Advaita Vedanta
from 700
There is only one reality without a second, you are not other than it, and the world of separate things is a misreading rather than a creation.
- Active
- from 700
- Where
- South India, and then across the subcontinent
- Also
- अद्वैत वेदान्त
- Status
- living
- Tradition
- Indian
The claim
Brahman alone is real. The self is not a part of it, or a spark from it, or united with it — it is not other than it, and the difference we perceive rests on ignorance rather than on anything out there.
What it held
Advaita's problem is set by its scriptures rather than chosen freely: the Upanishads say both that Brahman is the sole reality and that the world exists and matters. Shankara's solution is to distinguish two levels of truth. At the everyday level the world is perfectly real, causation holds, and ethics binds. At the highest level there is only Brahman, and the appearance of multiplicity is superimposition — adhyasa — the same error as seeing a snake where there is a rope.
This is not idealism in the European sense, and it is not a claim that the world is a hallucination. The rope is genuinely there; the snake is a misreading of it. Maya names the misreading rather than the thing. Liberation is therefore not an achievement or a journey but a recognition, and it can happen in this life. The liberated person continues to eat, teach and grow old, because the body's momentum outlasts the ignorance that started it.
The self it identifies with Brahman is not the personality. It is awareness itself, the witness that is presupposed by every experience and is never an object of any.
How it argued
Commentary. Shankara argues almost entirely through close reading of the Upanishads, the Bhagavad Gita and the Brahma Sutras, plus a distinctive use of analysis of ordinary error — dreaming, mistaking a rope, mistaking mother-of-pearl for silver — to show that misperception needs a real substrate.
What it was arguing against
Samkhya's two eternal principles, Buddhist momentariness and the denial of an abiding self, Nyaya realism about universals and God, and Mimamsa's claim that ritual action rather than knowledge is what liberates.
Where it disagreed with itself
The locus of ignorance — whose ignorance is it, if there is only Brahman? The Bhamati and Vivarana lines split over this and never reconciled. Also whether liberation while living is genuinely possible, and how far the world can be called unreal without absurdity.
Common misconceptions
That it teaches the world is an illusion, in the sense of not being there. Shankara's claim is about status rather than existence. And that Advaita is quietist: Shankara founded monasteries, argued publicly across India and wrote devotional hymns.
How it began
Gaudapada's verses on the Mandukya Upanishad give the position in outline in the seventh century. Shankara, in the eighth, turns it into a system through commentaries and a programme of debate, allegedly dying at thirty-two.
What became of it
It became the most prominent Vedanta, and its critics defined themselves against it — Ramanuja's qualified non-dualism and Madhva's dualism are both replies. The monastic orders Shankara founded are still functioning.
Lasting influence
Almost everything later in Indian philosophy answers it. Through Vivekananda and the nineteenth-century reformers it became, for many outside India, what Hinduism is — which flatters one school at the expense of several others.
Why it still matters
It is the most rigorous non-dualism anyone has produced, and contemporary philosophy of mind returns to its questions about whether awareness can be an object to itself.
Put another way
A rope on a dark path taken for a snake. Nothing needs to be added or removed for the fear to end — only seeing what is there.
Where to start
Upadeshasahasri. It is Shankara teaching rather than Shankara arguing, and the difference is considerable.
The surprising bit
Shankara's opponents accused him of being a crypto-Buddhist, because his teacher's teacher's position looked so close to Madhyamaka. The charge stuck hard enough that later Advaitins spent centuries answering it.
In their own words
Brahman is real, the world is appearance, the self is not other than Brahman.
That thou art.
Connections
- Answers
- Purva Mimamsa
- Opposed by
- Madhyamaka Buddhism, Vishishtadvaita Vedanta, Dvaita Vedanta
The verdict
The most demanding thing Indian philosophy asks of a reader, and the one most often reduced to a slogan.