- Length
- 120 pagesThe sutras alone, in Thibaut's translation with Shankara's commentary, 1890
- Reading
- SpecialistWritten for a school and normally read with a commentary
- Availability
- In printA current standard edition is available
Brahma Sutras
Five hundred and fifty-five aphorisms written to make the Upanishads say one thing, which instead became the ground on which several schools each proved they said something different. Almost nothing in Indian philosophy is more consequential and almost nothing is less readable on its own.
- Date
- c. 200-450
- Attributed to
- Badarayana
- Region
- India
- Language
- Sanskrit
- 1890 English, George Thibaut With Shankara's commentary; public domain Attested
- 1904 English, George Thibaut With Ramanuja's commentary; public domain Attested
Where it stands in the argument
- Position
- Exchange — Both: answers an earlier work and drew a later one
- Form
- Sutra
- Method
- Sutra and commentary — A compressed root text carried by its commentary
- Transmission
- Continuous — Copied and read without a break in its own language
- Standing
- Live — Still argued in current philosophical work
One of the three foundational texts of Vedanta, and the one that made a school possible by turning a body of scripture into a set of arguable positions.
What the book says
Five hundred and fifty-five aphorisms, most of them two or three words long, arbitrating between passages of the Upanishads that appear to contradict each other. It opens by announcing that now the enquiry into brahman begins, defines brahman as that from which everything proceeds, and states that it is known through scripture rather than through reasoning alone. Then it works: taking disputed Upanishadic passages one after another and deciding what each refers to. Is the golden person in the sun brahman or an individual soul? Is the eater of everything in one passage death, or fire, or the supreme? Does the light spoken of in another mean physical light or something else? The second chapter turns outward and refutes the rival systems - Samkhya first and at greatest length, then the atomists, then the Buddhists in several varieties, then the Jains - each in a handful of sutras. The third describes the means to knowledge and the discipline of the seeker. The fourth describes what liberation is and what happens to the liberated. The aphorisms are so compressed that they are effectively unreadable alone: a sutra of three words can be construed in ways that yield opposite doctrines, which is exactly what happened.
What it argues
That the Upanishads are consistent, that they teach a single ultimate reality from which everything proceeds, and that this reality is knowable through revealed text rather than by unaided reasoning. The second claim is the one that does the work: philosophy here is exegesis, and the correct method is to establish what scripture means rather than to argue independently to a conclusion. The refutations of the rival systems in the second chapter are correspondingly brisk, since their fatal defect is not that their arguments fail but that they proceed without the authority the sutras take to be indispensable.
What it answered
The Principal Upanishads c. 700-300 BCvarious
The Upanishads' own disagreements. Different conversations locate the ultimate differently, describe it in incompatible terms, and give different accounts of what happens after death. A tradition that treats those texts as revealed cannot simply prefer one; it has to show that the conflicts are apparent. The sutras are that demonstration, conducted passage by passage, and the effect was to convert a body of literature into a system that could be defended and attacked.
What answered it
Brahmasutra Bhasya c. 720-750Shankara
Shankara first, and then everybody. Because the sutras are so terse, disagreement about Vedanta took the form of rival commentaries on the same words rather than rival treatises - Shankara reading them as teaching that reality is undivided and the world's plurality unreal, Ramanuja as teaching that the ultimate is one but genuinely qualified by souls and matter, Madhva as teaching outright difference, and several others besides. Each had to show that his reading fitted every one of the five hundred and fifty-five, which is a discipline of a peculiar and demanding kind.
How it argues
By citation and construal, in the most extreme sutra form in Indian literature. A great many of the aphorisms are two words. The argument is carried entirely by which Upanishadic passage the sutra is taken to be discussing and what position it is taken to be adopting, and both are supplied by the commentator. This is the clearest case in the section of a text whose meaning is a function of its interpreter, and it is not an accident of transmission but a property of the form.
The moment
Composed when Buddhism and Samkhya were the dominant intellectual forces and the Vedic tradition needed a philosophical statement it could argue with rather than merely recite. The organisation of the text - definition, then reconciliation, then refutation of rivals, then practice, then liberation - is the shape of a school being founded.
How it travelled
Never out of use and never out of dispute. The sutras have been memorised, recited and commented on continuously for something like fifteen centuries. European scholarship met them through Thibaut's translations at the end of the nineteenth century, which printed the sutras with Shankara's and then Ramanuja's commentaries side by side and made the disagreement visible in English for the first time.
The strongest objection
That a text this compressed cannot settle anything, and that treating it as authoritative simply relocates the disagreement. If three-word aphorisms can be construed to teach non-dualism, qualified non-dualism and dualism with equal textual plausibility, then the sutras are not arbitrating between the Upanishads' conflicts but reproducing them at one remove. The tradition's answer is that a commentary is tested by whether it can handle the whole text without strain, which is a real constraint - but it is a constraint that several incompatible readings have satisfied.
Why read it
Not on its own, ever. Read it as Thibaut printed it, with a commentary running alongside, and read the same stretch in two commentaries if possible: nothing shows more clearly how much interpretation a philosophical text can carry, or how much of Indian philosophy consists of arguing over what a few words mean.
- First printed
- 1818
- First in English
- 1890
- Digitised
- Yes
The sutras are never printed alone in practice. At least a dozen major commentaries exist, and the differences between them are the history of Vedanta.
Thibaut's translations of 1890 and 1904, with Shankara's and Ramanuja's commentaries respectively, are public domain and remain in use. Later versions are in copyright.
Where it stands
Live. Vedanta remains the dominant strand of Hindu philosophy, its schools are institutionally intact, and the commentarial argument continues in Sanskrit as well as in modern scholarship.
On quoting this book
The Sanskrit is public domain and Thibaut's English is too, but a sutra of three words quoted without a commentary conveys nothing. Nothing is quoted.
Contested
The date and the author are both unknown, and the internal evidence suggests composition over time rather than at once. Which Upanishadic passage a given sutra addresses is disputed in hundreds of cases. Whether Badarayana's own position was closer to Shankara's non-dualism or to Ramanuja's qualified version is argued by modern scholars, with a majority now inclined to think it was neither, and that the sutras are less systematic than any of the commentators needed them to be. The traditional identification of the author with Vyasa is not accepted historically.