What is Vedanta?

Of the six darshanas, one came to overshadow all the rest, so completely that for most of the modern world “Hindu philosophy” simply means this school. It is Vedanta, and its name declares its ambition. Vedanta means the end of the Veda: the Upanishads that close the Vedic corpus, and, beyond that, the Veda’s final purpose and crown. Where its sister school Mimamsa studies the Veda’s commands to action, Vedanta studies its disclosures of reality, and asks the largest question the tradition knows how to ask.

But the most striking thing about Vedanta is not its ambition. It is a peculiarity of structure that has no real parallel among the world’s philosophies. Vedanta is not one system. It is a family of systems — non-dualist, qualified non-dualist, dualist, and several more — that are flatly opposed on the question they all care about most, and yet every one of them is built as a line-by-line commentary on the same three texts. They do not argue from rival scriptures. They argue over a shared one. To understand Vedanta is to understand how a single canon could be read to mean a soul that is God, a soul that is a real part of God, and a soul eternally and utterly other than God — and how each reading could claim, with a straight face and formidable learning, to be the plain sense of the words.

The threefold foundation

Vedanta is unusual among the schools in resting on three root texts rather than one, together called the prasthana-traya, the three points of departure. The first is the Upanishads, the revealed scripture, shruti, “that which is heard” — the seers’ own record of the ultimate. This is the shruti-prasthana, the revealed starting point. The second is the Brahma Sutra of Badarayana, four chapters of aphorisms so compressed they are almost unusable without a commentary, which gather the scattered teachings of the Upanishads into a reasoned order; this is the nyaya-prasthana, the starting point in reasoning. The third is the Bhagavad Gita, the remembered teaching, smriti — scripture made portable and practical, the smriti-prasthana.

The three matter enormously to what follows, because they are the rules of the game. To found a school of Vedanta, a teacher had to write a bhashya, a commentary, on all three, and show that they spoke, consistently, for his reading. This is the fact that makes Vedanta what it is. It is why the great rival schools all quote the same verses; why the founders are known collectively as the bhashyakaras, the commentators; and why the history of Vedanta is a history of readings rather than a history of new revelations. Every major sub-school builds its entire metaphysics as a running commentary on this one canon of three, and yet they arrive at conclusions that cannot all be true together. Vedanta, in the end, is less a single doctrine than a centuries-long argument conducted over a shared body of texts. The commonality is not incidental to the contest. The commonality is the whole point of it.

The inquiry into Brahman

The Brahma Sutra opens with a turn that defines the school. Its first aphorism deliberately echoes the opening of Mimamsa and then moves past it. In George Thibaut’s public-domain translation for the Sacred Books of the East, still the standard English rendering of the sutra, the whole of Vedanta begins here:

athato brahma-jijnasa. Then therefore the inquiry into Brahman. (Brahma Sutra 1.1.1)

Mimamsa had opened: athato dharma-jijnasa, now, therefore, the inquiry into dharma, into ritual duty. Vedanta answers with the same grammar and a different object: now, having dealt with action, the inquiry into Brahman, the reality behind everything. The single word atha, “now,” carries an argument in it — the inquiry into Brahman comes after, and beyond, the inquiry into works.

The second aphorism says what Brahman is, in the most compressed possible form:

janmady asya yatah. [Brahman is that] from which the origin and so on — that is, the origin, subsistence, and dissolution — of this world proceed. (Brahma Sutra 1.1.2)

That is the whole subject of Vedanta stated in three words: the one reality from which all things arise, in which they stand, and into which they return. And already the trouble begins, because the sutra says nothing about how the world proceeds from Brahman, or what it means for a world to have such a source, or whether that world is finally real. The text is so terse that it functions less as a statement than as a socket into which each commentator plugs his own system. Shankara reads janmady asya yatah and finds a Brahman whose apparent creation is finally an appearance; Ramanuja reads the same three words and finds a God of whom the world is the real body; Madhva reads them and finds a supreme Lord genuinely distinct from the dependent world He sustains. The sutra promised an inquiry. It did not close it.

The great sayings

The Upanishads do not, for the most part, argue their central truth. They declare it. Vedanta returns again and again to a small handful of terse pronouncements the tradition names the mahavakyas, the “great sayings” — single lines in which a seer states, without hedging, the relation of the self to the ultimate. Four of them became the load-bearing sentences of the whole school, one drawn from each of the four Vedas.

