Vedānta

What it is

The philosophical tradition taking its name from the end of the Vedas — the Upaniṣads — and concerned with the relationship between Brahman (the ultimate), ātman (the self) and the world.

It is not one position. It is a format: every school of Vedānta must produce a commentary on the prasthānatrayī, the three foundations — the principal Upaniṣads, the Brahma Sūtras, and the Bhagavad Gītā. Commenting on all three is the credential. What the schools then say is irreconcilable.

Advaita — non-dualism, systematised by Śaṅkara. Brahman alone is ultimately real. The self is not similar to Brahman but identical with it. The world is māyā — not a hallucination, but not ultimately real either. Bondage is ignorance, liberation is knowledge, and it can occur while still alive.

Viśiṣṭādvaita — qualified non-dualism, systematised by Rāmānuja (11th–12th century). Brahman is real, personal, and identified with Viṣṇu. Souls and matter are also real, and constitute God's body — so unity is genuine but so is distinction. The path is devotion and self-surrender, not knowledge.

Dvaita — dualism, systematised by Madhva (13th century). God and soul are permanently and eternally distinct, and always will be. Madhva insists on five eternal differences — between God and soul, God and matter, soul and matter, one soul and another, one material thing and another. Liberation is not merger but relationship.

The gap between these is total. On Advaita you are already God and do not know it. On Dvaita you never will be, and thinking otherwise is the error.

Where it came from

The Upaniṣads supply the raw material, and it is ambiguous enough to sustain all three readings. Tat tvam asi — that thou art — reads as identity to Śaṅkara and as something considerably more qualified to Rāmānuja, who spends a great deal of effort on it.

The Brahma Sūtras, attributed to Bādarāyaṇa and probably compiled in the early centuries CE, are terse to the point of unintelligibility — 555 aphorisms, many of two or three words. They were designed to be unpacked by a teacher, and they proved unpackable in several directions.

Śaṅkara wrote in the eighth century, Rāmānuja in the eleventh and twelfth, Madhva in the thirteenth. Later schools followed — Vallabha, Nimbārka, and the Bengali tradition of Caitanya with its doctrine of inconceivable difference-in-non-difference.

How it is practised

Advaita: through śravaṇa, manana and nididhyāsana — hearing the teaching, reasoning it through, and sustained contemplation — under a qualified teacher, with the four qualifications including discrimination between the eternal and the transient, and a genuine desire for liberation.

Viśiṣṭādvaita and Dvaita: through bhakti and prapatti, devotion and surrender, in temple worship and daily practice — which is what most Vedāntins have actually done.

What we can and cannot say

We can say the modern equation of Hinduism with Advaita Vedānta is recent and misleading.

It happened in two stages. Colonial-era scholars found in Advaita a systematic monistic philosophy that looked respectable by European standards, and treated it as the essence of Indian thought. Then Vivekananda, at the World's Parliament of Religions in Chicago in 1893 and afterwards, presented Advaita as the universal truth underlying all religions — a Neo-Vedānta framing that was enormously effective abroad and became influential in India itself.

The result is that "Hindu philosophy" in Western usage generally means one school out of six darśanas, in one of at least five interpretations, presented as the whole. Scholars including Anantanand Rambachan have argued that Neo-Vedānta departs substantially from Śaṅkara's own position as well.

Meanwhile the traditions most Hindus actually belong to are devotional, and their philosophy is Rāmānuja's or Madhva's or Caitanya's.

We can say Advaita's position has genuine philosophical interest and a close relative in the West: its relationship to idealism is real, and the differences — Advaita's Brahman is not a mind having experiences, and māyā is not Berkeley's God-sustained perception — are worth working through rather than assuming.

We can say the debate between the schools was conducted at a very high level over centuries, in detailed written commentary, and that dismissing Indian philosophy as mystical rather than argumentative survives about ten pages of Rāmānuja.

We cannot adjudicate. Three schools read the same texts with the same seriousness and reached opposite conclusions about the most basic question available, and the tradition has no mechanism for closing it — which is the situation described under perennialism and constructivism, arising inside a single tradition rather than between several.

Further reading

• Śaṅkara's Upadeśasāhasrī, and Rāmānuja's Vedārthasaṃgraha — read as a pair.
• Eliot Deutsch, Advaita Vedānta: A Philosophical Reconstruction (1969).
• Anantanand Rambachan, The Limits of Scripture (1994), on Vivekananda's reinterpretation.