary is a peculiar entity. I am not sure it can be read like a book. It requires to be read in small bits, and always with an eye to the odd disjuncture of privacy and the public domain. Isherwood would not have been ashamed by this work, he might well have seen it as a parody of St Augustine: please make me celebite, but not yet.

This title should be read by all fans of Isherwoods' novels and stories for insight into the man's character and life-style during his middle years after he emigrated to the United States. I was particularly interested in his committment to Vedanta and how that developed during these years, as well as the gradual development of his relationship with the very young Don Bachardy about whom we have so little information otherwise. Bachardy was and is a very private person. Isherwood emerges as a complex man and, like most diaries, this book shows him with all his personality warts as well as the ups and downs of his daily life. He suffered acutely at various times from very human maladies; boredom, writers' block, lonliness and hypochondriacal concerns. I think this has to be remembered when reading someone's diaries or letters. It's like seeing a person undressed; you get to view the good, the bad and the ugly. There is surprisingly little of Isherwood's sexual views or life included here however; certainly not much that is explicit, and his occasional bitchy remarks about Hollywood personalities is refreshingly candid. I would compare these diaries to those of Evelyn Waugh although Isherwood was far less the curmudgeon that Waugh was and lacked Waugh's crusty mean spiritedness.

As an ardent fan of Isherwood's novels, I am, perhaps, the ideal consumer for these lengthy diaries. I left the book on my bedside table, only to be read at night, and for three months enjoyed the author's observant, witty, spiritual, intelligent and sometimes banal entries with thankful adoration. Covering as they do a span of time that allows for great personal change, as well as an ever-shifting political climate, the Diaries open a window into a beloved author's day-to-day, while painting a fascinating backdrop that moves from Hollywood glamour to Pennsylvannia Quakerism to Eastern Spirituality and back. Isherwood's writing is always crisp, and wise without condescension. Through his devotion to searching out self-awareness, I found myself re-examining my own creative production levels. Put simply, the book is truly inspirational. I can't wait for the next installment.