Tat tvam asi, “that thou art,” is spoken in the sixth chapter of the Chandogya Upanishad (6.8.7), where the sage Uddalaka Aruni brings his son Shvetaketu, by one homely analogy after another — the salt dissolved invisibly through water, the sap that is one in every branch of a tree — to see that the finest essence pervading all things is not other than the boy himself. Aham brahmasmi, “I am Brahman,” stands in the Brihadaranyaka Upanishad (1.4.10), the words of one who has understood the truth from within. Prajnanam brahma, “consciousness is Brahman,” comes from the Aitareya Upanishad (3.3), the fruit of an inquiry into awareness as the ground of all that is. Ayam atma brahma, “this self is Brahman,” is the keystone of the Mandukya Upanishad (verse 2), the shortest of the principal Upanishads and the seed of a whole non-dualist tradition.

Four sayings, drawn from across the Vedas, and beneath all four lies a single question: how does the individual self, the atman, stand in relation to Brahman? Identical? Related? Distinct? The whole of Vedanta can be read as the tradition’s sustained effort to say exactly what these sentences mean when they set self and ultimate side by side. And it is precisely here, on the meaning of a few words, that the school breaks into its great divisions.

Take the most famous of them, tat tvam asi, and watch three masters pull one sentence three ways. For Shankara it means what it plainly says: the self simply is that reality, the “art” an equation with no remainder, and the whole labour of philosophy is to strip away the false ideas that keep us from seeing an identity that was always the case. Ramanuja reads the identical words as a statement of intimate relation rather than bare equation. The “that” and the “thou” name the same reality, yes — but as body names the soul that ensouls it: Shvetaketu’s inmost self is indwelt and ensouled by Brahman, the qualifier and the qualified named together in one breath, never collapsed into a bare oneness. Madhva goes further than either and reads the sentence to deny identity outright. In his celebrated grammatical move he parses tat tvam asi as sa-atma tvam asi or, on another of his readings, splits the phrase so that the particle carries a negation — a-tat tvam asi, “thou art not that” — turning the classic non-dualist proof-text into a declaration of the soul’s difference from, and dependence on, the God to whom it belongs. One line of Sanskrit, three grammars, three metaphysics. The contest of Vedanta is fought, verse by verse and particle by particle, at exactly this resolution.

Three answers to one question

The central question — how the individual soul relates to Brahman — admits more than one serious answer from the same texts. Three great teachers gave three, each anchoring his system to his own reading of the Brahma Sutra, and their schools have shaped Hindu thought ever since.

Advaita, non-dualism, is the answer of Shankara, conventionally placed around the eighth century (his traditional dates, 788–820, are disputed, and some scholars would move him earlier). Only Brahman is ultimately real — and Brahman without qualities, nirguna Brahman, pure being-consciousness beyond every attribute and every distinction. The individual soul is, in truth, not different from that Brahman at all; the appearance of a separate self in a plural world is the work of avidya, ignorance, whose creative face is maya. Shankara’s key technical move is adhyasa, superimposition: as a coil of rope in dim light is mistaken for a snake, so the qualities of the not-self are laid over the self and the self over the not-self, and this mutual mis-attribution is the root confusion the whole Brahma-sutra-bhashya opens by diagnosing. The world produced by it is not a bare nothing. It is vyavaharika, empirically real: the solid world we wake into and transact in, wholly reliable for as long as it lasts, holding good right up until liberating knowledge dawns. But it is not paramarthika, finally real. On the model Advaita calls vivarta, the world is an apparent transformation of Brahman, not a real one — Brahman seems to become the world as the rope seems to become the snake, without ever actually changing. Liberation, then, is not a journey and not an achievement. The soul does not travel to Brahman; it wakes to having always been Brahman. This is the reading treated in full in the Advaita Vedanta article, and it is the most famous of the three.

Shankara did not build alone. Behind him stands Gaudapada, traditionally his teacher’s teacher, whose Mandukya Karika — a verse commentary on that shortest Upanishad — already argues for ajativada, the doctrine of non-origination, the startling claim that nothing is ever really born or destroyed at all. Gaudapada’s language runs so close to Buddhist idealism, and his arguments for the unreality of the world so close to Mahayana, that critics from Ramanuja onward pressed the charge of prachanna-bauddha — that Advaita is “Buddhism in disguise,” a crypto-Buddhism that has smuggled the emptiness of the Madhyamaka and the mind-only of the Yogachara into Vedantic dress. Advaitins have answered the charge for a thousand years: Brahman is a positive, self-luminous reality where the Buddhist shunyata is not, and the two systems diverge exactly where it counts. But the resemblance is real enough that the accusation never quite dies, and it remains one of the live questions in the study of the school.

