[1][9][5] In the Telugu language anthology of 108 Upanishads of the Muktika canon, narrated by Rama to Hanuman, it is listed at number 36.

[12] This interest began with Brian Houghton Hodgson – a colonial official based in Nepal who was loaned a Sanskrit text titled Vajra Suchi in 1829, by a Buddhist friend of his, whose contents turned out to be similar to the vajrasūchi Upanishad.

The details of the caste system, its antiquity and "shrewd and argumentative attack" by a Buddhist, in the words of Hodgson, gained wide interest among 19th-century scholars.

[12] The scholarship that followed, surmised that "Ashu Ghosa" is possibly the famous Buddhist scholar Asvaghosa, who lived around the 2nd century CE.

Mariola Offredi – a professor of literature at the University of Venice, states that among all pre-colonial Sanskrit texts, the vajrasūchi Upanishad is a "sustained philosophical attack against the division of human beings into four social classes determined by birth".

[4] While many other Hindu texts such as Bhagavad Gita and Puranas question and critique varna and social divisions, adds Offredi, these discussions are at their thematic margins; only in vajrasūchi Upanishad do we find the questioning and philosophical rejection of varna to be the central message.

[19] The Vajrasuchi was studied and referred to by social reformers in the 19th century, states Rosalind O'Hanlon, to assert that "the whole of human kind is of one caste", that it is character not birth that distinguishes people.