The Oupnek'hat · how Vedānta reached Europe

Anquetil-Duperron rendered Dārā Shikōh's Persian Upanishads into Latin and published them in 1801–02 as the Oupnek'hat. Schopenhauer found it, kept it by him for decades, and called it the consolation of his life and his death; through him it reached German idealism, and through that, most of what the nineteenth century thought it knew about Indian philosophy. Note the shape of the chain, because this annex keeps meeting it: Sanskrit → a Mughal prince's Persian → a Frenchman's Latin → a German's metaphysics → a Theosophist's diagram → an occultist's Tree of Life. By the time the chakras were welded to the sefirot, the material had passed through five languages and at least three agendas. That is not a scandal — it is simply what transmission looks like, and the Buddha arrived on the next bench over as a Christian saint by a chain just like it.