Vishishtadvaita, qualified non-dualism, is the answer of Ramanuja, traditionally dated 1017–1137, whose great commentary on the Brahma Sutra is the Sri-bhashya. Reality is one, Ramanuja agrees — but it is one the way a living body is one. There is a single Brahman, the personal God Vishnu-Narayana, and the real multiplicity of conscious souls (chit) and unconscious matter (achit) is His body. The governing image is sharira-shariri-bhava, the body–soul relation: as a person’s body is real, distinct from the self, yet exists only to be ruled by and to serve that self, so souls and matter are genuinely real and genuinely distinct, never illusory, yet exist only as utterly dependent modes of the one God who is their inner controller, the antaryamin. Brahman for Ramanuja is not the attribute-less absolute of Advaita; a reality with no qualities, he argues, would be indistinguishable from a nothing. Brahman is saguna, the treasury of all auspicious qualities, and the world is its real self-expression. Plurality is not erased. It is gathered up into a greater unity. For Ramanuja the world is the real body of a God to be loved, never a mirage to be seen through.

Dvaita, dualism, is the answer of Madhva, c. 1238–1317, who also wrote his own bhashya on the Brahma Sutra. God and the soul are eternally, really and permanently distinct, and Madhva makes the point with a rigour unmatched in the tradition. He names a pancha-bheda, a fivefold order of real and eternal difference: between God and the soul, between God and matter, between one soul and another, between soul and matter, and between one piece of matter and another. No knowledge ever collapses any of these; difference is not the veil over reality but its very structure. There is no final merging and no awakening-into-identity. Liberation is the soul, freed of bondage, entering an eternal, graded, loving relationship with a supreme God who remains forever other — never the soul becoming God. Madhva read the same Upanishads as Shankara, and, as we have seen, could take the single sentence Shankara made the banner of non-dualism and parse it into a proof of difference. Same canon, opposite conclusion, on the one thing that mattered most.

The schools beyond the three

The three great answers do not exhaust Vedanta; between and beyond them lie further readings, each a distinct commentary on the same prasthana-traya. The oldest current is Bhedabheda, “difference and non-difference,” which holds that the soul is at once different from Brahman and not different — the two held together in tension rather than resolved away. Its roots are early (the pre-Shankara commentator Bhartriprapancha is associated with it), and its most influential later exponent is Nimbarka, whose Dvaitadvaita teaches that soul, world and God are eternally both distinct and one, like waves that are neither simply the sea nor simply other than it.

Vallabha’s Shuddhadvaita, “pure non-dualism” (c. sixteenth century), takes souls and world to be fully real and fully Brahman, untouched by any veil of maya — a non-dualism, unlike Shankara’s, in which the manifold world is a genuine self-manifestation of God and not an appearance to be cancelled. And the Achintya-bhedabheda of Chaitanya and the Gaudiya tradition names the bond of soul and God an inconceivable difference-in-non-difference: the soul is simultaneously one with and different from God in a way reason cannot finally close, and — the tradition adds — need not, since what thought cannot resolve, devotion can inhabit. Each of these is a full answer to the tat tvam asi question, and each defends itself, as the others do, from the shared canon.

What the schools share

Before the disagreements are pressed too hard, it is worth marking how much the rival Vedantas hold in common, because the shared ground is itself part of the teaching. All of them take Brahman to be the one ultimate reality and the source of the world. All hold that the human problem is a bondage rooted in ignorance, and that the cure is a liberating knowledge — for Brahman lies beyond the reach of perception and inference and can be known only through the revealed word, so that scripture, shabda, is the final authority on the ultimate. All treat the prasthana-traya as binding and set out to harmonise it. And all agree that the goal of a human life is liberation, moksha, the end of the round of rebirth — differing only, but profoundly, on what that liberated state is: identity with Brahman, or eternal loving service of Him, or something held between. The schools of Vedanta are not so many religions. They are readings of one inheritance, divided on a single question while united on almost everything that frames it.

