Jiva
जीव jīvaThe individual living self, the embodied soul that experiences and acts. The schools of Vedanta differ on its status: for Advaita it is finally identical with Brahman, for Vishishtadvaita it is a real part and body of the Lord, for Dvaita it is eternally distinct from and dependent on him.
Where this term appears
- Tat tvam asi: three readings Philosophy
Tat tvam asi, usually rendered "that thou art," is a single sentence from the Chandogya Upanishad (6.8.7) that became the proving ground for the three great schools…
- What is Advaita Vedanta? Philosophy
…e tradition's own reading, the Bhamati side holds that the individual jiva , the embodied soul, is the locus of the ignorance, while the Vivarana side holds that Brahman itself is the locus and object of the ig…
- Who Was Adi Shankara? Philosophy
Adi Shankara (most likely c. 700-750 CE; traditionally 788-820) was the philosopher who gave Advaita Vedanta, non-dualism, its definitive systematic form. He wrote…
- Bhuta Shuddhi: The Rite That Burns the Body to Ash Lineages
… mantras and presence onto it, limb by limb, and in the Shakta form a jiva-nyasa that infuses the new body with the very life of the Goddess, sealing the identity of worshipper and worshipped.
- Ishvara, Bhagavan and Brahman: How Hinduism Conceives God Essentials
Reading the very same verse, Bhagavata 1.2.11, the commentator Jiva Goswami of the sixteenth-century Krishna tradition finds in it a graded ascent that ends the other way up.
- The Antahkarana: The Fourfold Inner Instrument Essentials
The living, knowing, feeling person you take yourself to be, the jiva , is on this analysis precisely the atman's light caught in the mirror of the inner instrument, a reflection mistaking itself for a source.
- The Kularnava Tantra: The Kaula Path and the True Guru Lineages
…s, all-knowing source without beginning or end, and every soul, every jiva caught in the turning of birth and death, is a portion of that one reality, "like sparks of the fire." Liberation, in this vision, is n…
- What are Mudras? Lineages
The joined thumb and finger are read as the meeting of the individual self and the absolute, the small jiva touching the great Brahman .