William Dwight Whitney was an editor on Webster's Dictionary and a founding member of the American Philological Association. Principally a scholar of Sanskrit, he was a known expert on comparative linguistics. This paper examines various translation of the Upanishads, the sacred Vedic literature of India. As with the Hebrew Bible, the text comes with layers of commentary, rendering translation a complicated task where the translation of the original must mesh with the commentary, though the commentary itself may err in its interpretation. This paper is a good introduction to these works and their nature as well as a nuanced analysis of the translations of this important work of sacred literature.