Who was Badarayana?

A word on the ground beneath all this, because honesty requires it. The Brahma Sutra is attributed to Badarayana, and Badarayana is traditionally identified with Vyasa, the compiler of the Vedas and author of the Mahabharata. That identification is traditional, not historical; there is no independent evidence for it, and “Vyasa,” which means simply “the arranger,” reads more like a title than a name. Badarayana’s own date is unknown and much argued over, with estimates spread across several centuries before the common era and into it; the text as we have it is very likely a composite, with a late redaction over older material. What the sutra itself makes plain is that it is not a first word but a late one: it names and criticises rival positions — the Samkhya, the atomists, the Buddhists, the Jains — which means it presupposes a developed philosophical landscape and was written to arbitrate an argument already long under way. Even the second chapter’s business is largely the refutation of other schools. Badarayana, whoever he was, wrote as a systematiser of a tradition that already had opponents to answer.

And the terseness that makes the sutra so hard to date is the same terseness that made it so fertile. A text compressed almost to the point of silence is a text into which a determined commentator can read almost anything. That is precisely why three teachers of overwhelming and incompatible convictions could each take up the Brahma Sutra, write a full bhashya on it, and each come away certain that Badarayana had been on his side all along.

The river that reached the world

Vedanta’s dominance is not only a matter of the medieval past. When Hinduism was carried to the wider world in the modern era, it went largely in Vedantic dress — and largely in Advaita’s. The nineteenth-century reform movements, answering colonial and missionary critique, reached for Vedanta as the tradition’s most defensible and universal core, and it was in that spirit that teachers took it abroad. Vivekananda, at the 1893 Parliament of Religions in Chicago and in the lecturing years that followed, presented a confident, streamlined Vedanta — usually Advaita in temper — as the very essence of Hinduism, and even as a kind of religion behind the religions. Half a century later Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan, philosopher and later president of India, gave that vision its most learned statement, reading Advaita as the summit not only of Indian thought but of the perennial mystical impulse in all religions.

Scholars have named and studied this development. The German indologist Paul Hacker coined the term Neo-Vedanta for it, and Wilhelm Halbfass, in India and Europe, traced how deeply the modern presentation was shaped by the encounter with the West even as it claimed to be the tradition’s changeless core. Andrew Nicholson, in Unifying Hinduism, has argued that the impulse to gather the many darshanas into a single system with Vedanta at its crown is older than the colonial period, reaching back to late-medieval doxographers, so that neo-Vedanta inherited a project already begun. Francis Clooney and others, working comparatively, have kept the non-Advaitic Vedantas — Ramanuja’s above all — in clear view, a useful corrective to the habit of letting Shankara stand for the whole. The scholarly point is not to debunk. It is to notice that “Vedanta = Hinduism = Advaita” is a modern equation with a history, made by particular people for particular reasons, and that the classical schools were both richer and more divided than the equation suggests. What is beyond dispute is the reach: the vocabulary of Brahman and atman, of maya and self-realisation, now circles the globe — and it is Vedanta’s vocabulary.

Why it became the river

What carried Vedanta above the other darshanas was partly this very richness. Grounded in the most beloved scriptures, able to house both the austere non-dualist and the ardent devotee under one canon, expounded by teachers of overwhelming intellectual power who founded living lineages and monastic orders that still endure, it became the broad river into which most later Hindu thought drained. The differences among its schools are real and they are deep, turning on a single hinge: whether the soul is identical with Brahman, a real mode of Brahman, or eternally distinct from Brahman. The tradition does not pretend the question is settled. It names the divergence, preserves the commentaries side by side, and lets the great teachers stand.

That refusal to close the argument is, in the end, the most Vedantic thing about Vedanta. When a modern teacher speaks of Brahman, of the Self, of maya, of liberation as awakening to what one already is, they are speaking Vedanta, usually in Shankara’s accent. But behind that one accent stand the others — Ramanuja’s body and soul, Madhva’s fivefold difference, Nimbarka’s wave and sea, Chaitanya’s inconceivable bond — each with its own reading of tat tvam asi, each with its bhashya on the same four chapters of Badarayana, each certain it has heard the Upanishads rightly.

Now, therefore, the inquiry into Brahman. The sutra promised an inquiry, not a verdict.

The tradition has been holding to that distinction ever since.