Abstract
Advaita Vedanta, the philosophy of non-duality, is the
school of Vedantic thought most widely known outside India and the one that Adi
Shankaracharya systematised into its most rigorous and influential form in the
eighth century CE. Its central thesis is stated with a comprehensiveness that
has no parallel in Western philosophy: Brahman is the only reality; the world
of multiple, distinct, apparently separate things and persons is an appearance
in Brahman produced by the power of maya, which is neither real in the absolute
sense nor simply unreal; and the liberation that the tradition offers is the
direct recognition of one's own identity as Brahman, the recognition that what
one fundamentally is was never separate from the ultimate reality. This article
explores the Advaita Vedanta system in depth: the nature of Brahman as pure
being-consciousness-bliss, the theory of maya and its two functions, the
four-fold practice that Shankaracharya prescribes, the method of neti neti, and
the specific quality of the liberation the system describes.
Keywords: Advaita Vedanta, Brahman, maya, Adi
Shankaracharya, non-duality, Atman, liberation, viveka, vairagya, mumukshutva,
neti neti, Sanatana Dharma
Introduction
There is a statement in the tradition of Advaita
Vedanta that sounds, the first time one hears it, like either the deepest truth
or a category error: you are Brahman. Not you will become Brahman. Not you are
a part of Brahman. Not you are on the path to Brahman. You are, right now,
already, what Brahman is. The entire elaborate philosophical apparatus of
Advaita Vedanta, with its analysis of maya, its discussion of the three states
of consciousness, its neti neti method of negation, its careful distinctions
between different levels of reality, exists for a single purpose: to remove the
obstacles to the recognition of what is already and always the case.
This starting point is as radical as philosophy gets.
Most philosophical traditions, including other schools of Vedanta, begin from
the obvious fact of plurality and try to understand how things that appear
different might be related or ultimately unified. Advaita begins from the unity
and tries to understand how the appearance of plurality arises. The method is
different, the conclusions are different, and the quality of what is offered as
liberation is different. But the starting point, the insistence that the
reality is already one and that the project is recognition rather than
achievement, is what gives Advaita its distinctive character and its enormous
influence.
Brahman: Being, Consciousness,
Bliss
The Advaita understanding of Brahman is not the
understanding of a personal God who exists as the greatest of all beings.
Brahman in Advaita is the only reality: not a thing among things, not a being
among beings, but the ground of all being, the substratum in which all apparent
plurality appears and of which all apparent multiplicity is a modification.
Brahman is described as Satchidananda: Sat, pure being or existence; Chit, pure
consciousness or awareness; Ananda, pure bliss or fullness.
These three are not properties that Brahman has. They
are what Brahman is. Pure being means that Brahman simply is, without
qualification, without limitation, without the possibility of not being. Pure
consciousness means that awareness is not a feature of something that is also
aware but the very nature of what Brahman is. Pure bliss means that Brahman's
nature is fullness, completeness, the absence of any lack that desire and
suffering arise to fill. And the three are not three separate things but three
ways of pointing at the same undivided reality.
ब्रह्म सत्यं
जगन्मिथ्या जीवो
ब्रह्मैव नापरः।
Brahma satyam jagan mithya jivo
brahmaiva napara.
(Brahman is real; the world is an
appearance; the individual self is Brahman alone, not otherwise.)
Vivekachudamani, Verse 20 (Adi
Shankaracharya)
Brahma satyam: Brahman is real, in the absolute sense,
meaning it does not depend on anything else for its existence and cannot be negated.
Jagan mithya: the world is mithya, not simply false or unreal, but not real in
the absolute sense either. Mithya is a technical term in Advaita meaning that
which appears real but is ultimately dependent on a more fundamental reality
for its appearance. The world is not nothing. It appears. But what appears is
Brahman, appearing through the power of maya as the world of multiplicity. Jivo
brahmaiva napara: the individual self, the jiva, is Brahman alone, not
something other. This is the mahavakya, the great saying, that the entire
Advaita philosophical apparatus exists to make recognisable as one's own living
reality.
Maya: Neither Real Nor Unreal
The concept of maya is the most discussed and most
misunderstood element of the Advaita system. Maya is often glossed as illusion,
which suggests that the world is simply false, that what we perceive does not
exist at all, that the world is like a hallucination or a dream. This is not
the Advaita position. The world is not unreal in the sense of being a
hallucination. The world appears, and its appearance is not to be dismissed.
What is not real in the absolute sense is the world's apparent independence, its
apparent status as a multiplicity of genuinely separate things and persons that
exist in their own right apart from Brahman.
