Eknath Easwaran, best-selling translator of ''The Upanishads'', ''The Bhagavad Gita'', and ''The Dhammapada'', offers a personal exploration of the fundamentals of Indian spirituality, and shows how timeless truths help us understand ourselves and our life today. Lyrical, dramatic, and inspiring, the ''Katha Upanishad'' embraces the core ideas of Indian mysticism and presents them in the context of a mythic story we can all relate to - the story of a young hero, Nachiketa, who ventures into the shadowy kingdom of Death in search of immortality. The King of Death tests his resolve, but the teenager stands firm and demands answers to the age-old questions 'What is the purpose of life? What happens to me when I die'? And Death emerges as the perfect spiritual guide - direct, uncompromising, and challenging. Easwaran's approach to the Katha is practical, based on decades of teaching meditation. ''The Upanishads'' are lengthy, often hard to interpret. Easwaran helps the reader to appreciate their wisdom by selecting the key concepts and demonstrating their relevance to the choices we face in our lives today.The insights of the ''Katha'' are scattered, but Easwaran presents them systematically, as a way to explore deeper and deeper levels of personality. He gives clear explanations of the key Sanskrit terms such as karma and prana, illustrating them with everyday examples, entertaining anecdotes, and unusual analogies that readers can easily recognize. He situates Indian spirituality in the context of world mysticism, making this an appealing book for people of all faiths and philosophies. For students of philosophy and of Indian spirituality, and readers of wisdom literature of all backgrounds, the timeless lesson of the ''Katha'' is how to live to the fullest of human capacity. This is what the King of Death teaches Nachiketa, and this is what gives this book such importance for our world today.