This volume contains Sri Aurobindo’s translations of and commentaries on the Isha Upanishad His translations of and commentaries on other Upanishads and Vedantic texts, and his writings on the Upanishads and Vedanta philosophy in general, are published in Kena and Other Upanishads, volume 18 of THE COMPLETE WORKS OF SRI AUROBINDO

The present volume is divided into two parts The first consists of Sri Aurobindo’s final translation and analysis of the Isha Upanishad This is the only work in this volume that was published during his lifetime It contains his definitive interpretation of the Isha Upanishad

Before publishing this final translation and analysis, Sri Aurobindo wrote ten incomplete commentaries on the Isha Upanishad These appear in approximate chronological order in Part Two Ranging in length from a few pages to more than a hundred, they show the development of his interpretation of this Upanishad from around 1900 to the middle of 1914, when he began work on his final translation and analysis

The texts in both parts have been checked against the relevant manuscript and printed versions

Guide to Editorial Notation

The contents of Part Two of this volume were never prepared by Sri Aurobindo for publication They have been transcribed from manuscripts that sometimes present textual difficulties In this edition these problems have been indicated as far as possible by means of the notation shown below

Notation	Textual Problem
[ ]	Word(s) lost through damage to the manuscript (at the beginning of a piece, sometimes indicates that a page or pages of the manuscript have been lost)
[word]	Word(s) omitted by the author or lost through damage to the manuscript that are required by grammar or sense, and that could be supplied by the editors
[note]	Situations requiring textual explication; all such information is printed in italics