- Length
- 900 pagesThibaut's English, Sacred Books of the East vols 34 and 38, 1890-96
- Reading
- HardPresupposes texts it does not explain; a guide helps
- Availability
- In printA current standard edition is available
Brahmasutra Bhasya
The most influential work of Indian philosophy after the scriptures themselves, and the one that made non-dualism the default meaning of Vedanta. Its central claim is that the difference between you and everything else is a mistake of the same kind as seeing a snake where there is a rope - not a fantasy, but not what is there.
- Date
- c. 720-750
- Author
- Shankara
- Region
- Southern India; the Ganges plain
- Language
- Sanskrit
- 1890 English, George Thibaut Sacred Books of the East 34 and 38; public domain and still standard Attested
- 1965 English, Swami Gambhirananda Complete; in copyright Attested
Where it stands in the argument
- Position
- Exchange — Both: answers an earlier work and drew a later one
- Form
- Commentary
- 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
- Years to the reply
- 375 years
The dominant interpretation of Vedanta for twelve centuries, and the version of Indian philosophy that reached the West first and most completely.
What the book says
A commentary on the Brahma Sutras that is in practice an independent philosophical treatise, and the founding statement of non-dualist Vedanta. It opens before the commentary proper with a preamble that is the most famous thing Shankara wrote: we constantly confuse what we are with what we are not, superimposing the qualities of the body and the mind on the self and the self's awareness on them, in the way a rope in dim light is taken for a snake. Everything that follows depends on that. Brahman alone is real; the self within a person is not similar to brahman but identical with it; and the world of separate things, while not a hallucination, is not ultimately real either, being brahman misperceived. Shankara then works through all five hundred and fifty-five sutras showing that the Upanishads teach this and nothing else, and devotes the second chapter to demolishing the rivals - Samkhya at greatest length, then the atomists, then the Buddhists, whose various schools he takes apart in turn and whose momentariness he argues cannot account for memory. Liberation is not something produced or achieved: it is the removal of an error, and what remains was never bound.
What it argues
That there is one reality without a second, that the individual self is that reality, and that the world's appearance of plurality rests on a beginningless error. The error is not a psychological lapse but a structural condition: we cannot help superimposing subject on object and object on subject, and every ordinary transaction depends on doing so. Liberation therefore requires no action, since action produces results and what is sought was never absent; it requires only knowledge that removes the misidentification. The world is given a middle status - not real like brahman, not unreal like a square circle - which is the doctrine that made the system defensible and the doctrine its opponents attacked hardest.
What it answered
Samkhya Karika c. 350-450Isvarakrsna
Samkhya above all, and Buddhism at length. The Samkhya dispute is the one the tradition calls the contest with the chief wrestler: too much shared ground to leave standing. Against the Buddhists, Shankara argues that momentariness makes memory and recognition impossible, that an idealism without external objects cannot explain why experience has the order it has, and that a doctrine of universal emptiness cannot be stated without being abandoned. He was answering opponents who were still institutionally present; within a few centuries they would not be.
What answered it
Sri Bhasya c. 1100-1120Ramanuja
Ramanuja, three and a half centuries later, in a commentary on the same sutras that begins by taking apart the doctrine of ignorance. Where is this ignorance located - in brahman, which is pure knowledge, or in the individual self, which on Shankara's account is brahman? What is its status, since it is said to be neither real nor unreal? Madhva answered later still with an outright dualism. The three commentaries are the three great positions of Vedanta and all of them are readings of the same five hundred and fifty-five aphorisms.
How it argues
By construing sutras, and by anticipating objections at every step. The form is exegetical - each aphorism is stated, a prima facie reading is given, objections are raised, and the correct reading established - and the objections are put with enough force that opponents' positions survive in this text better than in some of their own. Shankara also argues at two levels, distinguishing what is true from the standpoint of ordinary transactions from what is true absolutely, and that distinction does an enormous amount of work: it lets him affirm the world for practical purposes while denying it ultimately.
The moment
Eighth-century India, with Buddhism still a major intellectual force and the Vedantic tradition needing a philosophical statement of the first rank. Shankara is traditionally said to have travelled the subcontinent debating, to have founded monastic centres at its four corners, and to have died at thirty-two. Almost all of that comes from hagiographies written centuries later and none of it can be verified, but the institutional network attributed to him is real and still functioning.
How it travelled
Continuously in India, and to the West as the representative Indian philosophy. Thibaut's translation of 1890 put it into English complete, and the nineteenth- and twentieth-century Western picture of Indian thought - as fundamentally monistic, world-denying and mystical - was formed substantially from this one work. That picture is now regarded as a distortion produced by encountering one school first, and the correction has been a major project of recent scholarship.
The strongest objection
Ramanuja's, and it is the sharpest objection in Indian philosophy. Ignorance is doing all the work in this system and it has nowhere to live. It cannot belong to brahman, which is by definition undivided awareness; it cannot belong to the individual self, since that self is brahman and the individuality is what ignorance was supposed to explain. Nor can its status be described: called neither real nor unreal, it is exempted from the very categories the system uses to demote the world. Shankara's defenders answer that ignorance is precisely what cannot be accommodated within the categories it generates, which is either the deepest point in the system or the place where it declines to be examined.
Why read it
The preamble on superimposition, which is a few pages, states the whole position and is one of the most striking pieces of philosophical writing anywhere. Beyond that, read the second chapter for the refutations, which are the best surviving statements of several opposing systems. The full commentary is for specialists.
- First printed
- 1818
- First in English
- 1890
- Digitised
- Yes
The commentary is longer than the text it comments on by a factor of many hundreds, and carries its own subcommentaries, of which Vacaspati Misra's and Padmapada's founded rival lines of interpretation within non-dualism.
Thibaut's 1890-96 English is public domain and remains the standard complete version. Gambhirananda's is in copyright.
Where it stands
Live and institutionally dominant. Non-dualist Vedanta is taught in monastic centres attributed to Shankara, is the framework most modern Hindu philosophical writing assumes, and remains the position other Vedanta schools define themselves against.
On quoting this book
The Sanskrit is public domain and Thibaut's English is too, but its Victorian rendering of the technical vocabulary is now considered misleading. Nothing is quoted.
Contested
Which works are genuinely Shankara's is a large problem; hundreds are attributed and few are secure. His dates have moved earlier as scholarship has improved. The charge that his position is Buddhism in Vedantic dress was made in his own tradition and has never entirely gone away, and the relation between his doctrine of two levels of truth and the Madhyamaka two truths is genuinely close. Whether Badarayana taught what Shankara says he taught is doubted by most modern scholars. And the hagiographical biography - the travels, the debates, the four monasteries, the death at thirty-two - is not history.