Maya operates through two functions: avarana-shakti,
the power of concealment, which conceals the true nature of Brahman and makes
it appear as if Brahman is not the ground of all appearance; and
viksepa-shakti, the power of projection, which projects the appearance of the
world of multiplicity onto the ground of Brahman. These two together produce
the experience of ordinary consciousness: the awareness that there is a world
of many things and a self that is one of those things, distinct from the world
and from other selves. This experience is neither real nor simply unreal: it is
empirically valid, meaning it is how things appear and how they must be treated
in ordinary life; but it is not ultimately real, meaning its apparent structure
of multiplicity and separateness does not correspond to the nature of reality
as Brahman knows itself.
यत्र यत्र मनो
याति तत्र
तत्र समाधयः।
मनसो निग्रहायत्नः
प्रत्याहारः स
उच्यते॥ ब्रह्मैवेदं
विश्वमिदं वरिष्ठं
ब्रह्मैव जन्मस्थितिसंयमो
हि।
Brahmaivedam vishvam idam
varishtham brahmaiva janma-sthiti-samyamo hi.
(This entire world is indeed
Brahman, the highest. Brahman indeed is its origin, sustenance, and
dissolution.)
Mundaka Upanishad, 2.2.11
Brahmaivedam vishvam: this world is Brahman. The
Advaita reading of this declaration is precise: the world that appears is
Brahman, not a different reality alongside Brahman. The world's origin,
sustenance, and dissolution are all Brahman, not events in a reality separate
from Brahman. This is the Upanishadic basis for the Advaita position, and
Shankaracharya's commentary tradition is devoted to showing that this is the
consistent meaning of the Upanishads throughout: not that the world and Brahman
are two things that are related, but that the world is Brahman appearing as
what it appears to be, and that the recognition of this identity is the
liberation the tradition offers.
The Method: Viveka, Vairagya, and
Neti Neti
Advaita Vedanta is not merely a philosophical position
to be intellectually understood. It is a path of transformation that the
tradition describes through a specific set of qualifications, practices, and
methods. The four qualifications, viveka, vairagya, the six inner disciplines,
and mumukshutva, prepare the mind for the recognition that the philosophical
path points toward. The method of neti neti, not this not this, is the specific
tool by which this preparation leads to recognition.
Neti neti is systematic negation: the identification
of everything that can be negated as the self, until what cannot be negated is
what remains. The body is not the self: one observes the body, so one cannot be
the body. The mind is not the self: one observes the mind's movements, so one
cannot be the mind. Even the sense of being a separate person, the ahamkara, is
not the self: it arises and subsides and can be observed. What remains when
everything that can be negated has been negated is the pure witnessing
awareness, the Purusha in Sankhya language, the Atman in Vedantic language,
which is identical with Brahman.
Conclusion
Advaita Vedanta's contribution to the tradition of Sanatana
Dharma is the most comprehensive and the most philosophically rigorous
expression of the non-dual insight that runs through the Upanishads from their
earliest layers. What Shankaracharya achieved is not an imposition of
non-duality on a tradition that taught something else. He showed, through
patient and brilliant exegesis of the Upanishadic texts, the Brahma Sutras, and
the Bhagavad Gita, that non-duality is the consistent and central teaching of
all three together, and he built around this insight a philosophical system so
rigorous and so complete that it has remained the dominant influence on the
tradition's philosophical self-understanding ever since.
The recognition that the tradition offers through
Advaita is not the achievement of something new. It is the recognition of what
was always already the case, the recognition that the seeker was always already
what was being sought. This is the most liberating and the most demanding thing
that any philosophical tradition has ever offered: the recognition that what
you most fundamentally are was never absent, never bound, never in need of
liberation, and that the entire path of practice and enquiry exists not to
produce this recognition but to remove the obstacles to a recognition that is
already waiting, always, in the silence behind the mind's noise.
अहं ब्रह्मास्मि।
Aham brahmasmi.
(I am Brahman.)
Brihadaranyaka Upanishad, 1.4.10
Three words in Sanskrit. The entire philosophy of
Advaita Vedanta is the unpacking of these three words until they are not merely
understood but lived. Aham: I. Brahma: Brahman, the ultimate reality. Asmi: am.
Not was or will be. Am. Present tense, immediate, not deferred. The recognition
the tradition points toward is not a future achievement. It is the recognition
of what is already and always the case, available in this moment, waiting for
the obstacles that conceal it to be seen through and released.
References and Suggested Reading
Adi Shankaracharya, Vivekachudamani, Brahmasutra
Bhashya, Bhagavad Gita Bhashya
Brihadaranyaka Upanishad, Chandogya Upanishad, Mundaka
Upanishad
S. Radhakrishnan, Indian Philosophy, Volume 2 (1927)
Swami Vivekananda, Jnana Yoga (1896)
Ramana Maharshi, Who Am I? (Nan Yar)
T.M.P. Mahadevan, Ramana Maharshi and His Philosophy
of Existence (1949)
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