Vedanta

This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.

The Upanishads are not a single, systematic text. They are a collection of philosophical dialogues and speculations, composed by different hands over centuries, and they say different, sometimes conflicting things about the relationship between Brahman, the ultimate reality, and the individual self. Shankara's achievement, working in the eighth century CE, was not to invent a new doctrine so much as to read the whole collection through one governing claim, tat tvam asi, that thou art, the Upanishadic formula he took as declaring the individual self, atman, strictly identical with Brahman rather than merely related to or derived from it. Everything else in his system follows from taking that identity literally. If atman and Brahman are truly one, then the ordinary experience of being a separate self, distinct from other selves and from the world, has to be explained away rather than simply accepted, and Shankara's explanation is maya, a term usually translated as illusion but closer in his own usage to superimposition, the mistaken layering of multiplicity and difference onto a reality that is actually undivided, the way a coiled rope glimpsed in dim light is mistaken for a snake. The world of ordinary experience is not, on this reading, simply unreal in the way a dream is unreal; it has a provisional, lower-order reality, real enough to act in and suffer in, but not real in the way Brahman alone is real. Liberation, moksha, is therefore not something achieved by ritual or effort in the ordinary sense, since there is no actual separate self to be liberated, it is achieved by a kind of knowledge, recognizing what was already true, that the self one takes oneself to be was never really separate from Brahman at all. This is why Shankara insisted commentary, careful argued interpretation of the triple canon, was itself the philosophical method: the truth was already stated in the texts, and philosophy's job was to read it correctly rather than to discover it independently.

This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.

Every school of Vedanta is required to write a commentary, a bhashya, on the same triple canon, the Upanishads, the Brahma Sutras and the Bhagavad Gita, which raises an obvious question: how did three philosophers reading the same texts, with the same reverence for the same authority, arrive at three incompatible metaphysics. The answer lies less in what each read than in what each was determined to preserve. Shankara, writing in the eighth century, was committed above all to the Upanishads' declarations of identity, tat tvam asi, that thou art, and built Advaita Vedanta's strict nondualism to honor them, treating the texts' language of difference, a devotee worshipping a personal God, a self distinct from the world, as a lower, provisional level of truth beneath the ultimate one. Ramanuja, three centuries later, thought this cost too much: a religious tradition built around loving devotion to a personal God, bhakti, cannot survive a doctrine that ultimately dissolves both the devotee and God into an undifferentiated absolute. His Vishishtadvaita, qualified nondualism, kept Brahman as the one ultimate reality but treated individual selves and the material world as real, eternal modes or attributes of Brahman rather than illusory appearances, real the way a body is really part of a person without being identical to the whole person. Madhva, in the thirteenth century, went further still, arguing that even qualified identity conceded too much to nondualism, and that the texts, read without Shankara's or Ramanuja's prior commitments, actually teach five eternal, irreducible differences, between the self and God, between different selves, between self and matter, between God and matter, and between different material things. His Dvaita Vedanta is frankly dualist, and frankly devotional, since a God genuinely distinct from the worshipper is a God who can genuinely be loved and served rather than ultimately identical with the one doing the loving. The dispute never resolved, because it was never only textual, each commentator brought a different judgment about what a coherent religious and philosophical life required the texts to mean, and Vedanta as a whole is best understood not as one doctrine but as the standing argument between these three answers.