The Sanskrit of Hinduism is the religion that has been preserved in India for over four thousand years. It has its roots in the Upanishads and its spread to Sri Lanka and then to Nepal. It is also the favorite hymns of many Christians. The Upanishads tell us that Lord Vishnu, the Hindu god, was satisfied by the sacrifice performed by his son Brahma on the auspicious occasion of the engagement of his wife princess Lakshmi with King Veeraballa of Magadh. This incident motivated the divine worship of Lord Vishnu and his ascension to heaven.
In the Upanishads we find some of the earliest references to the Sankrit of Hinduism. The Sanskrit of Hinduism texts narrate the story of the search for the undisclosed verses in the Vedas. With the help of these Sanskrit texts the learned scholars of the present era were able to decipher the meaning of the ancient Sanskrit poems. These texts also reveal the influence of the Sanskrit hymns on the concept of yoga and on the origin of the yogic asanas.
The Upanishad and the portions of the Sanskrit literature known as the Yoga Sutras was orally transmitted from one generation to another up to the time when they were composed. During the last century of the Indian empire in the Indian epics, known as the Ramayana and the Mahabharata, were orally transmitted and preserved by the South Indian brahmin elite. The present writers are using the Sanskrit of Hinduism as an advanced philosophical language that compares well to the modern languages of Latin and Greek.
The Upanishad is a philosophical treatise of three sections known as the Brahma Nadi Mandala and the Yojur Veda. Both these Sanskrit books were written to instruct the readers on the path of ethical conduct. The Brahma Nadi Mandala contains the ethical codes of the Upanishads and the Samhita Upanishad and consists of ninety-two verses. The Yojur Veda consists of about four hundred verses and is the greatest philosophical treatise in the world. Among the parts of this treatise known as the Yoga Sutras the two main Sanskrit books are the Chandanath Tagore's The Hindu Esoteric Series and the Upanishad Tagore's The Books of the Upanishads.
There are many authors who have composed independent commentaries on the works of the Upanishads. However, none of them can be called the foremost authorities on the Sanskrit of Hinduism. This is because the commentaries are only to be understood in a comparative manner. In other words, the commentaries of the earlier authors cannot be compared with the commentaries of the present authors. The authorities on the Sanskrit of Hinduism are those who wrote the original texts and who found relevance in the texts that they wrote. These authors are Shakyamuni, Maha Mankara, Swami Dhyan Giten and his disciples including Amrita Sher-ien, Subhas Chandra Bose and his student Narayananda.
In the beginning the Upanishads were classified into two types, those that were recited orally and those that were meant for practicers. Recitation of the sacred texts was a time consuming process and recitation was usually performed by a brahmachari or a student who had been initiated into the Hindu fold. However, in the modern era, modern students prefer to study the Upanishads through yoga mantras. Those who choose this option have a deeper understanding of the meaning of the Upanishads and are able to apply them in their daily life without the limitations of the tradition of chanting the sacred texts. Modern students of Sanskrit veda book also prefer Sanskrit sanyasa to Hinduism as they believe that the former has a better explanation of the essence of the Hindu religion while the latter is based on the philosophy of old Sanskrit.