⁂ Concepts · Sacred · No. 185
Brahman

One sentence, three grammars, three religions.

Brahman

The ultimate reality underlying everything - and, on the strongest reading, not different from the self.

Theme
Cosmos, the sacred and ultimate reality
Tradition
Indian
Term
ब्रह्मन् · brahman
Term fixed
c. 800

In plain terms

Brahman is what everything ultimately is. That much every Vedānta school accepts, and past it they part completely.

For Advaita, Brahman is without qualities - not because it lacks them but because any quality would be a limit, and the ultimate cannot be bounded. There is no second thing, so the world's apparent multiplicity is a misapprehension, and the self is Brahman without remainder.

For Viśiṣṭādvaita, Brahman is a personal God with the world and selves as his body - real, distinct, and utterly dependent. For Dvaita the difference between God, selves and world is permanent.

Same word, same texts, three incompatible metaphysics, and eight hundred years of extremely close argument about which reading the sentences will bear.

As a philosopher would put it

The Upaniṣadic identification of ātman and Brahman is the source claim, and the Brahma Sūtras attempt to systematise scattered statements - which is why the three great commentaries on that text are where Vedānta happens.

Śaṅkara's Advaita distinguishes nirguṇa Brahman, without qualities, from saguṇa Brahman, with qualities, treating the second as a lower-level truth adequate for devotion and superseded by knowledge. The world is neither real nor unreal but mithyā, and māyā accounts for its appearance.

Rāmānuja's objection is that a Brahman without qualities cannot be known, described or worshipped, and that scripture's descriptive statements must be taken seriously. His Brahman has all auspicious qualities, with selves and matter as his body.

Madhva's Dvaita makes the difference between God and everything else permanent and fivefold. The standard formula sat-cit-ānanda - being, consciousness, bliss - is common ground and is read differently by each.

Where you meet it

The three schools are not different traditions. They are three commentaries on one short text, and the disagreement is conducted sentence by sentence.

The Brahma Sūtras are around 555 aphorisms, many of them a few words long and unintelligible without a commentary - which is why the commentary is the philosophy. Śaṅkara wrote his around 800, Rāmānuja his in the twelfth century, Madhva his in the thirteenth, and each takes the same aphorisms in order and reads them into a different metaphysics.

The most famous single case is the Chāndogya's tat tvam asi, that thou art. Śaṅkara reads it as strict identity. Rāmānuja reads it as predicating of the self a dependence on Brahman, as a body is of its owner. Madhva reads it, on a different word division, as meaning that thou art not that.

One sentence, three grammars, three religions.

What is actually disputed

Whether Brahman has qualities.

Advaita's nirguṇa Brahman secures ultimacy - nothing determinate can be ultimate, since determination is limitation - and pays for it in describability: a reality about which nothing can be truly said sits uncomfortably with scripture's many descriptions, and with the devotional life the tradition also maintains.

Rāmānuja's qualified Brahman is knowable, lovable and describable, and faces the reverse charge: a Brahman with qualities is a being among beings in some respect, and the ultimacy is compromised.

The Buddhist objection cuts under both. If nothing has intrinsic nature, then an ultimate ground is exactly the reification the analysis of emptiness removes, and Śaṅkara was accused by his own tradition of being a crypto-Buddhist for how close his account came. Whether Advaita's non-dual absolute and Mādhyamika emptiness are rivals or the same position stated oppositely has been argued for a millennium.

Commonly confused with

  • God c. 1270 Advaita's Brahman is impersonal and without qualities. Rāmānuja's is closer to theism, and treating the word as a synonym for God assumes one school's reading.
  • the universe Brahman is what the universe ultimately is, on these accounts, not the collection of things in it.

Defined against

  • Śūnyatā An ultimate ground and the absence of any intrinsic nature are the two great Indian answers, and each tradition regards the other as the error

Philosophers

  • Shankara Brahman without qualities, identical with the self
  • Ramanujacharya Brahman with qualities, selves and world as his body
  • Yajnavalkya The Upaniṣadic sources of the identification
  • Nagarjuna The Buddhist argument against any ultimate ground
  • Kapila The dualist alternative, with no God required

Works

Schools

Related concepts

Ātman c. 700 BC · Mokṣa c. 800 · Māyā c. 800 · God c. 1270 · The sacred c. 400

The word in the Vedas names the power of sacred utterance and expands to mean the ground of everything; the Vedānta schools agree that Brahman is ultimate and disagree fundamentally about its nature and its relation to selves and world.